Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

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This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

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Front cover: The Taj Mahal viewed from a nearby building, Agra, Uttar Pradesh

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Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a five-month trip I made to India in 1998. This was part of a much larger, three-year journey that took me through Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Nepal, from 1995 to 1998. The book also includes my writing from a shorter and rather more leisurely return visit to Kerala in 2007.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled the world for three years, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon
June 2014

West Bengal and Orissa

Thoughts Before Arriving

Written: 18 January 1998   

I’ve been excited about the prospect of visiting India for some time now, and reading about it is only making me keener. Check out these selected facts that I gleaned from a bunch of articles in Time magazine:

India is home to one-sixth of the world’s population, and is second only in size to China (though India is projected to overtake China in 2030).

Five people die in traffic accidents in Delhi every day.

Fully three-quarters of the structures in Delhi violate building standards in some way.

Population growth is 2 per cent per year, less than half the rate it was before Nehru’s family planning programme in 1951 (which was the first one among developing nations). That’s still 18 million new mouths to feed every year, or more than half the population of Canada appearing every year in a country less than one-third of the size.

Delhi is the world’s fourth most polluted metropolis. One report estimates that the average Delhi-wallah inhales the toxic equivalent of the smoke from 20 cigarettes every day.

The population of India is 950 million¹. Of these, 350 million are living below the poverty line (as many as those living in India at Independence), and 250 million are middle class.

Of these 950 million, most are Hindus; there are over 100 million Muslims (only Indonesia and Pakistan have more), 20 million Christians, 18 million Sikhs, 7.5 million Buddhists, 4 million Jains, and lots of other minority faiths. It’s amazing that the country hasn’t succumbed to mass violence or dictatorship; indeed, the world’s largest democracy is relatively docile, outside of hotspots like Kashmir and the activities of Tamil sympathisers in the southeast.

More than a million people in Delhi live rough in homemade squats called jhuggi bastis; some even illegally tap into the electricity supply. They endure dysentery, cholera and dengue fever, and one in ten babies born to them dies in its infancy. They struggle to eke a living as construction workers, rickshaw peddlers, street hawkers or servants.

Delhi is full of historical buildings; there have been at least eight cities there in the last 3000 years, and some scholars say there have been up to 15. Traffic on one of New Delhi’s main thoroughfares has to swerve around the masonry slab that marks a Muslim saint’s grave; meanwhile the fairways at Delhi Golf Club have some unique hazards in the shape of royal tombs.

Is it any wonder I’ve been excited about visiting India for some time now? Compared to the indifference I felt when I read the guidebooks on Southeast Asia, India is a major draw card. As I touched down in Calcutta on the morning of January 18th 1998 I couldn’t wait. I wasn’t to be disappointed.

¹ It has since smashed through the one billion limit and is climbing all the time...

Calcutta

Written: 21 January 1998   

Calcutta has an image problem. Ask most people what springs to mind when you mention the capital of West Bengal, and the images are of black holes, excessive pollution, slums, Mother Theresa and human tragedy. The guidebooks recommend that if this is your first visit to India, you shouldn’t make Calcutta your point of arrival. I can see why, but in my case it was exactly what I needed to blow the cobwebs of complacency away; it has to be the best introduction to a country I’ve ever experienced. I instantly found myself getting a buzz from travelling again...

Calcutta is a calamity of humanity. From the minute you step off the plane, it’s in your face, shocking and surprising at every turn. India strikes you hard; all your preconceptions are inadequate. I can conjure up images in my mind of slums, beggars, pollution and sheer filth, but there’s a huge difference between imagination and reality, and however well prepared you are, the real thing makes you stop and think. On the other hand, I wasn’t so much shocked as fascinated; I’ve been gradually introduced to the squalor of Asia by travelling through various degrees of the developing world, and now that I’m in the developing world, I’m finding I can handle it. I’m actually more shocked at my lack of surprise than I am by the squalor itself; I feel almost guilty to be able to accept such shocking scenes without feeling overly emotional. Such is the effect of long-term travel.

But it is true what they say: India is a different world. From the sheer mass of humans to the frenetic pace of life, it’s like nothing you have ever seen before; it’s an almost contradictory combination of rushing around like headless chickens and sitting back and doing absolutely nothing, a mix that only the Indians seem to have perfected. Calcutta is, of course, a particularly good example of Indian mayhem, and it seems it has always been this way. In 1803 Lord Valentia wrote, ‘The town of Calcutta is at present well worthy of being the seat of our Indian Government both from its size and from the magnificent buildings which decorate the part of it inhabited by Europeans. The Black Town is a complete contrast to this as well can be conceived. Its streets are narrow and dirty; the houses... resembling the cabins of the poorest class in Ireland... Chowringhee, an entire village of palaces, forms the finest views I have ever beheld in any city.’

There’s still plenty of British splendour under the pollution... and what pollution! The difference between London and Bangkok is as great as the difference between Bangkok and Calcutta, and where Bangkok’s haze hung around like a naughty schoolkid, mischievous but not necessarily a real threat, Calcutta’s should come with a government health warning. If you manage to find a spot where you can see for a short distance – on the River Hooghly or in the Maidan, for example – then, well, you can’t see for a short distance. Bridges and tall buildings appear as if they’re floating in cumulonimbus, and as for the sun, it’s a distant, hazy memory. I’ve managed to catch Calcutta in the wet, but the daily downpours don’t shift the smog, they merely add to the chaos.

Calcutta is fairly flat, so when it rains, it’s a disaster. The streets are pretty squalid anyway, but I’m surprised by the sheer amount of mud in this precipitous city. Whether they’re digging up the roads and piling up dirt on the roadside, only to have it wash all over the street, or whether it’s a slum area where bitumen is an alien concept, the mud is ubiquitous. Coupled with the rains are temperatures that reflect the time of year: Calcutta is freezing. I thank the stars that I decided to hold on to my sleeping bag, and I’m snuggling up at night while my roommate, a Frenchman called Eric whom I befriended in the airport, is freezing his proverbials off under a thin blanket.

So the roads are mud traps, the weather is shocking and the pollution solid enough to be claiming squatters’ rights, but Calcutta is a fascinating place to explore. Every road holds new thrills, and every attempt to do something fairly simple results in an experience that leaves you dumbfounded. For example, visiting the bank to change my travellers cheques took ages; I knew Indian banks were slow, and indeed I managed to get my cheques changed in a pretty efficient half-an-hour, but it’s an edifying sight watching the man fill out three or four forms, all in triplicate, and then file them round to various people for signatures, checks and goodness knows what else. The British bureaucratic legacy lives on, but in India, red tape has been transformed into an art form.

Images of Calcutta

How can you describe a mad place like Calcutta? I’ll simply pick out some of the crazier things I saw as I wandered around the streets, getting splattered in mud, cow dung and exhaust fumes:

The driving is worse here than anywhere else I have been; Indians make Indonesians look like One Careful Woman Owners. One-way streets aren’t actually one-way, they simply mean you should be more careful about oncoming traffic, or – as most Indians seem to interpret the rules – one-way streets simply mean you should sound your horn continuously. Come to think of it, sounding your horn continuously is a prerequisite on any street, and Calcutta has to be one of the best places in the world to study the Doppler Effect; indeed, nine out of ten motorbikes have such hot-wired horns that their headlights dim when the horn goes off. Listening to the traffic is like a particularly energetic session at Crusty the Clown’s Funny Car Show: horns blare, honk, buzz, fart, whoop, rattle, ring and even screech like sirens, and behind the horns are multi-coloured rust buckets that look like they might fall apart at any moment. I’d heard that India was a circus, but I didn’t realise it was meant literally.

There are cows all over the place, acting as natural rubbish hoovers and creating traffic havoc when they decide to sit down and chew the cud in the middle of a main thoroughfare. Cows are sacred to the Hindus – you won’t find many beef steaks in India – and they have free rein over the whole country. Hitting a cow with your car is worse karma than running over a human, so the cows are left to wander all over the place, leaving havoc in their wake. Never have the rural and urban clashed so strangely as in the rolling meadows of Calcutta.

Homelessness is a fact of life for a huge number of Calcutta residents, and it’s simply amazing how every possible spot of land is used for makeshift tents, hard concrete beds and communal cooking collectives. Beggars tug at your clothes, looking pathetic and insisting more persistently than beggars in Southeast Asia. There are huge beggar rackets, and giving to Mother Theresa’s mission is a much better way of helping the poor, but although you can put the problem out of your mind, there’s no danger of being able to avoid it. Walking round Calcutta’s backstreets is like starring in a telethon.

The street – indeed, any open space – is the toilet, kitchen and bedroom for lots of people. Everywhere you go there are people pissing and shitting in the middle of the road; there are people washing themselves at the public water pumps, almost naked and all soaped up, desperately trying to shift the dirt that must be so ingrained after years in the pollution; and there are people cooking their lunch right next to drains that house more germs than a biological warhead. It’s no wonder that India is disease-ridden; education about cleanliness is, well, scant.

But, conversely, there are lots of smart middle class people in Calcutta. One must assume that tucked away in the depths of the city are reasonable housing estates, pleasant flats and relatively unpolluted areas, because the middle class is clean, pressed and eminently presentable, even if a lot of the clothes look like they’ve been rescued from a sixties retrospective fashion shoot. There’s an underground train system, of which only one north-south line is completed, but it’s efficient and relatively clean, and there are plenty of adverts around for computers, stereos and televisions, while dead dogs pile up under the hoardings, swelling up in the heat like cows on Australian highways. It’s the contrast between these different ways of life that brings the problem home; if you explore a place where everyone is poor, as would be the case in a poor village in the middle of Africa, the concept of poverty is more palatable, but when you see the incredibly poor and the comparatively well off squashed together on the same pavement, it makes the problem much more obvious, and much more unjust.

The 450m-long Howrah Bridge, which spans the River Hooghly, is the busiest bridge in the world, and walking across it has to rate as one of the strangest experiences in Calcutta. The cars, buses and taxis are manic as they converge on the cantilevered construction, and every day 60,000 vehicles drone over the river, as well as an uncountable number of pedestrians. While I was walking over to the railway station to buy a timetable, I saw a taxi collide with a truck, losing its front offside wheel and sparking to a halt in the middle of the road. The truck kept going, the taxi passengers got out and simply hailed another taxi, and the taxi driver was left with a wrecked car and an angry bunch of crazy locals all swerving to avoid him and his taxi, none of whom thought it a good idea to stop and help. I left him to it; watching the pilgrims bathing in the river while their friends defecated just upstream from them was entertaining enough.

Howrah Station, Calcutta’s main railway station, is incredible. It’s an imposing building housing dozens of lines, and trains run from here to every corner of the subcontinent. India’s trains are simply superb; a relic from the British Raj, the railways are masterfully run, rarely run on time but always run, and are the best way to get around this vast country. India has over 60,000km of tracks, and every day 7000 passenger trains run, carrying over 10.5 million passengers and connecting 7100 stations; not surprisingly, Indian Railways is the world’s largest single employer, with over 1.6 million staff. Howrah Station is a bustling hovel, with naked beggars sleeping in the middle of the main hallway while porters rush around shouting orders and blowing whistles for no discernible reason. Waiting for a train isn’t boring in India; it might be draining, but it’s certainly not boring.

The railway system isn’t the only relic from the British Raj; Calcutta was the first capital of British India – Delhi didn’t take over until 1912 – and it has its fair share of pompous Victorian monuments. The most impressive is the huge Victoria Monument at the southern end of the Maidan; it’s an imposing white marble monstrosity that sums up the decadence and pomp of the British Empire in one phallic thrust. Out front is a statue of Queen Victoria during her fat-Elvis stage, and inside is a statue of the relatively unknown slim Victoria; if the second statue’s anything to go by, she was quite a looker in the early years, so perhaps Albert wasn’t such a blind bugger after all. Still, even in fat old crone mode, old Vic’s an impressive sight, presiding over a city that’s totally Indian and as far from Britain as you can possibly get.

Inside the Victoria Monument is a very good museum that explains the history of Calcutta, from its founding in 1690 by Job Charnock to the present day. I found it fascinating, and thoroughly enjoyed being bounced around the displays by the Indian tourists thronging to this piece of the Raj; Indians seem to thrive on human pinball, and if you’re a female you should be prepared for a fair amount of fondling in the process. Not for the first time I thanked the stars I was born with an appendage...

In front of the Victoria Monument and the nearby St Paul’s Cathedral is the large grassy expanse of the Maidan. The Maidan is locally known as the Lungs of Calcutta, and it’s a very apt description; as you walk through the rubbish, cow dung and fading grass, you can almost hear it wheeze. I couldn’t help thinking of the aftermath of the Glastonbury festival, when the rubbish of a hundred thousand stoned revellers is all that remains of the year’s biggest music event, and like the aftermath of Glastonbury, there are a number of casualties curled up on the floor in the Maidan. The difference is that most Glastonbury visitors have a home to go to, and it only happens once a year; in contrast the Maidan is for real, and it’s there every day of the year.

The Maidan is also home to a large number of sports clubs: over there is the ICI Sports Club, and tucked away in another corner is The Telegraph Sports Club. It seems amazing to have such a proliferation of health clubs in an area where jogging for half an hour will do you more damage than inhaling liquid tar, but I guess they hail from the days before exhaust fumes and chemical pollution. It’s probably safer to stay at home with a six-pack, a pizza and the remote control than to try to improve your biceps on the Maidan.

At first glance, the Indians are a wonderfully friendly bunch, and their English is the best I’ve come across since Australia and New Zealand. Conversations can still feel a bit like a customs form – name, occupation, country of origin, length of stay, and so on – but most of the locals have enough English for you to be able to have a real conversation with them once the niceties are out of the way. This is a delightful change from Indonesia and Thailand, where the language barrier is more challenging.

Indian attitudes are, however, baffling. If you have to do something, then reserve at least five times the amount of time that you’d need in the West; banks, shops and transport seem to happen at a snail’s pace, as if everyone’s running through glue. Once you accept this, it’s a lot of fun trying to get things done. One fellow traveller whom I met in Calcutta was trying to find an Enfield motorcycle to tour round on, and I joined him for an exploratory trip round the mechanical shops of Calcutta. One shop he visited was shut because ‘it is raining’, and another told him to come back tomorrow because ‘we can’t find the bike just yet’, despite the fact that he was already coming back from the day before. And ask an Indian whether something is true, and you’ll get a wobble of the head; the wobble can mean ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘I don’t know’, or any combination of the above. It can frustrate the hell out of you, but it’s a complete hoot if you don’t really care yourself.

Those things you read about in Indian novels are all here, and they guarantee a fascinating time. Rickshaw-wallahs, thin and crusty, struggle along the streets, pulling their rickshaws and passengers through the detritus of the streets; it’s a hard life and many die young, but it’s a popular service, unique to Calcutta (other cities tend to go with bicycle rickshaws and auto-rickshaws). Pan-wallahs sell pan, that glorious combination of betel nut, spices and condiments, all folded up in a leaf, which you chew after a meal and eventually spit out onto the pavement to create another nosebleed stain in the dirt. Black-red teeth abound, just as in Indonesia, but here pan is quite the art form. And every street is lined with little terracotta teacups, smashed into the gutter; when you buy chai (tea) from a street vendor you get it in a little cup, which you just chuck onto the street when you’ve drunk the sweet, milky concoction. It’s hygienic, but you can’t help wondering where the terracotta ends up.

The food is great – at least, it is in the main city. There’s dhal (spicy lentil mush), chapatis, Thums Up (which tastes like Coke with a spicy Indian kick), millions of types of curry, rice dishes, egg concoctions, breads... I was in food heaven in Calcutta. Outside the cities the food can be pretty patchy, but I thoroughly enjoyed learning exactly what Indian cuisine is all about. I’ve spent so long in England ignoring half the menu in tandoori restaurants and sticking to chicken vindaloo, pulau rice and keema nan that discovering the sheer range of Indian dishes is a hobby in itself.

When you do a business transaction, wait until you’re handed your change before giving them your money. This is to ensure that you actually get your change; in a wonderful display of underhand capitalism, you won’t necessarily get your change without a fight, but if you refuse to pay until you already have your change, you’ve at least got a fighting chance of not being ripped off. Quite a few fixed prices and no language barrier make shopping in India much easier than dealing with the cowboys in Indonesia, but there is still plenty of scope for losing out.

As I walked along the road, umbrella dripping and crowds converging, a local man walked past me, looked me in the eye, and through a cracked and toothless smile shouted, ‘This is India!’ I couldn’t help but agree with him. This is indeed India.

Puri

Written: 30 January 1998   

Eric and I rolled into Puri on the Calcutta train on Thursday morning. The train journey was surprisingly tame; the Calcutta-Puri line is pretty efficient – we only arrived three hours late, not a bad trip – and the berths in the second-class sleeper were comfortable. Indian trains can be a real experience, but my first exposure to the system was easy and considerably less hassle than the train in Java. One girl had her pack stolen, but we’d been warned of a racket on the Puri Express, so I held tightly onto my bags until we were well into the journey, when I had time to chain them down. Theft isn’t rife in India – not compared to more touristy places like Thailand – but it happens, especially on the more popular tourist routes.

Puri was where I rediscovered my joie de vivre, a little something that I managed to mislay halfway through Indonesia and have only found occasionally since. Sitting in Raju’s Restaurant¹, a little roadside café frequented by the travelling community, I began to feel an unfamiliar ache round the eyes; I thought I might be getting ill, I hadn’t felt it for so long. Then I realised... my eyes were smiling again. For the first time in ages, I was thrilled to be on the trail. ‘This is India!’ I thought.

As the skin formed on my super-sweet milky tea, I simply sat there, taking in the sights of rural India. Puri, some 500km south of Calcutta down the eastern coast of the mainland, is a pilgrim town, one of the holiest spots in India for Hindus. As a result it’s full of weird and wonderful characters as well as hundreds of Indian tourists, and as the cows wander along the road, eating everything and crapping in the gutter, and the children play cricket in the backstreets, stoned pilgrims meander along the road, struggling through a haze of bhang.

For Puri is one of those unique spots where the use of marijuana and opium is not only legal, it’s supported by the government; there are quite a few government bhang shops dotted around the town where you can buy grass and opium, as well as bhang, an edible form of marijuana which you just swill down and enjoy. This is a major draw card for western tourists, of course, but I didn’t come across any downside to this availability; Puri is simply relaxed, and everyone seems to be silently satisfied, for some reason...

Puri is not just popular because it’s a drug-friendly pilgrim town; it also has a beach. The beach doesn’t win any prizes though; the inhabitants of the local fishing village use it as a toilet, and go for their daily squat as the sun’s coming up, leaving a lovely smell to waft down onto anyone brave enough to sunbathe. However, for the casual tourist the beach holds some wonderful conversations; the salesmen of India know their targets are captive when they’re soaking up the rays, and the sales pitches come in all shapes and sizes. There’s the man selling carvings of positions from the Kama Sutra; the massage man; the dropout selling dope, despite government regulations; the salesman for the restaurant up the road; and, of course, the stoned pilgrims. One of the latter approached us as we watched the world go by, and among the inane chatter he spouted for over twenty minutes (with no prompting from us, I might add) was this wonderful poem, which sums up India quite well, I think:

Life is good when it’s sunny; Life is good when it’s raining.
Life is good when it’s hot; Life is good when it’s cold.
Life is good when it’s day; Life is good when it’s night.
Life is good when it’s black; Life is good when it’s white.
Life is good when it’s easy; Life is good when it’s hard.

...and so on. When we asked him what was so good about life when it was raining, he replied, ‘I sleep when it’s raining.’ Monsoon time is obviously a difficult time for poets.

Non-local Locals

The traveller crowd in Puri were fun, too. Take John the Mancunian, whose wonderfully characterful accent proved the perfect tool for describing his visit to the bank. ‘So I goes into the bank, right, and hands over me fookin’ twenty pound note, like, and the bloke studies it and says, “I cannot change this, it’s mutilated”. And I says it’s not fookin’ mutilated, mate, it’s just a rip, it’s how they check for counterfeits, you know, by seeing if you can rip through the watermark, it’s standard procedure that is, you ask anybody who works for a bank in England. So I says to ’im, get the phone and I’ll ring the fookin’ Bank of England and prove it, go on, they’ll tell you it’s standard procedure, like, but he bloody wouldn’t. Fookin’ bastard.’ John turned out to be a wonderful person who loved India, despite this outburst; everyone goes through this exact same problem with money at some point in their Indian trip, and everyone reacts in the same way. It’s practically a rite of passage.

And then there was Peter, the old English electronic engineer who had been coming to Puri regularly for his holidays and proved a mine of information about the town and how to catch the local buses and trains. Add in a mix of hippies, spiritual explorers and people who defied categorisation, and staring at the travellers turned out to be just as much fun as staring at the locals.

Well, almost. There are few sights more distressing, and few sights that draw the eyes more, than beggars. The beggars in India are deformed, dirty, and really pitiful; stumps are held out for a few rupees, scabby bodies shuffle themselves through the dirt, mumbling for change, and women with flesh sagging from their bones stand around, toothlessly asking for money while you suck on another mouthful of cripspy teats. And every evening the night watchman walks along the road, blowing his policeman’s whistle and making sure the beggars don’t stray into the wrong areas; regular whistles mean there’s no problem, lots of short, sharp whistles mean something’s going on, and no whistles demonstrate exactly why the night watchman gets paid danger money. I only saw one bit of hassle while I was in Puri; an explosive Italian caused a scene in Raju’s Restaurant by insulting Raju’s brother and generally being a drunken idiot. Not surprisingly the night watchman was nowhere to be seen.

Humans aren’t the only entertainment in Puri. Along with the wandering cows are hundreds of dogs; in common with other Asian countries, dogs run wild, spreading rabies and turds, but in India the numbers go off the scale. They normally don’t bother humans – unless you’re carrying food, in which case they begin to take interest, a scary transition from studied apathy to vaguely menacing stalking – but they sure bother each other, chasing after unwelcome strays and arguing over food scraps and territorial rights. At night the noisy whining of the mosquitoes is only matched by the choruses of whooping and yelping dogs; it’s a concentrated effort that makes it sound like the dogs of Puri are auditioning for the next Disney flick as the pack of unsavoury characters that always get their comeuppance. Between the canine wailing, the crickets’ shrill chirping, the bats screaming and the early morning nattering of the locals, my earplugs have been earning their keep.

Trying to Leave Puri

The downside to Indian life hit me on the Sunday. Both Eric and I woke up during the night and threw up copiously, before spending almost all of the next day in bed, making endless hurried trips to our en suite. Obviously we’d eaten or drunk something suspect, but of course it was impossible to tell exactly what. India is a particularly unpleasant place to get gastric complications, because wherever you go people are spitting their pan in the street², pissing on the pavement, cooking goodness knows what in smoky barbecues, and generally not helping the situation as you stumble down the street, clutching your guts. However, by this stage in my travels I’ve become pretty philosophical about illness, so when I woke up on the Monday, feeling much better, I decided to make my plans for the next few days.

Those plans involved moving somewhere, so I strutted down to the railway station to make a booking. Indian railway booking offices are an education in chaos, and it’s a minor miracle that the bookings, once made, are reliable. I wanted to go from Puri to Warangal, and then on to Hyderabad; when you buy a ticket for a journey over 500km you are entitled to a two-day break wherever you want, and I wanted my break at Warangal. I queued at the information window, and after about ten minutes I managed to find out that, yes, this was possible, and I should fill in a reservation form and queue at the other window. This queue took only 45 minutes to evaporate – a very short wait by normal standards – but the ticket guy said I couldn’t have the ticket I wanted, and I ended up buying a ticket just to Warangal. With Indian Railways, this is par for the course; as if to rub in the almost slapstick vibe of the railways, when the phone rang in the ticket booth, the man picked up one phone and said, ‘Hello,’ but the phone kept ringing, so he picked up another phone and said, ‘Hello,’ and the phone kept ringing, and then he picked up a third phone and said, ‘Hello,’ and the phone kept ringing... and it was only when he pushed a button on the third phone that he finally got the call. If it hadn’t been for real, it would have been a comedy sketch.

That night I settled down for my last night in Puri, pleased to be making a move in the morning. The move I actually made in the morning was not quite as expected; sometime during the early hours of the morning I began to feel a little nauseous, and come 6am I was back in the bathroom, shooting copious quantities of variously digested foodstuffs from both ends of my body. Stomach cramps set in, I felt dizzy and weak, and I realised that there was no way I was going to be boarding a train that morning. Once again, sickness scuppered my plans.

By mid-morning things were no better, so I limped out into the morning light to find the manager, who was distressed to find that I had relapsed and rushed off to get me some medicine as I dashed back into the bathroom for another shot at goal. The medicine he brought looked dubious; one sachet was of oral rehydration salts, and I was pleased to note that ORS is readily available in India, after the fiasco in Rantepao; the other sachet, however, contained some unmarked pills with just a brand name on the packet, and the manager said they would work wonders. I took the salts, but figured I’d avoid the pills until I knew a bit more about my condition.

I could afford this luxury because our neighbour in the hotel, a very kind Swiss girl called Ruth, said it sounded as if I had giardia, a nasty little parasite that she’d managed to pick up some six months before. Earning canonization in the process, she offered to take one of my still-warm stool samples up to the testing station, and after I’d found a use for an empty film canister that I’m sure Kodak didn’t have in mind when they invented it, off she went, tepid package in hand. The results confirmed it: I did indeed have giardia.

Eric saved the day for the second time by going into town to collect some Secnil to kill the parasite, and at the same time he cancelled my train reservation. Meanwhile I sat in bed cursing my luck and altering my plans. Luckily my plans are specifically designed to be alterable, and instead I spent a profitable convalescence studying maps of India, weather patterns, railway timetables and my guidebook. Truth be told, I rather enjoyed it; sometimes organising a large trip is almost as fun as the trip itself. The extra days that I spent recuperating in Puri slowed me down, made me simplify my itinerary, and reminded me of my mortality, as if I needed more hints. In retrospect, this wasn’t a bad thing; I got better, very slowly, I got some letters written, and I met a fellow music lover, Danny from Israel, with whom I whiled away the hours talking music. Things could have been much, much worse, and I still managed to get to Hyderabad in the end.

¹ A wonderful establishment where the food is good, and the menu is an entertainment in itself. In true Indian style, spelling is an optional extra, and at Raju’s you can dine in true dyslexic decadence. Why not try the freshly squeezed Grage Juice while you munch on your Butter Huney Toast? A bowl of Museli in the morning is good for the soul, and the soup range is extensive: Espinach Cheese Soup, Massrum Soup and that old favourite Hot & Soup are all available. Under the heading Our Cripspy Teat you can sample the Spinch Pokara, and staying on the spinach theme there’s Spinch with Cheese and Spinch with Coconut Fry. Fish lovers adore the Tunna Stack and Lobstar by Order, and for people who like their food cold, you can check out the Chilly Chicken. And if that isn’t enough to get the taste buds rolling, you can spend hours trying to decide between the Macaroni Tomato with Cheese Sauce and the Tomato Cheese Macaroni. What a glorious place!

² A true Indian obsession, pan, pronounced ‘parn’, is possibly the most revolting thing I’ve ever tasted. The equivalent of the betel nut in Indonesia, pan is a combination of tobacco, betel nut, lime paste (that’s lime as in lime ash, not the fruit) and various strange spices and condiments. It’s chewed, and results in huge numbers of red-coloured stains on the pavement as people spit out their accumulated saliva and, eventually, the pan itself. It sounds foul, and indeed it is; I tried pan in Puri, and the experience lasted about five seconds before I realised it’s definitely an acquired taste. God knows who first decided to chew betel nuts, but whoever did started off an Asian craze, ‘craze’ being the operative word.

Hinduism and Indian History

Written: 25 January 1998   

In appreciating India, it’s extremely handy to have a basic grounding in Indian history and the tenets of Hinduism, as there are very few places in the country that haven’t been fundamentally shaped by a combination of theological and historic events. So here’s a quick summary of Hinduism and Indian history.

The Hindu Pantheon

Hinduism has a lot of gods – it makes Christianity look positively lightweight. However most of the stories are centred round a handful of big players, and it’s worth knowing who they are.

It’s also worth noting that India’s gods look very unlike the local population (unlike in Christianity, where Jesus looks like a normal human being). In no pictures of Hindu gods will you see a moustache, except occasionally on the baddies, such as the Ramayana’s evil Lord Ravana; in India you will be hard pressed to find a man without the ratty porn-star look. Hindu gods and goddesses don’t worry about flashing their flesh around, and although they keep their nether regions and mammaries well hidden, they always show a bit of leg; in India, legs are a novelty, so much so that when I see foreigners wearing shorts, I cringe. And a number of Hindu gods are depicted with light-coloured or blue skin; most Indians are neither light-skinned nor blue, but this may explain why it is more desirable for an Indian to be born light rather than dark. Anyway, on to the gods themselves...

First up is Brahma, the Creator. His consort is Sarasvati, the Goddess of Learning, and he rides around on a white swan, carrying a musical instrument called a veena in his hands. Brahma is fairly unusual in that he has a head with four faces – one facing forwards, one facing backwards and one on each side – which represent his all-seeing presence.

Then there’s Vishnu the Preserver. His consort is Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth and Prosperity, and he rides around on the mythical garuda bird, carrying a conch shell and a discus. Vishnu has visited earth in nine incarnations, the first six of which were in a variety of animal and human forms. In visit seven he came down as Rama (whose consort is Sita), in visit eight he turned up as Krishna (with consorts Rahda, Rukmani, and Satyabharma), and for visit nine he was the Buddha (though Buddhists disagree with this, and that’s the main reason why the two religions split). For his tenth incarnation, Vishnu will come as Kalki, and will appear riding on a white horse.

The third main god in this trinity – which is often regarded as a representation of one omnipresent god – is Siva the Destroyer (pronounced ‘Sheeva’). His consort is Parvati, the Beautiful, and he rides around on Nandi the bull, carrying a trident. Parvati has a couple of other forms, too: Durga the Terrible, who carries ten weapons in her hands and rides a tiger, and the scary Kali, the fiercest of the gods, who demands sacrifices and wears a garland of skulls. A pleasant couple indeed.

Siva and Parvati have two important children. The first, and probably the most popular Hindu god, is Ganesh, the God of Prosperity and Wisdom, who cruises round town on a rat. Ganesh is easy to spot because he has an elephant’s head. Legend has it that Parvati asked Ganesh to guard the entrance to their home while she bathed, and while he was doing so a stranger arrived and made to enter the house. Ganesh tried to stop him and in a rage the stranger lopped off Ganesh’s head, but it turned out that the stranger was Siva, returning from a very long trip abroad, and father and son simply didn’t recognise each other. Parvati forced Siva to bring their son back to life, but he could only do so by giving him the head of the first living thing he saw, which turned out to be an elephant. Life is never easy when you’re a god, is it? Their other son is Kartikkaya, the God of War, which is perhaps not surprising when you consider his parentage.

There are a few other gods, like Hanuman the Monkey God, who crops up in the epic poem the Ramayana, and Surya the Sun God, but these are the most important personalities of Hinduism. It makes Christianity and Islam look kind of short-staffed, wouldn’t you say?

A Potted History of India

While we’re on the subject of Indian culture, here’s a quick discography of India’s various empires and civilisations. Understanding India’s past is particularly useful when visiting forts, temples and so on – history gives these buildings a wonderful dimension on top of the already breathtaking architecture.

Indus Valley Civilisation
3300 BC – 1500 BC
One of the world’s first urban civilisations, this is when Hinduism was born.

Aryan Empire
1500 BC – 321 BC
Aryan invaders retain Hinduism and the caste system is introduced. The rise of Buddhism starts around 500 BC, and Hinduism tries to contain it by including Buddha as one of its gods (the ninth incarnation of Vishnu).

Mauryan Empire
321 BC – 184 BC
The Mauryan Empire reaches its peak under the great Emperor Ashoka, who converts to Buddhism in 262 BC. He builds many Buddhist rock carvings and pillars, including Sanchi. Buddhism doesn’t reach the south, which remains staunchly Hindu.

Sunga Empire
184 BC – 70 BC
Many Buddhist cave carvings are completed.

Various Buddhist Empires
70 BC – 319 AD
Including the Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian and Indo-Sassanid Kingdoms, and the Kuchan Empire.

Gupta Empire
319 – 606
Known as the Classical Age. Much Buddhist art is created and buildings are erected, but towards the end of the empire Buddhism declines and Hinduism rises in popularity once again.

The North Splits
606 – 1527
After the invasion of the White Huns, northern India splits up into lots of individual Hindu kingdoms, and is never really unified. The Muslims start to raid India from 1001, with varying degrees of success, eventually establishing the Mughal Empire in 1527.

Sundry Empires in the South
550 – 1565
The Hindu empires of the Cholas, Pandyas, Cheras, Chalukyas, Pallavas, Hyasalas and the Vijayanagar Kingdom all flourish at various times and in various places in the south. Also a large number of localised city-based kingdoms thrive.

Mughal Empire
1527 – 1757
The Mughals are great builders and artists, introducing Islam into India but tolerating other religions. The Taj Mahal is built between 1631 and 1653, but the power of the empire declines steadily after the death of the last major emperor in 1707.

The Marathas
1646 – 1803
The Marathas gradually take over the weakening Mughals’ lands, defeating the Mughals in 1757, but a defeat in 1761 by Afghanistan stops their expansion, and eventually they decline and fall to the British.

The British
1612 – 1947
First British trading post is established at Surat (Gujarat) in 1612. Others follow in Madras (1640), Bombay (1668) and Calcutta (1690). In 1803 the East India Company defeats the Marathas, leaving only the Punjab outside British control; the Punjab is taken in 1849. In 1816 the British and Nepalese reach agreement on the boundaries of Nepal following a two-year war, and mutual respect between the Gurkhas and the British prevents Nepal becoming part of the Indian Empire. In 1857 the Indian Mutiny leads to the British government winding up the East India Company and taking over India itself.

Independent India
In 1947 India gains independence from Britain, and what we now know as Pakistan and Bangladesh are partitioned off into separate countries, among much rioting and bloodshed. The India we know today is born.

Konark

Written: 24 January 1998   

Puri is a procrastinator’s paradise, but after a couple of days of finding my bearings, I decided I had to ease myself out of the restaurant-by-the-sea experience to explore the biggest tourist attraction in the area: the Sun Temple in Konark. A World Heritage site – always a good pointer, especially in India, which is home to lots of them – it’s a gorgeous sandstone building, smothered in intricate carvings in the way that most Hindu temples are. However, Konark’s carvings have a subject matter that is a world away from the seriousness of many other temples; Konark specialises in the (t)horny subject of sex.

From intricate carvings of monogamy in a whole range of positions, to polygamy with varying numbers of women, up to polyandry and a whole parade of erect penises, Konark is fascinating. Created in celebration of Surya, the Sun God, it is aligned east-west and takes the form of a huge chariot, with carved wheels down the side that double as sun clocks. Eric and I took a guide, who delighted in pointing out particularly interesting sculptures, such as the dog licking a woman in, well, yes, that way, and the man with an infected and swollen manhood all bundled up in a painful-looking bandage; he managed to impart a lot of information, despite his wonderfully heavy Indian accent¹, which made it rather hard to understand some of the more technical references to sex. Heck, it’s an ambiguous enough subject in plain English...

Konark is well worth the visit, even if there are plenty of touts chanting, ‘I show you erotic sculpture, very sexy postcards, very nice, just looking, cheap price,’ all day long. But then again, there are plenty of tourists there, mainly Indians, and where there are tourists, there are the trappings of tourism. Indeed, Indian tourists are a sight in themselves: smart², well dressed and polite, they seem to fail the test when it comes to respecting their historical sites. Despite the barriers stopping the crowds from approaching certain areas of the monument, there are always plenty of Indians scrabbling over the fragile sandstone; as a result the site is policed by people with whistles who blow like crazy whenever they see anyone climbing where they shouldn’t. They don’t actually do anything, but they sure do make a lot of noise...

And the bus journey there and back proves that the Indian concept of ‘full’ is equalled only by the Indonesians. Jammed on the back seat, I thanked my lucky stars that I’ve learned to control my claustrophobia. What a shame my sense of smell is still acute; having your head jammed up someone else’s armpit for an hour on a tropical bus isn’t my idea of heaven, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a Konark sculpture on the very subject...

¹ English is the lingua franca in India (often it’s the only way for two Indians from disparate areas to communicate), but it’s not so much English, more Inglish. Take the bobbling accent of the Indian living in England and make it thicker, and you end up with a wonderfully musical sound that reminds me of a muddy tide lapping against a dock pile. It might not always be easy to understand, but it’s always a joy to listen to.

² Middle-class Indians are exceptionally well turned out. The men have their standard shirts and trousers, which are well pressed but fairly drab, but the women are sheer celebrations of colour, with wonderful sarees, golden earrings and necklaces, bangles and ankle bracelets, and a sense of style that’s unique and effective. Their hair is always clean and tied up neatly, whether in a bun or the popular plaited ponytail, and is secured with exotic brooches, flowers or pretty hair bands. Seeing how a lot of people live in India, it’s a testament to them that they consistently manage to look so smart; it’s a delight to behold.

Travellers in India

Written: 29 January 1998   

There is a depth to the travellers I have so far met in India that was glaringly absent from the hapless hackers I rubbed shoulders with in Southeast Asia. I spent plenty of time moaning about the other travellers I met when I was in Malaysia and Thailand, but for the most part India seems to have avoided the impact of the lobotomised hordes, and it’s a richer place because of it.

Take the clientele in Raju’s Restaurant, who were an interesting cross-section of the travelling society in India (though perhaps the patrons are a little more esoteric, as Puri isn’t as popular a destination as Varanasi, Agra or Goa). The general intellectual level was very good, and nobody struck me as more concerned with beer and ‘the way they do it at home’ than with slipping into the Indian way of life as smoothly as possible. All sorts of nationalities were present, and most people were old enough to be interesting, and with one delightful exception – the one which proved the rule – I found my faith in travellers fully restored. I sincerely hope this continues through my travels in the subcontinent; good travelling companions are better than good guidebooks any day.

The exception? An overweight and anaemic English girl with her Turkish boyfriend, whose relational interplay was hilarious and not a little sad. She overruled him at every turn, managing to phrase her decisions very politically in the way that only a possessive lover can get away with; ‘Shall we go and sit outside then?’ sounds innocent on paper, but when it’s expressed in a tone that brooks no argument, it’s more an order than a discussion. He acquiesced in a shameless display of weak will, and one can only assume that either she was very special in bed, or there was undercurrent in there to do with UK visas. It simply reinforced how lucky I am to have travelled unencumbered for so long.

Oh, and I nearly forgot the Blending Crowd. I’m not sure why India should breed more of these strange and faintly amusing characters than anywhere else – it’s probably a residue from the heyday of the sixties counterculture and the Beatles’ embracing of Indian religion – but there are quite a few westerners who go all out for the Indian look: sarees and bindis for the women (Indian dresses and forehead dots respectively), and kurta pyjamas and woven handbags for the men. I suppose that they think they’re blending into the local scene, but there are two glaring problems: they’ve got the wrong skin colour, and they look faintly stupid. Besides, you can’t become a Hindu, you have to be born a Hindu, so even those who go all out to follow Vishnu and Siva are kidding themselves and won’t be allowed into the temples, no matter what weird and wonderful clothes they wear. It’s a little bit sad, really, but luckily these are the minority in the travelling scene. Most people appear to be completely normal, though perhaps that’s only because they’re surrounded by madness...

Religious Tolerance

Written: 30 January 1998   

After recovering from my bout of giardia, I finally boarded the overnight train heading southbound from Puri to Hyderabad. The long journey was considerably enlivened – as if it needed to be, considering the bubbling insanity of India’s trains – by a bunch of young Indian zoology students from Andhra Pradesh, of which Hyderabad is the state capital. One of them, Kiran, was particularly interesting; he was that rarest of creatures, a non-proselytising Indian Christian.

‘I have a beautiful steel guitar,’ he said, ‘made by a steel factory that was set up as a collaboration between the Germans and the Russians. When the factory closed down, they sold off many items cheaply, and I got a beautiful guitar for only 500 rupees. I was incredibly lucky; I believe it was a gift from God so I could make music and have a hobby.’

Having lost both parents at age five, he suffered from ‘many troubles’ for some time, but he discovered Jesus, and was telling me that he had read the Bible, right up to Mark’s gospel, which he was tackling now. This isn’t terribly unusual in the great scheme of things, but in India, becoming a Christian isn’t just a case of crying ‘hallelujah’ and digging Jehovah instead of Siva; it’s a case of voluntarily ostracising yourself from society. Hindus reject those of their faith who switch to another; after all, as far as they’re concerned, you’re born a Hindu and will die a Hindu, and that’s all there is to it.

‘The man in charge of the pilgrims in Puri, I was talking to him the other day,’ said Kiran. ‘He’s been unhappy for nine years now and is not finding solace in his Hinduism, so I persuaded him to think about Jesus, if he can make the change. And this friend of mine, Jaganhadha, has an uncle who changed to Christianity, but he was thrown out by his family; the uncle is now prosperous and happy, but the family is in turmoil, and Jaganhadha is thinking of turning Christian too. But it’s a hard decision, to discard your family for your beliefs. You must be sure.’

Kiran also had some interesting views on politics and colonialism, and they’re worth mentioning. From such people as these you learn much about the country you are travelling in, but the only way to really understand the place is to be born here; it’s so different from the West that it’s practically another planet.

‘We are very thankful for the British,’ he said. ‘They gave us an education system, the railways, a health system, and a democracy, even if it is very corrupt now. We have not really advanced these since the British left, so without the British, we would have nothing at all.

‘Unfortunately, our big problem is that there is much corruption in the government. If the BJP party gets in, things will be very bad for the Christians. Consider the story of the Babri Masjid¹. It’s very difficult; I will have a Zoological degree soon, but I can only work with animals or in the wildlife service unless the government makes more jobs available in that field.’

This brings up two points: colonialism is regarded by some people as akin to philanthropy, and having a degree here restricts you to a specific career path, rather than opening up the job market as it does in the West. They’re small differences, but they’re important ones.

There is hope for India despite its problems with corruption, but it pays to be wary of policies that alienate specific groups. Politics has a way of becoming self-referential; if your party appeals to an unsavoury section of society, you should expect it to backfire on you, whether you’re in India or the West. Consider this quote from a Queenslander about Pauline Hanson, the chip-shop owner and leader of the Australian party One Nation, whose policies are heavily anti-immigration and are essentially racist (and who therefore has a worryingly large following in rural Australia, a fact not lost on countries in Southeast Asia, who regard Hanson as the devil incarnate). ‘That Pauline Hanson has a lot of good policies,’ blurts our man from Queensland². ‘I reckon if she was a man, I would vote for her.’ Thus we make the bed in which we lie...

¹ A mosque in the small town of Ayodhya, in central Uttar Pradesh, the Babri Masjid was the centre of a huge controversy back in 1992. Hindus revere Ayodhya as the birthplace of Rama, the popular seventh incarnation of Vishnu, and the mosque was claimed to be standing on the site of the original Rama Temple. Hindu fundamentalists wanted to destroy the mosque and build a new Rama Temple, and the BJP, which is staunchly pro-Hindu and anti-non-Hindu, made it clear that it supported the fundamentalist viewpoint. Confrontation and rioting filled the headlines in 1992, and in December 1992 the mosque was torn down by Hindus, which led to major riots and over 200 deaths. It’s easy to see why non-Hindus fear a BJP government in the next elections.

² Still, Queenslanders always were at the earthier end of Australia. As they say there, ‘I have a simple deal with the croc. I don’t swim near his home, and he doesn’t drink in my pub.’

Andhra Pradesh

Hyderabad

Written: 4 February 1998   

I took an instant shine to Hyderabad, but I’m not entirely sure why. My first impressions when I got off the train were of insanely busy traffic, a blisteringly hot climate and auto-rickshaw drivers who steadfastly refused to use their meters, but the place had something strangely enticing about it¹. Powering from the station in Secunderabad down to Hyderabad – the two are twin cities, with about 10km between the two centres – I got the thrill of my life leaning into the curves and sucking in my breath as we narrowly avoided yet another bus seemingly hell bent on flattening us into the bitumen. I found a hotel, dumped my stuff and found a place to eat, totally thrilled to be somewhere new.

The food was excellent; for the first time I felt I was eating food that came up to the standard of Indian restaurants in England. Hyderabad is the home of biryani, the succulent dish that combines rice with all sorts of interesting fruits and vegetables, and needless to say it does it magnificently.

I also came up trumps at the railway station, managing to book exactly the ticket I wanted for Chennai (the new name for Madras), and only having to queue for about ten minutes, a time that would be respectable in Europe. I posted some letters, rang home, and all of a sudden had a whole afternoon to kill, which I did by wandering aimlessly until I reached a hill, which naturally I climbed.

I found Hyderabad spread out below my feet. In the distance were mosques, forts, and a stadium from which speeches in a strange tongue floated over the afternoon breeze. A bunch of lads who had followed me up the hill wandered over and started up a conversation, proudly telling me that there was a rally for the BJP party there that very afternoon, as part of the campaign for the forthcoming elections. That explained the masses of young men marching the streets, flying the party flag and yelping like they were at a carnival; I’d noticed them when a busload of BJP supporters had screeched past me on the main street and the boys crowded on the roof had spotted me, seemingly the only white tourist in Hyderabad, whereupon they waved and shouted until they disappeared into the melee. Hyderabad isn’t exactly a hot spot for western tourists; I only spotted one other white face in the entire week I was there, a guy called Nick whom I met in a biryani restaurant (and who would join me on a day trip to Golconda).

The Planetarium

Not only was there a great view from the top of the hill, but it also housed a planetarium and science museum, and interested to see what an Indian science museum might hold in store, I paid my 18 rupees for a combined museum and planetarium ticket and marched through the doors. It was more interesting for the people than the displays; most of the science area was given over to the sort of hands-on exhibit where you press a button, pull a lever, look through a hole and try to work out what on earth you’re supposed to be looking at, and not surprisingly the place was teeming with kids. Interestingly the adults were having just as much fun playing with the exhibits as the kids, but as soon as I walked in, things changed. Apparently a western tourist is much more fun to play with than a bunch of scientific experiments – look, the funny white man shakes your hand if you hold it out to him, what a blast! – and I spent most of the time shooing away persistent urchins, who would delightedly push the buttons and pull the levers for me, and then have the cheek to ask me for ten rupees for their efforts. The only place I got any peace was in the basement.

The basement was a bit of a surprise. Hardly anybody went down there, and despite this being a science museum, most of it had nothing to do with science at all. Apart from a number of interesting Hindu sculptures and paintings, the basement was given over to the private collection of some erstwhile benefactor, and the main bulk of the collection was made up of porcelain figures. There I was, in the depths of southeastern India, wandering through rooms full of limited edition Royal Doulton and Wedgwood, thinking that we were both strangers in a strange land. And for the first time in my life I actually enjoyed looking at porcelain figures; despite an awful lot of crud, there were some delightful pieces, including one particularly skilled set of dancing ladies from the 1930s, in which the body-hugging dresses looked so realistic and suggestive that I couldn’t quite believe that they were made from the same stuff as coffee mugs and toilets.

The basement might have been quirky, but the planetarium was even weirder. The content was fairly standard – ‘Look how these stars make up a bull,’ that sort of thing – but the voiceover, pronounced in impeccable Indian English by a professor who sounded like Dan Maskell mixed with Mahatma Gandhi, made all the difference. I sat amazed as I learned about the ‘mye-thology’ behind the constellations, the huge galaxy in ‘An-drom-ee-da’, the exploration of Mars by ‘Nay-sa’, and everybody’s favourite, old ‘Edgy Wells’ himself, who wrote a famous book about the invasion of earth by the ‘Mar-shee-yuns’. Add in the crowds of schoolkids on field trips, the poor girl two seats down from me who threw up halfway through the show (and with whom I thoroughly sympathised after Puri), and the little bastard who kept kicking the back of my seat every ten seconds, and it was a planetarium as only India knows how.

And just to rub my face in it, I lost my sunglasses during the show; they slipped out of my pocket, and I didn’t notice in the darkness. I mention this because I’ve lost six pairs in the last 12 months on the road, and this pair was my seventh. I’d even gone to the unfashionable trouble of wearing a band so they couldn’t fall off my neck, but stupidly I shoved them in my pocket, forgetting that I’ve lost every single other pair by doing the same. I might be able to cross continents, but I simply can’t hold onto a pair of sunglasses. It’s uncanny.

Museum Madness

The next day I visited the Salar Jung Museum, a huge, rambling building full of dull rooms of paintings, pottery, metalwork, jade, clothes and all the other exhibits that you expect to find in local museums, except everything was presented in a way that only Indian museums can manage. Everything looks as if it was set up in the days of the Raj and has been left exactly the same ever since, without a hint of upkeep: dust accumulates, colours fade, displays get slowly destroyed by meddling Indian tourists... it’s a sad sight, but tucked away in the bowels of this lumbering beast are some beautiful gems, such as the incredible collection of ivory carvings from all over India, and the room of ancient manuscripts in Arabic languages, detailing the holy scriptures of Islam.

The museum is also affected by the scourge of India’s tourist attractions: the Indian day tour. Mostly frequented by Indian tourists, the day tour is an incredibly cheap way of seeing huge numbers of attractions in a very short space of time, and as such I’ve avoided them like the plague. In Hyderabad, for example, one tour takes you to the Buddha Purnima, the Qutab Shahi Tombs, Golconda Fort, Salar Jung Museum, the Mecca Masjid, Charminar, the zoo, a handicrafts emporium, the planetarium and the Birla Mandir, all in one day. I took over three days to do the same, and I avoided the zoo and handicrafts emporium, thankfully.

This explains the human whirlwinds that plough through the museum at regular intervals. There I was, examining yet another collection of Royal Doulton and Wedgwood, when I was forcibly flattened against the glass case while a bus load of chattering Indian tourists flew past, scanning the exhibits without any noticeable slowing down. The next time I heard the approaching maelstrom I ducked into an alcove, escaping certain death in the same way as the bull runners in Pamplona.

I then walked south to Charminar Gate, which is shown on every packet of Charminar cigarettes, one of India’s favourite brands of filterless smokes; the catch phrase on packets of Charminar cigarettes is ‘Nothing else really satisfies’, which is true if your definition of satisfaction is coughing up a greeny every morning when you kick start your lungs. The gate itself is impressive; blocking the traffic pretty effectively, it looms over the surrounding bazaar and gives the winding backstreets a flavour of Persia, with its Islamic minarets and characteristic arches. Just up the road is the Mecca Masjid, one of the largest mosques in the world, that is said to cater for 10,000 worshippers. It is, however, far from the most impressive, and after wandering around and being stung for some baksheesh² by a con man who pointed out to me a particular stone that was supposed to be from Mecca itself – who knows if he was telling the truth – I scurried back to my hotel for a hot shower.

The next day I completed the collection of tourist curios on offer by wandering up to the Birla Mandir, catching a boat out to the Buddha Purnima, and lazing in the public gardens after an exhausting visit to the murky Archaeological Museum. The highlight was the Birla Mandir, also known as Sri Venkateshwara Temple; perched above the city, this modern white marble Hindu temple is simply beautiful, as it catches the sunlight and lights up the hilltop with its intricate carvings and golden tower. I felt more comfortable than usual wandering barefoot round the sacred pathways; a sign at the bottom makes it perfectly clear that this temple is open to everyone ‘regardless of race, creed or caste’, which is a nice change after the normal practice of banning non-Hindus from the inner sanctum. I even felt easy taking snapshots, while the day tour masses swamped the monument with their instamatics and herd-like pushing and shoving. Often, as a stranger in a strange culture, I feel a little anxious, conscious of my ignorance of local etiquette, but when there are lots of other Indian tourists around, I feel fine; they manage to stamp all over their own heritage so comprehensively that the polite reticence of the conscientious westerner seems almost reverential in comparison.

The Buddha Purnima is pleasant too; it’s a 17.5m-high statue of Buddha that towers above a platform in the middle of the city’s huge Hussain Sagar lake. I took a boat out to the statue and back³, and it was easy to picture how disaster struck when the statue was being installed. The barge carrying it to the island capsized and the statue, a huge piece of stone, sunk to the bottom of the lake. Luckily a salvage team managed to bring it back up unharmed, despite a two-year sojourn in the depths, but they couldn’t bring back the eight people who’d gone down with it. It completes the tripartite of Hyderabadi religion: the Islamic Masjid Mecca, the Hindu Birla Mandir and the Buddhist Buddha Purnima.

And as for the Archaeological Museum, yet again I became the main exhibit as family after family engaged me in polite conversation about what I thought of India, what was my name, where did I come from and so on. I wonder whether all this repetitive conversation is going to drive me nuts in much the same way it did in Indonesia, but where my Indonesian conversations consisted generally of census questions and rarely strayed into conversation about Indonesia itself, Indian conversation is more like a job application form, with questions like ‘Why do you want this job? What are your good and bad points? Do you have any other comments that might affect your application?’ attached to spaciously empty white boxes. The set pieces of ‘What is your name?’ and ‘What country?’ soon give way to questions like ‘Why have you come here? What do you think of India? And do you like Indian girls?’ all of which are quite good questions if you want a conversation beyond the monosyllabic. It might still be an interviewing by numbers, but at least it’s an interview, rather than a monologue. I could get used to this...

¹ How many other places can you see a scraggly old git sitting on a dirty red rug, which he’s laid out on the pavement and covered with various yellowing sets of false teeth, a couple of mirrors on sticks and a selection of rusty and semi-sharp instruments that would put the ship’s surgeon at the Battle of Trafalgar to shame, all of which is tucked away behind a hand-scrawled sign reading ‘Teeth Dentist’? It made my root canal throb just to look at it.

² Baksheesh is a uniquely Indian concept. A strange combination of bribe and tip, baksheesh isn’t viewed as a luxury that only rich people can afford, it’s simply the way to get thing done. If you’re waiting at the bus stand and every bus that goes past is hopelessly crowded, slip the conductor some baksheesh and you’ll end up with a prime seat. If the train is full, some judicious baksheesh will get you a seat and, if it’s humanly possible, a berth. If you’re staying in a hotel for a few days, surreptitious use of baksheesh can ensure you always get served promptly and courteously; without, you may end up not being served at all. If you get arrested, baksheesh often works instead of an official fine. Baksheesh is an integral part of life, and although it strikes westerners as strange to have to bribe your way through life, here it’s the social norm, and you’d better get used to it. The problem is that there are plenty of people who demand baksheesh for doing nothing; the skill lies in intelligent and inoffensive discrimination.

³ The boat departed from a recreational garden set next to the lake, which wasn’t notable so much for its landscaped gardens or amorous couples canoodling under the neem trees, but more for its rubbish bins, the first I’d seen in 16 days in India. But don’t get the impression that Hyderabad is any cleaner than any other Indian city; on the way back from my walk, I wandered past a man from the council who was trying to unblock the drains. In the West this would all be hidden behind one of those cute little stripy tents that gives the workmen enough privacy to drink as much tea as is humanly possible in the working day, but in India there’s no need for privacy; the concrete slabs that passed for manhole covers were slid to one side and the man, clad only in a short dhoti tied round his midriff, was trying to shift the blockage by sticking his leg down the hole as far as it would go and wiggling his foot. Just as I walked past he pulled out his leg, all smothered in faeces the colour of the outback and the consistency of porridge, and just down the pavement a man was pissing against the wall, under a sign declaring the nearby shop to be a pharmacy. Is it any wonder the mortality rate is so high?

Golconda

Written: 1 February 1998   

After a couple of days exploring Hyderabad, I decided to head off to nearby Golconda Fort, one of the most magnificent fortress complexes in India, and some 11km west of Hyderabad. Most of the fort dates from the 16th and 17th centuries when the Qutab Shahi kings ruled the area, and just down the road are the flashy tombs where the kings and their relatives are buried.

Nick, whom I’d met in a Hyderabadi biryani restaurant, decided to join me, and a reasonably quick and astoundingly bouncy bus ride saw us to the main gate of the fort, where kids touted the services of the myriad cafés and restaurants cluttered round the entrance. After a Thums Up to shake off the effects of the bus, we paid our two rupees to get in, bought a little descriptive map of the area, and shrugging off the persistent guides who managed to speak such quick and unfathomable Inglish that it would have been a patent waste of time to take them, we stepped through the main gate and into the Golconda complex.

It took my breath away. Perhaps it’s my English heritage, but forts hold a special place in my heart, even if I haven’t actually visited many. I first noticed this when reading James Michener’s The Drifters while crossing the south Pacific, which is a distinctly castle-free part of the world; his description of the fortresses near Marrakech made me want to get off the boat and head straight for them (though, come to think of it, reading about anywhere made me want to get off that bloody boat). Golconda Fort sits astride a large hill, surrounded by semi-desert, and the buildings cover a huge area round the base of the hill. I was in heaven.

While exploring this wonderland of turrets, towers, mosques and minarets – the builders were Muslims, not surprisingly – we stumbled upon the ubiquitous gaggle of kids, who they latched onto us in time-honoured fashion. ‘Give me five rupees!’ they cried every time we so much as moved a toe.

Initially we tolerated them – hell, at first we probably even encouraged them out of politeness – but before long it started to get a bit tiring, and I had to put on my best fake-angry voice and tell them to get lost. To be honest they were quite lively and entertaining, but there’s nothing that ruins an ancient, mediaeval atmosphere as comprehensively as crazy kids.

And what an atmosphere! From the citadel at the top of the hill the scale of the fortress is apparent; inside the inner walls are the ruins of the fortress proper, and between the inner and outer walls, visible in the far-off distance, lies a still-thriving city. Over there, some kids are playing cricket in a park; to the east, there are schools and houses; in the north, you can make out some more industrial-looking buildings; and beyond lies a dry, dusty landscape that reminded me of pictures from Mars. I could imagine the king sitting on his citadel, watching the invading Mughals approaching from the horizon, kicking up clouds of dust as their horses marched ever onwards; even with the usual pack of Indian tourists milling around and defacing the property – quite literally in the case of one idiot, who was carving his name into the wall right under a sign proclaiming that what he was doing was illegal – Golconda was simply fantastic.

The Qutab Shahi Tombs

From Golconda, the Qutab Shahi Tombs are a short walk through some little villages and winding streets, with their white-washed walls, Muslim locals and stagnant open drains; I thought it felt a bit like Greece in the days before a huge influx of tourists brought money and clean streets.

The tombs themselves are an intriguing mix of the old and the new; the old buildings, domed and distinctly Islamic, soar into the cloudless sky, while the new gardens round the tombs play host to the Indian equivalent of Sunday afternoon down the park. While the bones of the kings lie dusty and long-dead in their stone sarcophagi, the locals play cricket, bouncing rubber balls off the tomb walls, and blasting loud Hindi pop music out of tinny ghetto blasters turned up to full volume.

If the kings and their kin thought they’d be resting in peace in their pleasant gardens, they couldn’t have been more wrong; if I were a Muslim, I’d probably be a bit miffed by the treatment the tombs get from the locals, although it has to be said that Hyderabad does have a very large Muslim population, more so than the national average, so perhaps they don’t mind after all.

In fact, the city is unique among southern centres in that its most common language is Urdu, rather than Hindi or a local dialect¹; certainly, women clad in black robes with full burqas are common. And for once the burqa has a use; it doubles as a face mask, which is not a bad thing given the pollution levels in Hyderabad.

If we thought we’d be able to explore the gardens in the tranquillity normally reserved for cemeteries, we couldn’t have been more wrong. I used to have an urge – a fleeting urge to be a rock star, as most budding guitarists have at some stage – but now I’ve had quite enough. At every turn, locals flocked to us, holding out their hands and going, ‘Helloo, how yoo?’ Seemingly desperate to be shaken by the hand, they grabbed our arms, after which they’d look at their friends and grin, as if touching a foreigner was something cool and kind of kooky.

It was fun at first, but just as a can of Coke is perfect but a two-litre bottle is too much, the novelty soon wore off. Still, the locals are thoroughly friendly, they are delighted to see visitors, and a sizable number of them can hold a reasonable conversation in Inglish. That’s not so bad.

Back in Hyderabad

That night I watched the sun setting over the city from my hotel roof, noticing that hidden away up there was a large pile of empty whisky and lager bottles, most wrapped in brown paper bags, and all of them stacked in one corner of the roof. Andhra Pradesh used to be a dry state – it now has some bottle shops around, I notice – and alcohol isn’t drunk in public, so I’d obviously stumbled on a favourite supping spot for alcohol-consuming visitors. It was a good spot too; as the sun dipped below the horizon, Golconda stood out in silhouette in the distance, and the various mosques cast long shadows as their evening calls to prayer echoed out. It felt just like the Middle East.

It also felt like a good time to try some local sweets, to round off the evening; I’d already had a delicious tandoori chicken down the Punjab Restaurant, and with a fully restored appetite, I was hungry for more. So I went down to the sweet shop and asked for a 500g box of various sweets, and armed with my box of goodies, I retired to my room to write some letters and munch on this culinary experiment.

Good lord, the Indians like their sweets sweet. My first bite made my teeth ache in anticipation of decay, and they’d waved the white flag and signed a peace treaty by the time I’d tried all the different types. Most were a bit much for my tender palate – yoghurt is nice in a pot or a drink, but when your fudge tastes of yoghurt, it feels as if something’s gone wrong – but a couple were rather enjoyable, so I flagged them for future reference and tried to sleep through the sugar rush. At least that explains my dreams that night...

¹ There are 18 official languages in India, and over 1600 minor languages and dialects dotted around. This is one reason for the retention of English despite over 50 years of independence, because for two Indians from opposite ends of the country to communicate, they’ll probably have to use English. Hindi is the official language of India, but down in Tamil Nadu, for example, nobody speaks it, they all speak Tamil; indeed, most states have their own, individual language. Urdu is interesting because although it’s an Indian language that was developed in Delhi and is used as the state language of Kashmir and Jammu, it was adopted early on by the Muslims, so it’s written in the scratchy calligraphy of Perso-Arabic script and contains a number of Persian words. Another interesting one is Sanskrit, the ancient language of India; it is, I suppose, the Indian equivalent of Chaucerian English, and is the language of the Hindu Vedas. But despite all these different ways of expressing yourself, there still doesn’t seem to be any way of expressing the concepts of ‘punctuality’, ‘efficiency’ or ‘peace and quiet’ in Indian, and there probably never will be.

Hyderabadi Conversations

Written: 4 February 1998   

It was with glee that I realised I’d booked my ticket from Hyderabad to Chennai a day too late; I checked the timetable and found I wasn’t due to leave until seven o’clock in the evening. Having already exhausted Hyderabad’s main attractions, I moved onto its next claim to fame, its food. According to the locals, Hyderabad invented biryani, that gorgeous combination of fragrant rice and vegetables that’s so popular in England, and even if this is stretching the truth, they’ve certainly mastered the dish. Chicken biryani never tasted so good as in Hyderabad, and I decided to spend my extra day by tracking down the best restaurant in town, the Paradise Garden Restaurant, and parking myself there for an extended lunch. God, it felt good.

But it wasn’t just excellent cuisine that my midday splash furnished me with; it also provided me with much food for thought. Seated opposite me in the distinctly middle class dining room – where most people spoke Inglish over their hors d’oeuvres, and a few even spoke English – were two well-dressed and well-pressed young men. Inevitably, as it always does in India, the census chatter gave way to the subject of money: how much did my ticket cost, did I find India cheap, what did my job pay?

‘Tell me, what would be a good wage in London?’ one of them asked.

‘Hmm. Well, I guess a decent wage would be £20,000 a year. You could live in London pretty comfortably on that, and even more comfortably if you lived outside London and commuted,’ I replied.

‘What do you earn?’

‘Hard to say, really. I’m a freelancer, so my earnings aren’t fixed. That’s the price you pay for such a pleasant lifestyle. What do you two do?’

‘We are programmers. Cobol.’

‘And you work here in Hyderabad?’

‘Yes, but we have been offered jobs abroad. We can go to London and earn £36,000 in a year there.’

I sucked in my breath; that was nearly double the salary of the job I’d quit to go travelling. ‘Wow! I’m in the wrong job...’ I said.

‘But we go to America instead, me to Kansas and my friend to New Jersey. The wage there is US$50,000 per year.’

‘I think you’ll find you’ll probably manage on that...’ I volunteered, wondering how to consolidate this with the beggars dying a slow death in the septic sewers of the city outside.

The flip side of the coin turned up in a conversation that invaded my privacy as I wandered the two hours back from the restaurant in Secunderabad. He just appeared; one minute I was enjoying a peaceful stroll past the Hussain Sagar, and the next I was answering census questions once again.

‘Where you from?’ asked the young man, who introduced himself as Rumi Siddqui. He had a clean, folded handkerchief in one hand with which he constantly wiped his lips and dabbed his unshaven chin. It was a faintly disturbing sight that was more suited to an obese and sweating man twice his age.

‘England,’ I said, not exactly keen to become embroiled in another Inglish conversation.

‘You married?’

‘Nope.’

‘You Christian?’

‘Yes, I suppose you could say that.’

‘I am Muslim. How old you?’

‘Twenty-seven. How old are you?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘And are you married?’ I asked.

‘No. But I always look after girls. You know any girls in England who want to marry an Indian? Can you bring me to your country and find me an English girl? Not many English girls come here.’

‘Er, no, I don’t think so. If an English girl wants to marry an Indian, there are plenty in England to choose from, you know. We have lots of Indians in England.’

‘I am interested in travel, like you I think. Can you help me to get to your country? When you are home, can you talk to someone to help me?’

‘I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. You have to go through the embassies and get visas and stuff. I’m no use at all.’

‘You perhaps go home and send me a visa.’

‘I don’t think so. There’s nothing I can do. About all you can do is emigrate, or marry an English girl.’

‘Your girls at home, they are easy, no? When you ask for fuck, they give fuck?’

‘Hell, no!’ I said, a bit miffed at the turn of conversation. ‘That’s just what you think, watching all those stupid American films and soap operas. If you really want to know why English girls don’t come here alone, it’s because the locals think they’re only after one thing and keep going up to them with such subtleties as, “Do you want a fuck?” Women in the West are far from easy, take it from me.’

‘But they wear many flesh, much short clothes? Always showing off and flirting?’

‘Well, they don’t exactly wear burqas, but no, they don’t show any more flesh than the women in Singapore, for example. Besides, every Indian woman I see shows off the flesh round her waist, and women in England don’t really do that. Then again, Indian women always wear sarees down to their feet, while western women show off their legs more. Two different areas of the body, two different approaches, but no real difference. Muslim women are different, but Hindus aren’t really.’

‘But all your women have AIDS, right?’

‘Are you kidding? There’s more AIDS in Asia than there is in Europe and America. Have you ever been to Bangkok?’

‘Hmm. I hope you do not mind me talking like this about your country. I try to find out, and often I am mistaken, for which I apologise.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘You have any brothers?’

‘Yes, one brother and a sister.’

‘Ah, one brother.’

‘And a sister.’

‘Yes. A brother. What does he do?’

‘He’s a lawyer.’

‘Ah.’

‘And my sister’s a student.’

‘Your brother is a lawyer. That is good.’

‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘I have four brothers. They are all engineers and one is going to America.’

‘And do you have any sisters?’

‘Four brothers, yes.’

‘No, do you have any sisters?’

‘One sister, but she’s married. Four brothers.’

‘Four brothers. I see. And are you an engineer too?’

‘No, I start work as a motorcycle courier on Friday.’

‘Ah, so you’re going to be one of those crazy biker-men, eh!’

‘Yes. See over there, that’s traffic police headquarters. There many bad people pay big money for not having insurance or licence.’

‘I see.’

‘I have no insurance or licence either.’

‘But you’re about to become a motorcycle courier!’

‘I avoid police, then. We go in here and have tea, yes? It is good to be talking to you.’

And so, on it went. I put him right about a few more misconceptions about the West – we’re not all rich, we don’t all shoot people, we don’t all have extra-marital affairs, and we don’t all eat cows and pigs for every meal – and I politely tolerated his Islamic sexism; in return I learned a lot about Indian perceptions of the West, and I bid Rumi a warm goodbye with a promise to send him a postcard on my return. He at least deserved that, especially as he’d refused to let me pay for the tea...

Music on the Brain

Written: 4 February 1998   

It was in Hyderabad that music lodged itself in my brain and refused to let go. When I go on long-distance walks I tend to get a song stuck in my head right from the start, and it keeps rattling round my cranium in time to my steps, all the way through to the end of the walk. For some reason Hyderabad kicked off the same process, and I found myself remembering snatched melodies and memories from ages past.

The most telling indication that I’ve been travelling for too long came as I was reading a new purchase, Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer, a travelogue about Asia and how its culture is being changed by the West¹. I came across this highly accurate line: ‘If the great horror of travelling is that the foreign can come to seem drearily familiar, the happy surprise of travelling is that the familiar can come to seem wondrously exotic.’ Totally unbidden, the opening chords from the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ started up in my subconscious, so loud that I had to put the book down and listen.

The astounding thing is that, despite ‘Hotel California’ being one of the most radio-friendly and overplayed songs in the history of west coast rock, in my brain it suddenly sounded fresh. Incredible though it seems, as Don Henley sang, ‘Down a dark desert highway/Cool wind in my hair’ inside my head, it felt original, fresh, almost inventive. I couldn’t believe it; this was the musical equivalent of watching yet another repeat of the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show and finding oneself surprised when Angela Rippon pushes away the news desk and reveals not only glorious legs, but a serious talent for dance. I couldn’t believe it; indeed, the familiar was beginning to sound wondrously exotic, as the warm smell of colitas rose up through the air.

But ‘Hotel California’, alas, didn’t have the staying power to bug me for more than a few minutes, and as I watched the sun set once again over Hyderabad, I started humming the song that has been haunting me ever since I heard it again in Singapore. ‘I’m sitting in a railway station/Got a ticket for my destination,’ warbled Paul Simon. ‘On a tour of one-night stands/My suitcase and guitar at hand/And every stop is neatly planned/For a poet and a one-man band/Homeward Bound, I wish I was/Homeward Bound...’

I don’t think I’ll shift that one until I finally get home...

¹ For some reason I find some travelogues faintly depressing, because other people’s exploits always sound so much more interesting than your own. Amusing and earthy travelogues I adore, but those that detail incredible events that are unique and impossible to repeat – such as travelling in country X before country X becomes ruined by tourism, or stumbling into a piece of paradise in a country that has since been ravaged by war – make me a little sad and not a little jealous. This is annoying; I find myself falling into the trap of travel competition – ‘my trip’s better than your trip, na na na na na’ – and I hate that. Why is it so hard to appreciate that what you yourself have achieved might be fairly impressive, and that this isn’t a competition?

The Indian Film Industry

Written: 4 February 1998   

At this stage it’s worth mentioning yet another incredible Indian institution: the Indian film industry. Rumi’s stereotypical image of western women had come mainly from American movies, which seem all the more lewd and free-lovin’ because most Indian movies don’t even show kissing, let alone nudity. But what Indian flicks lose in censorship, they more than make up for in sheer exuberance.

Bombay is the official centre of Indian film, so much so that the films are known as ‘Bollywood’ movies (though this is unlikely to change to ‘Mollywood’ now that Bombay has changed its name to Mumbai). Bollywood churns out twice as many films every year as Hollywood, and where the average Hollywood blockbuster clocks in at about 90 minutes, Bollywood epics run to an exhausting average of two-and-a-half hours. Each movie has at least five sing-along dance routines, and every type of film genre – action, romance, thriller, crime and musical – is packed into the celluloid equivalent of bubble and squeak.

To a westerner the films can appear a little amateurish at times, but the figures point to an industry that is far from unsuccessful. Bollywood blockbusters, of which there are more than 800 produced every year, have million-dollar budgets, produce over 100 million ticket sales every week, have huge advertising campaigns – the posters mount up on walls and telegraph poles, only to be nibbled off by passing goats and cows – and have made a lot of Bombay residents very rich indeed.

The actors, once in the big time, are made for life. The men are generally moustachioed podges who all look pretty identical, while the women are rotund and coyly flirtatious; this excess of weight denotes prosperity in much the same way it does in Polynesia. Once an actor or actress makes it, he or she will end up acting in lots of films, all at the same time; stories of actors working on over 100 films simultaneously are not uncommon, because it’s actors that sell films. Directors also spread their talents thinly; one successful director was so overbooked that he directed his movies by phone. And if an actor or actress becomes well known for a certain ‘device’, they tend to use that device in every film they star in; thus, if Ursula Andress was an Indian film star, they would find an opportunity for her to slink out of the sea in a black bikini and knife belt in every one of her movies.

The plots can also feel rather unsophisticated, at least as far as the western film critic goes. To the untrained eye (and ear) Bollywood films are formulaic, to say the least. There is a handsome hero and a beautiful heroine, normally from different classes, as well as an evil seductress and a villain. The hero has a friend, who falls in love with the seductress and manages to change her ways, and in the end good always conquers evil. Mixed into this less-than-thrilling piece of screenwriting are the sing-along pieces, which spring up with a spontaneity and inappropriateness that even Fame has trouble beating. The action scenes are never far away – fights break out so quickly you’re left wondering what sparked them off – and involve plenty of martial manoeuvres and overdubbed grunts and groans. The romantic scenes are renowned for their lack of content rather than their promiscuity; one film I heard about had two lovers embracing, about to go for a kiss, and just as the dirty deed was to be shown the scene cut to romantic orchestral overtures and a picture of the Eiffel Tower thrusting manfully into the sky. With Bollywood, you sometimes just have to use your imagination.

But it’s easy to understand the reason for such repetitiveness in theme and presentation. The audience in India must be one of the most varied and diverse cross-sections of mankind ever to go to the movies, so to get big ticket sales, you have to appeal to everyone. So there’s no sex, which would offend the more pious pundits; there are no heavy historical or mythological themes, which would annoy the revisionists; there are no specifically regional films, which would restrict the audience on geographical terms (films about the Mughals wouldn’t be popular in the deep south, since the Mughals never reached there); films about the western world would only appeal to educated people, and they don’t make up the masses; and so the common denominator is the sing-along action romance, and so you find it absolutely everywhere. Sure, there are some arty films that are successful abroad, but as they normally concentrate on poverty and real life, Indians don’t want to watch them; they want escapism at the flicks, just like the rest of us.

And, truth be told, Bollywood reflects the country itself. Colourful, noisy, brash, romantic, coy but seductive, festive and larger than life, watching an Indian movie is the next best thing to being here. It’s a poor second, though...

Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry

Chennai

Written: 8 February 1998   

Incredible though it might seem, Chennai, the fourth biggest city in India, is almost pleasant. The traffic’s comparatively light, the slums are only moderately squalid, there aren’t that many beggars, the pollution isn’t solid enough to pose an ornithological challenge, the buses only ooze people at rush hour, and most surprisingly of all, there are underpasses. It’s quite amazing.

Well, it’s amazing after Calcutta and Hyderabad; Chennai (which was known as Madras until April 1996) is on its way to becoming an urban sprawl, but it hasn’t got there yet. OK, it’s not quite paradise – crossing the rotting Cooum River by footbridge is an exercise in breathing steadily through the mouth, and cows still manage to create traffic chaos and cow pats simultaneously – but I was expecting another full-on Indian city, and instead I found I could stroll through the traffic without the elements of luck and prayer that are so essential in other cities. And I even managed to change money at the bank instantaneously, which was a first.

But the price to pay for all this easy living is a slight twinge of boredom. It’s as if Chennai is situated beyond the event horizon of some nearby black hole; nothing seems to happen here. You can count the interesting sights on one hand, and if you’re after a good time after dark, think again; Tamil Nadu’s strict licensing laws make popping out for a beer simply depressing, with the only option being the dark subterranean permit rooms where drinkers guiltily sup their evil concoctions while looking forward to the special hangover that only Indian beer seems capable of producing¹. I arrived in Chennai at 9.15am – astoundingly the train arrived a full five minutes early – and booked into a hotel, and by 4pm I’d seen all the sights, managed to change some money, done some window-shopping, and found myself wandering aimlessly. This was not what I expected to happen.

The Sights of Chennai

Yes, Chennai is a city without any huge attractions, despite its history as the first major British settlement (it dates from 1639). Apart from two interesting colonial building complexes, Chennai is a collection of shops, banks, rickshaws and heat, but to me it seemed to have no spirit and no soul, and the people reflected this in their manner; whereas in Hyderabad I couldn’t move for hellos and smiling waves, the people of Chennai appear to have perfected the art of staring right through you with that unnerving blank look reserved by lunatics and government politicians. I smiled happily, but the only people who smiled back were some of the educated and young middle class business-wallahs, and the school children (of course), who spotted me, surrounded me and gave me a quick lesson on how to play hooker in a scrum (for which they then tried to charge me two rupees).

Take Fort St George, one of the two colonial areas in Chennai. Its history is long – it was first used as a fort in 1653 – and the on-site museum is worth a look. But the large walled complex is now used for various government departments, such as the Secretariat and the Legislative Assembly, and when you visit you constantly feel as if you’re poking your nose into business that not only doesn’t concern you, it might land you on the wrong side of the bars. From the ominous sign that proclaims a small windowless room by the entrance to be the ‘Frisking Point’, to the Burt Reynolds look-alike guards who prowl round every corner, I felt as if I would have my camera whisked away from me and the film unceremoniously pulled off the spool as I clicked a picture of St Mary’s, the oldest surviving British church in India (built in 1678-1680) and the place where Clive of India was married. Indeed, as I walked up a flight of stone steps in the vain hope that it might afford me a more photogenic view of the tree-clad church, one of the guards whistled me down with a growl, and my heart missed a beat; I shot back down to ground level faster than you could say, ‘Bail is refused.’

Still, if I had been strong-armed into the lock up, at least I would eventually have ended up in what I found to be the liveliest spot in Chennai. The High Court building, a glorious red maze of spires and Saracenic towers that was built in 1892 and is said to be the largest judicial building in the world after the courts in London, was bustling with barristers (all in the traditional long black cloak and white two-piece tie). From the look of things plenty of locals have realised that the only way they are going to make their lives more interesting is to break the law, or failing that, to go and watch someone else get their dues in court. I can sympathise; leaving the day-glo buildings behind, I wandered through Parry’s Corner, Chennai’s equivalent of Piccadilly Circus, though nothing particularly interesting was happening; there wasn’t even a cow sitting in the middle of the road, chewing the cud and catching out the unlicensed. So I slumped back to my hotel² to make plans for the morrow.

And there I met Howard, a lone traveller from Manchester who declared that he was travelling round the world to find out whether or not he liked Johnny Cash’s ‘A Thing Called Love’. This is as good a reason for travelling as I have ever heard, so we teamed up to tackle Tamil Nadu: first stop, Mamallapuram.

¹ Although it’s followed closely by the hangover produced by Thailand’s Mekong whisky, a concoction that doesn’t quite turn you blind, but which tries very hard.

² My hotel was memorable for the grubby little signs on the wall of each room that said (and I quote exactly):

ATTENTION!

Guests Are-Advised
To be CAUTIOUS
of Strangers at Hotels Around
Who Coax you for
A Dance-Party-or-Something Like
They are Troublesome

Manager

The hotel was also memorable for the huge rats that inhabited the lower-floor bathrooms, so large that the resident cats studiously avoided the area. Some enterprising traveller had even chiselled away at the letters ‘BATHROOM’ above one particularly inviting hole to leave ‘RAT ROOM’, an accurate observation if ever there was one...

Buying Music in India

Written: 7 February 1998   

In Chennai I ended up cracking under the sheer pressure of window-shopping for a day. I’d wandered into town with the intention of browsing through the shopping malls, checking out the street stalls and exploring the markets, but not necessarily to buy anything; after all, everything I buy I have to carry around, and I’ve got enough junk already.

The music shop came up and clubbed me on the back of the head before I could reach out to defend myself. ‘Cassettes’ it blurted from its windows; ‘CDs’, ‘Latest Hits’, ‘Videos’ it said; and realising that losing myself in the rows of tapes would be a good way to kill a couple of hours, I strolled in. I went in poor, and I came out rich.

Flipping over a tape to check the price, I balked. One hundred rupees for the latest Oasis album; that’s £1.60, not a lot of money. I looked further. Classic tapes were Rs75, new ones around Rs100, and even double albums crammed onto single tapes were still Rs100. I considered buying a few to be able to play on borrowed Walkmans, and then I spotted an innocent and downright cheap-looking box in the ‘Accessories’ section; an Indian copy of a Walkman, clocking in at Rs400, begged me to give it a home, and for one heady moment I realised I could have a stereo and a bunch of tapes for little more than the price of one CD in London. I chose carefully, and walked out of the shop with an excitement akin to a child’s Christmas Eve. The Walkman even had a speaker, perfect for those lazy afternoons sitting out on the veranda.

So, I’m back in the music. The range in the shop was pretty good, especially as far as classic from the 1960s and 1970s were concerned, and I walked out onto the street clutching the following albums in my mitts, ready for an afternoon of sun and song:

The Beatles – Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Simon and Garfunkel – Greatest Hits

U2 – Achtung Baby

Pearl Jam – Vitalogy

Oasis – Be Here Now

Pink Floyd – The Wall

Crowded House – Recurring Dream (Very Best Of...)

Armed with the above and a book, I managed to laze my way through Friday, and that night I ended up staying up into the wee hours with a wonderful group of other travellers, which radically altered my plans for an early Saturday departure. Madras might have been a bit mundane, but I loved every minute of it; thank goodness for other travellers in India. And when your schedule is as free as mine, changing your plans is as easy as rolling over and hitting the snooze button.

Mamallapuram

Written: 11 February 1998   

After exhausting the sights of Chennai, Howard and I finally boarded the bus south to the temple beach town of Mamallapuram (previously known as Mahabalipuram, another name change in a land that is confusing enough without dithering about what to call things). Mamallapuram is best known for its rock temples and pretty little beach, but these days it’s as popular for its travellers’ scene as anything else.

The bus was incredibly packed. I had a little kid sitting on my feet (and eventually falling asleep there) while I hung onto a handrail for dear life. Luckily it was a short one-and-a-half hour journey, and the clean sea breeze of Mamallapuram was heaven as we stumbled out of the bus. We found ourselves a nice cheap hotel, and sauntered off to see the World Heritage Shore Temple on the beach.

The Shore Temple is another quite beautiful example of intricate rock carving, and even though most of the detail has been sandblasted away by the coastal weather, it manages to retain an air of mystery, even when coach loads of Indian tourists are scrambling over the walls and picnicking under the signs declaring, ‘It is forbidden to bring eatables into this site.’ Dating from the Pallava period of the late seventh century, it’s a highly photogenic place, as long as you don’t take any shots looking south down the beach, where a huge nuclear power station churns out goodness knows what into the Bay of Bengal. Unsurprisingly I chose not to go swimming in Mamallapuram, lest I be bitten by a gently glowing three-headed tuna with a PhD in Astrophysics.

Tucked away behind the town, away from the beach, is the most wonderful collection of rock-hewn caves and stand-alone temples. Palm trees soar from cracks in the huge boulders that are strewn around the area, and wandering round in the blistering heat, you come across inviting shrines with their cool interiors, huge spires denoting ancient places of worship, and mounds of steps cut into the rock. The temples are quite beautiful and are wonderful examples of Hindu rock art, and they’re uniquely different to the temples I’ve already seen in Konark and Hyderabad.

But sights aside, Mamallapuram feels like it’s been positively designed for relaxation. Beer is relatively expensive, but it’s still affordable; we couldn’t resist trying the Marco Polo Beer, which at 8.75 per cent is one of the strongest available in India, and which comes complete with the warning ‘Liquor ruins country, family, life’ emblazoned on the label (surprisingly, it didn’t say, ‘Liquor ruins country, family, life and the whole of the next day,’ though it probably should have done). The seafood is glorious and some of the safest in India, having been irradiated even before it’s caught. And on returning to our hotel at some god-awful hour, we came across a huge family gathering – argument or party, we couldn’t tell which – and ended up in conversation with this astoundingly stoned old Indian, whose eyes bled red and whose sentences weren’t remotely in the right order. It would have freaked me out if I hadn’t myself been struggling through a haze of country, family and life, and that night, drifting off to the sounds of Indian insanity down the corridor, I thought to myself once again, ‘This is India!’

And with the Rose Garden Restaurant offering a Breake Fast of Scrumbled Egg on bread, of which you could have one slice, two silces or three sileces, I felt right at home in sunny Mamallapuram.

Slowing Down

Written: 10 February 1998   

India is beginning to slow me down, as if I’m walking through treacle. I’ve had schedules and plans to keep me company since I started this trip in Sydney some two-and-a-half years ago, and India’s no different, but for the first time, I’m losing interest in rushing round and ticking off everything on my list; now I seem to spend most of my planning sessions dropping things from the itinerary, rather than adding them.

It’s India, you see. The concepts of ‘mañana’, ‘whenever’ and ‘siesta’ don’t need to be spelled out here; taking however long it takes is the philosophy, and if you don’t roll with it, you’ll be run over. Buses arrive when they arrive; trains depart when they pull out; banks change cheques when they change them; beggars die when they die; cows sit down when they get tired; the electricity works when there isn’t a problem. The suited executive from the Land of the Transit Lounge would lose his mind in Indefinite India, but for the long-term traveller it affords the opportunity to glide into another timeline; if the world of the West is a well-oiled machine, India is a Heath Robinson contraption whose purpose is unclear, performance sporadic and schematics fascinating.

The places make India, the people make India, the atmosphere makes India, and rushing around from place to place only manages to change a journey of discovery into the pandemonium of those ten-sights-a-minute guided tours. This is more than a little pointless, surely? I have learned more about India and seen more amazing sights by sitting down and watching the circus pass through town than I have by zooming through the hills by bus or train. The journeys are interesting, but the destination is more so, whatever the guidebooks say about ‘getting there being 90 per cent of the experience’.

But there is a downside to all this slow living. Waiting an hour for your morning pot of coffee isn’t unusual, and getting tea instead of what you ordered is even more normal. Asking a question like ‘Is the sea always this rough?’ will get you the less than useful answer, ‘Sometimes.’ Asking whether there is a bus to the next town elicits the ambiguous, ‘It’s possible.’ And the ubiquitous head wobble can mean yes, no or maybe, depending on quite how it’s done, leaving the novice westerner flummoxed¹ and more confused than before.

Still, if you just smile at people, they grin back, dope-fuelled eyes as red as butter chicken. The Indians spend a lot of time staring into space, as do a lot of the western visitors, so it’s not hard to understand why things don’t get done. As we walked to see the Five Rathas (a lovely collection of small rock temples just outside Mamallapuram), this crazy man lurched at me, making a grab for my hat, and as I ducked to one side, he lost his balance and tumbled onto the pavement, smashing his coccyx on the concrete. He passed out there and then, but it woke me up; he was still unconscious when we went past him again. Even the police raid during our last night at the hotel was happy; we grinned aimlessly as they fired census questions at us, and they went away satisfied and probably wondering why we were smiling so much. But it worked.

So I find myself leaning into the wind, wading through the surf, crawling uphill; use whatever metaphor you like, I’m thoroughly getting into the Indian way of life, taking in their timescale, and probably losing a bit more of my western self in the process, which is no bad thing...

It’s the most intriguing and interesting time I’ve had in my life.

¹ And sometimes angry too. Howard, for example, would get quite irate with the locals, eventually culminating in a cry of, ‘I fookin’ hate fookin’ Indians, they really piss me off sometimes, they’re just fookin’ useless!’ Luckily I’ve been able to roll with it as far as it rolls, but poor old Howard did seem to get all the bad luck; while I was travelling with him he never seemed to get what he ordered in restaurants, he always got stared at (probably because he shaved his head), he always ended up in the bus seat next to the dribbling weirdo or in the ladies’ section, and not surprisingly it started to get on his nerves. As he put it, ‘Any nation who worships an elephant and a monkey must be up the bloody spout anyway.’ He still loved it, though...

Pondicherry

Written: 12 February 1998   

Pondicherry threw me from the first second. Rising on the morning of our departure from Mamallapuram, we grabbed a quick two-silce Breake Fast and headed for the bus stand, where an almost empty bus was waiting, proclaiming ‘Pondy’ on the front. Empty buses don’t exist in India, but there, in front of us, was one with leg room and space for luggage, and not only was it empty, but it only took an hour and a half to do the three-and-a-half hour stretch south to Pondicherry. It quite unnerved me.

So we arrived in Pondicherry earlier than expected, still reeling from this efficient service, and wandered about the streets in a bit of a daze. Pondicherry town is part of the tiny, scattered Union Territory of Pondicherry, which contains the four little French pockets of the country that were only bequeathed to independent India in the 1950s. Pondy is supposed to be the place where France meets India, but initial impressions are of a place that’s still overwhelmingly Indian, where paint peels and the dust blows just as it does everywhere else. There’s still the fragrance of stagnant merde wafting sur le vent, and plenty of local characters qui faisent de toilette in the middle of the street; le canal through the centre of town is more like a slow trickling sewer, and le parc central plays host to plenty of characters from Les Miserables.

But after a while you notice the little things: Pondy isn’t quite Pont-de-cherie, but the French influence is still visible. The water front, though not exactly French, is not exactly Indian either; the police sport red gendarmerie caps; crumbling cathedrals hide down broad, leafy boulevards with names like Rue de Dumas and Rue de François Martin, while cafés sport names like Bar Qualithé and Le Rendezvous and sell dishes like poulet au beurre d’ail avec riz blanc; and the French area, sandwiched between le canal and la mer, is spotlessly clean, with lots of little men cleaning the streets using witches’ brooms. On the other hand, when a rickshaw driver tried his usual, ‘Hello sir, want rickshaw?’ and I replied with, «Non merci, je veux me promener. C’est un beau jour et Pondicherry est une petite ville, n’est pas?» he just looked confused and shuffled his feet.

The French influence is probably most noticeable when it comes to the availability of alcohol, as we found out when Howard and I visited the Bar Qualithé for a few beers in the company of Matthew, an American we’d met en route.

The price of beer is exceptional, even if the beer isn’t; stocks are always low in India, and we managed to drink our way through the bar’s entire stock of Kingfisher, Haywards, Black Label Lager¹ and Cannon 10000 in only four beers each. Before we knew it, last orders were called at 11pm and a drunken fight broke out between a couple of low-tolerance Indian patrons and the management; not surprisingly, the management won, as they do the world over at closing time.

The menu had looked good, too, though after we’d perused the available dishes for about half an hour, the waiter happened to mention, ‘All we have is rice and noodles, I hope that’s all right,’ which was a shame as I was dying to try the Green Piece Soup and Finger Chipes. And as we wandered home through the dark streets between the French and Indian areas, we came across a huge collection of bodies, sleeping peacefully on the pavement, in the nearby park and outside a set of gates labelled ‘Pondicherry Maternal Hospital’. On closer inspection every one of the bodies was a pregnant woman, most of whom were a lot closer to the labour pains than to the conception. That’s not the sort of thing you’d see in Paris.

Still, one thing’s definitely the same in Pondy as in France: they drive like maniacs, and often on the right-hand side of the road. Not that they’re supposed to in India...

¹ Bottles of Black Label are ominously labelled ‘The taste you grow up to’. This is, of course, only two letters off the real story.

Trichy

Written: 15 February 1998   

It wasn’t tricky to get to Trichy, just time-consuming. Trichy, whose full name Tiruchirappalli is only ever used by those inside the bubble of railway bureaucracy, is an interesting and bustling town in the central south, and its sights are well worth the severe shuddering of the bus journey from Pondicherry.

Trichy’s two main attractions are the Rock Fort Temple and the Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple. The first one is interesting because it’s perched on top of a huge hill of smooth stone, dominating the town centre much more convincingly than the nearby Church of Mother Lourdes (which would otherwise be the centrepiece of the town); the second is famous for its huge gopurams (the pyramid-shaped towers that form the gates into Dravidian temples) and seven sets of concentric walls, all of which are open to non-Hindus except the very last.

The Rock Fort Temple is fairly impressive, but after Golconda a rock fort has got to be pretty outstanding to merit more than a mention; the 437 numbered steps to the summit are more interesting for the groups of pilgrims and tired school children resting there than for anything else, but the view from the top is well worth the climb. Trichy lies all around with its slums and sanctuaries, its sewers and shouting salesmen, and in the distance the huge gopurams of Sri Ranganathaswamy soar above the palm trees. If it wasn’t for the inanely invasive conversations of the stoned pilgrims hanging around the inner sanctum, it would be a glorious place in which to sit and contemplate, but in India you simply can’t expect peace, so I just joined in and talked total rubbish back.

In fact, I’ve had to give up on so many promising conversations with stoned pilgrims that I have formulated a foolproof plan for dealing with these confused and confusing individuals. They say something to me and I fail to understand, so I smile and quote song lyrics back to them. They look slightly fazed, but undaunted try something else, and back flies another lyric. This can go on for quite some time, and eventually they decide you’re worse off than them, and wander off. The best thing is that they always think you’re being really sociable, and compared to the usual brush-off, I am, so as far as I’m concerned it’s a win-win approach. We both certainly come out of it happier, anyway.

Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple

Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple is another place where peace is but a distant memory. With seven concentric walls, 21 gopurams and a total area of 2.5 square kilometres, the temple shocks with its scale alone, and the fact that the biggest gopuram on the outside wall is a monstrous 73m high makes it hard to miss, and worth not missing.

Walk through this gopuram and you’ll discover a whole city crammed into the narrow streets. There are bazaars, houses, election rallies, beggars, cows, dust, sun, more gopurams, smartly dressed women, barber shops, dhoti-clad men, flies, rickshaws, loud music, buses, deafening speeches; everywhere there are people, people, people, all doing something, even if it’s just sitting on the wall, watching the world going by and spitting out half-chewed pan.

We engaged the services of a temple guide, and it turned out to be well worth the money. With it being such a huge complex you can wander around for ages without really knowing what on earth is going on, and even with a guide it’s far from clear exactly what everyone is doing with all that coconut-smashing and water-sprinkling, but at least we managed to glean some information. The complex is dedicated to Vishnu, so there are plenty of statues of deities like Rama, Krishna, Hanuman and other figures from the Ramayana, as well as characters from the legends of Vishnu’s other avatars, and everywhere seems to have a little quirk built in.

For example, there’s a niche in the wall halfway down the western side of the seventh temple, and if you shout your name there – or, more accurately, if the guide shouts an Inglish version of your name there – it echoes around the long corridor and is supposed to bring you good fortune. And there’s a little stone slab inside the sixth wall with two footprints carved into it, and five little holes in front of them; if you can put your feet on the prints, stick the five fingers of your right hand into the holes, and lean over to your left until you can see the statue at the end of the corridor, then apparently you’ll go to paradise. Having tried it, it’s probably just a way of screening out those who are too stoned from reaching nirvana... and there are plenty of people wandering aimlessly around the temple who couldn’t even manage the five-finger trick, let alone the leaning.

Take the resident fruitcake, who spotted us round the back of the sixth temple wall and decided we would be good fodder for a monologue. Staring through his one good eye, the other swirling in the murky milk of cataracts, he started an oration in Tamil that not only meant nothing to us, it meant nothing to our guide.

‘Is he mad?’ Howard asked our guide.

‘No, his mind just changed,’ the guide replied, shaking his head knowingly.

‘Too many drugs?’ I asked.

‘There are many ways to change your mind,’ replied our guide with a look in his eye that totally failed to clarify the issue.

Meanwhile the madman was warming to his theme, even as people gathered around us to laugh at his meanderings through the inner recesses of his confused mind. His monologue paused to invite discussion, so I broke in with a wave. ‘Words are flowing off like endless rain into a paper cup,’ I said in the same way I would have said, ‘Let’s do lunch next Thursday,’ and for a split second he caught my eye and seemed to understand.

But the moment of clarity disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and unfazed he continued to rant, looking me up and down while hopping from foot to foot. ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘a soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust.’ For a moment Lennon’s acid insights seemed to strike a chord and he looked slightly dazed¹, but whatever he’d discovered clearly wasn’t the answer, so he looked to the ceiling and launched an angry tirade against the roof stones, which obviously bothered him a lot. ‘It’s possible,’ I replied, ‘but I am the egg man, they are the egg men, I am the walrus, goo-goo-ba-joob,’ and he snapped to a close, staring at me as if I’d just said something deeply profound. Which, of course, I had, so I wobbled my head as we left him holding up pieces of half-eaten coconut and shaking them menacingly at the sky.

The other sights of the temple are equally bemusing, from the intricately carved pillars with clever designs that look like both elephants and bulls depending on how you looked at them, to the handful of Kama Sutra carvings that have been thrown in for good measure. All around bodies are sprawled on the floor, though whether the inactivity is a result of mind-bending herbal remedies or a lack of effort, I couldn’t tell. Whatever the reality, Sri Ranganathaswamy is a blast.

Drinking in Tamil Nadu

And so was Friday night. In time-honoured fashion we elected to pop out for a quick beer after our evening meal, and this time we ended up in the Bar Paradise, a downstairs cubby-hole that had practically no lighting and where the atmosphere reeked of schoolboy rule-breaking. As I’ve mentioned before, Tamil Nadu is fairly unimpressed with the concept of alcohol (as in most of India, marijuana and alcohol have the reverse roles that they do in Europe), so they make you drink it behind firmly shuttered windows and doors, preferably underground, and definitely not after 11pm.

The three bottles of Haywards 5000 we enjoyed went straight to my head, as I haven’t been drinking regularly enough to build up any tolerance. The conversation migrated to include a local Indian called Rajiv, who proved to be an interesting and very well-spoken find. A law advocate, he was a Muslim who was in love with a Hindu girl, but the affair was proving to be almost impossible to maintain, as the scars of the 50 stitches dotted around Rajiv’s body proved. We rode back to our hotel on the back of his gorgeous Enfield, played cards for an hour or so, and he went back to his life of law and lawlessness. That’s one more intelligent and witty Indian whom religious segregation is systematically battering into the ground...

¹ This is not just an Indian phenomenon. There are plenty of westerners wandering around the continent who have spent too long in an ashram (an ashram being a retreat set up by a guru), and some of these people, though by no means all, can be a real handful. Ashram casualties come in a number of flavours, but they have one binding characteristic: they make no sense whatsoever. Most of them seem to be stuck in the sixties or seventies; indeed, a western writer I met in Chennai said that when he first travelled in India back in the seventies, people never talked about beer, backpacks or beaches, because the only topics of conversation were which guru you were going to and which ashrams you’d visited. India in the seventies was evidently full of people who wanted to have their magic pie and eat it.

Thanjavur

Written: 14 February 1998   

Saturday morning’s head hurt, and I very nearly ended up slipping into a day-long lethargy of recuperation, but after a couple of minutes back in the madness of India I was raring to go. There’s no better pick-me-up than live insanity on your doorstep.

Howard and I parted company as he boarded the southbound bus from Trichy to Madurai, but I had one more mission to accomplish before following him; I wanted to check out another World Heritage site in the town of Thanjavur, an hour and a half east of Trichy. So I wandered around the bus stand, asking the grey-uniformed bus conductors where the Thanjavur bus was, and rather unusually got nothing but blank stares. I think my inability to be understood was down to the fact that Thanjavur is known to some people as Tanjore, the foreign name for the city, so armed with this handy bit of information, I managed to find the right bus.

But it didn’t actually go to Thanjavur, of course. Instead it stopped at a dusty bus terminal in the middle of nowhere, another bus ride from Thanjavur itself, but this being India I didn’t mind one bit, as friendly faces directed me first over there, then over here, then to that bus on the other side and finally to the town bus that promised to take me to the town centre. Almost unbelievably I ended up in central Thanjavur, exactly where I wanted to be; the Indian transport system really is a marvel.

My first visit was to Thanjavur Palace, a ruined and crumbling old collection of huge stone walls, ancient buildings, temples and towers. The view from the top of the bell tower was magnificent, looking right over a local cricket match, and as I wandered through the streets of the old palace I came across the first wave of the Thanjavurian Welcoming Committee. As pretty as a picture and dressed in an immaculate saree and accompanying accoutrements, there was little Priya, surely no older than eleven, but speaking perfect and polite English. We chatted, and I met some of her friends, all of them smiles with legs, and having dashed her hopes of getting a school pen or some chocolate¹, I let her try on my hat and shades, transforming her from a heartbreaker of the future into a crusty old long-term traveller in the blink of an eye. Five minutes later I was surrounded by a gaggle of gushing girls, each wanting to try out these new clothes and giggling at each other as the hat covered their eyes. It was delightful.

And the Thanjavurians continued to be amazingly friendly, even more so than the people in Hyderabad. At the World Heritage Brihadesvada Temple I stumbled into a group of young boys who insisted on having their photograph taken with me, and as I wandered round this stunning complex of Cholan architecture I fell into conversation with a man called Krishna, who happened to be a tour guide from Kerala who was over in Tamil Nadu on his holidays. He managed to smuggle me into the Hindu-only interior of the temple, where a huge Siva lingam sits, and we explored the temple together, with its towering 63m-high gopuram, a huge stone Nandi, two (live) elephants to bless the pilgrims as they enter, and stone carvings that are up there with Java’s ruins and Thailand’s Buddhist shrines.

Ambling back to the bus stand, I came across two interesting sights, the first of which was the election. With election fever running wild, it didn’t surprise me to come across the usual blaring speeches and chanting crowds, but what did surprise me was the scale of the operation in Thanjavur. Not far from the temple was a crowded arena where the speeches were being passionately made, but not content with the microphone and speakers normally employed by political speakers, the organisers had rigged up loudspeakers throughout the whole town, so wherever I walked, I could listen to the rants and raves of the local political sect. People cheered while others stood around listening and chewing, and the whole town seemed caught up in a democratic feeding frenzy, with heaving buses groaning along the street, crammed to overflowing with ecstatic supporters of some party or other shouting out their support.

And during this riot of opinions I noticed the second thing: the women of Thanjavur. Little Priya was just the embryonic version of the Tamil woman, and as the men got caught up in their games of politics and barracking, the women glided on by, gleaming in their colourful sarees, glinting nose studs and tinkling earrings. Indian women aren’t as naturally beautiful as, say, the Polynesians, but Indian ladies have a grace that’s hard to define. They seem immensely proud of their womanhood, they strive to look smart against all the odds, and where their men look relatively drab, they look radiant. Couple this with the severe beauty that a large number of the women possess, and you have an eye-catching sight that is as uniquely Indian as coconut bras are Polynesian and cowboy hats are American. India is at once a celebration of femininity and a disaster for feminism.

The coup de grace, however, was the gargantuan obesity of the articulated bus-cum-trailer that was home to a group of touring Germans. I saw them as I left the temple, advancing on all fronts towards the shoe-minding stall, cameras cocked and guidebooks unsheathed; luckily they arrived after I’d managed to soak up the atmosphere of Brihadesvada and was about to leave, so I wasn’t caught up in the stampede. However, as I hammered down the pothole-strewn road on the Trichy-bound bus, I looked to the side to see the German bus pottering along in the slow lane, and although they had nobody crushing them to death in the aisles, our Teutonic friends all looked pretty bored, to be honest. How shocking to think that clinical air-conditioned tours can even manage to suck the thrill out of India.

¹ These, among others, are the universal demands from Indian children. Adults are a bit more hopeful; they ask for visas.

I’ll Have a Limca, Please

Written: 13 February 1998   

If you had been sitting in the Trichy restaurant¹ where Howard and I were attempting to eat on the evening of Friday the 13th², you would have heard the following conversation.

‘And to drink, sir?’

‘I’ll have a Limca, please.’

‘Sorry sir, no Limca.’

‘Do you have any Teem, then?’

‘No Teem, sorry sir.’

‘Do you have any lemon drinks at all?’

‘Just lemon soda, sir.’

‘Hmm, OK. Well, what bottled drinks do you have, then?’

‘We have Limca, Teem, Coca-Cola...’

‘Limca, eh? How about that. Yes, I think I’ll have a Limca, please...’

‘Certainly sir. With pleasure.’

It’s all part of the charm of restaurants in India. Will you get what you order? Will they manage to add up the bill correctly? And will you ever find a restaurant where they have more than two menus to share between the whole restaurant? As they say round here, it’s possible...

¹ Incidentally, this was a restaurant where you could get that old favourite Mull, Gatwany Soup, the somewhat cannibalistic-sounding Spanish with Lamb salad, the cryptic S/C/Veg Soup, the classic Chicken Maynice, the not very popular Spetish Meat Bolles, the world-famous trio of Chicken 65, Chicken 95 and Chicken 8&8, the amazing Gobi Butt Masala, and to round it off, Venilla or Straw Burry ice cream.

Many thanks to Vijai from Kochi, who emailed me with translations for some of the above. Mull, Gatwany Soup is obviously Mulligatawny Soup, and Spetish Meat Bolles is evidently something to do with meatballs, but I’d never have worked out that S/C/Veg Soup is Sweetcorn and Vegetable Soup. As for Spanish with Lamb salad, Vijai said:

It certainly sounds ominous, and I think it’s there for the exotic sound of its name; the locals don’t care what’s Spanish about it, they just like to see the word there.

And finally, Gobi Butt Masala elicited this response:

Gobi is cauliflower. Butt sounds like someone’s idea of a stupid joke, meaning nothing in Tamil

Thanks for helping out, Vijai.

Thanks also to Vinay, who left the following information about Chicken 65 in my Guestbook:

I have two versions stories regarding the origin of Chicken 65, but the most convincing one is detailed at the end.

Story 1: The story goes that an English traveller visiting Kerala in 1965 asked a chef to make this dish. The traveller expressed his contentment at the result and left, whereupon the bar staff tried the remainders, having never seen anything like it before. The result certainly was good and Chicken 65 was born, there being no other name for it.

Story 2: As legend has it, in all the kallu (country liquor) bars, the favourite ‘food fight’ is: who can eat the maximum number of chillies? It is a symbol of machoism to be able to eat the most chillies. An enterprising hotelier capitalised on this and cooked up the dish Chicken 65, denoting that 65 chillies were used for every kilogram of chicken. After this there have been many variations in the preparation but I am yet to find out if there are 95 chillies in Chicken 95. If yes, I need to visit the doc tomorrow. ;-)

And for another, equally plausible explanation, my thanks to Andrew Goh, who posted the following:

I was in Madras/Madurai in March 1995 and I asked the same question about Chicken 65. It is actually chicken who are reared to a maximum of 65 days before slaughtering so that the flesh is tender and sweet. Over here we call it spring chicken.

Surely one of these must be right... or maybe even all of them. This is India, after all.

² You might think that Friday the 13th might explain events in the restaurant that night, but you’d be wrong. Every day is this weird in India...

Madurai

Written: 17 February 1998   

After another long bus ride from Trichy, passing some wonderful landscapes and huge rock formations on which the locals had thoughtfully painted adverts for tea bags and soap powder, I arrived in the city of Madurai, home to yet more temples and a bustling bazaar scene. Seeing as I was back on my own again, I decided to pre-empt the loneliness blues by treating myself to a few nights at a mid-range hotel, namely the US$5-a-night Hotel Aarathy. My room had a television that, after a few deft manipulations of the tuning controls, revealed MTV and CNN; it had a hot water shower; it had a balcony; and best of all it had a view over a wonderfully colourful temple across the street.

Unfortunately it was still an Indian hotel. My sheets were fairly grotty (and were never replaced, despite my requests and baksheesh), the fan had a death rattle and the speed control was stuck on gale force, there were millions of little red ants everywhere who delivered a particularly irritating bite, and the hot water was only hot when it felt like it (which wasn’t exactly a crisis in the tropical heat, but hey, I wanted my money’s worth). And even when you book into a mid-range hotel, you don’t get away from Indian intrusions; one of the things that really bugs me about Indian hotels is that you will never get an uninterrupted lie in, because at some stage in the early morning (between 7 and 8.30am usually) there will be a knock at the door, and not your usual discreet knock, more a battering. Sometimes, if you ignore it, it goes away; sometimes it’s accompanied by the cry of ‘Chai! Kaafi!’ and you can yell back a ‘No thank you!’ for a bit of peace; but my experience in the Hotel Aarathy was fairly unique and not a little confusing, if only because the rooms were equipped with phones which could have been used to call up the services on offer if I had been interested in a morning tea.

My door buzzer went off at 8.30am, which the Indians consider to be halfway through the day (after all, when you don’t have a television, bars are taboo and you can hardly afford electricity, what else is there to do at night except turn in early and, maybe, try to increase the population?). I ignored it, and it buzzed again. Realising with a sigh that my slumber was now irreparably shattered, I slipped on my sarong and stuck my head round the door. ‘Yes, what?’ I asked rather brusquely, hair sticking out like a briar bush.

‘This is the laundry man,’ said one of the two men standing in the corridor, indicating his companion. ‘He’s been here since six o’clock,’ he continued, obviously assuming that this would clarify matters. I must have looked pretty blank, because he pointed at the man behind him again and said, ‘Laundry man.’

Perhaps this was my clean sheet, at last, but I wasn’t interested. ‘No thanks, no laundry,’ I said and closed the door in their faces, infuriated that my relaxing start to the day had been shattered. So I checked out later that day and moved into a place that was less than half the price; it still had a hurricane fan but this time there were no ants. It didn’t have MTV either, but one night of Indian pop was enough to cure my TV-blues for some time.

I also bumped into Howard again and checked out Madurai’s main temple with him. Sri Meenakshi Temple is pretty huge and has a lot of towers, all painted in a beautiful rainbow of colours; the outer four towers are particularly tall – the largest is 50m high – and they are smothered in literally thousands of sculptures of Hindu deities catching the sunlight; the western gopuram alone has 1134 sculptures covering every surface. Inside, the temple is mostly undercover rather than open plan, with dark, incense-filled rooms, messy stone shrines, elephants blessing devotees and a background smell that’s hauntingly familiar. Sri Meenakshi is both beautiful and dingy, and all the more interesting for its inherent contrasts; this is going to be my last temple for a while, as I’m off to the hills for a break from the sweltering heat of the cities, and this is a high note to finish on.

All the while, the election continues to create havoc across the country. A total of 48 people have died in Coimbatore in western Tamil Nadu, in various weekend explosions and arrests, and I thank my stars that due to the staggered polling system – implemented so the security forces can travel around the country to police the voting without being too spread out – Madurai isn’t voting until next weekend. I may still end up in a voting area, though; I just hope it’s a peaceful one.

The Sound of Indian Politics

Written: 26 February 1998   

The bus trip west into the hills containing the little town of Kodaikanal was predictably hair-raising. Grabbing onto any handhold I could find, I was thrown around the back seat of the bus like crockery in a marital dispute, clutching at my airborne backpack with my left foot and desperately trying to stop myself smashing into my neighbours every time the videogame-junkie driver tackled another hairpin. On the way up into the Western Ghats I noticed that above the rock-painted adverts someone had scrawled ‘Jesus never fails’; I sincerely hoped that the bus’s brakes were as reliable as the Son of God.

The first thing I noticed about Kodaikanal was the temperature. Clad in cloud and hidden from the sun, the cool air that washed around me as I stepped off the bus was as shocking as the cold dip after a sauna, and just as refreshing. I quickly fished out my sweatshirt, an item of clothing that rarely sees the light, found myself a bed in a dorm, and fell into conversation with various oddities from all over the world. The mist enveloped, the temperature dropped even further, and that night I slept the peaceful sleep of someone who has just moved from the noisy city to the silent countryside.

Peace, however, was designed to be broken, and if there is a race of tranquillity-tramplers it’s the Indians. Surely genetically hard of hearing, the Indians are one of the many Asian peoples who only buy stereos if the volume dial goes up to 11, and even in a beautiful hill station such as Kodaikanal, morning well and truly breaks under the sonic boom of India’s morning yawn.

But the most amazing noise pollution – and diesel pollution too – came from the little trucks blaring round town, playing election propaganda to anyone within a five-mile radius of their speakers. During election time these vans are as common as mud in the towns of lowland India (and that’s pretty damn common) but in Kodaikanal they were even more conspicuous because of the lack of other noise. Wandering down a pleasant country lane towards a placid lake where happy couples paddled their rowboats around like a scene from an E M Forster novel, I’d hear something different in the distant air: a cricket crowd perhaps, politely applauding a deftly cut boundary; possibly the call of a faraway bird of prey, swooping down to grab its lunch; or maybe the sound of a gardener mowing the extensive lawns of one of the ex-Raj residences dotted around. And the sound would get louder, and louder, and defying physical limits, even louder, until a battered old Ambassador would shoot into view round the corner, sporting a pair of loudspeaker horns that looked like something from an ancient gramophone, wired up to a car battery by someone who still had to learn the difference between earth, neutral and live (and who would probably soon discover it the hard way). Every time I had to cover my ears as the cacophony drove past, even drowning out the sound of the van’s incessant horn with its din.

The content of the din itself was quite something too, regardless of the volume. Apart from bellowing out recorded speeches from politicians – in Tamil, of course, so I was spared the details – these sonic buggies would play the party’s theme tunes. Now most political parties have an election tune these days – even Thatcher’s crowd did – but the Hindi concoctions that echo around the hills of India sound to the uninitiated just like normal Hindi pop¹; it sounds seriously surreal, but it is perhaps in keeping with the way Indian politics is played out. Old Ronnie Reagan becoming President of the United States was incredible enough, but the number of Indian politicians who used to be film stars is unnerving; because they looked good on screen, the populace assumes they’ll be good in office, which is a rather brave assumption, I would suggest.

For example, southern Tamil Nadu’s favourite candidate never appeared in any publicity without sporting his Reservoir Dogs shades, so much so that the locals referred to him as the ‘Glass Man’. And the leader of the Congress(I) party, Sonia Gandhi, is Italian and doesn’t speak Hindi (though it is reported that she’s trying to learn); never mind, say the people, she looks great and she’s a Gandhi, so she must be cool. This last point isn’t as facetious as it sounds, as India’s political figures have suffered heavily from the cult of personality since Independence. The first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was followed by his daughter Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi), and after her assassination in 1984 at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards, her son Rajiv Gandhi took over. He himself was assassinated in 1989 by Tamil extremists; and along with the fact that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic back in 1948, it makes you wonder how sensible it is to be an Indian politician with this famous surname.

Perhaps that’s why it took so much persuasion and so much time for Sonia to join the fray. Either that, or she doesn’t like shattering the peaceful world of the Indian hill station with election propaganda either...

¹ Which reminds me of a story that Howard told me. The scene: Howard and a new-found Cockney travel mate are in the back of a taxi in Goa. Cockney Man says to Taxi Driver, ‘Got any good tunes, mate?’ Taxi Driver says, ‘I have some Hindi music.’ Cockney Man says, ‘Yeah, cool, shove it on.’ Taxi Man does so, and out screeches Hindi music at full blast. ‘What the bloody hell is this?’ screams Cockney Man. ‘This isn’t bleedin’ indie music!’ What a great export for our country...

Kodaikanal

Written: 26 February 1998   

Kodaikanal is a hill station. This peculiar brand of colonial creation is increasingly popular with tourists, but Kodai is still fairly embryonic as far as tourism goes; sure, there are plenty of wealthy weekenders paddling about on the lake, but there are none of the high rise hotels that have ruined similar places.

Hill stations were devised by colonialists as places to get away from the monsoon’s heat and humidity; being high up, settlements like Kodaikanal (about 2100m above sea level) don’t suffer from the crazy climates of the plains, and can support a much more European array of flowers, trees and pleasantries like mosquito-free boating lakes and forest walks. For the traveller the hill station affords an opportunity to stop sweating and take it easy for a while.

There is a downside to the weather though: it gets bloody cold, the water is freezing, and quite often you can spend the whole day shrouded in cloud, transforming walks with beautiful views into monotonous trudges through the mist. However the mix of India with the cool weather and rolling landscape more than makes up for any inconvenience; as with Indonesia’s Dieng Plateau, Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands and Thailand’s Chiang Mai, the effect of breath-condensing temperatures on the local culture goes a lot deeper than is immediately obvious from the woolly jumpers and balaclavas sported by the inhabitants.

On my second day in Kodai I moved out to Pampar Puram, a little village some 40 minutes’ walk from the town centre, a fact that rubbed itself home as I walked back from town in the pitch black of night, the country lanes swirling in impenetrable fog like something out of a Sherlock Holmes story. After the comparative luxury of the city hotel scene, living in a country farmhouse (owned by a farmer called Jerayam) was both a return to roots and a wonderful opportunity to escape the stresses of India’s urban sprawls.

The rural ruggedness of the village with its little chai shops, dirt roads and roaming cows and dogs made procrastination a very attractive deal. My plans slowly slipped away into the ether as the timescale of Pampar Puram settled in; Kodaikanal, only a few hilly kilometres away with its tourists, buses and sculptured lakeside setting, might have been on the other side of the planet for all I cared.

The walking was good. I wandered around lakes, up hills, into forests and through villages, savouring sights like the plantations of fresh-smelling Australian blue gum trees, and pretty-as-a-picture cottages with lovely British-era names like ‘Ingleby’, ‘Plymouth’, ‘Park View’, ‘Clavarack’, ‘Central House’, ‘Lakeside’ and, less romantically, ‘Bolton’. Kodaikanal doesn’t feel like India, but it’s definitely Indian, and is just another example of how amazingly diverse this country is.

Images of Kodaikanal

Of course, very little actually happened during my extended stay in Pampar Puram; that’s the whole point of taking time out to relax in a quiet haven. But just for the record, here are a few highlights of my stay in the hills:

I met an equally laid-back Swiss traveller called Niko, and together we explored lakes, valleys, lookouts and forests, wandering aimlessly along cattle tracks and bridle paths. One particular highlight was a reservoir up in the hills where a team of Indian workers were quarrying rock right by the side of the water; we wandered past, exchanged smiles and hellos, and as we settled down for a rest in the soft pine needle beds just round the corner from the quarry, the world exploded as the dynamite the workers had been sticking into holes in the rock face went off. I guess that in India if you manage to get blown up in an explosives accident, it’s just the will of God; it probably never occurred to them to warn us about it...

Wandering up the road to watch a local cricket match, I managed to get a ride on the back of a push bike down to the pitch and, after the match, a ride on a motorbike to the tourist spot overlooking Pillar Rocks, a place I’d been meaning to visit. This sounds like a bit of good luck, but if you’ve ever been on the back of a screaming Indian-driven Kawasaki on a hairpin road, you’ll understand just how hair-raising it is. Ashok, my courteous but reckless driver, heard my sharp intake of breath as we vulcanised our way round another corner, and shouted, ‘Cold, isn’t it!’ He totally failed to realise that my reaction had nothing to do with temperature, but more to do with the juggernaut approaching at full speed on our side of the road. And Pillar Rocks? It’s probably very pleasant when the clouds aren’t smothering the view, but all I saw was grey mist and loads of trinket shops: not exactly worth risking your life for.

The people in the local chai shops were as friendly as they come. They taught us some choice words in Tamil (which I instantly forgot), invited us to join in their cricket matches, swapped cigarettes and stories, and pointed out the best places for us to visit. It’s just another example of the wonderful people in India, and I realised with some delight that whereas after a month in Indonesia I was ready to throttle the locals, after a month in India I’m growing to like the people more and more. And I still don’t know exactly why, ’cos they can be an infuriating bunch quite a lot of the time...

Green Valley View is a pleasant viewpoint that’s renowned as a favourite suicide spot owing to its 2000 ft drop off; these days it seems that the only things going over the edge are empty Coke cans and chocolate wrappers, but its reputation brings in the tourists by the truckload. That still doesn’t explain the sign erected by the cliff edge, which says, ‘Mocking of ladies is punishable.’ When I visited the lookout even the group of Christian nuns who had popped in for a look were climbing over the barbed-wire wall for a better view of the scenery, so any explanation is possible. I didn’t mock anyone, just in case...

I have discovered my favourite Indian foodstuff, bar none: Milk Bikis. These delectable treats are identical to Malted Milk biscuits back home (or ‘moo cow’ biscuits as we used to call them when I was a nipper) and they’re perfect for the midnight munchies. At Rs6.50 per packet (about 10p) they’re a cheap way to make it through the day; full marks to Britannia, the company behind the packet, many of which I consumed in Kodai.

The election came and went, and provided me with one of the quietest days I’d yet seen. The village was dead and the town not much livelier; I had expected an explosive culmination of all the blustering and bloodletting, but instead everything closed down and kept to itself. It was slightly disappointing, but then again, in an election where the voting started in some constituencies on 15 February, and the results won’t arrive until a week into March, I suppose there’s none of the ‘incoming results’ TV coverage that’s so prevalent in western elections. I just assume that things will finally go crazy when the results are released...

In every valley there is someone with a smile that lives on beyond their presence. Pampar Puram’s resident Happiness Guru was called Sayga and he worked on the local golf course, trimming the greens. With his black bush hat, his infectious and trippy laugh and an uncanny ability to spring out on you in the middle of nowhere and drag you off for a quick chai, he kept us smiling throughout our stay. Not for nothing did the locals refer him to as the ‘hero of Pampar Puram’.

Sarah, a bubbling nineteen-year-old brunette from Brighton, arrived halfway through my stay and improved life in the farmhouse considerably. The three of us talked, sat round campfires, walked, cooked and slipped further into the timelessness of the hills, but surely the most momentous bonding took place when we idly started to talk about music. Niko had already declared his love for English music, particularly the gloriously acidic New Model Army, and I was still having trouble shifting Sheryl Crow’s ‘Home’ from my mind, having played it incessantly as the soundtrack to my Singapore experience; so when Sarah declared she had both a New Model Army tape and Sheryl’s latest in her bag, it seemed as if heaven itself had landed in Pampar Puram. How apt is this quote from William Styron’s classic novel Sophie’s Choice, which I happened to be reading at the time: ‘Just the availability of music alone, she said, filled her insides with a sense of delectation, as one feels just before what one knows will be a sumptuous meal.’ We feasted on the tinny sound of memories wafting from her Walkman like hungry children in a sweet shop.

Our music couldn’t compete with the local brew, though. Throughout the election, music exploded through the village’s public announcement system every morning at 5.30am, and this I took with good grace and a set of earplugs, assuming it was all just electioneering. But the election came and went, and the music continued unabated, kicking in before even the sun had yawned itself awake; I have no idea whether this is a common event in sleepy backwaters, but it doesn’t half shatter any chance of an uninterrupted lie in.

And all we did all day was explore, taking some wonderful trips into the hilly forests, discovering waterfalls, villages and yet more happy, friendly locals. It was really hard to move on, but with my original schedule in tatters, I had to move at some point. So I eventually hauled myself out of the farmhouse and headed back down to Madurai, after some nine days of living rough in the hills...

Travellers’ Opinions of India

Written: 25 February 1998   

Here are various opinions of travelling in India, given to me by people who’ve been there.

‘It’s... well, it’s... so... err...’

‘India is like going back to basics in every aspect of life.’

‘Spend the whole six months there. You won’t regret a single day.’

‘India makes you think. Constantly.’

‘...hard to explain... intense I suppose... umm...’

‘Every day you see something different that blows your mind.’

‘It’s the most infuriating, dirty, depressing place I’ve ever been. I left after two weeks and don’t ever want to go back.’

‘Every single day in India you experience every type of emotion: anger, horror, pity, joy, frustration, amazement, disgust, elation. It’s a real roller-coaster ride.’

‘...hang on... I nearly had it then...’

‘India challenges all your preconceptions of life.’

‘You’ll be dying to get on that plane out of Delhi. And two weeks later you’ll be dying to go back again.’

‘...ah sod it, you’ll just have to go yourself. It’s an enigma.’

They’re all right, in their own way. And my opinion? I love it, utterly!

Madurai

Written: 27 February 1998   

It was pleasant to arrive back in Madurai after rattling down the mountain from Kodaikanal, and having to stay an extra night there owing to a lack of free berths on the overnight train to Kollam was far from a hardship. Where the farmhouse in Kodai had buckets and backyards, Madurai had hot water showers; where Kodai had boring old idly and dosa, Madurai had wonderful butter chicken and nan; where Kodai had weather so cold that my washing never dried, Madurai had enough roasting heat to drive the water from my freshly dipped clothes within two hours. And the same old guest house had the same old rooms above the same old restaurant that played the same old music, creating an atmosphere that would have been like coming home, if it hadn’t been for the lack of Howard.

But where Kodai had a dry coolness that only the mountains can provide, Madurai slathered in the humidity of approaching summer. I’d noticed the heat on my previous visit, but it hadn’t really hit me because I hadn’t yet visited anywhere cold in India (if you discount Calcutta); but after the chills of the hills, I found the steam of the plains disconcerting. It shortened my temper, and when I went for a stroll round a couple of places I hadn’t managed to see on my first stopover, the touts whom I’d previously ignored with good grace and gritted teeth managed to touch a raw nerve. One particularly insistent clothes salesman started to follow me round with his promise of cheap clothes and excellent quality, so I turned round abruptly, palms out in front of me as if to push him away, and with my nose a few scant inches from his I said as politely as I could, ‘No thank you.’ He jumped back a mile, suppressing a stifled yelp; it got him off my case, but I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty. After all, he was no worse than the rickshaw-wallahs and drug pushers that I’ve been shrugging off nonchalantly in every other tourist city, and I felt ashamed that India had finally got to me, even if it was a short, sharp moment that soon passed.

Kerala

Kollam to Alappuzha

Written: 28 February 1998   

That night I struck out on the sleeper train from Madurai to Kollam, my first destination by the Arabian Sea, which laps against the west coast of India. I was only going to Kollam to catch the backwater boat north to Alappuzha, along a particularly pleasant water route along the inland waterways of coastal Kerala, so I hopped straight from the train onto the boat, a transition eased by the willingness of the rickshaw-wallahs to take me exactly where I needed to go (where they got a generous commission, no doubt).

The state of Kerala is a thin north-south strip along the western coast of the tip of southern India, and it’s instantly got a different feel to the eastern massif of Tamil Nadu. Palm trees, a permanent fixture throughout India, have invaded Kerala in a similar fashion to Indians on a bus; there’s scarcely any space left that isn’t lightly shaded by a canopy of fronds and nuts. There’s a pleasant sea breeze in most places that helps to keep the humidity comparatively low, and with the mountains of the Western Ghats cutting Kerala off from the rest of southern India, the culture is markedly different to its neighbouring states; it’s no coincidence that just down the coast from Kollam are some of the most popular beaches in India after Goa.

The backwater boat takes advantage of the natural and man-made waterways that follow the coast from north to south, just inland from the sea. Smothered on either side by palms and rural houses, the route of the eight-hour trip is quite beautiful, if you manage to ignore the tourists. Yes, the backwater trip is a severe tourist trap, and although it’s easy to shut out the inanity of the local’s reactions, the boat I boarded had a particularly intriguing mixture of western weirdoes. There was the English geek with his NHS specs, stupid curly haircut and a talent for insipid small talk; the two Birmingham lasses who concentrated on showing off as much bare flesh as possible; the man who plugged himself into his Walkman and stayed connected and thus disconnected until we arrived... as per usual the tourists were as much of an attraction as the beauty of the surroundings.

Except that the tourists were instantly forgettable, while the scenery is the stuff of which memories are made. My long-enforced boycott of the delights of water transport (barring the Indonesian cockroach ferries) has made me forget just how pleasant coasting can be, and with absolutely no swell, a cloudless sky and a total lack of idiotic crew, it all added up to a distinctly pleasurable day. There’s an idyllic detachment that comes from having nothing to do and no control over your destination, forcing you to kick back and simply savour the experience, so I settled into my sunny seat on deck and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Still, Indian peace is, as I have already discussed, a bit of an oxymoron. Passing through the villages where the canal is lined with concrete paths, children run along the banks, easily keeping up with the boat while shouting out, ‘Have you one pen? Give me please one pen! One pen, one pen!’ and other such variations on a theme. Of course, nobody gives them a pen to start with, and their persistence – following the boat for five or ten minutes, screaming out their litany that by the end has become ‘wunpenpleezwunpengimmewunpen!’ – is either a product of fanaticism or sheer boredom; but eventually the pens start to fly of the boat and competition hots up, with the shouting only getting louder and louder as the tourists throw out more goodies. There are smiles everywhere, but I can’t help the feeling that this is a slightly false sense of socialising; the children were all grins and so were most of the adults, but plenty of men on the banks of the river looked quite fed up with our presence. And out of maybe a hundred kids, only one said thank you when he got his pen. Bless him.

Despite the obvious Indian-ness of the people, one thing that startled me was how similar the Keralan backwaters are to French Polynesia and some parts of Indonesia, such as Flores and equatorial Sulawesi.

On reflection, there can’t be too many variations available in the recipe when the ingredients are water, blue sky, palm trees, fishing, copra farming and squat huts, but it’s uncanny how much I was reminded of distant atolls and remote fishing villages. For one slightly scary split second I even felt a twinge of homesickness for those unusual days spent floating through the bowels of the Pacific, but perhaps it was simply relief at not being there, disguised as nostalgia.

Another aspect of Kerala that smacks of Polynesia is the incredible turnout of the women, despite the primitiveness of the habitat. I’ve commented before on the pristine quality of the fairer sex in India as compared to the clean but mediocre male species, but when your home is on a tiny breakwater between a waterlogged paddy field and a weed-choked canal, the vibrancy of the eye-catching sarees is even more commendable. Nothing, it seems, can dull the liveliness of the local beauties, even incredible poverty.

The boat trip ended in a picture-perfect sunset over the sleepy town of Alappuzha, where I boarded a bus north for Ernakulam, one half of the twin town of Kochi-Ernakulam. I managed to get myself a seat in the melee by the time-honoured method of passing my daypack through the window for someone to place in a vacant space, but the Brummie girls from the boat obviously hadn’t managed to slip into the Indian psyche quite as convincingly, because their laden entry into the heaving bus was accompanied by the one of the most pathetic displays of whingeing and squealing I have ever heard.

Their argument with the conductor, who quite reasonably insisted they take their packs up to the front of the bus, embarrassed me in the way that only unwanted geographical kinship can; heads turned and wobbled in disbelief as Midlands voices rose to fever pitch in an expression of frustration and futility that could only have resulted from a bad day in the heat.

So when we arrived in Ernakulam I made a break for freedom by jumping into the first available rickshaw and heading off for a hotel, but the ubiquity of the Lonely Planet meant that not only did the noisome couple book into the same hotel as me five minutes later, I also bumped into them at a nearby restaurant, where I was treated to the therapeutic retelling of the gory details of their ordeal. Is it any wonder some people find India a struggle, when simply boarding a bus becomes a major drama?

Kochi

Written: 2 March 1998   

Kerala is a real melting pot, and the coastal city of Kochi is a perfect example of the cultural mishmash of India’s southwestern corner. On the way to Kochi I spotted plenty of Christian churches, which is unusual for India, and I also spotted lots of political flags smothered in hammers and sickles; Kerala was the first state in the world to freely elect a communist government, and it still has communist rulers. In Kochi itself things are even more blatant; 20 per cent of Kerala is Christian, but you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a much higher proportion.

From statues of Jesus holding out his hands in supplication to signs declaring that 5 March is ‘Stalin Remembrance Day’, Kochi feels different from the rest of India in more ways than one. Even the locals seem more friendly and relaxed than usual, and as I took the ferry from Kochi’s twin town Ernakulam across the bay to Kochi itself, I fell into conversation with a middle-aged man from Bangalore who was visiting with his girlfriend. He gleefully told me all about the three-week holiday he was on, and as the boat plied its way across the harbour mouth, the conversation flowed freely.

‘We took a lovely trip up into the hills yesterday, about 100km on the bus,’ he said.

‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘How was it?’

‘Wonderful. We walked up into the top of the hills there, and the most amazing thing was the plants. 5 ft high, they were, all growing wild in front of our very eyes.’

‘Plants? Err... yeah, right, sounds great.’

‘Yes, and they just chop the leaves off as they need and leave the rest to grow naturally.’

‘Leaves? Umm...’

‘It was great. We bought five tolas of oil for a great price.’

And then it clicked. A tola is 11.6 grams, and it’s the weight system used for selling hashish, marijuana, bhang or whatever else the locals need to maintain their red-eyed look of wonderment. My new-found friend kept talking, unconcerned by the turn our conversation had taken, and proceeded to try to persuade me that I should buy one of his tolas at the knockdown price of 400 rupees, ‘a lot less than I’ll get when I go to Goa and sell it to the tourists there,’ he said.

But I was on the ferry to catch the sights of Kochi, a difficult prospect through the haze of hash oil, so I thanked him for his kind offer and slipped into the crowds on the ferry terminal, quite happy just to get high on my surroundings.

The Backstreets of Kochi

Kochi has a wonderfully eclectic collection of Portuguese churches and backstreets with a Jewish overtone, not to mention a beach with the strangest fishing tackle you’ve ever seen; it’s a superb place to wander round on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The imposing St Francis’ Church is the oldest western church in India, with the original building dating from 1503 (by contrast, St Mary’s in Chennai is the oldest British church, dating from 1678). One Sunday, outside the church, I watched a cricket match played out under the shade of the palm trees, complete with cricket whites, a manual scoreboard and locals playing their own games of catch round the boundary, oblivious to the action on the pitch.

Meanwhile, out on the bay, the fishermen operate their Chinese fishing nets. These strange wooden constructions consist of huge nets attached to one end of a long pole that can be raised and lowered by judicious use of counter-weights and levers. The actual catch they get is pretty poor, probably due to the large numbers of container ships docking in Kochi’s busy docks, but the contraptions themselves are quite an attraction, whatever the results.

And down the road from the ferry terminal is Jewtown – yes, it’s actually called that – which was originally set up in 52 AD at the time of St Thomas the Apostle’s voyage to India. By all accounts the Portuguese, who arrived here some 500 years ago and a few hundred years after Jewtown had been founded, were quite surprised to find a Christian presence already here; they weren’t so impressed, though, with the locals’ total ignorance of the Pope. Jewtown, which is now reduced to an old synagogue and a few little backstreets crammed with craft shops and spice traders, is a picturesque and slightly unusual area, and although the number of resident Jews has reduced drastically, it still retains the feel of a suburb apart from the rest of Kochi.

It’s also home to Mattancherry Palace, a decrepit old building that contains some of the best Hindu mural paintings I have seen, depicting scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Top of the list is a cheeky little scene of Krishna, everyone’s favourite wide-boy, fondling a number of blissfully happy milk maids with his two feet and six hands, while at the same time playing the flute and getting quite a few rub-a-dub-dubs himself in return. Good old Hinduism: Christianity and Islam could learn a few things about being happy from the Hindu legends.

The Promenade

Returning to my hotel by ferry after a truly worthwhile wander around Kochi, I grabbed some supper and set out to explore Ernakulam, the main city of the two and home to the larger hotels, the biggest shops and the most insane rickshaw drivers. And to my amazement I discovered something that would be more at home in a coastal town in England than in India: Ernakulam has a promenade. Ignore, if you will, the piles of discarded packaging drifting into mounds round the tree trunks and the familiar smell of half-decomposed sewage wafting off the humid bay, and you have what is, by definition at least, a promenade. The clientele aren’t quite the Edwardian couple with parasol and pram, but what the strollers lack in aesthetics they more than make up with their numbers. Backing this aromatic concrete pathway are huge posters of Christ¹ and large tower blocks whose lobotomised architects obviously thought that the Stalin era had the art of building down to a tee; but surely the most astounding fixture on this seaside extravaganza is the bridge.

Bathed in the saffron suffusion of sodium lights, the Ernakulam walkway bridge is like something out of The Jetsons and is just as anachronistic. Made from finest concrete, with steel hawsers artistically supporting the structure’s roof, it’s a favourite spot for the locals to hang around looking cool, shooting the breeze and inhaling the heady fumes of the nearby sewers. Perhaps the popularity of the bridge has something to do with the four ice cream kiosks sitting on either side of the small canal that the bridge crosses, which themselves are protected from the outside world by huge piles of discarded ice cream tubs. But whatever the magnetism of the thing, walking across it is like running the gauntlet.

Coming from the comparative darkness of the promenade, where homely couples take their little children for a stroll to sample the fresh sea breeze, the sodium shockwave of the bridge is like turning the corner into a boy racer’s Escort with all its extra headlights on high beam. Smarting from the glare, I wandered across the centre of this space-age monstrosity in a bit of a daze, only realising when halfway across that everyone lining the bridge’s railings was staring right at me. Pausing only to make sure that there was nothing obviously wrong with my appearance, I met a few gazes head on, smiling my teeth off in a show of bravado matched only by the terminally stoned or the incredibly rich; of course, following the rules of Indian engagement to the letter, those who caught my beaming gaze smiled back with genuine glee. This is the Indian reaction to westerners: they’re delighted to be singled out of the crowd and smiled at, and a little embarrassed to have been caught ogling you in the first place. This is why I grin at absolutely everyone in India; they love it so, and the response is an instantaneously heart-warming grin that makes ecstasy look like aspirin. You’ve just got to love the locals round here...

¹ Christ gave me the spooks in Southern India. Perhaps it’s too much exposure to images like the Turin Shroud, but the pictures of Jesus smothered over Kerala made me think of graveyards at night and that incredibly disturbing glazed look on yer man’s face as he bleeds to death on the cross. Normally pictures of the Son of God are faintly comforting, even if I don’t actually worship his dad, but in Kerala I found myself preferring Krishna fondling the milk maids to the bearded distress of the crucifixion.

James Bond in India

Written: 1 March 1998   

A happy coincidence saw me bump into Sarah in the Indian Coffee House, whom I’d last seen in Kodaikanal. She’d rejoined her travelling partner Lisa, and I was doubly pleased because I wasn’t that sure Kochi deserved another day of exploring, and a day loafing around with the two Brightonians felt a darn sight more interesting than photographing yet another colonial church.

Our plan for the day centred on the new James Bond film. Tomorrow Never Dies, the second James Bond with Pierce Brosnan at the helm, turned out to be a mediocre flick with jokes bordering on the smuttiness of a Carry On film¹, but the most incredible thing wasn’t so much the film as the way it was shown. I’d thought we’d be immersing myself in a dreamland of vodka martinis and action-packed scenes from the wildest reaches of chauvinistic swashbuckling, but instead we ended up with an experience of James Bond that was not exactly what Ian Fleming intended.

The cinema in India is an interactive event; people don’t sit silently through a film, they jeer and clap and yell and scream. And so with James Bond the clichés elicit a raucous response from the crowd: when Q turns up with his latest gizmos, they go wild; when the stunt at the start of the film ends up in a near-death explosion of mayhem, destruction and a skin-of-the-teeth escape by Bond, they leap about in a frenzy; and when he saves the world from certain catastrophe, they’re practically spasmodic with relief. But where the action scenes earn high praise, the one-liners totally pass them by, and more than once the only people laughing at the dialogue were the three English tourists.

But surely the main appeal of James Bond is that there’s something for nearly everyone, and in the case of India it’s easy to pinpoint the chief attraction of 007: it’s all about the wonderful vehicles that he drives. When Q unveiled his spanking new state-of-the-art BMW-cum-weapon-of-mass-destruction, the testosterone-fuelled members of the audience cheered with beery boyishness, and when Bond stole a bike as a prelude to a rooftop chase par excellence through the chaos of Saigon – yet again on a BMW, which is a surprising find in backstreet Vietnam, wouldn’t you say? – I swear I could hear them salivating on the back row (and yes, it was simple salivating rather than the more traditional back row sport; this is innocent India, remember). If westerners admire 007 for his suave and sophisticated manner, his beautiful women and his snappy dialogue, the Indians admire him for his hardware and his ability to blow up everything in sight. When westerners think of Bond, they think of beautiful curves and how attractive they are in little black dresses; when the Indians think of Bond, they think of beautiful curves and how aerodynamic they are.

But halfway through the film, just as the action was kicking in, the lights came up and there it was: an intermission. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a break in the middle of a film, and although during a three-hour Hindi epic I would think a breath of fresh air is a biological necessity (not to mention a psychological one), it rather spoils the flow of a Bond movie. And not only did everyone rush out of the theatre for a quick snack, pan or whatever, but those remaining were thrilled to see a trailer for the film Titanic, during which they cheered and clapped when Leonardo DiCaprio came on screen as if he was the tenth incarnation of Vishnu. If I’d had dreams of escapism, I was being rudely pulled back into reality, and the film wasn’t even done.

Despite the loud discussion halfway through the second reel a couple of rows behind us – which everyone joined, forgetting for a moment that they’d come to the cinema to watch a film rather than discuss the price of fish – the film managed to reach its explosive climax without a hitch. But a final surprise awaited us; as soon as the baddies got blown up, the crowd got up and started to leave, before the film had even finished. The traditional end to a James Bond film, where Bond is settling in with his latest lover while steadfastly ignoring the concerned radio crackle of HQ, is irrelevant in India. I never caught the witty retort in Tomorrow Never Dies because there was such mayhem as the crowd milled out that all the dialogue was inaudible; and then, as soon as the credits hit the screen, the projectionist killed the film dead. Talk about being shocked back into reality.

And what a reality! I swear that as we stood on the pavement blinking into the traffic, I felt as if I was back in the film, with rickshaws doing insane stunts round me, chasing invisible spies through the dangerous streets of urban India. And then I realised that India is always like that. Here, 007 would just be another mad driver in a mad country, except he’d be driving a pouting BMW.

¹ For example, Bond is screwing his attractive Danish teacher when Moneypenny rings him up on his mobile; when he eventually finds the thing and answers it, he says he’s ‘brushing up on a little Danish’, and Moneypenny tells him to pull it out pronto and save the world again with the words ‘you always were a cunning linguist, James.’ It’s an old joke and, if you ask me, a little contrived, but I guess that’s James Bond for you.

Karnataka

Mysore

Written: 4 March 1998   

I really wanted to like Mysore, but I didn’t, not because there was anything wrong with Mysore itself, but because I was completely shattered by the nightmare bus journey from Kochi. One thing that doesn’t get more pleasant with experience is the overnight journey, and the bus that I picked for the ten-hour trip to Mysore was old, crappy and noisy, and had to bounce along some of the most pothole-ridden excuses for highways that I’ve ever seen. I was to find out later that in India, Valium is almost irresponsibly cheap and can normally be bought over the counter from any chemist with a sympathetic ear, but ignorant of this handy tip, I unfortunately managed to stay awake for every minute of the juddering journey.

Despite the miserable attitude that this lack of sleep forced on me, Mysore’s attractions were pleasant, with its huge palace, a grand hill temple and a wonderfully colourful market. Mysore Palace, a monstrosity of pomposity and the seat of the maharajas of Mysore – who still exist and, in a similar fashion to upper class inhabitants of English stately homes, still live there, albeit in a little building off the back – was quite a sight, even if I did get stung twice for baksheesh by the palace guards who insisted on pumping me with uninteresting information about the building and then demanding money in return.

I also got accosted by a man from Kerala who had whisky on his breath and a serious desire to get me to write to him from home; I found him extremely hard to shake off, despite my protestations that my favourite pastime was uninterrupted peace and quiet. Eventually the only way I could get rid of him without causing offence was to promise to write to him once I got back home, which of course I did; you should never promise to write to someone unless you actually mean it. I got my personal space back and he got his letter (though he never replied, of course; too much whisky, perhaps).

I then took a bus up Chamundi Hill to the hill temple for a view over Mysore that didn’t turn out to be that special, so I quickly glided down the 1000 steps to the bottom of the hill and went exploring the fruit ‘n’ veg market at Devaraja. Here, at last, was the character I’d heard about from other visitors to Mysore: wonderfully friendly people, amazingly vibrant piles of tika powder in all the colours of the rainbow, mounds of incense sticks and fragrant oils, heaps of vegetables of unknown origin and use, and everywhere people busily selling, buying, haggling and living life to the full. It’s worth visiting Mysore for the market alone; it almost perked me up enough to enjoy myself.

But I still found myself suffering from a downer after the bus journey, and the hotel I’d picked in my sleepy state wasn’t exactly conducive to a good night’s rest, so after just one day I found myself boarding the bus to Bangalore in search of, well, something else. In a country as big as India, there’s an easy solution to frustration: you just keep going.

So poor Mysore, it caught me at a bad time, but at least I learned my lesson. Don’t try to explore somewhere new when you can hardly keep your eyes open, or you’ll have to rely on the photographs to remind you where you’ve been. And what’s the point of that?

Bangalore

Written: 7 March 1998   

Bangalore is the yuppie capital of India; certainly its streets are cleaner and its teeth brighter than any other Indian city. But despite the veneer of western capitalism, Bangalore remains a typically Indian place, proof perhaps that however hard the Cult of America tries, it will never conquer the second largest population mass in the world.

Yes, there are supermarkets, but their shelves are tiny and the goods overpriced. There are signs everywhere proclaiming, ‘We prefer Visa,’ but this turns out to be a blatant lie; find me anyone who wouldn’t rather have cold, hard cash. There are comparatively few cows blundering through the streets; I only saw a handful, though they were particularly fine specimens. There are rubbish bins, but they still overflow with rubbish, attract flies and stink like a sumo wrestler’s jockstrap. And the people are as aloof as city dwellers anywhere in the world; smiling at them produces a total blank, and apart from a handful of happy-go-lucky locals, Bangalorians seem to suffer from the dehumanisation that comes with successful capitalism.

Other similarities between Bangalore and western cities are quite apparent, but in everything the spectre of Indian insanity looms large. For example, Bangalore sports little red and green men at pedestrian crossings, but in true Indian style nobody takes a blind bit of notice of them, and they’re useless anyway; one set I saw gave you precisely four seconds of green time before reverting to red, not even enough for Linford Christie to get across. Coupled with this are the traffic police, who stand at traffic-light-controlled junctions, directing traffic by whistle; it’s as if the official line is to ignore the lights, which is exactly what happens. To be honest, crossing the road when the red light should be stopping the traffic is probably more dangerous than crossing when it’s green, because when it’s red the rickshaws are concentrating more on not hitting the traffic crossing their path than avoiding something petty like pedestrians.

Bangalore still has beggars – a particularly insistent type, too – but instead of living in lean-to tents on the high street, they sit outside shops selling genuine Ray Bans and designer clothes. Not all, though, are this street-wise; I saw my first case of elephantiasis in Bangalore, the disease that makes your limbs swell up so much that your legs look like an elephant’s; it was quite a sight, and my heart went out to the poor man.

Perhaps more surprisingly, Bangalorian rickshaw drivers use their meters, which is a first for me in India; everywhere else they steadfastly refuse to use them because they can always make more money out of a dumb tourist by quoting a crazy price and haggling it down a little, but in Bangalore it’s illegal not to use the meter, and unbelievably the drivers tend to obey. The only problem with the meter is that instead of getting worried about being ripped off for a trip that may or may not be a long way, you end up getting paranoid about whether the driver is going round and round in circles, just to up the fare. My first rickshaw driver didn’t help things; I wanted to go to a place called the Airlines Hotel on Madras Bank Road, and he started heading for the airport on Old Madras Road, which would have cost me an extra Rs50 if I hadn’t been paying attention.

In the Buff

But surely the biggest shock that awaited me in Bangalore was the availability of beef, or to be more precise, ‘buff’. The cow might be sacred but the buffalo isn’t, and perhaps a reason for the near lack of them in the city is that they’re available in burgers, pizzas, steaks and stews; it’s not that common, but there are restaurants serving buff, and I found myself drawn inexorably towards the smell of burnt bovine like a rat to the lilt of the Pied Piper. I didn’t realise how much I missed the taste of beef until I tucked into a meal of buff soup and buff pizza at one of the best Euro-Indian restaurants I’ve seen for a while. Along with this luxury, beer is freely available and is drinkable in pleasant surroundings as opposed to the prisons of Tamil Nadu, and you can find such western icons as Wimpy and KFC dotted around (though there’s no McDonald’s, yet).

Possibly as a result of this surfeit of gluttony, a sizable proportion of Bangalore’s middle-aged women are quite fat, which comes as a disappointment after the sleek beauty of the rural areas; the younger generation, however, are decked out in hip-hugging 501s and curve-enhancing mini T-shirts, with hardly a saree to be seen. It’s an intriguing sight, wandering past a huge queue full of young couples all waiting to see the sexy BMW in Tomorrow Never Dies. And in fairness, the young men of Bangalore look smart in a way that I didn’t believe Indian men could, with their designer tops and smart pressed trousers; the odd lungi makes an appearance, but for the most part the male Bangalorians look as well turned out as the national cricket team.

I decided to take advantage of the cosmopolitanism of Bangalore by developing ten rolls of film and mailing them home. Even Kodak makes no sense here, though; on the receipt I received for my deposited films was a disclaimer, which said, ‘Because days used in colour photographic materials, like other days, may change in time, neither prints nor copies will be replaced or otherwise warranted against any change in colour.’ Isn’t it sheer poetry? Whatever it means...

I also managed to track down some more excellent music – Sheryl Crow’s latest and Radiohead’s OK Computer – and as I wandered down the road towards my shabby little hotel room to try them out, I stopped dead in my tracks. Surely that couldn’t be the smell of kretek wafting down the street... but there it was, Gudang Garam for sale at the kiosk! If anything, this sums up Bangalore; to become truly stylish, you need American jeans, a German car, a British accent and Indonesian smokes. Thankfully you’ll still be an Indian, though.

The Sights of Bangalore

The sights of Bangalore aren’t that numerous, but the ones that are worth a visit are pretty impressive. Government buildings dominate the wide, tree-lined boulevards, especially the bright red monstrosity of the High Court and the modern and highly stylish Vidhana Soudha, which is home to the Secretariat and State Legislature. Above the entrance to the latter is the inscription ‘Government work is God’s work’, which might help to explain why government work involves so much bureaucracy and paperwork; the civil service is truly the home to the Holy Triplicate.

In the south of the city is a botanic garden, probably one of the best in India, and although the grass is brown and the plants wilting from a serious lack of rain, Lalbagh Garden is pretty impressive. The lakes glimmer, the trees cast their shade over the dusty lawns, countless Indians lie prostrate and motionless on the ground, and copious litter skitters down the paths in the afternoon breeze; it’s pleasant, despite the people casually throwing Pepsi cans into the undergrowth regardless of the nearby litter bins, and although it didn’t buoy my spirits like Kings Park in Perth or the gardens in Singapore, I felt at least that the work of the 18th century botanists who laid it out in the days before the British wasn’t entirely wasted.

And on my way back to the shops and shysters of the main shopping area, I came across a delightful little sign on the pavement. ‘Urinating, spitting and littering in public places will attract administrative charges,’ it said, and I couldn’t resist kneeling down to copy these priceless words down. It was only than that I noticed the smell; I must have been standing in a puddle of at least four hours of God’s work...

The Post Office

Written: 7 March 1998   

There are a couple of services that even Bangalore’s yuppiedom can’t render any more ludicrous: government tours and the post office.

I decided that I wanted to try out one of those crazy break-neck Indian tours, and where better than the temple towns of Belur, Halebid and Sravanabelagola, three classic architectural sites that are apparently worth visiting, but which can take quite some time to reach by public transport? I say ‘apparently’ because I never got to see them.

I’d originally tried to book a tour from Mysore, but a lack of interest meant that the companies couldn’t guarantee the tours would go, and indeed every company I tried eventually cancelled their ‘daily’ tours due to a lack of numbers. ‘Never mind,’ I thought, ‘I’ll try in Bangalore where there are more tourists,’ and sure enough the state tourist department said they had a tour, it was going every day and yes, it would definitely leave. This, by the way, is a use of the word ‘definitely’ that doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.

So I turned up at the state tourism offices at 7am on Friday morning, only to discover that I was the only person actually booked on the tour, and that it was therefore cancelled, quite within the bounds of the small print which I had read and assumed didn’t apply, seeing as I’d been told the tour would definitely be going. But there was absolutely no point in getting annoyed, so I took my refund with a good-natured shrug and walked back to my hotel; it amused me later to note that my refund was too much by Rs100, a little bit of divine justice if ever I’ve seen it.

I wasn’t that bothered, to be honest, because I’d just had ten rolls of film back from the local developing studio, most of which seemed to be pictures of temples. I was in danger of being completely templed-out, so in retrospect it was probably a good thing that the tour had fallen through, or I’d have been wading through yet more of the things...

But I was still left with ten sets of photographs to send back home, which struck me as a pretty easy job: shove them in a jiffy bag, nip down the post office and send them off. If only it was that easy; in India there’s no such thing as a jiffy bag, and using a normal envelope is just asking for trouble, so it’s back to basics again. The solution is to nip down to the local tailor, who will stitch up your precious memories in cheap linen, which is tougher than any jiffy bag; this you can then take to the post office for mailing.

This can take forever. There’s Book Post Surface Mail, Book Post Air Mail, Registered Sea Mail, Registered Air Mail, Ordinary Surface Mail, Ordinary Air Mail and a different counter for parcels and letters (the difference between which isn’t clear), as well as a separate counter for stamps and a separate information counter for discovering which counter you need. I wanted to send a parcel (which turned out to be the kind of parcel that needed to be dealt with by the letter people), post a letter (for which I needed stamps from the stamp man before handing it in at the letter counter) and buy some aerogrammes (from yet another counter), so by the time I’d finished my business with the philatelic equivalent of the civil service I was pretty exhausted and not a little confused. But at least it was cheap and, eventually, my films made it home, so I can’t really complain.

Reflections in Bangalore

Written: 5 March 1998   

Here are some random reflections, penned while sweating through the heat wave in Bangalore:

The smarter you look in Bangalore, the more attention you attract from the touts and beggars. If I go out into the streets of the city in my smart trousers and clean shirt, I can’t believe the difference; by wearing standard western issue and being white, I am basically advertising the fact that I am rich beyond all Indian dreams, and that I should be liberated of this financial burden at all costs. Compared to the reaction when I slouch round in baggy cottons and a salt-marked three-day-old T-shirt, it’s freaky, though it might have something to do with the large number of white tourists in Bangalore, all gagging to be fleeced, and saying things like, ‘Well, it’s only three pounds in real money you know, that’s awfully cheap,’ when a fairer price is nearer 30p. There’s gold in them there hills...

Being the smartarse with the budget has its dark side, though. I’ve often mentioned the beggars, but never my personal relationship with them, and it’s time to come clean. Until now I’ve always totally ignored the pleading children, the fingerless diseased, the sagging crones and the skateboard cripples, because I’ve told myself that it’s better to give your money to a charitable organisation like Mother Theresa than into the hands of a beggar, just in case that beggar isn’t so poor, or is working for someone else. There is, however, one big flaw in this argument; I’ve never given a bloody penny to any of these charities I pay lip service to, and it suddenly struck me that I’m simply a rich westerner who counts his rupees on a daily basis and never gives anything away. Haggling with the salesmen over what is essentially a pittance is one thing; if I end up paying ten times the real price, then so will the next tourist, and that’s not good, though it’s certainly not worth arguing over a few rupees. But not giving anything to someone who is dying in front of my eyes is simply unforgivable, and in Bangalore I suffered a complete turnaround; now, if I have change, then so does the beggar, if he or she doesn’t look too well off already.

Of course, it can be argued – quite truthfully, I might add – that this recently discovered philanthropy is nothing more than an attempt to ease my conscience, and that it has its roots in pure selfishness, and the desire to stop feeling guilty about my previous misanthropy. This is also true, but those of us who can seriously say that they give to charity with totally pure intentions are either lying or have no dark side, and I don’t believe such a human exists.

On the subject of money, I realised the other day that my money belt – a cotton contraption that snuggles under my trousers nicely, hiding my valuables in an area guarded by instinctive intrusion paranoia – is now a part of me and I feel undressed without it. Consider this: my belt routinely contains over one year’s salary for the average Indian (about £200) in cash, plus a lot more than that in travellers cheques. Perhaps this is what they mean by a capitalist waistline...

Jarvis Cocker once wrote a song called ‘Dogs are Everywhere’. I don’t think he was specifically thinking of India at the time, but he could well have been; I have never seen (or heard) such a pack of miscreant scoundrels as the dogs in India, and if it wasn’t for the part they play in cleaning up the rubbish off the streets, I’d say this place had a serious problem. I can hardly believe that in England, stray dogs are rounded up and put down; here, every dog is a stray, and the concept of a pet dog is as laughable as a pet swan would be in England. Chalk up the dogs as another species that will survive the nuclear holocaust, along with the cockroaches.

I woke up this morning with what can only be described as a smoker’s cough; hacking on the congestion in my lungs, I unexpectedly brought up all the pollution I’ve inhaled. It doesn’t bother me too much, but I don’t really smoke, apart from the odd packet just to sample the local brands of cigarette, none of which I’ve particularly liked; it’s just pollution getting to me, and the head cold that has been my constant travelling companion has finally matured into full-blown Indian congestion. Roll on the clear air of the Himalayas...

Bangalore railway station is as clean and modern as any in the West. Computer screens show the departures and arrivals, TVs show MTV on the platforms, shops sell Pepsi and coffee, and the tracks are free of cows and excess litter. And above the heads of the busy commuters hangs a sign saying, ‘To know how good your career is going to be, consult an astrologer.’ And this just over from the sign that mysteriously advises, ‘Do not entrain or detrain a moving train.’ It’s a top spot for weirdness.

I am gathering a hefty collection of Indian addresses from people who have been interesting enough to merit a decent conversation (drunken Keralans excepted). I have one regret, though, and it is this. Back at Surabaya train station in Java I met a very sociable young man who was in the Indonesian air force, and after talking to him on the platform for a while, he wanted to swap addresses; I took his, and I gave him a false one, because at that ill-starred time I couldn’t think of anything worse than having to put up with pidgin-English letters from afar. Then on the train I sat next to a young Muslim girl who plucked up all her courage and linguistic skills to string together a conversation with me; she also asked to swap addresses, and I told her that as I had been travelling for so long I no longer had an address (an excuse I use to this day, because I don’t really want to give out my address to all and sundry) but she gave me hers anyway, entreating me to write to her, as she collected foreign stamps. She was, as I recall, from Solo.

In a fit of general malaise with the whole Indonesian thing, I screwed up both addresses and binned them. For this I feel guilty; a postcard is a tiny effort for me, but for someone in financially stricken Indonesia it would be a real treat. And as if to rub it in, I read that the first major piece of violence sparked off by the Indonesian disaster happened in Solo. It’s one of my few regrets... so whenever I get an address these days, I make sure I write as promised. It’s the least I can do, really.

I’m slowly becoming Indian, in some ways at least. Part of it is through necessity and part of it through resignation, but I now find myself spitting in the street, urinating in public, chucking rubbish onto the roadside, eating with my hands and crossing traffic with reckless abandon. In justification, I spit because India’s pollution makes it a necessity to cough up the unpleasant, and as spitting is preferable to swallowing, I simply join the herd in this socially accepted gesture; I urinate in public because, again, it is the norm, and there simply aren’t any public toilets in India; I chuck rubbish only onto existing piles of rubbish, but I’d rather use a bin, if only there were such things (the piles act like impromptu bins anyway); I eat with my hands because there isn’t any cutlery, it’s kind of fun, it seems to make the food taste better, it’s the normal way to eat your food, and I always wash them first; and I cross the traffic with a new sixth sense that I have gradually been developing since Indonesia, because it’s not only the best way to navigate your way through a city, it’s rather entertaining at the same time, in a videogame kind of way.

However, all of these habits will disappear within two seconds of my arrival back in the West, where they have clean air, public toilets, rubbish bins, cutlery and pedestrian crossings. And there are some Indian habits I’ll never pick up, like drinking your coffee from a saucer or wobbling your head in an ambiguous way (although, if I want to get my own back on an Indian, I wobble my head when he asks me a question; ‘Which country you coming from?’ Wobble. Ha!). Deep down, I guess I’m an ingrained westerner, but it’s certainly fun to dabble in being a local.

Kama Sutra

Written: 7 March 1998   

To kill a few hours before the departure of my train to Hampi, I decided to go and see an Indian movie. The one I picked, Kama Sutra, rather fortuitously turned out to be in English, and not only was it comprehensible, it was a serious film. This is perhaps because it wasn’t a typical Indian film at all, but was produced in association with the British company Channel Four films.

Kama Sutra, as the title rather subtly implies, is a love story. Like most Indian cinema, the emphasis was more on the story part than the love part, though there was quite a bit of kissing and nudity, something you wouldn’t find in a mainstream Hindi movie. I found myself transfixed; it oozed atmosphere and cinematic appeal, even if the story failed to follow up on the more intriguing sub-plots and instead stuck rather unimaginatively to the main story, a standard ‘Love Hurts’ tragedy set in 16th-century India.

But I didn’t care about the plot, because the costumes, sets and attention to detail were so good at portraying ancient India that I almost felt I recognised the place. And perched pleasantly on top of this vivid imagery was one of the most beautiful actresses I’ve ever seen in a film, a British-born Indian called Indira Varma. I wasn’t the only one who found her alluring either, as about 90 per cent of the audience was male, sitting there masticating on their pan while thinking of something far more assonant. The male actors were pretty damn perfect too, but of course I didn’t notice that.

So despite the overwhelming popularity of Bollywood, Kama Sutra shows that India can produce westernised films, albeit in cahoots with western production companies. And the soundtrack was stunning, regardless of the complete lack of any song-and-dance routines; instrumental, Indian and perfect for the film, it was full of the sort of Indian music that I’ve liked since stumbling on Ravi Shankar back in my days as a hippy.

It was quite a relief after all the sing-along insanity of normal Indian film culture...

Hampi

Written: 16 March 1998   

A night-train ride northwest of Bangalore, Hampi seems to exist in a sphere of its own, a self-contained combination of timeless natural wonder and historical human impact. Here the ruins of ancient civilisations pepper the rocky landscapes while restaurants pander to the requirements of the tourist classes, and all the time the slow turbulence of the Tungabhadra River meanders along the valley floor, only months away from the raging tumescence of the monsoon.

Describing the atmosphere of Hampi is as difficult a task as describing the allure of the city lights or the hypnotic attraction of dance music, but there is no doubt in every visitor’s mind that Hampi has a special something, even if putting your finger on that something is impossible. For some it is the stark beauty of the igneous rock formations that dominate the landscape as it shivers under the heat haze of the midday sun; for others it is the different sense of time, a disconnection from the hustle and bustle of modern India – indeed, the modern world – as cows ramble past the stone steps where colourfully dressed women beat the dirt out of their washing; and for others it’s Hampi’s proximity to the beach state of Goa, resulting in the availability of luxuries like king-size cigarette papers and wonderful tourist trinkets while managing to remain an outpost of primitive culture.

Because the little town of Hampi is surrounded by one of the most extensive and varied collections of ruined buildings this side of Delphi, I decided to employ the services of a guide, a young man called Chandra who turned out to be a particularly good find. During the course of two half-day tours, he managed to transform a collection of dilapidated stone constructions into a living, breathing world of bazaars, incense, rituals, royalty, engineering genius and warring nations, a feat achieved by combining his encyclopaedic knowledge of local history with an evocative delivery, a talent unusual in someone so young. As a one-on-one guide he brought Hampi alive, recreating the scenes from 500 years ago when the Europeans were tentatively reaching out their colonial intentions towards the east, the Muslims were methodically invading India from the north, and the Vijayanagara Kingdom was thriving in the Hampi area. I normally scorn guides, but this time it turned out to be a good move.

On the other hand, touring Hampi in the incredibly sweltering afternoon sun did make me think that if I saw yet another temple, I’d probably kick it. After a while lingams and gopurams begin to look exactly like all the other lingams and gopurams you’ve ever seen, and so it was with the temples of Hampi. But this is where Hampi wins hands-down over other sites, because behind each ruined building is scenery that bewilders.

In a geological pattern echoed by the rock sculptures of central Australia, Hampi’s landscape is volcanic in origin; as the volcanic exudate cooled it cracked along vaguely orthogonal lines which, when exposed to the vagaries of weathering, wore down into piles of rounded boulders the size of houses. The resulting mountains of rocks are stacked up in gravity-defying balancing acts, with boulders seemingly about to roll down onto the town while stone slabs look as if a slight push will slice them like bread off a loaf, taking with them banana trees, coconut palms and electric cables.

Electric cables, indeed; for Hampi, while an historical tour de force, is an attraction that’s positively ripe for the milking. The number of visitors who flock to see the sights is on the increase, and simply looking at my two-year-old guidebook’s description of accommodation and restaurants shows how much has already changed. But for once the onset of the clumsy boot-heels of tourism doesn’t concern me greatly; to destroy the unique atmosphere of Hampi you would have to defile a stunningly large area of inhospitable Martian landscape, and more buildings won’t manage that. And Hampi is hardly the place where the clubs of Goa or the high-rises of the hill stations would work; the people just don’t seem to have drunk from the cup of mammon that the Goans have drained. This is, without a doubt, a godsend.

Images of Hampi

As with all fairly long stays, I happily slipped into the lifestyle. In Hampi the mañana ethos is stronger than in most places, and yet again I found my plans slipping gently away. Highlights of my lounging in Hampi follow, in no particular order:

Have you ever heard a musical temple? Neither had I before Chandra took me to the World Heritage Vitthala Temple. Here, tapping certain stone pillars produces harmonics that can only be described as ethereal, and it’s something that’s quite impossible to imagine until you hear a tune being tapped out on a stone carving of a drum. Discovering this sort of architectural genius really makes you really think about modern life; modern man could probably build such a temple out of granite if he so desired, but it could only be achieved with the aid of computers and science, systems that the builders of Hampi couldn’t have dreamed of even in their most hallucinogenic phases. The same goes for the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the statues of Easter Island, the palaces of the Aztecs, the megaliths of the Bada Valley and so on. Do you ever get the feeling that by learning so much, we forget even more?

Other astounding architectural wonders pointed out to me by the vivacious Chandra were a comprehensive aqueduct system for filling the city’s water tanks and bathing pools; underground temples used for secret meetings, where bats now inhabit the dank water-lined corridors while shafts of sunlight slice through the gloom; ancient water-based air conditioning on the first floor of the queen’s pad; and a refractive light trick that reflects a gopuram’s image upside down on the wall inside the temple. I could describe the fascinating history of the area and all the quirky clashes of Jainism, Hinduism and Islam that are reflected in the architecture, but plenty of better-informed scholars have written on that topic. In the case of Hampi, it’s best just to go there and see it for yourself.

The local tribeswomen have resurrected their traditional dress in a wonderful combination of aesthetic concern and wily tourist appeal. These women, normally fairly ancient, get around in costumes that look as if they’ve smothered themselves in glue and rolled around the floor of a pantomime seamstress’s sewing room. Chunks of mirrors offset the garish pinks and purples, monstrous nose studs clash with whole families of arm bands, and all the time they’re trying to persuade you to shell out for handbags that would have made early Pink Floyd fans suck in their breath at the savage colour schemes. If Blue Peter was into fashion, this would be the result, and it’s a gloriously kitsch sight.

Also quite aware of the deep pockets of tourists, crazy sadhus – wandering holy men who live an ascetic lifestyle – roam the streets with their wild eyes and wilder claims, and herds of wonderful postcard-selling children ply the restaurants with their excellent English and smiles that keep on shining well beyond their departure. If these little charmers are typical of the next generation of Indians, then this country’s got a rosy future.

Why is it that just as soon as you have met some of the most warm-hearted and interesting people on your whole trip, they have to disappear into the folds of the travellers’ trail, and always too soon? In Hampi I met and waved goodbye to a whole group of great people who instantly struck a chord. Kenny, Ross, Kirsten, Mark, Leslie, Mark and Sharon... and don’t forget the locals, a collection of coyly intelligent bundles of fun who turned the whole event into one long festival of singalongs, culinary experiments and familial closeness. Maical, Lakshmi, Ali and countless others didn’t just enliven Hampi, they personified it. And, as if I need to mention it, people smile back in Hampi. Not for the first time do I find myself hoping that I’ll meet them all again, some sunny day.

I finished reading Sophie’s Choice and I actually felt tears welling at the cataclysmic outcome of the novel. Perhaps it was the fact that I identified heavily with the narrator, but it moved me; the only other book I remember affecting me like this was a series that I read as a child, some five or six books whose names I forget and whose contents I only vaguely remember. After completing the last book and reading of the death of a character who had permeated each of the stories, I felt for the first time the icy grip of a master storyteller killing off a character who’s become almost real. Sophie’s Choice came along at a time when I was really beginning to rediscover my passion for all things literary, and if anything it has solidified my hopes to become a writer. If only I could produce the matchless prose of William Styron, I would feel I had achieved my life’s ambition...

As if to remind me who’s the boss, another bout of vomiting and diarrhoea struck me down five days after I arrived in Hampi, taking me by surprise me after a month and a half of reasonable health. I lay knocked out in my room, writhing in a turmoil of half-remembered dreams, sweat-wrung sheets and subterranean homesick blues, hoping for nothing more than a visit from somebody. Unfortunately I twisted in solitude, feeling far more than just lonely; I felt forgotten. However, it turned out that there was no reason to feel lonely, at least as far as illness went. During my eight-day stay absolutely everyone in the group went down with something, from the mildly uncomfortable to the serious, so there’s clearly a hygiene problem in Hampi, especially at this time of year when water is scarce. (And, just like in Puri, my illness coincided with enforced vegetarianism, because Hampi is a no-meat zone on account of its religious significance; bring on the chicken, I say.)

The sunsets in Hampi are indescribably beautiful, so I won’t.

Try crossing a river in a coracle and you’ll never again be scared by amusement park rides. Over the river from Hampi are more restaurants and hotels, where they even serve alcohol (though I stuck to the lassi, given my illness); you reach them by entrusting your life to a wood-and-tar contraption that redefines the word ‘basic’. At night the coracles are beached by the riverside, overturned into a family of giant turtle shapes that leave behind perfect circles of fertile grass. On the other hand, entrusting your life to Charon isn’t as crazy as floating down the river in an inflatable rubber tube, which is a popular way of seeing the landscape. I would have gone, but I found watching the tourists float past from my vantage point in the riverside restaurants far more relaxing than the prospect of getting wet myself. Besides, I kept thinking that I could always do that tomorrow...

It seems that Hampi has every type of Indian weirdness available, all crammed into one small town. There’s an ashram being built on the hills overlooking the eastern end of the bazaar; there’s a crazy palmist down by the river with orange robes, a huge beard and a little hut, who can be seen wandering around the town with his portable radio on full blast; there’s a local homeopathic doctor who will cure all your ills for Rs50, asking questions like ‘What qualities do you most admire in your friends?’ instead of ‘Now, where exactly does it hurt?’; there are restaurants serving bhang lassi by the river, and extremely strong ones too, judging by the local populace (bhang lassi is a marijuana milkshake, and is the closest thing I’ve ever found to Anthony Burgess’s ‘moloko with knives’ from A Clockwork Orange); and there are dogs, pigs, cows and chickens wandering around everywhere, eating each other’s faeces and generally having a ball. It sounds just like everywhere else I’ve been in India, doesn’t it?

And to cap it all, I was lucky enough to be in Hampi for the Holi Festival, and I can’t think of a better place to spend it...

The Holi Festival

Written: 14 March 1998   

As a therapy, regression often proves effective. From the simple weekend routine of playing knock-about football with your mates, to the psychologically intriguing exploits of businessmen who dress up in nappies and suck their thumbs in oversize cots while paying a mistress a small fortune to act as their mummy, reverting back to childhood is a glorious release from having to fake an adult outlook every day. Not surprisingly the Indians are fully aware of the positive energies associated with regression, but typically they manage to make it feel far less Freudian and far more fun; and to cap it all, they’ve set aside one day a year, Holi, that’s wholly dedicated to slipping back into childhood, or at least that’s how it appears from the outside. There is a religious significance, of course, but then Christmas is a religious holiday too... apparently.

Holi is an annual holiday celebrated on the full moon in March, purportedly to say goodbye to winter and hello to warmer weather. This is why Holi is mainly a northern festival, because in the south the last thing people want is for the pleasant temperatures of winter to turn into the humid tandoori oven of summer. Hampi is a delightful exception, possibly due to the tourist influx, though the day that we celebrated the coming of hotter weather, it was scorching enough to make the balls on a brass monkey dangerous to touch. Still, as with most festivals, the original reason for celebrating Holi has all but been sidelined in favour of the festivities themselves; thus the bonfire the night before, lit as a symbol of the destruction of the evil demon Holika, isn’t so much a spiritual affair as a chance for the locals to slap on the western dance music and leap around the streets, annoying the policemen and singularly failing to light the fire until most of the spectators have drifted off to sleep. But the bonfire is only one bit of Holi; the best part is saved for the day after the full moon.

Holi is all about colour, namely colour in the hair, colour on the face, colour on your clothes, colour all over the streets and colour just about anywhere it’ll stick. The colour itself takes the form of tika powder, either thrown au naturel or added to water and squeezed from a plastic bottle; it pays to wear grotty clothes on Holi (so I simply chose randomly from my collection of sun-bleached and laundry-battered garments) because if you play with tika powder, everyone’s a winner bar the clothes.

The mayhem goes on all morning. Fuelled by copious amounts of bhang, the locals dance around to the beat of tin drums, smothering themselves and any unwary passers-by in a psychedelic dream coat of purples, blues, yellows, reds and greens, managing to attract a sizable collection of manic westerners on the way who join in with characteristic energy. Five minutes after joining the throng it doesn’t matter whether you’re white or black, because everyone is purple; a couple of hours later and clean people are not only a rarity, they’re targets. The streets run purple, buildings drip with missed shots, cars look as if they’ve been hit by multicoloured bird shit and tentatively the women of Hampi, who have sensibly hidden themselves away for the madness, come out of the woodwork, vainly trying to recognise friends and family through the layers of pigment.

And before long, half the population of Hampi is down at the ghats, scrubbing and soaping in vain as they realise that not only does tika powder stain like buggery, it doesn’t react to traditional ablution methods at all. Soap slides off skin, leaving pink splatter marks plainly visible; shampoo might add Vitamin B5 to the follicles, but it doesn’t shift the streaks. In fact the only thing that even pretends to work is rubbing with sand, physically removing layers of coloured skin, and leaving everyone exhausted but happy. It seems that one of the side effects of baptism by Holi water is a healthy glow, if you count purple, yellow, red, green and blue as healthy, which, judging by the smiles, everyone here does.

But nobody cares, and indeed it’s kind of entertaining to be slightly stained for the week after Holi; everyone knows what you’ve been up to and grins maniacally as you wander past with your pink face and green hair. It took 1977 and the Sex Pistols to bring colourful anarchy to England, and then it came with an extended middle digit; the Hindus have known about it for centuries, and it’s a darn sight more fun when it involves staining your friends (and with tika rather than spit).

And you don’t have to wear safety pins through your nose, either...

Bijapur

Written: 18 March 1998   

Waving goodbye to my Hampi friends as they boarded the bus for the southbound train, I felt a strange yet familiar feeling. Yes, it was sad to be seeing newly discovered kin disappear into the evening sun, but I suddenly felt that little thrill associated with being alone again, with being independent and having to make my own decisions.

Those decisions included leaving Hampi the next day and jumping on the train to Bijapur, a major town to the north. It struck me on arrival that Bijapur feels quite a lot like Hyderabad, and a glance at the map shows that the distance between the two isn’t that great; indeed, Bijapur has a large Muslim population just like Hyderabad, which probably explains it.

Bijapur’s great attractions are architectural, specifically its Islamic architecture. Minarets, domes and echoing burial chambers all conjure up images of the Arabian Nights, with crescent moons rising in clear starry skies while camel trains stand silhouetted on the desert horizon; even the wailing of the muezzin stirs me in a strange way, even if it’s just in frustration at being woken up at 4am yet again. Whatever the western image of Islam, its atmospheric grace never ceases to amaze me.

The Golcumbaz

The Golcumbaz, for example, is astounding. A huge domed building, looking slightly ungainly but definitely impressive, the Golcumbaz’s appeal lies not so much in its impressive size and structure, but in the aural effect of its dome. The dome contains a whispering gallery, and it’s a stunner.

Climb up to the balcony inside the dome and clap your hands, and the sound gets echoed back to you ten times in an explosion of noise that borders on the spooky. Make a raspberry sound and listen to a choir of flatulence; blow a whistle and marvel at sounds that even Roger Whittaker couldn’t reproduce; sneeze and the whole world sneezes with you. But listen in silence and the true power of the Golcumbaz becomes apparent.

That is, it becomes apparent if you can manage to find silence in which to listen; after all this is India, where silence in public places is a rarity, especially given the sheer number of people in the country. But against all the odds I managed to coincide my visit to the Golcumbaz with the only time of the day when the hordes of Indian tourists were in transit between sights, and I had the whispering gallery to myself for a good five minutes. It was during this time that I discovered the true secret of the dome.

Dotted around the perimeter of the dome are eight little doorways onto the roof, each of them shaped in the traditional archway design of Islam, and through these doors waft the sounds of the city. Through one doorway the lilt of the market-wallahs selling their goods echoes tenfold on the roof; through another the rickshaw horns argue with each other in triple triplicate; yet another amplifies the warbling of the Muslim call to prayer; and over there a door catches a flock of birds as they chatter on the outside parapet, oblivious to the eavesdropper inside. The Golcumbaz is the Islamic equivalent of the mixing studio – or, to be more theistic, the Islamic equivalent of an all-seeing, all-hearing god – and for five minutes I was privileged enough to be in a studio free of Hindi pop artistes.

Of course, the silence didn’t last, and just as I reached the end of my personal repertoire of funny noises, a troupe of Indians appeared through one of the doors and proceeded to scream, clap, screech and expectorate¹ in a cacophony of sound that would have woken the ancient Islamic king buried in the cellar if he hadn’t already given up trying to rest in peace. I retreated to the comparative peace of the city streets before my eardrums suffered permanent damage.

The Incomparable Ibrahim Roza

Other beautiful buildings followed, such as the simple yet striking Jama-e-Masjid Mosque; the Asar Mahal, where kids play cricket in the nearby water tank, and I was accosted by a crazy old man who kept shouting, ‘Cumoncumon!’ as he dragged me up to the roof and insisted I take pictures of him prancing around before demanding some baksheesh; and the Citadel, which sports some beautiful ruins and pleasant parks.

But little prepared me for the sheer beauty of the Ibrahim Roza. Scorched by sunlight and surrounded by parched parks, the minarets and domes of the twin burial tombs of this astoundingly beautiful building summarise everything that is aesthetically emotive about Islamic architecture. Perfect domes are topped with crescent moons, surrounded on four corners by symmetrical minarets that manage to combine structural simplicity with intricate stonework; doorways with the distinctive pointed arch lead into cool high-ceilinged chambers, sheltering the tombs from the outside world and cutting off almost all traces of city bustle; covered walkways around the perimeters of the buildings provide a contemplative environment for a relaxing read or (if you really want to be a local) a quick snooze; and all the time there’s a background vibration of history, long marches, religious wars, scimitars, sultans and Persian love stories.

Even the small group of locals who invaded my peace did it in a respectable and almost welcome way, saying, ‘Excuse me sir, sorry to disturb you,’ before launching into a surprisingly elegant and worthwhile conversation. The concepts of Islam and modern India sometimes appear to be at loggerheads, the former being strict and regulated and the latter strictly unregulated, yet there are more Muslims in India than in most purely Muslim countries, including all of the Arab states; it also seems to be the case that Indian cities with large Muslim areas are generally more respectable and less chaotic than their Hindu counterparts. Many people would say that this is a shame, and would point to the busy insanity of India as one of its main attractions, but I beg to differ; the contrast of Islamic India with the Hindu mainstream is like a breath of fresh air that makes you appreciate both religions more. Furthermore, I just adore Islamic architecture, Islam’s evocative histories and the (comparatively) reticent politeness of Muslims. I sometimes wonder if westerners have more in common with the Muslim Indians than Hindu Indians; this might seem a strange thing to say, given the traditional gulf between the West and Islam, but when you see the different religions in action, it certainly makes you think.

Holi in Bijapur

On the other hand, there were three areas where the austere nature of Islam seemed to crumble in Bijapur. First, some places celebrate Holi not only on the full moon, but also on a few specific days afterwards, and sometimes every day of the following week. 17 March was evidently one of those days in Bijapur, and I saw plenty of people wandering around smothered in purple and silver (the favourite colours of the Bijapurians, presumably); I even managed to gain a few facial and arm stains myself, much to the glee of the local populace. One assumes that only the Hindus actually participate in the Holi celebration, but the proliferation of brightly coloured people and the ubiquitous smell of alcohol clashed vibrantly with the traditional view of an Islamic town.

Second, Bijapur was full of pigs, more so than any other Indian city I’ve visited. Muslims don’t eat pigs, but in a strange display of opposites attracting, Bijapur snorted and rummaged around in the dirt with the best of them.

But surely the biggest clash between cultures is when a foreigner like myself visits a peaceful Muslim tomb and ends up doing the Temple Tango. This dance, a common sight when white people explore temples in India, is a simple consequence of having to take off your shoes at the entrance to every temple, leaving you to enter on bare feet. This is fine in theory, but when the summer sun has been baking the stone slabs all day, it’s a bit much to bear when your feet aren’t hardened up like the local soles, and you end up hopping around from shadow to shadow, muttering ows and ouches in increasingly loud volume as the heat builds up on the balls of your feet. Of course, you have to leave your shoes outside Hindu temples as well as Muslim ones, but in a Hindu temple the Temple Tango isn’t quite so noticeable among the busily fascinating activities that seem to take place all the time. In a Muslim tomb, though, it feels rather out of place; I just hope my hopping round the Ibrahim Roza didn’t look as disrespectful as it felt.

¹ This was despite the poetic nonsense of the sign downstairs proclaiming that ‘Spitting and writting [sic] is strictly prohibited’. Chalk up another great sign in a country that excels in this lost art.

Maharashtra

Aurangabad

Written: 20 March 1998   

It was a long transit day on the bus north from Bijapur to Aurangabad, where I’d originally planned to stay for three nights. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the sights around the city – such as the wonderful caves at Ellora and Ajanta, and the atmospheric fort at Daultabad – but in the end I was happy to move on after just two nights.

This early departure was entirely down to the place in which I stayed, rather than Aurangabad itself. Aurangabad is home to a genuine Youth Hostel, and with its fairly convenient location and extremely cheap prices (Rs20 per night, or about 30p) I went for it. I think it’s fair to say that I’ll only stay in another Youth Hostel when I have no choice; they all have the same slightly unnerving atmosphere, and although it’s hard to put my finger on the exact reason for this odd vibe, it’s been present in every one I’ve stayed in, from Australia to India.

Perhaps it was the institutional feel of the whole set-up that set my teeth on edge: lights out was at 10pm, the manager was not a ‘manager’ but a ‘warden’, there were plenty of sickly sweet Christian messages posted on the walls, and the buildings looked like something out of a 1950s hospital. But I think the real reason for my failure to enjoy Aurangabad Youth Hostel was the type of person it attracts. Calling them ‘strange’ would be a kindness.

To be fair, my experience of Youth Hostels hasn’t exactly been good anywhere. My one memory of the hostel in Perth was of one particularly depressed traveller spending a Saturday night lying in a pool of delirium having taken an overdose of Prozac; the paramedics were most courteous as they carted him off, gibbering quietly to himself.

But all Youth Hostels are home to one particular type of weirdo: the hostel networker. He or she is normally (but not always) young, is pretty shy, has travelled extensively but never outside the international network of hostels, and tends to have some kind of oddity about them, whether it’s a habit of staring blankly ahead, a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or just a lack of social normality. It’s hard to imagine them having anything in their future apart from a future career teaching Physics for the Open University.

There will also be a smattering of Japanese, a few serious Germans, a couple of headcases with tattoos and strangely cropped facial hair, and at least one resident weirdo who has been there longer than anyone can remember and who still doesn’t quite fit in.

I booked in for three nights but could only handle two. It felt like leaving school at the end of term when I finally lugged my pack out of the door and hailed a rickshaw; I even felt like playing conkers with the driver, but either he didn’t know how to play or he misunderstood me. Instead he just covered his groin with his hands, smiled nervously and shuffled me into his cab.

I couldn’t get in quick enough...

Ellora

Written: 19 March 1998   

The main attractions around Aurangabad are the cave temple complexes of Ellora and Ajanta, and for them it’s worth putting up with any amount of social asphyxiation. I spent a whole day at Ellora, and it’s simply magnificent.

Television and computers must be the most destructive forces known to man, because before either of these (admittedly excellent) developments came along, man actually achieved things. The caves at Ellora are prime examples of what man can do if he doesn’t get hooked on soap operas and videogames, and instead is desperate for something else to alleviate the boring nature of his existence. Faith might move mountains, but you’ve got to have a lot more than faith if you’re going to dig entire temples out of rock faces.

Or should I say into rock faces. The temples of Ellora are as big and as impressive as any others you will see in India, but here each temple is literally made out of a single piece of stone; before the builders arrived there was a hill made of rock, but after all the whittling and chipping there stood (and still stands) a collection of complex multi-storey temples, smothered in intricate carvings, towers, statues and plenty of cool rooms for meditative reflection... all made out of one continuous piece of rock. In much the same way that sculptors take lumps of stone and tease beautiful statues out them, the builders of Ellora took an entire cliff and teased the most incredible temple complexes out of them. The scale of the achievement at Ellora is breathtaking.

There are three main collections of temples at Ellora: the Buddhist temples, built around 600 to 800 AD; the Hindu temples, built between 600 and 900 AD; and the Jain temples, built somewhere between 800 and 1000 AD. The varied styles of the 34 caves are wonderfully diverse, from the austere and peacefully meditative atmosphere of the Buddhist temples and the overwhelming grandeur and pomposity of the Hindu offerings, to the halfway house of the Jain constructions, which manage to combine aspects of the others into a uniquely different religion.

The main temple in the complex – the Kailash Temple from the Hindu period – is a masterpiece. Built by digging down vertically into the mountainside and forming the whole temple complex from the top down, it is estimated that simply quarrying the three million cubic feet of rock (about 200,000 tonnes) must have taken at least 100 years; the complex covers twice the area of the Parthenon and is 1.5 times as high; and the whole thing is literally made out of a mountain. It is, not surprisingly, a stunning sight.

Put simply, Ellora makes the mind boggle, which, one assumes, is the whole point.

Daultabad

Written: 19 March 1998   

Ellora is impressive, but so is another sight around Aurangabad, the mighty Daultabad Fort. Always a sucker for a good fort, I stopped off at Daultabad on the way back from Ellora, and I wasn’t disappointed. Soaring from the desert plains is a mountain that forms the perfect natural defence, with sheer cliff walls petering out into a hilly crown that makes an excellent setting for a fortress. But even though the fort is a wonderful sight and provides great views of the surrounding desert hills, it’s the story behind Daultabad that gives it an atmosphere all of its own.

The original fortress in Daultabad was built in the 12th century AD by the Hindu rulers of the Deccan, but in 1308 it fell into the hands of the Muslims. It must have caught the eye of the conquerors because Mohammed Tughlaq, the Sultan of Delhi, decided to move his capital from Delhi to Daultabad. In a display of madness that even modern India has trouble matching, he marched his entire population 1100km south to his new city, even taking the old and unwell; not surprisingly, thousands of his subjects died on the way. Undeterred by this unfortunate experience, he eventually realised that the blistering heat of the desert wasn’t quite his cup of tea after all, because 17 years later he marched them all the way back to Delhi, again creating a severe dent in the population levels. I bet he was popular with his subjects... well, those who were left, anyway.

The fort, however, has stood the test of time remarkably well. The ruins sit atop a huge hill, surveying the land for miles around, and even with the proliferation of nattering tourists it retains its atmosphere of ancient and turbulent times, combining ancient Hindu and Islamic architecture into one gorgeous sight.

Along with Ellora, it makes Aurangabad an essential stop on the way north.

Ajanta

Written: 21 March 1998   

I made a beeline north from Aurangabad as soon as I could, and stepped from the world of 1950s Christian values into what can only be described as the Twilight Zone. A three-hour journey north soon saw me and Ian, a fellow inmate at the Youth Hostel, booking into a hotel in the little town of Fardapur, a speck on the landscape that has all the atmosphere of a motorway service station.

Fardapur’s claim to fame is its proximity to the cave temples of Ajanta, but as with Aurangabad, something wasn’t right. The restaurants had menus that claimed to sell almost anything you might desire, but all they could actually manage was fried rice and soft drinks; the northbound bus out of town left at either 8am, 8.15am or 8.30am, and took either four hours, eight hours, ten hours or 12 hours, depending on who you asked (for the record, the bus left at 8.45am and the journey lasted 12.5 hours, so nobody won the sweepstake); and as we sat in our room, mysterious locals would walk past our window, staring in and mumbling weird sounds that would be more at home in a David Attenborough documentary.

Add in the birds nesting in our bathroom and flying in and out of the windows to collect food, the fan that changed its speed more often than an Indian bus driver, and the fact that we kept getting told the hotel was full as we tried to pay for another night, when it quite blatantly wasn’t, and I think you can safely say that Fardapur could be wiped out by a freak earthquake and nobody on the tourist trail would even notice. If oblivion needs to be personified, you couldn’t do better than Fardapur; where else can you see signs like the following in our hotel lobby?

ROOM CHARGE Rs150

EXTRA PARSON Rs50

Something tells me that even an extra Man of God couldn’t bring sense to the desperate situation in crumbling Fardapur...

The Ajanta Caves

Still, the Ajanta caves were worth a visit, even if they aren’t as spectacular as those at Ellora. Ajanta’s main appeal are the paintings inside the caves, which are all Buddhist; they predate the Ellora caves, having been built between 250 BC and 650 AD. Although the paintings are faded they are quite spectacular, and the cool shade offered by the caves creates a beautiful and atmospheric viewing chamber.

As an added bonus, the caves are in a pretty little setting on a bend in a river (which was, unfortunately, almost totally dried up when we visited), and we spent a couple of very pleasant hours wandering around randomly, avoiding the touts and soaking up the heat, desperately trying to put off the return to the hotel for as long as possible. Needless to say, we didn’t stay in Fardapur any longer than necessary, and soon I was on my way north to Mandu, home to yet more amazing religious architecture.

Cricket and India

Written: 22 March 1998   

Everywhere you look in India, someone is playing cricket; look out of bus windows, along dusty streets, in tiny villages and big cities, and you’ll see a bunch of youngsters playing the game with rudimentary bats and branches for stumps. It’s in the blood in much the same way that football is in South America and ice hockey is in Canada¹, and wandering past the locals as they bowl polished stones at baobab-stick stumps, you can’t help wondering why cricket is such a deep obsession in India.

My theory is that it’s because cricket is no more than a sporting personification of the whole country. For a start, cricket has surely the most warped set of rules, regulations and bureaucracy of any sport. Trying to explain the rules of cricket to someone who’s never watched the sport is harder than trying to explain the unspoken rules of the English class system to a Belgian; indeed, the vast majority of non-English European travellers have no idea of the basic concepts behind the game, and even after ten minutes trying to grasp the fundamentals, they’re often no closer to the truth. Add in a scoring system with more statistics than a political manifesto and you have a numerical quagmire of proportions that can only be described as governmental.

Then there’s the nature of the game itself. Turn up halfway through a match and ask, ‘Who’s winning?’ and there’s no answer; even the most experienced cricketer can’t tell you with any amount of certainty. This is astoundingly Indian; no questions have definite answers here, it’s always ‘It’s possible’ and ‘Maybe’, and even then the actual answer can suddenly change, just like in cricket. In cricket you have to wait until the last ball has been bowled to be sure of the result, and often there’s no result at all, despite five days of play; you can have a draw even when one team has scored considerably more than the other, which seems like a contradiction, but that’s cricket. It’s not that other sports don’t have draws, it’s just that a draw in soccer is a definite equality, whereas in cricket it’s a result of not finishing the game properly.

Then there are two equally placed umpires, so they can get embroiled in an argument as to who is right, who’s the most senior umpire and so on (though thank goodness baksheesh isn’t represented in cricket – the thought of a batsman being clean bowled and then wandering up to the umpire, slipping him ten rupees, and miraculously staying in is too much to contemplate). And on the subject of authority figures, the whole uniform thing – pressed whites and collared shirts – hits an Indian nerve; everywhere you go in India there are policemen in their smart army uniforms, bus conductors wearing khaki, sadhus in their saffron robes, waiters in the Indian Coffee Houses sprouting hats that look like delicately folded napkins, and countless other well-dressed officials oiling the wheels of the machine. In India, uniforms are a very important status symbol.

Also, cricket is a team game, which represents the theoretical solidarity of a united India; but when it comes down to bowler versus batsman it’s an individual sport, which is a bit closer to the truth of an India made up of a conglomeration of states who keep mumbling about their independence while setting off bombs to make their point.

But I suppose the real reason that Indians like cricket is that it’s possible to spend days, literally, watching one game, and for a nation that spends days, literally, sitting around in chai shops shooting the breeze, cricket is perfect. As far as lazy sunny day sports go, cricket reflects the Indian vibe more than anything else, and I think that’s why you see it everywhere, from the country to the cities. Perhaps that’s why travelling in India can sometimes feel like a test match...

¹ Ken, a very friendly American whom I met in Mandu, told me about a conversation he’d once had with an Indian boy. The young sports fan was telling him how excellent India and Pakistan were at hockey; they were, in fact, world leaders, he was keen to point out. Ken, however, couldn’t get his head around this. ‘Where on earth do you find the ice?’ he asked, and for the first time in India, said Ken, he witnessed a confused silence.

Madhya Pradesh

Mandu

Written: 25 March 1998   

After two days of long bus journeys north from Ajanta, through dusty landscapes and the transit city of Indore, I finally arrived in Mandu. I’ve been getting itchy feet while exploring the hot, dusty, flat plains of central India, and I’m beginning to dream of lofty hill stations nestling at the feet of snow-capped Himalayas, but Mandu has reminded me once and for all why the arid desert areas of India are in a world of their own. Mandu is a huge fortress built by the Muslims, a combination of two of the things that make travelling worthwhile: glorious landscapes and fantastic architecture. And when I say fantastic, I really mean it; Mandu is utterly spectacular.

I simply fell in love with the place. I’ve said it before, but I am a total sucker for the sheer beauty of cupola-topped pavilions outlined against the pure blue sky, or the peace of domed tombs breaking the savage dryness of the dusty red scrubland. Photographs only manage to capture a part of the appeal, as the context of Mandu – perched on top of a windswept cliff in the middle of the Deccan Plains – is a vital part of the ambience of the place; Mandu is a huge, crumbling collection of crumbling buildings from the 15th and 16th centuries, sitting on top of a large, flat mountain, surrounded on all sides by steep sloping sides and rugged hairpin roads. It is steeped in atmosphere and history.

With lakes, citadels, stunning views over the plains below and a friendly local population who mysteriously insist on greeting you with ‘Bye-bye’ instead of ‘Hello’, I wandered happily for hours in the blistering heat, sheltering in cool tombs, under the arches of deteriorating mosques and in the shade of the baobabs, bottle-shaped trees¹ with painfully twisted and leafless branches that look completely parched (and probably are). Despite the stiflingly hot breeze from the plains, I thrived.

Of course, there are some distinctly Indian occurrences that in the West would mar an otherwise perfect place, but here they are all part of the experience. For example, one of the more intriguing spots in Mandu is called Echo Point, so named because its position next to a steep hill creates an echo when you clap; I was unable to experience this sonic novelty, however, because right by the clapping point is a café blaring out the loudest Hindi pop music that Mandu’s erratic electricity supply can churn out, which somewhat spoils the effect.

And at Rapamuti’s Pavilion, a building whose simple design and amazing views summarise everything that is good about rock fortresses, I was accosted by four young Hindu dudes who insisted on taking photographs of me hugging them. They also asked if they could borrow my Australian bush hat (despite it being made from rudely slaughtered cow) and proceeded to pose with it for the camera, each in his turn and each with his own distinctive style. I had to suppress a smile as each of them thrust his groin out, hooked his thumbs into his jeans and managed an impersonation of the seventies that made John Travolta look chic.

But these small wrinkles in the fabric didn’t even touch the tranquillity of Mandu. When it was time to leave for Bhopal I had to tear myself away, for Mandu is up there with Bijapur’s Ibrahim Rosa, and that’s really saying something.

¹ The baobab trees look exactly like the boab trees of northern Australia, and this similarity is no coincidence, as the baobab and the boab are different species of the Adansonia genus.

Bhopal

Written: 27 March 1998   

Wednesday was one of those days that makes you want to throw in the towel and bury your head under the pillow. I was trying to get from Mandu to Indore in time to catch the train to Bhopal, where I could buy an onward ticket to Gorakhpur, just south of Nepal, but almost everything that could go wrong went wrong.

It didn’t start well. The bus from Mandu to Indore arrived two hours late, missing the train to Bhopal by ten minutes, so I had to jump on another bumpy bus to Bhopal instead. This bus arrived only one hour late, giving me no more than a few minutes to rush to the reservation office at the train station, where I was lucky enough to be the last person able to book a ticket before the ‘Closed’ sign went up. I then went looking for a hotel, and after trying eight places that were full or had no single rooms, I eventually found somewhere on the ninth try, a place perhaps best summed up by my receipt, which was made out to ‘Mr Froiengner’. I collapsed, exhausted but happy to have achieved at least something in the form of my train ticket for tomorrow.

My relief was short-lived, though, as it turned out my ticket wasn’t a reservation, but simply an indication that I had been placed on the waiting list, in 23rd position to be precise. Unfortunately the ‘Closed’ sign prevented me doing anything about it – such as trying a different train, a different route or a different class – so even my rush to the reservation office had been a waste of time. Never mind; at times like these, when some people light Hamlet cigars and some people drink too much, I have a solution.

Back in the Australian outback my solution was to find the nearest mountain and climb it, but in India I have neither the necessary personal transport nor, in the central plains, any convenient mountains. However, there is another wonderful thing I can do to cheer myself up, and it can only work in India: when it all gets too much, it’s time to treat myself to a slap up meal with all the trimmings. The meal I had in Bhopal was huge, tasty, accompanied by a big, freezing bottle of beer and rounded off with a pleasantly priced bill of just £2. That’s right: £2 will buy you a monster meal here, and as I normally spend about £1 on my evening splurge, doubling the budget really is a treat. Good old India.

The next day I managed to upgrade my ticket to air-conditioned class – which meant I also got a sleeping berth – but the price was five times higher, jumping from Rs210 to Rs1001, or from just over £3 up to a comparatively whopping £16 for the 864km, 19.5 hour journey. It’s easily the longest and most expensive trip I’ve done so far in Asia, but when you consider that a 1000km bus journey in Australia costs over £50 – and that’s in a reclining bus seat rather than a berth – then even in air-conditioned class, Indian Railways is still ludicrously good value for money. Transport is always a big chunk of any travel budget, but public transport in the developing world is generally pretty cheap, particularly for visiting westerners. We really are the lucky ones.

Union Carbide

Anyway, back to Bhopal. After spending the morning visiting nearby Sanchi, eating some more wonderful food and discovering a branch of the Indian Coffee House, a wonderful chain that does simply divine masala dosa for breakfast as well as the best coffee I’ve had in India, I spent the rest of the day exploring Bhopal while waiting for the train. Before arriving in Bhopal I’d thought the name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it until my guidebook reminded me of one of the most tragic stories in the history of India.

Back on the sultry winter’s evening of 3 December 1984, the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal gave the residents an early Christmas present of 15 tonnes of methyl isocyanate. This instantly deadly gas, used in the manufacture of pesticides by the American multinational, seeped out of the factory and spread through the town as people slept, killing thousands and permanently destroying the lives of countless others, ‘countless’ being the operative word here as accurate figures are hard to come by. Officially the death toll was recorded as 5000, with over half a million people having their health permanently destroyed by the disaster, but many people think that these figures are rather conservative and that the death toll is closer to 20,000.

Of course Union Carbide, being a big corporation, struck a deal with the Indian government as far as compensation was concerned, so precious little has actually appeared and helped those who lost everything, and although Bhopal is back to relative normality and Union Carbide has closed its factory and left the area, the spectre of the world’s worst ever industrial disaster looms in the past. It’s scary stuff indeed.

As for the town itself, it’s another wonderfully busy Indian city with a few mosques, temples, museums and the like. Unfortunately I was a bit too busy running around trying to find a hotel room and somewhere to eat, but that’s life on the road for you.

Bumpy Ride North

My unexpected air-conditioned two-tier sleeper journey was an eye-opener, being a step above first class and second only to the ultimate luxury, the air-conditioned first class sleeper. After extensive travel on second class sleepers – the cheapest sleeper class – AC is amazingly quiet (due to the windows being sealed) and full of little luxuries, like curtains to pull round your berth and individual reading lights. The chai men are also conspicuous by their absence, a major blessing that alone is worth paying five times the price for. Sure, the luxury of AC class is fairly illusory given the standard of my current lifestyle – in Europe these AC carriages would probably be consigned to the scrap heap and standard Indian second class would no doubt contravene a whole host of EU directives – but I found the long, long journey north simply wonderful after all the bouncy buses and rickety rickshaws of budget India.

It also gave me a chance to read my guidebook to Nepal, and I liked what I read. Not that India is getting me down – quite the opposite, in fact – but the idea of western food, some of the best trekking in the world, short distances to travel and a lack of Indian madness and mayhem all sounds like a holiday after just under three months in the heat of the south.

The only blot on the smooth landscape of air-con heaven was the sudden change in body temperature I suffered at midnight, which was followed by a good old session heaving up my previous two meals in the less than salubrious environment of the Indian Railways toilet. It’s funny how these regular bouts of sickness have simply become a sideshow to the main picture, no more than another inconvenience like putting up the mosquito net every night or taking the daily dose of vitamins and minerals; I just hope it’s not all being caused by one bug that steadfastly refuses to leave my system, or it might continue beyond past my return home.

Excluding my stomach, things went according to plan, and before I knew it I’d arrived at Gorakhpur, hopped on a bus and arrived at Sunauli, one of the few border towns with Nepal. I spent a few amusing hours wandering back and forth over the border, which nobody seemed to mind one bit, so I can now say I’ve been an illegal immigrant in Nepal; I also changed some money, booked a bus for the morning to the Himalayan town of Pokhara, and settled in to enjoy my last night in India for a month. Needless to say, I ate myself back to health in my rather pleasant hotel before hitting the sack, ready to tackle Nepal in the morning.

Sanchi

Written: 26 March 1998   

Sanchi is a hill topped with some spectacular Buddhist ruins, ‘among the best in India’ according to my guidebook (which says more about the other Buddhist ruins in India than I care to know). Certainly the ruins are Buddhist and they’re reasonably interesting, but after my recent visits to the astonishing rock temples of Ellora and the deeply atmospheric Mughal fortresses of Mandu, stupas aren’t quite as thrilling. Dome-shaped and topped with strange spires that look like something out of Flash Gordon, stupas just sit there: you can’t go inside them, you can’t climb them, and although they look pleasant, so does crazy paving, and I wouldn’t cross a continent to look at a patio.

The surrounding area is peaceful – which is why the Emperor Ashoka chose it in the third century BC as a site for his Buddhist stupas – and it’s certainly a wonderful place to visit, but as for the architecture (World Heritage stuff, no less) I didn’t think it was that special. This is a pity, but perhaps it unintentionally reflects a change in my attitude towards Buddhism, something I was pretty fond of back in the bush of Australia, where I lapped up books on the stuff and even did a bit of meditation.

The problem is that Buddhism is based around the precept that life is a piece of shit, and where that idea was particularly appealing at a time of my life when I was leaving home because I wasn’t happy with things as they were, it doesn’t hold much water nowadays. I keep thinking of that famous Chinese painting called ‘The Three Masters’, where each of the inventors of the three main eastern religions – Confucius (Confucianism), Gautama Buddha (Buddhism) and Lao-Tse (Taoism) – has just dipped his finger in a vat of vinegar and stuck it in his mouth. Confucius, who believes that life should be governed by rules, regulations and a reverence of ancestors, has a sour expression, as if to say that this taste is disgusting and that something should be done about it; Buddha has a bitter expression on his face, a reflection that he believes life to be an endless cycle of suffering, escapable only by attaining enlightenment through meditation and a purity of spirit, and that the vinegary taste is just a confirmation of this attitude; and finally Lao-Tse is smiling, because he reckons life is a pretty good thing, and everything in life has its purpose, its beauty and its relevance.

From this I tend to think that Taoism is the best sounding of the lot, but I have yet to do any hardcore research and I’m not really in the mood for religious discourse at the moment; at present I’m reading the Ramayana, the mythical story of Rama, and it’s as good a read as the stories of ancient Greece or the wonderful tales of King Arthur. Then I’ve got the Arabian Nights, a perfect accompaniment to the buildings I’ve been exploring, followed by Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare, a children’s book that contains fifteen of the bard’s plays retold in shortened form for children, which is a good way of learning the plots without having to wade through the real thing. India, being the second largest publisher of English books after America and the UK, has some wonderful options, and all at knockdown prices, of course.

Vaguely related to this, I’ve developed a new sitting posture. I used to kneel whenever I sat on the ground, which is perhaps a reflection of my Christian upbringing; when I started growing my hair and reading about meditation and Buddhas, I started to sit cross-legged; and now that I’m in India I sit like the Indians, after weeks of frustrating practice.

The Indians squat down by the usual method of bending the knees and lowering your bum until it is on top of your heels, but they go a little bit further and manage the same position with the soles of their feet totally flat on the floor.

Try it: I bet you end up with your heels off the floor, with all the weight on the front ball of your feet. Well after lots of practice on, of all things, the good old squat toilet, I can now sit with my feet flat on the floor, with my bottom off the ground and with pretty reasonable balance. It’s surprisingly comfortable, and that’s why you see Indians everywhere squatting down for hours, looking at ease in a position that looks decidedly painful. So now you know...

Thoughts After Three Months

Written: 28 March 1998   

So that’s the end of my first three months in India, but am I any the wiser? I’m not sure, really; all I can think of is a phrase from James Hawes’ A White Merc with Fins where the anti-heroine, Suzy, is joking about going to India for three months. In a fit of accuracy, she decides not to bother because she’ll just end up ‘losing two stone and talking shite’. Unwittingly, Hawes’ description is accurate as hell.

It’s easy to talk shite about India, if only because it’s so full of contradictions that it’s hard to be definitive about anything. On one hand I very much like the people of India, but then I think back to all the scams, lies, cons and hassles I’ve encountered over the last three months, and although Indonesia annoyed me more on that score, India is up there with the best. Then there’s the food; on one hand it’s excellent (I’ve always been very fond of curries and spices, after all) but it can be pretty depressing when all you’ve got is another bloody meal of dhal and rice again.

The health aspect, despite looking promising for a while in the far south, is terrible. I forget how many times I’ve been ill in India, and I’ve been pretty careful about my intake. And then there’s the permanent Indian head cold, the aches and pains of being crammed onto public transport for amazingly long journeys with bad suspension, the constant annoyance of mosquitoes, the dubious quality of a lot of India’s ablutions and, to cap it all, a fairly serious recurrence of the salt-sore eczema I got on the Pacific, no doubt due to the high temperatures and humidity.

But this is all part of it, of course. I’m fully aware that if I really want solid shits I can always fly home, but for some masochistic reason I’ve never entertained the idea. The reason is, of course, that I utterly, utterly love India, despite its inherent frustrations. Perhaps it is because of these very contradictions that it is so fascinating, or because its size means there is so much variety, but as soon as I ducked out of India into Nepal I felt a strange sense of loss. Don’t get me wrong, the safe tranquillity of the tourist trail in Nepal is complete bliss, but I can’t help thinking that it’s missing some spark, and I can’t wait to get back into India.

One guy I met told me that travelling anywhere else in the world after India was bound to be boring, which is why he kept coming back. I sincerely hope this isn’t true, but if it is I can understand why; India has to be the most amazingly magnetic and repellent country I’ve ever experienced. I’m already excited about coming back after my visit to Nepal, even if it means being constantly ill again. It’s worth it.

Interlude

At this point in my journey I left India to travel through Nepal, which you can read about in another of my books, Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). From Nepal I returned to India, which is where the next chapter picks up the story...

West Bengal

The Toy Train

Written: 12 May 1998   

Noel Gallagher once wrote, ‘These are crazy days but they make me shine,’ and he was spot on; India is crazy, but it sure as hell is making me shine. Just one example is India’s train network, which is delightfully bonkers, and the train into Darjeeling is a case in point. There are no traffic lights on the railway line from Siliguri to Darjeeling; instead, a lone man stands in the middle of the humid jungle waving a red flag. This sums up the whole Toy Train experience rather well.

For the train from the plains up to the hill station of Darjeeling is no ordinary train; it’s a tiny steam train locally known as the Toy Train. Taking eight timetable hours to screech its way up the 80km track to the most famous tea-producing area in India, the journey is a combination of ancient technology and the seemingly archaic Indian way of doing things; for example, at one point we sat on the tracks for what felt like ages, waiting for a group of five workmen to mend the track ahead of us, which had washed away in the rains.

The name ‘steam train’ is fairly misleading, too; looking at pictures of classic locomotives belching white from their chimneys, I used to think that the train was throwing out clouds of steam, but then my science lessons taught me that it was mostly smoke from the boiler. The Toy Train to Darjeeling proves this point; as the train toils its way up the mountains, it leaves a trail of black smoke in the sky, and at every corner bits of hot coal ash waft into the carriages, covering people and packs in a fine layer of soot and pin-pricking their skin with dissipating heat.

But this doesn’t deter from a delightful journey. When I first heard the distinctive chugging of the steam engine – 4/4 time, one repeated bar of two forte treble crochets and two piano bass crotchets, played at a varying tempo depending on the gradient – I was instantly reminded of Thomas the Tank Engine and the Fat Controller, but somehow this wasn’t quite right. Thomas and his friends are huge engines, dwarfing the cute stick men as they stand statically though Ringo’s narration, but a more accurate analogy might be Ivor the Engine, as the Toy Train is, well, much more toy-like than Thomas; and although the hilly scenery around Darjeeling isn’t quite the Welsh valleys, I could almost imagine the dragons sitting on the engine and hatching their babies.

I very much doubt that Ivor came across a great deal of Indian traffic, though. The railway follows the road for the main part¹, crossing it fairly regularly, and therein lies the problem: trains have brakes that take ages to work, and Indian truck drivers don’t seem to be aware that their vehicles have brakes in the first place, so the prospect of train meeting truck on the barricade-free crossings is a real one. Add in the thrill of a narrow (2 ft) gauge train lurching and bumping its way through the undergrowth, and you have an experience that is as close to luxury train travel as Indonesian ferries are to expensive cruises.

Another thing that hardly ever happens in the books is the train running out of water, but this being India it wasn’t long before we ground to yet another halt, and this time we stayed there. In a classic engineering solution to the problem of getting a train up a severely steep hillside, the track is full of switchbacks where the train has to zigzag backwards and forwards, gradually ascending the hill by judicious use of points (each changed by a lonely old man hiding from the rain in a decrepit old brick house). It wasn’t, then, much of a surprise that after a few hours on board we’d yet again backed into a dead end and stopped.

After 15 minutes I stuck my head out of the window and tried to see why we still weren’t moving. The fact that there was no engine may have had something do with it, but nobody had thought to inform the passengers that the train had run out of water and needed to go off for a refill; we were already running late from the work on the track and it was quite obvious that we were going nowhere.

Luckily the siding was still close to the road, so along with half the train I jumped down onto the track, walked down to the road and eventually hailed a bus. The heavens opened, I got to Darjeeling before long, and that was the Toy Train experience. ‘Not to be missed’ was the guidebook’s accidentally accurate summary; ‘not to be trusted’ would perhaps have been more accurate.

Crazy days indeed.

¹ Which means you pass wonderful signs such as, ‘If you want to donate blood, do not do it on the road, donate it in the blood bank,’ ‘It is better to be 15 minutes late in this world than to be 15 minutes earlier in the next,’ and, rather worryingly, ‘Love thy neighbour... but not while driving.’ It’s a pity nobody takes a blind bit of notice.

Darjeeling

Written: 12 May 1998   

Darjeeling is one of India’s most famous hill stations; it is, of course, renowned for its tea. Most of the hill stations I’ve visited – the Cameron Highlands, Kodaikanal, Dieng and so on – are situated in valleys, with a pleasant town centre surrounded by hills studded with beautiful residences. Not so Darjeeling; this hill station lives at an altitude of 2134m on a west-facing slope, which makes it easy to work out which direction you’re facing, but it also makes exploring the town feel like a workout on a step machine.

The town itself is fairly large. From above, Darjeeling looks like most Indian dwellings, with rusty tin roofs, ugly black water tanks and washing draped just about everywhere, but the slope manages to prevent the claustrophobic feeling that I normally associate with closely cropped and crowded places. Walk up the hill and you can look down on the whole town with views all the way down to the deep valley floor below, and if the weather is clear you can see the western Himalayas dominating the horizon, with Everest just visible as a deceptively diminutive peak among the closer mountains.

That’s if the weather is clear, though. Like other hill stations, the summer temperatures in Darjeeling are simply divine compared to the sweat and toil of the plains below, but the price you pay as the monsoon approaches is a lot of cloud, a fair amount of rain and a total lack of views. My hotel room, complete with balcony and the familiar stain of wet mould in the corner, would have provided me with the perfect setting for sipping tea and talking politics, but in the end all it could manage was a view reminiscent of that from a 747 flying over wintry Europe. I’d expected this, and having spent weeks surrounded by the Himalayas I wasn’t that disappointed not to be able to see the mountains, but it did make it harder to get motivated about exploring the area.

Occasional glimpses through the fog made it worthwhile, however, and I met up with a couple of very friendly Irish travellers, Chris and Martina, who proved excellent companions for exploring the hill station. The snow leopard sanctuary, which has the only breeding programme in southern Asia and the only one in the world that has had any kind of success, was well worth the hour’s walk from town; the endangered snow leopard is a superbly beautiful creature, especially the cubs, and as they gambolled round their cages we talked to the man in charge of the programme, learning as much about Asian politics as we did about snow leopards.

The grandly named Darjeeling Rangeet Valley Passenger Ropeway is another interesting attraction, not so much because the cable car is anything fantastic (though the views over the rolling fields of tea bushes are decidedly photogenic) but because the thrill of putting your life in the hands of the first ever Indian cable car really gets the adrenalin flowing. Rattling our way down the hill and back up again in a car complete with smashed window and a door you couldn’t open from the inside, we managed to complete the journey without serious incident (luckily the ropeway isn’t steam-powered).

It is, however, a good way to get below the high cloud that smothers the town at this time of year, and at last we managed to get a glimpse of the Himalayas, albeit a long way away and not the group containing Everest. For the latter we had to be content with the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute Museum, a fascinating collection of stories and memorabilia from the various Everest expeditions; the late Tenzing Norgay, one of the first two¹ to reach the top of Everest, lived in Darjeeling, and the museum he helped to set up is full of his equipment.

Then there’s the botanical garden, a pleasant green park on the sloping valley sides just below the town, which is surprising not so much for its flora and ponds but for the peace and quiet which it affords; this makes hitting the high street a serious culture shock, with its myriad shops selling Tibetan goods and cramped market backstreets heaving with cobblers, tailors, pan shops and tea vendors. Darjeeling is a holiday spot in every way, and the number of Indian tourists milling around creating fascinating chaos shows just how popular such a set-up is.

But the most important thing to do in Darjeeling is to relax with a nice pot of tea and a good view or, failing the latter, a comfortable chair. Every day that we were in Darjeeling, Chris, Martina and I found our way to Glenary’s, a reminder of the days of the Raj with its smart waiters, impeccable service, excellent food and an anachronistically high-ceilinged dining room that, in the winter, would be flickeringly lit by the roar of the fire at one end. But we didn’t need a fire, we just needed tea; not surprisingly the tea in Darjeeling is excellent, and not just because it’s served western-style. If you order chai in India, you’ll get a grubby glass filled with an incredibly milky and teeth-crunchingly sweet concoction that is made by filtering violently boiling milk through the tea-maker’s equivalent of an old sock filled with tea leaves, and after throwing it around a bit in a style faintly reminiscent of flashy bartenders – though that’s where any similarity between an Indian chai stall owner and a waistcoat-clad cocktail expert ends, believe me – he’ll present it to you with a bill for two rupees. It tastes wonderful and I’m a huge fan, but it’s nothing like tea as westerners know it.

In Darjeeling, however, you get a pot of local tea, a tea strainer, a jug of hot milk, sugar in a bowl and time to enjoy yourself. Darjeeling tea is a mild-flavoured brew compared to fiery Lapsang Suchong or the slightly sickly spices of Earl Grey – experts probably use words like ‘delicate’ and ‘subtle’ when talking about Darjeeling tea – so it’s a godsend that it’s not treated with the usual Indian courtesy; the flavour would be totally crushed if it was served through a sock.

Tea isn’t the only important part of Afternoon Tea, though; don’t forget tiffin. Immortalised by Sid James in Carry On Up The Khyber – whose sessions behind locked doors with various big-bosomed beauties of the Raj were referred to as ‘a bit of tiffin’ – the Indian word ‘tiffin’ simply means a snack, and is yet another Indian word that has found its way into everyday English². Tiffin in Darjeeling means cakes and lots of them, and between the three of us we managed to build up enough fatty residue to see us through the meanest of Indian illnesses. I shan’t annoy you by mentioning the prices; suffice to say that a hoard of cakes and a couple of pots of tea came in well under £1, and that back in England I wouldn’t visit an establishment like Glenary’s without an expense account or a benefactor in tow. How the other half³ live...

Tea Terminology

The whole subject of Darjeeling tea deserves a separate section, if only because the sheer complexity of it makes PG Tips look positively plebeian. Ready for a whole new world? Then we’ll begin.

Darjeeling tea isn’t just one type of tea, it’s a whole family of teas; talking about Darjeeling tea is a bit like saying someone speaks English, when they could be speaking Geordie, Australian, New Jersey, Inglish, Cockney and so on. And like accents, some teas have class and others just don’t.

A look at the processing method used in the Happy Valley Tea Estate in Darjeeling shows how one bush can produce five different varieties. The picked leaves are placed in long trays to a depth of about 20cm where air is blown from underneath to drive out moisture in a two-stage process, with six hours of cold air and six hours of hot; this reduces the moisture content of the green leaves from 75 per cent to 35 per cent.

The leaves then pass into a rolling machine where they are rolled and crushed for 45 minutes to bring out the juices from the cells, after which a sifter machine separates out any leaves that are too big. Fermentation is next, where the leaves are left on cold metal shelves for two to three hours to ferment in their juices, turning the colour from green to brown; they are then passed through the drying machine, a long conveyor through a furnace set to 117°C where the moisture is reduced to about 2 per cent. Finally the leaves, now ready to brew up, are sorted into categories according to leaf size, with the smaller leaves being the best quality; at the Happy Valley the teas produced are, in order of quality with the best first, Orange Pekoe, Golden Flower, Golden Supremo, Supremo and Tea Bags.

But it’s not just the drying and fermenting process that creates categories of tea, it’s also the picking method used before the leaves are processed. Tea bushes are squat little affairs, and the leaves grow upwards in a manner reminiscent of bonsai yew trees; pruning is done off the top of the tree, and each branch produces three leaves: two mature outer leaves and a younger inner leaf. The best teas come from the tips of the mature leaves (as the younger leaf has less character), and so the picking method provides another part of the categorisation method.

The very finest Darjeeling tea is called Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, which is made from the top part of the two mature leaves. Next is Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, which is a coarse-plucking tea, meaning that all three leaves are plucked to make it. Then there’s Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, which has even coarser plucking (in other words, less care is taken). There is even a further distinction; the first two teas come from ‘Chinese’ plants with their small, thin leaves and better flavour, while the third comes from ‘Assam’ plants with their thicker leaves and stronger (but less delicate) flavour.

But what does all this jargon mean? This is where it gets confusing, but basically the ‘Super Fine Tippy’ part refers to the picking method, the ‘Golden Flowery’ bit refers to which grade comes out of the final sifting machine, the ‘Orange’ denotes the colour of the tea when it is put into boiling water (orange is good and means the tea is whisky-coloured as opposed to the cheaper teas which turn the water a rum colour), and ‘Pekoe’ means that the tea flavour comes straight from the leaves rather than from an added perfume.

So you’ve decided on the type of tea you’d like to buy, but things have only just started. Within each type of tea are four broad bands denoting the time of year the tea was picked, namely First Flush, Second Flush, Rain Flush and Autumn Flush. The differences between the various flushes are as marked as the differences between vintages of wine, because tea quality is very dependent on climate; and because bushes are plucked in blocks, with one block being picked every 15-20 days, the same bushes can produce very different teas. The tea-picking season runs from March to November, and the best teas are picked in March, the so-called First Flush; if tea is plucked after or during heavy rain, then the rain will have washed the flavour juices off the leaves and the tea will have less flavour, so the best flushes are during the dry spells (hence First and Autumn Flushes are good).

Then within the flush categories are more specific details, and the quality varies surprisingly. For example, First Flush Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe from the fourth week in March retails at Rs600 per kilogram, but from the second week in March it costs Rs1100 per kilogram, nearly twice as much. It clearly pays to research the product before buying.

And in case you think you know it all before hitting the tea shop, there are countless other types of Darjeeling tea, from Bio-organic tea (when no pesticides or chemicals are used, which is true for all teas but in this case the estate has a certificate to prove it) to Green tea (which uses a different manufacturing process to the rest). That’s without even delving into other regions and all their intricacies, such as Assam from India’s northeast.

Of course the best way to buy tea is to ignore all the jargon and to go into the shop for a taste test of the product. Unfortunately your average tea shop doesn’t have four hundred pots of hot tea for you to sample, so you have to check out the leaves themselves. Take a small pile of tea in your palm, close your fist and breathe through the tea to warm it up and moisturise it slightly. You then smell it with a deep breath and make your choice.

I have to confess that all the teas I smelled seemed very much the same, even though they looked quite different, with the expensive teas looking quite fine and the cheaper ones much more burned and scrappy-looking. The man in the tea shop confided that most of the locals can’t tell the teas apart either; only those with lots of experience can. Still, it’s all in the taste when you finally brew up.

But even then the tea experience isn’t simple. Should you add milk? Should you take sugar? Well, it depends on the tea; stronger teas from the Assam plant (not to be confused with Assam tea, which is tea grown in Assam) are fine with a little milk (‘Only a drop,’ said the tea shop owner, ‘because then they are getting the real tea taste’) but the more delicate Chinese plant teas should be taken without milk. Oh, and make sure you store your tea in a metal tin, rather than plastic or glass.

So next time you settle down for a cuppa, think about what you’re drinking. It’s been through an awful lot, even before you start brewing up...

¹ Hillary and Tenzing have always kept quiet about who actually reached the top first, which is interesting. If you ask a westerner who climbed Everest first, the answer will be ‘Edmund Hillary’; ask someone from the Indian subcontinent and the emphasis will be on Tenzing Norgay. They’re both right, because nobody knows who was first except for the two who made it, and they’re not telling; there are no clues in the photos, either, as the flags flown on the summit were the Union Jack (for New Zealander Hillary), Indian (for Norgay) and Nepalese (as Everest is in Nepal).

² There are lots of Indian words that have made it into English. Veranda, guru, pyjamas, sandals, ganja, dungarees, shampoo, khaki, jungle, loot, monsoon, hookah, curry... all these are Indian words that we commonly use today. There are more than you think.

³ One rich middle class Indian told me that if you have money, India is the best country in the world to live, and not just because it’s cheap. With money you can live a lifestyle that’s as good as anything you can get in the West, but your money can also buy you all the drugs you want, as much corruption as you like (by judicious use of baksheesh) and can even get you the perfect spouse and produce well-educated kids to ensure the family fortune stays as the family fortune. If money is no object in the West, you can still get anything, but if you’re caught bribing, you can do time; in India, it’s all part of the social fabric, so not only can you get away with it, you do.

Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh

The Power of Authority

Written: 13 May 1998   

Did I mention the Toy Train? I sure did, and I thought at the time that it would be my last train story, because up until this point my experience with Indian Railways has been moderately painless. Until Siliguri, that is...

The three of us, by now thick as thieves, took the jeep down from Darjeeling to Siliguri, hoping to be able to book a train ticket to Varanasi on the overnight train. I knew that the train would almost certainly be full for that night, but having had no real problems with booking a ticket before (except for Bhopal to Gorakhpur, but that was due to Rama’s birthday) I reckoned we’d be all right for the night after.

We arrived at Siliguri’s main station, NJP, in mid-afternoon and joined the queue at the ticket counter. However, when we reached the counter we discovered that we could only buy tickets for seats there, not berths, and we should go to the other side of the station to see the Ticket Collector, who would help us. We did as we were told, but the Ticket Collector had very little English and proved pretty useless, and he just sent us back to the same queue at the ticket counter. Again the ticket counter refused to help, but a return journey to the Ticket Collector finally produced an address for Siliguri’s railway booking office. We couldn’t believe that NJP, a major station, didn’t have its own booking system, but shrugging at the madness of it all, we took a rickshaw to the booking office, a good few kilometres and a cosy ride away with all our backpacks stuffed behind us.

At the booking office I joined the queue at the Information Counter to ask about availability of berths on the train, and when I finally reached the man he told me it was well-nigh impossible to get sleepers out of NJP towards Delhi, as they were all full for days, but if I joined the ticket queue and bought a waiting list ticket for the journey I required, then I could come back and have a word with the Reservations Officer about getting in on an emergency quota. I thanked him and joined the shortest queue for tickets; inevitably this counter closed as I reached the front, so I joined the back of the only other queue, which was still waiting for its counter to open. After maybe three-quarters of an hour I got to the front of the queue, handed my reservation form over, and the man frowned. ‘For tonight?’ he said. ‘Or tomorrow,’ I replied, explaining what the man at the Information Counter had said. The ticket man disappeared, came back and asked me to wait. This I did for a quarter of an hour, after which he left the room, came back and sent me right back to the Information Counter.

The man at the Information Counter wasn’t exactly thrilled to see me again, and said I still had to get a waiting list ticket before I could get onto the emergency quota. Armed with my timetable I grilled him about availability on other trains, but all the trains were booked up for at least four days, there weren’t any first class berths available, and I really didn’t fancy an overnight bus ride through the sweaty fields of the Gangetic plain. Eventually he handed me over to the Reservations Officer, a fat man with an attitude problem, who told me exactly what I needed to do if I wanted to get onto his emergency quota. ‘Get a waiting list ticket,’ he said, smiling smugly, ‘then bring your passport and proof of money exchange, and we will see what we can do.’

I could feel him enjoying The Power, a strange opiate one feels when one knows one has complete authority over a situation, and someone without that authority wants what only you can give them. In India, coping with The Power is an essential part of survival; to get what you want you have to kowtow to sad little men who have snaked their way up the ranks of the railway company, always being polite when what you’d rather do is smash the man’s face into your right kneecap. I coped admirably, repeating in my head the anti-Power mantra, ‘I can always leave India, but this poor bugger can’t...’

Returning to the ticket queue for half an hour and five Marlboros, I finally got a waiting list ticket for the next day’s train, as today’s had already started on its journey and I couldn’t get a waiting list ticket for a train that was already on the move, could I? Then it was back to the man with The Power, and roping in Martina and her encashment certificates, we handed over our passports, sycophantically helping the bulbous idiot to decipher the calendar and work out that thirteen comes after twelve and that tomorrow comes after today; and after crawling through the dirt and kissing his boots we finally got the assurance that we would have three berths for the journey the following night, and all we had to do was turn up at the station and we’d be in the computer and on the train. I thanked him gushingly and walked off, unconvinced that he would actually prove to be of any help.

After spending the next day shopping and playing cards in the fairly nondescript boom town that is Siliguri, we turned up at the railway station on time and went to the reservations counter, where we discovered that two of us had a berth, but mysteriously the third one didn’t. This meant that I had to spend until 2.15am that night being as nice as pie to the conductor, another man who wielded The Power, in an attempt to persuade him to find me a berth on the impossibly crowded train. To his credit he did find me a place to sleep and didn’t even ask for baksheesh, but this final bending over backwards to blow sunshine up this man’s anus had washed me out, and I spent the night out like a light. When I awoke, we were well on our way to Varanasi, and all I did was plug in my Walkman and stare out of the window. It was bliss to be temporarily disconnected.

Death of the Ganges

Written: 16 May 1998   

The Ganges has long been associated with life-giving properties, and amazingly, scientific studies may have found a scientific basis for the myth. Unfortunately, it might be too late, as the Ganges is highly polluted.

At Patna, a few days after celebrating the 1997 Chhath festival on the banks of the Ganges, several devotees suddenly suffered from skin eruptions, red spots and other skin irritations. Apparently it was the ‘holy dip’ in the Ganges that led to this problem; something in the water, possibly a result of indiscriminate waste disposal into the river, had triggered off this reaction.

Cynical though it may sound, such an incident was simply waiting to happen, as the rivers in India are basically treated like glorified sewers. On the one hand they are considered sacred, and on the other they are abused day in and day out by the very people that revere them. Religious ceremonies and practices that have been followed for centuries only help to spread infection, and it’s highly unlikely that things will change any time soon.

Along its 2525km-long course, the Ganges receives mostly untreated sewage from 27 major towns. The Ganges Action Plan (GAP), which is touted as the centrepiece of river cleaning policy in India, has spent more than 4.5 billion rupees on the problem, but with little concrete success. The reality is that in all the main towns situated on the banks of the Ganges, untreated and partially treated sewage still flows into the river. The sewage treatment plants lie idle for most of the day because there’s no power to run them, lots of the pumps are clogged up with plastic bags, and as an example of the lack of progress, in Patna the public toilets have been converted into offices, and the town sewage ponds serve as cricket grounds.

The waters of the Ganges have always had the strange quality of not putrefying, even after long periods of storage. Scientific studies carried out by Roorkee University in the early 1980s confirmed an age-old belief that its waters were special; the Ganges was shown to have a unique quality in that it has a remarkable self-cleansing ability, certainly better than any other river in the world. It also has a very high oxygen-retaining capacity, which explains why its waters remain fresh over long periods of storage.

Conducted between 1982 and 1984, the studies indicated that concentrations of disease-causing bacteria, which shot up at waste dumping points along the river, reduced by almost 90 per cent some 7 to 10km downstream from the dumps. As far back as 1896, E. Hanbury Hankin, a British physician, reported in the Annales de l’Institut Pasteur that cholera microbes died within three hours in Ganges water, while they continued to thrive after 48 hours in distilled water.

When such a unique and remarkable river becomes the source of skin problems, it is reflective of the river’s degradation. Essentially a ‘pipes and pumps’ scheme, the GAP is being replicated in 14 polluted rivers in the country without anyone asking whether the original GAP has worked. While sewers and sewage treatment are an absolute necessity in any town or city, mindlessly repeating an expensive and arguably unsuccessful plan is probably not the best way to tackle the situation.

It seems that some rivers, however holy, are destined to die. I sincerely hope that Mother Ganges isn’t one of them.

Varanasi

Written: 20 May 1998   

Warning: This article contains some seriously disturbing photographs of dead human bodies. Please do not view them unless you are absolutely certain that you want to. If you want to read the article without pictures, I recommend you read the eBook version. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

If you had to choose one city to represent everything that is really Indian, you would probably choose Varanasi. This means it is a fascinating place; it also means it’s almost impossible to describe on paper.

The first area of Varanasi is the main business district, known as the Cantonment area. Almost every city has a Cantonment area; this was the Raj-era term for the administrative and military area of a city, and most cities retain the Cantonment name for the central part. Varanasi’s core is also its least interesting area, so let’s dispense with it quickly; if you want a train ticket or a bank, go to the Cantonment, otherwise you’re better off hanging out in the two other main areas of town.

Varanasi is built along the west bank of the Ganges, which, in an attempt to avoid the hills to the east in Bihar, turns north towards the Ghaghara River; this means that the river flows north at Varanasi, against all intuition, and Varanasi is perched on the west bank, facing into the sunrise. All along this bank is the second area of town, a long line of ghats¹ stretching for some six or seven kilometres between the famous Benares Hindu University in the south and the large railway bridge in the north. Inland from the ghats, to the west, is the third area, the old town, where things start to get really interesting. It’s the ghats and the old town that make Varanasi what it is.

Finding a Hotel

Arriving in Varanasi after a long train journey, your first experience is one of total confusion and disorientation. It is a guarantee that your rickshaw driver will totally ignore your instructions to take you to the hotel you’ve told him, and will instead stop outside a hotel which gives him a healthy commission; we just sat there and refused to budge until he started his motor up again and took us where we wanted to go.

This infuriated the hotel owner who pretended to take our snub as a comment on his hotel (‘Rooms very nice sir, just five minutes’ walk to the river, very clean’) but I’m not going to fall for a rickshaw driver’s trick this far into my Indian experience... so eventually we found ourselves dropped somewhere else entirely, though exactly where, we couldn’t work out; the rickshaw driver told us he couldn’t drive right down to the ghats (a lie, I later found out, as rickshaws ran over my toes right at the top of the steps) so we were left to fend for ourselves. It took us a long time to find what we wanted, but it was well worth the effort.

The guest house I chose, Ajay’s Guest House overlooking Rana ghat, was right on the river, and from its roof I got a bird’s eye view of the banks of the Ganges (Chris and Martina chose a slightly more luxurious hotel away from the river). What surprised me most was how one-sided Varanasi is; the east bank of the river is totally untouched by buildings, and the few shacks built by the water’s edge are temporary to say the least. The river is perhaps 200m wide in this, the pre-monsoon season, but there’s a very wide silt strip on the east bank that gets totally flooded in the monsoon, more than doubling the width of the river. It’s no wonder the east bank is unpopulated if every year you lose your house, but it still surprised me that even on the permanent part of the eastern bank, where scrubby trees line the horizon, there were no houses at all. I would soon discover why Varanasi is perched on just one bank of the river...

The Ghats

Ghats are central to life in India. As part of their religion Hindus wash regularly – the Indian version of ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ – and the ghats are the place to wash bodies, clothes, crockery and anything else that gets dirty. But as I discovered in Hampi during the tika-scrubbing of Holi, the ghats are not just communal baths, they’re the Indian equivalent of the local pub. Watching ghats through the day is instructive; they start to liven up before the sun rises, when those with early starts mingle with the particularly pious in a morning scrub to wake up the senses and rub off the smell of another hot, sweaty tropical night. The busiest time is after sunrise when everyone turns up for their morning ablutions and absolutions; kids frolic in the river, playing games with the tourist boats while their mothers start on the clothes washing and old men ponder how long it will be before they’ll be floating down the river permanently.

This is the essence of India. While the kids splash more water out of the Ganges than the monsoon puts in, a solitary man prays towards the sun, chanting Hindu prayers and scooping water up in his cupped hands, pouring the holy river out in a parabola in front of him and repeating the slow movement five or six times before he slowly turns round, holding his hands together in prayer and immersing himself fully, all the while continuing his prayers, barely audible in their monotonic whisper. Suddenly his prayer is finished, and it is as if for the first time he notices the cacophony around him, the beginning of a whole new day in India.

While the old man prays the women are bathing at another end of the ghat; in some ghats the division of men and women is so obvious it hurts the morning-sensitive eyes. One end of the ghat is covered in brown bodies, scantily clad in tightly tucked cloths tied round the midriff and leaping around like lizards on a hot tile floor, and at the other end is the shock of colourful sarees and dresses that Indian women have made their own. The reason for the division is the patriarchal society; men can strip down to briefs that would make tourists on a Thai beach do a double take, but the women have to bathe in full attire, showing nothing more than a bit of ankle and a strip round the waist. I watched women having full soapy baths without removing a stitch, the expert slipping of soap under the layers a result of ritual and acceptance of the status quo. I can’t imagine having a bath with my clothes on, and I doubt Indian men can either, but they make their women put up with it; it’s an indication of the strength of the female spirit in India that, even during the morning wash, the women manage to retain their radiance and beauty to the shame of the dawdling and gangly men. It’s also a poignant reminder that the men don’t deserve their chauvinist domination.

After the morning rush hour the ghats calm down, for the sun has come up over the horizon and is starting to make sure that everyone knows it’s summer. The stone steps begin to heat up, the hotel rooms overlooking the river flood with sunlight, forcing the occupants to get up and open their windows, and the boats start to return their sightseeing punters back to shore. The men and some of the women disappear off to their jobs in town, and the remaining women settle down to another day of cooking, cleaning, washing, looking after the kids and catching up with the gossip from next door. People still come and wash at the ghats, and pilgrims still turn up to bathe in the healing waters of the Ganges, but until the sun has crossed the sky the biggest activity on the ghats involves catching and conning tourists, and the burning of bodies at the two burning ghats.

Come late evening the men start to drift back towards the river, now shaded from the sun by the buildings at the edge of the old city. Sitting on the steps with their portable stoves and socks stuffed with cheap tea leaves, the chai vendors make a killing as men come back from work and tarry a while before the evening meal, which is being slaved over by a hard-worked wife somewhere in the bowels of the city. At this time many people take another dip to remove the scum layer gained in the searing heat of the day, the kids jumping around as if to prove that even a long, hot day in the dusty atmosphere of the city streets isn’t enough to dent their enthusiasm for life.

Finally, as the sun goes down, the ghats have their last wind, and people come out to stroll along the promenade, to catch up on any gossip they may have missed, to have another wash and just to sit and watch the world go by. Darkness falls, the lights come on, and slowly people drift off to bed – a lot of them sleeping on the ghats themselves – before Varanasi finally falls silent, if you ignore the thousands of noisily territorial dogs that plague urban India.

The Burning Ghats

Each ghat has its function beyond being a social centre. There are over one hundred ghats in Varanasi, and while some of them are crumbling and obviously not much use beyond being somewhere convenient to take a crap, most have a specific function. Five of the ghats – Asi, Dasaswamedh, Barnasangam, Panchganga and Maikarnika – are the special ghats where Hindu pilgrims must bathe each day, in that order; other ghats are where the Muslims hang out with their little skull caps; others are used by the dhobi-wallahs to thrash the clothes they’ve got to wash, made easier by the flat rocks positioned at regular intervals just in the water; yet another is for Jain worshippers, while the ascetics hang out at the Dandi ghat, no doubt discussing how long it is since they had a good meal; the Mir ghat leads to a temple for Nepalese worshippers; and others have special powers, such as the Somewar ghat which is particularly good at healing diseases. In much the same way as some prefer the Dog and Duck over the Queen’s Head, everyone in Varanasi has their local ghat, though seeing as alcohol is banned in the central town, they have to make do with a sip of the Ganges².

Easily the most infamous ghats are Jalsain and Harishchandra, at least as far as westerners are concerned, for these are the burning ghats where cremations take place. Varanasi isn’t just a city with lots of ghats and temples, it’s a seriously holy place, so holy in fact that dying and having your body dumped in the Ganges here is so auspicious that it’s a guaranteed way of getting to heaven. This strikes me as one of the more bizarre aspects of Hinduism; if you can get to heaven simply by dying in Varanasi and making the correct arrangements, then why care about karma and caste and working hard all your life, why not just enjoy life and make sure you die in Varanasi?

But not everybody can afford to die in Varanasi. The wood for the cremation costs money, quite a lot of it, and I was told that if someone dies in the street, the authorities wait until people have thrown enough money onto the body before they burn it; on the other hand, I was also told that there’s a dump truck that goes around collecting dead bodies, but whatever the truth, the sleeping beggars probably get a swift kick in the ribs every now and then, just to make sure they’re still with us.

I was rather paranoid about approaching the burning ghats, not so much because of the many travellers’ tales I’d heard about cons, hassles and rip-offs there, but because I felt it was none of my business. What would you think if, just as you were standing in the graveyard watching your dearly beloved being lowered into the frozen winter soil, a bunch of yelping tourists came up and started taking pictures, saying things like, ‘That’s sick, man, check out that guy’s burning hair!’ and ‘Shit, this place stinks worse than a fuckin’ butcher’s shop!’ I didn’t want to get involved.

But it’s impossible to avoid the whole scene, and despite my misgivings, I wasn’t going to miss out on seeing such a strange sight. Jalsain is the main burning ghat³, and as the bodies are brought in by relatives on stretchers, entirely covered in garish red and gold fabrics, the clockwork efficiency of the system seems at odds with the importance of the occasion, for being cremated and scattered in the Ganges is the Hindu equivalent of being buried in Westminster Abbey. After the relatives wash the body in the Ganges for the last time, simply by dipping the covered body in the river, it is placed on top of an orderly pile of logs by the workers (untouchables, the lowest caste of all) who neatly stack more logs on top before lighting the pyre. It doesn’t take long for the fire to catch, and at any one time you can see two or three bodies burning steadily in the river breeze, giving off a smell that’s disturbingly reminiscent of a barbecue.

A typical body takes three to four hours to burn, but there’s always something left; for a woman it’s the hips, and for a man the lower back (don’t ask me why), and these are just chucked into the river for the dogs to fight over. Meanwhile the ashes are sifted by a man called the Watchman for gold and silver, which he gets to keep, and then they’re scattered on the water (or, rather, shovelled in for the river to wash away later, as there’s so much ash). The whole process is surprisingly efficient and hygienic; after all, cremation is the cleanest way to dispose of a body.

But there’s a bit of Indian logic that makes all this cleanliness irrelevant. Not everyone is burned at the ghats, oh no. Holy cows, children less than twelve years old and pregnant women are not burned because they are already considered pure (in the latter case it’s the baby who is pure) and the whole point of the fire is to cleanse the soul on its way to heaven, so cremation isn’t needed; also, lepers and people suffering from other diseases (‘People with poisons in their body’ was how one chap referred to it) are not burned, so along with the cows, children and pregnant women they’re tied to a rock, rowed out into the middle of the river and dumped overboard.

That sounds just fine, but Indian ropes being Indian ropes, these bodies soon find their way to the surface, and due to the gentleness of the current in the non-monsoon Ganges, they can hang around for quite some time before the birds and dogs finally get to them. During this time they tend to drift over to the east bank, which probably explains why there isn’t a great deal of housing there, daily dead body delivery not being up there in the estate agent’s list of desirable attributes. Taking a boat on the river, a delightful experience especially at sunrise, is a wonderful and cheap way to enjoy the ghat area, but if you’re squeamish then you may be put off your breakfast by the floating bodies with their gaping skulls picked almost clean by the birds, and the faintly familiar rib cages stacked on the east bank.

It doesn’t seem to bother the locals, though. Despite the regular parade of dead humans and bloated cows floating past, everyone still bathes and drinks at their local ghat. On top of the obvious health issues raised by bathing with the dead, there are plenty of other hygienic faux pas, such as the man bathing ten feet from another man who’s pissing in the river, all of which is enough to make you more wary of the Ganges than you are about strangers calling you ‘friend’ and salesmen who offer you their ‘best price’. This is a shame, because the Ganges in Varanasi isn’t the mud-slicked quagmire you might expect from a river that has had to struggle its way through thousands of miles of Indians using it as a moving rubbish-dump-cum-sewer⁴; in fact it’s a pleasant deep blue, and it’s only on closer inspection you see all the rubbish collected on the banks and the human detritus piled up on the eastern side.

Ram Nagar Fort

Closer inspection was what I had in mind on my penultimate day in Varanasi. I’ve wanted to take a walk along the Ganges for some time, and not just because the Ganges is so famous; it’s surprisingly elusive for such a long river, and most of the well-known cities in India have nothing to do with it. Delhi and Agra are on the Yamuna River, Calcutta is on the Hooghly, Chennai and Mumbai are miles south of the Gangetic plains, and places like Darjeeling and Kashmir are a long way from the slow march of Mother Ganga. But it’s the Ganges that everyone associates with India, and I wanted to check it out.

Setting out from my hotel, I walked south down the west bank to the rickety pontoon bridge that spans the Ganges during the dry season. One glance and you can see why it isn’t used in the monsoon; it’s got enough holes and leaks to make it a scary proposition even if the Ganges dries up. On the other side of the bridge, over on the east bank, is the Ram Nagar Fort, and being a sucker for forts, I made straight for it as the sun began to get serious.

Inside the fort – where incidentally Queen Elizabeth stayed on her visit in 1958, when I assume the place had rather more class than it does now – is a rather sad museum containing little of merit beyond an exquisite collection of intricate ivory carvings. As I breezed past the moth-eaten clothes and decrepit dust buckets that are all that remain of the Maharaja of Benares’ transport department, I fell into conversation with a well-spoken man called Ram who hailed from Andhra Pradesh. With his shaved head (apart from a tuft at the back) and tika mark he was obviously a Hindu, and he began to explain why he was in Varanasi.

‘I have just committed the bones of my mother to the Ganges,’ he said. ‘That is why I have my head shaved; the eldest son has it done as a mark of respect.’

I offered my condolences, and asked him if being buried in the Ganges meant his mother was now in heaven.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘If a person’s bones are buried in the Ganges at Varanasi or Allahabad⁵ then, as long as the bones remain in the river, that person will be in heaven. And with bones, they do not float, so he or she will remain in heaven forever.

‘Many American Hindus come here to be cremated,’ he added. ‘I suppose they can easily afford the wood, but I do wonder why so many western tourists come to Varanasi. What is the attraction for them? They are not Hindus, so it can’t be for the pilgrimage.’

I didn’t tell him that it was probably the sick attraction of watching people like his mother burn, and instead waffled on about the amazing streets of the old city, the serenity of the Ganges and the multitude of cheap hotels. The only drawback was the heat, I said, which is why the number of tourists is far less in the summer.

‘It was 49 degrees here yesterday,’ said Ram, surprising me considerably as I’d managed to cope pretty well; I initially thought he meant 39 degrees, but later I was to read about a heat wave cruising northern India, pushing the temperatures into the high forties. ‘It is very hot, but it gets hotter in Andhra Pradesh, up into the fifties. Rajasthan will be hot; it is interesting that you are going there now. What is your reaction to the nuclear tests there?’

He was referring to the underground nuclear tests that the Indian government have just carried out in the Thar Desert north of Pokaran, a move which has earned the country trade sanctions and widespread criticism but which makes the point that India is prepared to defend itself against its arch-enemy, Pakistan. I told him I thought it was crazy that such a poor country should spend money on nuclear testing, but Ram’s reaction was unexpected.

‘India is not a poor country,’ he said, ‘but the Indians are a poor people. We have much corruption and terrorism here, and places like Kashmir are particularly dangerous.’

I replied that I had found people in the south to be marginally friendlier and less likely to rip you off than in the north, but he wasn’t so sure, despite my comment being a backhanded compliment to his people.

‘In the south they will argue with you,’ he said, ‘but in the north they will just cut your throat. Be careful.’

I thanked him for his advice and we parted; and having wandered around the fort to my satisfaction, I decided to walk right across town, but this time on the east bank. I wanted to see how a city could just stop at a river and not spring up on the other side, and what I saw confirmed my earlier theory.

East Bank of the Ganges

The east bank of the Ganges is a false one; dry, cracked mud stretches for a couple of hundred metres back from the water’s edge, until it reaches a gradual rise where the vegetation can survive the monsoon without being washed out. I spent the first part of my walk in this scrubland of trees, grass and severe heat, a beautiful environment that is a total anathema to anything living.

The sun beat down on my bush hat, pushing sweat out through my clothes, down the back of my daypack and into my eyes, and it wasn’t long before I wistfully thought of Noel Coward and his uncanny accuracy. I enjoyed it though, not having had a good dry scrub walk since Australia, and when I spotted the plume of blue smoke from the main burning ghat in the distance on the other side of the Ganges, I headed towards the water to get a view of the city on the opposite bank.

Crossing the mud flats to the sand banks, I nearly stumbled into a huge sand mine, filled with trucks and men digging deep into the sand. I couldn’t help wondering how this might affect all those pious Hindus up in heaven who’d died in the monsoon and whose bones had settled in the flood plain; one assumes the workmen would chuck any bones they found into the river, but imagine how annoyed you’d be if you were suddenly plucked from paradise because someone found your femur some thirty feet down. Is nothing sacred here?

It seems not. I soon reached the east bank, which slides into the murky water without ceremony or embankment, and the first thing I noticed was the smell, the familiar stench of rotting garbage and sewage, but this time with an added twinge, a sour odour of burned meat; the burning ghats were in full swing, and the wind wasn’t doing me any favours. I remembered a body that I’d seen from a morning boat trip on the river a couple of days before – an upper half of the torso only, body still swathed and the face nothing but a cleaned skull, not hollow but not covered in flesh either – and prepared myself for the worst. I wasn’t to be disappointed.

In all I came across six or seven rotting humans washed up on the shore; the uncertainty comes from my lack of expertise in biology, as one of them could have been anything. Some were simply bones, picked clean by the local dogs (who were particularly vicious and territorial, nearly attacking me as I wandered along); others were bloated like kangaroos by the side of the Australian highway, splitting open at the seams like some failed experiment in deep sea diving; one looked like a chicken wrapped in silk, floating in the tide, until I realised it must have been a baby; another one lay askew without a head, its skull six feet away catching the lapping waves and echoing the sound of the surf through its left eye; I found myself utterly detached, the reporter doing his job, and took a few photos in much the same way that a pathologist would do. After seeing someone dying in front of my very eyes on the Nepalese highway, dead bodies are nothing to me.

Just downstream from the most disgusting corpse – all I could think of was Lennon’s line ‘Yellow matter custard/Dripping from a dead dog’s eye’ – was a young man having a wash; he even drank the water, obviously enjoying the coolness of Mother Ganga on his skin. This I found more disturbing than the rictus grins behind me, and as I wandered further north towards the railway bridge, I encountered a number of other people in the water. One pair of stalwarts were dragging a huge net along the current, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘fishers of men’; three others were peeling the hide off a stunningly rotten and pungent cow that had been floating in the river for far too long and which I’d passed on the morning boat trip two days before; women crouched in huts and brewed tea; and despite this human presence, I came across yet more decaying unfortunates who were not only no longer in heaven, they were almost certainly in hell.

Unlike the dogs, the people on the east bank, though few in number, were markedly friendlier than the inhabitants of the city. I suppose when you’re surrounded by dead rich people who have been washed up from heaven, you lose a lot of your bigotries; every day you’re reminded that we are all dust in the end, whatever our status in life. Every one of them said hello, and lots of them tried to start a conversation in Hindi (though with little success); in the city all I ever got was the usual chanting of ‘Hello friend, you want cold drink/cigarettes/hotel/massage (delete as applicable)?’ ‘Hello friend’ is an especially irritating phrase; ‘Hello mister’ is simply inane and faintly amusing, and the normal ‘Hello sir’ the Indians use is polite and fine by me, but ‘Hello friend’?

This is a country where they leave their friends bobbing on the east bank for the dogs and maggots, for goodness sake. No thanks, friend.

The Old City

Yes, the ghats are quite stunning, and make for some interesting walks. But behind every great man is a great woman, and behind the craziness of the ghats is the even more intense insanity of the old city. Like all cities that grow up steadily and totally unplanned, the old city is chaos, but it’s a different sort of chaos from the more normal traffic and population clash of India’s cities; in the old city of Varanasi the streets are seldom wider than eight feet, so there are no cars or rickshaws, and there aren’t so many people. It sounds like heaven.

But of course it’s not. You can take the cars off the streets but you can’t do anything about the cows, and with Varanasi being such a holy city, it’s packed with wandering bovines. Cows, being docile beasts and fairly slow-moving, are not much of a problem as you can slide past them pretty easily, but ‘slide’ is the operative word; where there are cows there is cow shit, and if you take the number of cows in Varanasi and think how many pats they drop in your average day, you can understand why the streets of Varanasi are coated in the stuff. It helps to keep the dust down, but it means you have to keep your head down when you’re walking, especially at night.

As well as the cows, there are millions of dogs, loads of goats, plenty of rats and countless other examples of Noah’s work kicking around the backstreets, but the animals aren’t the main obstacles when you run the old city gauntlet. Shop owners entice you into their tiny hovels with a ‘Hello, you want something?’; sadhus stutter past in dulled saffron robes, some floating on bhang and some just floating naturally; push bikes click along the cobbles as the riders get off to push them, and there’s even the odd motorcycle brave enough to slosh through the shit, even though it’s probably quicker to walk; hashish sellers saunter up with their mantra of ‘Good hash, Manali hash, best quality, cheap price,’ and when you ignore them, a hopeful ‘Maybe later, sir? I see you tomorrow?’; and always there are sights to grab the eyes, things that make all the slip-sliding worthwhile.

That is, there are if you can work out how to find them. It took me a while to find out that the worst possible way of exploring the old city is to try to use a map; some places in this world are impossible to depict on paper, and Varanasi is one of them, up there with Caen (where we would always get lost on family holidays) and the jungle paths of Taman Negara. In fact the best thing to do in Varanasi is to ditch the map in the cow dung and fish out a compass; the Ganges is always east and the Cantonment is always west, so if you get really stuck you can always head for them. I spent hours wandering round the streets, discovering beautiful mosques such as the Great Mosque of Aurangzeb, Hindu temples galore, kids playing marbles in the street, urchins showering under broken pipes in the gutter, women making offerings in tiny Siva shrines, beggars napping in the shade offered by the thin streets... the whole of Indian culture lives in the streets of the old city.

At night the place is transformed, and not just because nobody can tell what they are treading in. Frequent power cuts notwithstanding, the ill-lit arteries of the heart of the city provide you with plenty to see: peering in through a half-closed door you can see a father teaching his son the tools of his pan-making trade, the child’s eyes wide with wonder in the flickering candle light; smoke billows out of a dull red glow where large pots of milk boil and men manufacture trays of sweets, silhouetted demons sweating in a man-made inferno; a man stands in front of a statue of Ganesh, the stonework almost invisible under the thick layers of red paint smeared on it, chanting a mantra and holding smouldering incense sticks in his outstretched hands; on the steps around a chai shop men sit and chat away, their sticky glasses filled with sickly tea and their plates smeared with the remains of yet another dangerous-looking Indian snack; a shop-keeper squints through his half-moon glasses at his books by the light of a kerosene lamp, adding up figures in his head and writing down totals and stock levels with an old pen; and all the time the atmosphere of Varanasi, an indefinable feeling that permeates these ancient lanes, makes it all seem worthwhile and strangely seductive, despite the obvious squalor, smell and suffering. I challenge anybody to come to Varanasi and not be moved.

(Indeed Chris, who is on his first visit to India in the capable hands of his friend, Martina, herself visiting India for her third time and Varanasi for the second, was totally bowled over by the place. He’d loved Darjeeling and had found Delhi pretty crazy, but Varanasi really did it for him. He’ll be back, no doubt about it; one month in India is never enough.)

As for what I actually did in Varanasi, well that’s the funny thing. I did almost nothing, at least as far as traditional tourism goes. Varanasi is not a tourist haven in terms of specific sights, it’s a tourist haven in terms of sitting and watching, and I did a lot of that. After I bade farewell to Chris and Martina, who only had time for a few days in the city, I managed to change rooms to a stunning balcony location overlooking the ghats. From my basic but clean room (two mattresses on the floor, fan, light bulb and shelves) I could look out of a window each way onto the ghats, and my door opened out onto a semi-circular balcony from which I could see pretty much everything. I tried in vain to keep the local monkeys out of my bed⁶, I spent whole days writing on my balcony and taking showers every two hours, I wandered up and down the ghats staring at the scenes before me, and I visited temples, mosques, forts and all the other buildings that appealed.

As if it were possible, one particular night managed to sum up Varanasi, even if it could have happened anywhere. Chris and I were sitting on the guest house roof watching the Ganges ripple past the ghats, and before we knew what was happening we heard a banging and a crashing from downstairs, and a large group of people stomped up the stairs to invade the roof. There were a few westerners and the rest were Indian, and as we sat there agog, they proceeded to practise their art, that of juggling fire. In the deep blue of night, the pale three-quarter moon rising over the river in front of us, we saw a lanky Frenchman juggling burning clubs; an Indian expert spinning a six-foot-pole with both ends lit, describing neon circles in the air; and an Australian girl creating Lissajoux patterns round her head and body with burning kerosene pads attached to the ends of two chains, one held in each hand. It was a meeting of cultures via the universal language of the circus, and the Indians and westerners chatted about tricks they’d learned, how much they had to practise and where they were next meeting up for a show.

It seemed as if the circus down in the streets below had come up to the rooftop for the night. I sat amazed as the Varanasi sky burned around me, and in the morning realised that if I had to pick one place in India to recommend to people to visit, this would be it.

¹ Ghats are stone steps leading down into a river or lake; they’re also bloody slippery, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when I saw a little boy slip over just below my hotel balcony and crack the back of his head open. The Western Ghats, with a capital G, are the hills in southern India, but ghats with no capitalisation are everywhere in India. Varanasi is probably the most famous ghat city in the country, though.

² Though some would suggest that the Ganges has more of a kick than alcohol – it certainly has more living matter in it than real ale.

³ Harishchandra is smaller, but it does have an electric crematorium and a resident sadhu whose penance (for goodness only knows what) is to eat bits of flesh as they roll out of the toaster. This behaviour is accepted here; the lowest of the low jobs is to deal with cremations, so the sadhu has effectively lowered himself as low as he can, like all good penitents. It makes a change from standing on your head for 12 years or going on hunger strike, or indeed any of the other sadhu penances out there.

⁴ And you can see why they do use it. On the train through Bihar, one of India’s poorest and most densely populated states, I saw children bathing in pools so stagnant that I had to look twice to determine whether or not it was water. People have to wash, and if there’s a river there, they’re going to use it. It sure beats bathing in stagnant pools.

⁵ Allahabad is about 100km west of Varanasi, where the Ganges meets the Yamuna.

⁶ Noticing in the process that monkeys sit exactly like Indians, crouched down on flat feet (something westerners would also do if we used squat toilets). Luckily the monkeys ended up being interesting conversationalists, even if a little too temperamental and over keen to bare their teeth and lunge, so there was no repeat of Gunung Rinjani’s unpleasantness.

Death on the Platform

Written: 20 May 1998   

The City of the Dead wasn’t going to let me go easily. I had booked myself on the overnight train to Gwalior, an eight-hour journey across the dusty plains of gently sweating northern India, but when I turned up at the station, my train was nowhere to be seen.

When a train is seriously late in the West, the chances are there will at least be an announcement about it, if only to avoid recrimination from a bunch of furious commuters in angry suits. In India, however, the onus is on the passenger to work out what’s going on; the electronic board that Varanasi Junction so proudly boasts proved to be useless, proclaiming at first that the train was still leaving at 1310 (despite it already being an hour later than that), and after a while unceremoniously dropping my train from its list.

So I spent the next few hours flitting between the Inquiry counter, the Assistance booth (the difference being that the latter is useless and simply refers you to the former) and the man with The Power, the Station Master. This irritatingly fat man – perhaps a reflection of his fat pay packet – had eight phones surrounding him on his cluttered desk, one of which was red and four of which had wind-up handles on their sides. I stood amazed as he dialled on one, picked up another, barked something down yet another, and finally realised that one of the receivers, which had been off the hook from the start, was the one he wanted. It took five minutes to unravel the spiralled cords, by which time he enlightened me with the words, ‘Your train is late.’ I couldn’t thank him enough, the fuckwit.

Luckily I made friends with a couple of old Australian ladies who worked for the Tasmanian AIDS Council. They guarded my bags while I ran around trying to find the missing train, and when I eventually resigned myself to sitting under the speaker, hanging on every word the computerised announcer came out with (a technological innovation that is actually fairly useful), they proved to be excellent company.

‘Look, there’s a man asleep over there, right in the middle of the platform,’ said Connie, the elder of the two and the teller of tall tales from the African continent.

‘He’s probably dead,’ joked her companion, a veteran of Asian travel. ‘After all, it’s an auspicious place to die.’

‘I don’t think the Hindus reckon on dying in Varanasi Junction,’ I pointed out, and stood up to get yet another soft drink. On my way I passed the sleeping man and stared down at his oblivious face. It took me five seconds to notice he wasn’t breathing.

‘Is this man dead?’ I asked a well-groomed Muslim who was standing nearby, staring at the man with a look of resignation.

‘Yes,’ he replied, as if answering a question about the weather.

‘Probably waiting for the Gwalior train,’ I thought, and went for my drink.

His death surprised me; the man had only appeared there fifteen minutes before, just another person in Varanasi station lying down for a kip, and now he was stiffening up right by the Thums Up¹ stall. The top pocket of his shirt was stuffed with tickets and money, none of which was missing, and people were walking past without a blink. To all intents and purposes he was asleep, just permanently.

The status quo soon shifted when someone else noticed that he wasn’t breathing. Gradually a small crowd started to appear, all conjecturing on the state of the man but not lifting a finger to do anything; I was fleetingly reminded of Nepalese highways, but unfairly, it turned out, as a contingent of railway men came and carried him away, bent fingers trailing through the thin layer of dust on the hot station floor, flies scattering in their wake.

When my train finally pulled in some five-and-a-half hours late, I considered myself lucky to have escaped Varanasi with my life. It seems that even people who aren’t expecting it come to Varanasi to die.

¹ One of my biggest worries about returning home isn’t the job market or the drudgery of the lifestyle; it’s the expense of soft drinks. Due to the searing heat I have developed quite an attachment to Coke, Mirinda, Thums Up and the rest of the gang, and I sure am gonna miss ’em. Of course the weather in England isn’t quite as thirst-inducing as in India, but I’ve got a taste for fizz and it’s going to be hard to resist. I’d better get a SodaStream...

Air Coolers

Written: 22 May 1998   

One of the delights of the cheap Indian hotel is the air cooler. Much more rudimentary and therefore much more cost-effective than freon-based air conditioning, air coolers are to room cooling systems what holes in the ground are to toilets: they’re simple but effective.

In its simplest form an air cooler is just a large box with a fan on the front face, which pulls air into the box through the other three vertical sides and pushes it out of the front. The bottom is filled with water that is pumped into the top to trickle down the three remaining vertical sides, which are normally covered in a twisted plastic matting material to give maximum surface area. It’s simple: hot air is sucked into the box and passes through the trickling water, which cools it down. It works too.

The only disadvantages are the noise level (as the air needs to be sucked pretty quickly to be cooled effectively) and an increase in humidity (as the air blown out is pretty wet). But air cooling has saved my life in this heat wave that’s sweeping India, killing people with dehydration and sunstroke. It might be hot on the streets, but it’s cool inside...

Gwalior

Written: 23 May 1998   

When other travellers find out that I’m planning to explore Rajasthan and Gujarat in June and July, there’s a collective sucking in of breath. The reason? The heat.

Heat sounds pretty tame on paper. ‘It will be 41°C today,’ reads the forecast and it’s just a number, but the reality is something else. The heat in pre-monsoonal India has to be felt to be believed.

My Gwalior-bound train finally pulled into town six hours late – not a bad effort by the driver, who managed to keep the train running at the right speed despite it being out of sync with the rest of India’s huge timetable – but by the time it screeched to a halt, the cabin was absolutely steaming. The seats were a burning sticky plastic, the metal struts supporting the berths were a searing and untouchable temperature, and the air was so stifling it was actually cooler to close the windows and prevent the hot country air from coming inside rather than suffer the furnace-like breeze. I made friends with a couple of young Indian blokes called Alok and Pavan¹ who helped me while away a journey made harder by a head cold and a slight temperature, and when I finally alighted I made straight for the nearest hotel, where I stood under the shower for a good half an hour.

The hotel turned out to be amazingly noisy but utterly redeemed by its position right over the local Indian Coffee House. In much the same way that McDonald’s is a homely sight when you’re stuck in the middle of a totally alien city, the Indian Coffee House is a guaranteed winner; their masala dosas have to be the best breakfast I’ve ever come across, and their coffee is so good I have to cram it all in before midday if I want any chance of a good night’s sleep. The traffic noise shook the walls of my room – which, incidentally, were almost too hot to touch, seeing as my thermometer reported the temperature inside the room as 41°C – but I had earplugs and a full belly, so I survived.

Gwalior Fort

Gwalior’s main attraction is its fortress, and what an attraction it is. Up there with Mandu, Bijapur and Golconda for beautiful Islamic atmospherics, Gwalior Fort dominates the town completely. Houses lie compressed at the foot of the steep 300 ft cliffs that make up the citadel; it’s a little like a smaller Mandu with a city at its feet. I struck out to explore the area early on Friday morning.

The heat soon made itself quite unbearable, but I’d stocked up with plenty of water, and I wandered along the city streets in the shade of a bright magenta reflective umbrella that I bought in Calcutta, but which has only really come into its own in the blistering heat of the pre-monsoon. Gwalior is only a two-hour train ride from Agra (one of the most touristy places in India) but it might as well be on the moon for all the effect westernisation has had. It was all smiles and friendliness as I sweltered my way first to the locked southern gate (where I found some impressive Ellora-esque Jain carvings) and then to the long, winding road that leads to the northeast gate. Kids shouted out, ‘Hello, how are you?’ and ran up to shake my hand, men cracked into smiles when they saw me grinning like a cat, and even the women broke down a social barrier or two to say good morning. Hardly anybody maintained a stare, and if they did it was obviously because they were freaked out by the sight of a crazy white man heading off into the 40-degree-plus midday sun with nothing but a flimsy umbrella – a perfectly understandable reaction.

Reaching the fort after a long, hard ascent, I gratefully snuck into the airy spaces of the palaces and barracks that still stand guard over the city (though the only soldiers you’ll see these days are those on day trips from the nearby garrisons). The buildings on the fort don’t all date from one period, but the ones I enjoyed the most were, predictably, from the Mughal period, with their Islamic designs and wonderful silhouettes. The biggest building, the Man Singh Palace, still has quite a bit of colour left on it, with dashes of yellow and blue tiles that would have been quite magical when new; all that remains now are hints of mosaics, though one area obviously used to be plastered with yellow ducks on a blue background, which seems more suited to a bathroom than a fortress.

I climbed up the crumbling stairs to the roof and sat down in the shade of a lone pavilion, the perfect place for keeping watch on the plains below for the tell-tale sign of an invading dust plume; here the midday sun was directly above me, but with a stiff westerly breeze burning through the pavilion, it wasn’t at all uncomfortable. I could see Gwalior town surrounding the fort complex, which contained the striking white spires of a modern Sikh gurdwara (the name for a Sikh temple), the Konark-esque twin Hindu Sasbahu Temples (dating from the 9th to 11th centuries) and the gopuram-based Teli Ka Mandir. And then I hopped down and walked round them all...

George of Gwalior

Suitably drained by my exploration of Gwalior’s magnificent fortress, I decided to spend the afternoon indoors, preferably somewhere with air conditioning or at least some fans; the Jai Vilas Palace and Museum fitted the bill perfectly. The residence of the Maharaja of Gwalior – who still lives there, although he’s converted most of his little shack into a museum – the palace is at once everything that was majestic about the Maharajas, and everything that was sickeningly decadent.

It’s obvious from the first moment you arrive. The entrance fee is an extortionate Rs100, well over the price of any other entrance fee I’ve had to pay in India, and on stepping inside it’s obvious why; faced with the unearthly cost of maintaining such a huge palace without the usual income from bullying peasants and blackmailing politicians, the aristocracy of Gwalior is clearly trying to bleed the public by legitimate means.

The Maharaja is a fat little man, as is the custom for rich Indians. Right from the first room there’s an unmistakable air of Kipling and Empire about the place, and indeed, the first thing you notice is a big, framed sign pinned on the wall listing the Maharaja’s full name, titles and all. Although I doubt this is the case, I like to think that he’s known as George to his mates, because his full title is – deep breath! – His Highness Maharaja Mukhtar-ul-Mulk, Azim-ul-Iqtidar, Rafi-ush-Shan, Wala Shikoh, Mohtasham-i-Dauran, Umdat-ul-Umara, Maharajadhiraja Alijah Hisam-us-Saltanat, Honorary Lieutenant General Sir George Jiwaji Rao Scindia Bahadur Shrinath Mansur-i-Zaman, Fidwi-i-Hazrat Malik-i-Muazzam-i-Rafi-ud-Darjat-i-Inglistan GCIS Maharaja of Gwalior. Anyone with a name like this must be slightly insane from birth, and the museum proves that not only is George insane, he’s also got impeccably bad taste.

The museum is divided up into a number of areas, each of which deals with a particular subject. Some areas are large, reflecting a subject close to George’s heart, and other areas are small, probably denoting a collection that George bought one drunken day after too many brandies and a run of successful bets on the gee-gees. For example, the euphemistically named ‘Natural History Museum’ contains a selection of animals that George and his ancestors have killed over the years, including large numbers of tigers, rhinos, leopards, crocodiles, deer, ducks, mongooses (complete with snakes), buffalos, antelopes, gazelles and, strangely enough, parrots. These are all stuffed and mounted in snapshot poses, the tigers looking mean and ready to pounce as if to underline George’s bravery in facing up to the monsters. Littering the walls are pictures of George with various other fat, rich men – including the occasional sovereign of England – all posing over prostrate carcasses and staring into the middle distance as people tended to do back in the days of primitive photography.

The rest of the museum is along similar lines. Some collections are so tacky you wonder who on earth would buy them, until you remember that George is an Indian; he obviously has a soft spot for awful watercolours with titles like ‘Her first love letter’ and ‘Joyous spring’, which celebrate a time of innocence and perfection in lovelorn Victorian England, and some of the furniture he has is simply beyond belief, such as the Italian cut-glass swing that’s proudly gathering dust in a little-visited corner of his mansion. Rounding up the rest are the Arms Gallery, which is full of big swords and guns; the Archaeological Gallery, where George seems to have stashed half of India’s Hindu stone carvings; the vehicles section, with its six litters and 14 carriages; rooms and rooms of furniture from various periods; the tapestry and rug section (which defines the term moth-eaten quite succinctly); an excellent collection of Mughal and Hindu miniature paintings; some rope from the construction of the Pyramids; a nondescript clothing section; a small and well-hidden room of erotic art, of which the only faintly erotic piece is a marble statue of a woman in cahoots with a swan; a room full of etchings from the Indian Mutiny which are exceptionally pro-British; a collection of old Urdu and Hindu manuscripts; some wonderful ivory carvings; some far from wonderful models of buildings; a Chinese gallery; and various other oddities too irrelevant to mention. To say that George’s collection is eclectic is to overstate the obvious.

All this interested me, but the best is saved until last. At the far end of the mansion are two huge rooms, one above the other, that manage to encapsulate the pomposity of the aristocracy and serve to point out that as institutions get bloated to the point of self-parody, they must surely come tumbling down. The small part of me that always wanted to go to Oxford thrilled at the sight; the rest of me wanted to scream.

The downstairs Banquet Hall is huge, with three long tables disappearing off into the distance. Lining each side of the tables I counted 24 chairs, so each table seats some 48 people; with one more at each end that’s 50 per table, giving 150 people per banquet. This isn’t so unbelievable, until you look at the splendour of each place setting, but what is beyond the pale is the train set that sits on the middle table. Looping round the perimeter of the tablecloth, the train, a silver locomotive with ‘SCANDIA’ embossed on the side, pulls four cut-glass decanters of brandy and three cut-glass bowls of cigars, so if one wants a top up one simply has to wait for the next arrival... and unlike Indian Railways, the George Express always arrives on time.

As if this isn’t opulent enough, the upstairs Durbar Hall, a huge lounge, is monstrous. The walls are white and gold with a massively arched ceiling (the gold paint used in this room is said to have weighed 58kg), and tables and chairs litter the floor like a posh hotel foyer; but the eye is not drawn by this comfortable luxury, but by the two huge chandeliers that dominate the space. Each chandelier is 12.5m high (41 feet), weighs 3.5 tonnes and carries 248 candles (or bulbs these days); when the room was constructed the engineers hung elephants from the hooks to check that they would take the weight of the chandeliers. Along with all the other lights in the room I estimated there must be some 750 candle holders in all, which must have been a nightmare for the poor soul who was in charge of keeping them alight.

It all manages to make living out of a suitcase look particularly attractive, to be honest.

Political Romp

As if this pomp and circumstance wasn’t enough to make me feel like a downtrodden member of the proletariat, when I got back to my hotel there was a right royal ruckus going on in the railway station. A band was playing, fireworks were exploding and people were milling about, so after dumping my bag, I shot straight back out for a look.

Arriving by train was a new government minister; the recently elected BJP government has just had a cabinet reshuffle, and one of the new faces is the MP from Gwalior, hence the jubilation. The old boy was coming home for a bit of a shindig.

I hung around, camera in hand, taking pictures of the band and the dancers, but when the locals saw me and my bush hat, they pulled me over and brought me right to the man himself. I didn’t really know what to do – after all, I had no idea who this guy was, he could have been the bleeding Prime Minister for all I knew – so I snapped a couple of shots of him in the name of world peace, said thanks as he posed dutifully, and went off to try to discover who had just filled up two shots of my new film. Nobody at the hotel seemed to know, or care; ‘Some kind of minister, I think,’ was all I managed to get, but at least I can now say I’ve met a genuine Indian politician.

That night I’d arranged to meet Pavan, the friend I’d made on the train. He rang to say he’d be a little late – which was good of him, as in India one expects everything to be late by default and without prior warning – so I lounged in the heat on my balcony, overlooking the fumes of east Gwalior. As I dozed off – owing to a cough mixture I’d bought that managed to knock me out cold, despite a total lack of warning on the bottle – I dreamed of flashing lights and loud, raucous music, and before you know it there it was, right in front of me: dancing, music, neon lights and a fat man on a horse with a servant holding an umbrella over his head. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, and sure enough I wasn’t dreaming; a parade of glitzy noise pollution was celebrating its way along the road in front of my hotel, stopping every few yards to have a dance and wake up the neighbours. On their heads women carried strip-lights stuck in pots, Indian men danced their hip-swinging grooves to loud band music, and a group of beautifully turned-out women stood behind, coyly glancing around. People waved up to me and wanted me to join in, but luckily Pavan turned up to rescue me in time.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself in the vegetarian restaurant across the road. Pavan had brought along his cousin Kamal and his friend Sham², and we spent the night exchanging cultural insights and religious concepts. Being Jains, they were an interesting bunch, not least because of their rules (strict vegetarianism, no garlic, no onions, no milk and so on; strict Jain priests even cover their mouths to prevent them from swallowing insects). The meal ended and, as is the Indian way, we didn’t sit around chatting, but instead went straight off on our separate ways. Sometimes, after a hard day, that’s the best way of all.

¹ Which mean, in Hindi, Light and Air respectively. When westerners give their kids crazy names – like Moon Unit (Frank Zappa’s daughter), Zowie Bowie (David Bowie’s son), or Peaches, Pixie and Fifi Trixibelle (Bob Geldof and Paula Yates’ daughters) – they tend to be regarded by the populace as having taken far too many drugs. India, on the other hand, is full of people called Moon, Mountain, Monsoon and so on; it’s just that hardly anybody in the West speaks Hindi, so we don’t notice. Yet again the Indians were ahead of the hippies by generations. Good for them.

² That’s Lotus and Black to you and me.

Agra

Written: 25 May 1998   

I prepared for my arrival in Agra by clamming up and refusing to budge when the touts descended. In the event it was fine; the city’s legendary hassle factor was obviously too exhausted to brave the scorching temperatures.

Sure, the rickshaw man tried to charge me Rs30 from the station to the hotel area, though I won that argument because I knew the price was fixed at Rs15 for all rickshaws; and I made sure he dropped me off at a different hotel to the one I wanted to stay in, to avoid the scam where rickshaw drivers tell the hotel owners that it was their idea to bring you to the hotel and claim a commission that they don’t deserve (and which gets added to your bill). But that was it; sure, the shopkeepers all pleaded with me to visit their shops, and I politely refused, but the touts didn’t appear to be too bad. ‘Travelling in the off-season has its advantages,’ I thought to myself, though I didn’t realise they were simply lying in wait, waiting for me to drop my defences...

You’d never have believed it was the off-season, judging by the masses sprawling round the Taj Mahal. I arrived on a Saturday, so it was bound to be full, but even so it surprised me to see so many Indian tourists posing for photographs and wanting to include me too. I popped into the Taj for a quick look soon after I arrived, and only saw four other westerners, two of whom were friendly hippies and two of whom seemed to be having a comparatively miserable time. But it takes a lot more than crowds of tourists and unhappy westerners to spoil something like this.

I mean, it’s the Taj Mahal! It’s up there with the Pyramids, the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House and the Houses of Parliament, but in one aspect it’s so much more emotive than any of these, because it was built for love. The Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built it in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631 during childbirth; heartbroken, the Emperor commissioned the construction of a huge monument which took from 1631 to 1653 to build, requiring 20,000 workers to create. The Emperor, who was later deposed by his son Aurangzeb and spent the rest of his life locked up in Agra Fort staring out at his creation, is buried under the Taj, next to his beloved wife.

Even without such a tragi-romantic story behind it, the Taj would be perfect. Its symmetry is legendary, its white marble is brilliantly reflective and the intricacy of the work on the walls is incredible; everywhere you look the marble is inlaid with semi-precious stones, forming patterns of flowers and curlicues that offset the Arabic script arching over the entrances. Inside it is cool but surprisingly light, and the acoustics are not dissimilar to those of the Golcumbaz in Bijapur, though with the maelstrom of the crowds you’re lucky to leave the mausoleum with your hearing intact, let alone able to detect echoes.

The Taj doesn’t stand alone, either. The tourist mobs rush in at the southern end of the park, snap themselves posing with the Taj in the background, walk up the garden paths to the Taj itself, snap themselves looking serious in the throng gathered round the doorway, enter, clap, scream and yell, and then go home. Nobody bothers with the flanking buildings, which makes them rather pleasant.

On each side of the searing white Taj is a red sandstone mosque; these two are mirror images of each other, although only the left one is actually used as a mosque (as the other faces the wrong way). Opposite the Taj’s main entrance, at the other end of the long ornamental garden that features in everyone’s photos, is the original entrance (through which you now exit), and lining the path between the two is a beautiful waterway in which you can see the Taj reflected, assuming it’s actually got water in it. All I got were brown leaves, but that’s only to be expected at a time of year when droughts and heat waves take centre stage.

But when all is said and done, the Taj Mahal is the Taj Mahal, and that’s why everyone’s here. It’s one of the most stunning buildings in the world, but on my first visit I felt a little underwhelmed; I’d been more moved by the lonely tombs of Bijapur, or the far pavilions of Mandu, each of which sums up the stark beauty of the Mughal Empire better than the honeymoon sweetness of the Taj. Perhaps a lifetime’s exposure to the image of the Taj Mahal manages to eradicate the element of surprise; in Australia, I’d been surprised when Uluru (Ayers Rock) turned out to be completely unlike its public image, but the Taj was exactly what I expected: I expected it to be stunning, and stunning it was, but somehow that wasn’t enough. The Taj seemed to have no mystery, and I vowed to come back at dawn the next day to see if the silence of sunrise could capture the atmosphere that I found so powerful in the less well-known Islamic monuments.

Early Morning Taj Mahal

In the end it wasn’t exactly a silence, and the gates didn’t open until 6am, well after sunrise, but the difference was staggering. Almost exclusively peopled by white tourists, the noise level inside and around the marble walls was negligible; in fact, the noisiest people were the Indian guides, who seem to have mastered the nasal whines of the railway chai men in order to cut through the background noise of modern India. The westerners milling around were, in general, quiet and courteous, even if some of them did look like they had forgotten to put their clothes on when they got up, and if only more of them had smiled I might even have liked them. Instead I wanted to shout, ‘Look around! It’s amazing! Why aren’t you happy?’

But I kept quiet, and this enabled me to test out the acoustics inside the mausoleum. They are truly wonderful; whereas the Golcumbaz echoes your noises back to you ten times, the Taj just perpetuates the sound, not so much as an echo but more as a reverberation. It goes on for seconds, turning a talking voice into a drone of feedback and the muezzin’s call into a marvel of tonal purity. Back in Melbourne, many moons ago, I discovered an album in Chris’s record collection that was recorded inside the Taj; it was a recording made in 1968 by Paul Horn, a flute player, who managed to sneak into the Taj at night with his flute, a tape recorder and, presumably, some judicious use of baksheesh. When I first listened to it, I thought the concept was gloriously exotic and wonderfully flower-power, but that morning in the echoing dome, it suddenly seemed very real, as whispering voices bounced off the domed ceiling.

The reason for the lack of early morning Indians and the resulting lack of noise is the entry-price policy. During the day the entry price is Rs15, an astounding deal to see one of the world’s greatest monuments; but for an hour-and-a-half at dawn and a couple of hours at sunset the entry price soars to Rs105, which is still a reasonable amount by western standards, but which is high enough to dissuade the masses (as was obvious when the price went down at 7.30am and the crowds piled in, shattering the peace and the contemplative atmosphere of the place). The ethics of such a policy are debatable, but there’s no doubt it’s very pleasant to be able to enjoy a more peaceful Taj than during the daytime scramble.

Indeed, I saw the policy of dissuasion in action. When I finally tracked down the ticket office through my insomniac muddle, there was a young Indian couple ahead of me, with the man speaking loudly in a complaining voice. He obviously hadn’t known there was a price difference, and was mouthing off to the ticket man in English about how you fuckers aren’t getting my money that easily and it’s disgusting what you fuckers have done – his English was pretty strong, especially in the vernacular. He refused to pay, and as he turned around to go he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t fall for this scam, it’s disgusting, they want 105 rupees before 7.30, then it’s 15, the fuckers.’ Grabbing behind him, he took a long swig from a half-empty 650ml beer bottle, breathed the fumes into my face and strolled off, dragging his sour-faced girlfriend with him.

I didn’t tell him that not only was I going to pay, I was glad to do so if it meant not having to share the Taj with him and his bottle; he was moaning about the cost of maybe two beers, and it was obvious that he wasn’t exactly poor. Sometimes the middle class in developing countries gets on my nerves; places like China, Sri Lanka and Nepal charge you the equivalent of hundreds of rupees for each monument, whatever the time of day, and sometimes I wonder if rich Indians realise how lucky they are.

So how was the Taj, after all that? It was infinitely better with fewer tourists (of course), but still not the earth-shattering experience that I’d hoped for; as with Uluru, I purposely kept my expectations low, but unlike Uluru, the Taj was everything I’d presumed it would be, but no more. It is stunningly beautiful, ravaged by tourists, eminently photogenic and definitely worth visiting at different times of the day; much like Uluru, it changes colour as the sun washes over the sky, and despite Agra’s appalling pollution, it is still radiant (though possibly not for much longer if the air quality doesn’t improve drastically). As a monument to love it is unique, though its use as a photographic background for newlyweds is somewhat clichéd.

It’s just missing that little something... perhaps a sense of mystery, or the joy associated with discovering something that few others know about. I suppose that’s the price you pay for having your photograph splashed across the covers of fifty per cent of books about India.

Exploring the Rest of Agra

I had planned to spend a total of three days in Agra, but after a hot second day avoiding the touts and visiting the city’s other main attraction, Agra Fort – a ‘must’ according to my guidebook – I decided that Agra was no longer worthy of my patronage. The hassle from the local businessmen, who had woken up since my relatively quiet arrival, was starting to drive me nuts, and India is full of places that are infinitely more interesting and infinitely more friendly.

It didn’t help that I found Agra Fort to be fairly disappointing. It’s more of a palace with fortress walls than a proper fort, and it’s not high up, looking down on the city, but is at street level on the banks of the River Yamuna; my favourite fortresses have great views and a barren beauty, but Agra Fort has neither. To be fair the most beautiful part of the fort, the Moti Masjid, isn’t open to the public, but neither are the underground dungeons, fortress walls, northern buildings or any of the roofs. Add in the crowds of jostling Indian tourists and it’s only just worth the effort; I’ve seen more impressive fortresses and more beautiful palaces, and without hordes of tourists too.

I will remember Agra Fort for one thing, though, and that’s the gang of touts who hang around at the bridge to the entrance. Agra’s hassle factor is definitely higher than normal, which isn’t a surprise when you consider how much of a tourist attraction it is, but the difference isn’t so much in the amount of attention, which you get everywhere in India, but in the way the touts operate. They’re just plain annoying and they don’t give up, even if it’s blindingly obvious that you don’t want that leather whip or wooden travel backgammon set. In the off-season they’re particularly desperate, and it’s almost embarrassing the way they beg you to buy from them.

In fact, when I capitulated and bought a bottle of water from one of the stalls, I handed over ten rupees – it was only eight rupees per bottle near my hotel – but the man wanted 12 rupees, which is actually the standard price for water. I’d been fired up by the touts though, and decided that I’d make him suffer instead, refusing to budge from ten rupees. My stubbornness earned me what the Indian thought was the ultimate insult, ‘Are you Israeli?’ referring to the Israelis’ legendary bargaining aggression and stubbornness; realising he wasn’t going to give in and that perhaps I’d overstepped the mark, I immediately coughed up two more rupees and moved on, slightly annoyed with myself that I was losing my cool because of the touts’ never-ending aggression.

On my way out of Agra Fort things got worse. One particular tout simply wouldn’t let go.

‘Hey friend, you want marble box?’

‘No.’

‘Just twenty-five rupees.’

‘No.’

‘Beautiful inlay stones, lovely box, look.’

‘No.’

‘Okay, twenty rupees.’

‘No.’

‘Marble box, like Taj Mahal, see.’

‘No.’

‘It opens, look. Fifteen rupees.’

‘No.’

‘Just looking, friend.’

‘No.’

‘Fifteen rupees, very good price, how many you take?’

‘No.’

‘I have others too, but this one very cheap price. Ten rupees.’

‘No.’

‘Ten rupees, my final offer.’

‘No.’

‘Ten rupees, please sir, please buy one box ten rupees only, please.’

‘No.’

‘Is very cheap, only ten rupees. Yes?’

‘No.’

‘Please baba...’

He only let me go because he was crushed out of the way by the woman selling leather whips (‘Leather? But you’re a Hindu!’ I said; ‘Very cheap,’ she said, ‘very good quality’) and the man with the wooden travel backgammon set (‘I also have chess set, baba’). Then the rickshaw drivers closed in, and I managed to duck out of one corner and make off down the road, while a collection of drooling and rabid touts continued to hassle what was by now an empty space.

That afternoon I made plans to get out. I’d seen the Taj, done the fort and realised that if India has an ugly side, it’s Agra.

Leaving Agra

I escaped from Agra the following day, but only after another typical tout extravaganza. The standard rickshaw price from my hotel to the bus terminal should have been Rs15 but the rickshaw-wallahs were insisting on Rs30, and although the price difference was pathetic in real terms, I felt aggrieved enough by the whole Agra scene to stand my ground. I haggled mercilessly, and eventually got it down to Rs25, hardly a victory, but something at least.

But then I discovered I could get the standard rate of Rs15 if I stopped at a shop on the way where the rickshaw driver would get a commission. ‘I’m not buying anything, though,’ I said, ‘so you won’t get any money.’

‘Yes I will,’ said the rickshaw man. ‘I get 25 rupees for every tourist I bring, even if they buy nothing.’

‘OK then, how about this,’ I said, deciding to try to get one back on the touts. ‘We go to a shop and split the commission, ten rupees for me, 15 for you, so I get to go to the station for five rupees, don’t have to buy anything, and the only person who loses is the stupid shop who pays commission to rickshaw-wallahs. Deal?’

He was cagey, but he would have agreed if I’d pushed him; I however had only been winding him up and had no intention of hanging round in a shop pretending to be interested in cheap marble carvings and tacky carpets, so I ended up paying the Rs25 fee for an uninterrupted journey to the bus. It made me understand a bit more about why Agra is such a pit, though; it’s full of people who simply want your money.

I mentioned this to the rickshaw-wallah’s boss, who had joined me in the rickshaw. He’d asked me whether I liked Agra, and I told him precisely what I thought, and he sadly agreed. ‘We are not all bad,’ he said, and I said that, to be honest, the people I’d met away from the Taj and fort had been fine. But that wasn’t the point; the touts in those areas more than made up for the smiles of the rest of the city’s population.

‘You will find the same in Jaipur,’ he said, referring to the capital of Rajasthan, where I would be heading in a few days. ‘They are very bad there too. Better you go to Gujarat, where the people are very friendly.’

I thanked him, got on the bus and whistled off to Fatehpur Sikri, an hour’s jostling bus ride away, where I was praying the touts would give it a rest. Some chance...

Fatehpur Sikri

Written: 26 May 1998   

This popular day-trip destination between Agra and Jaipur is a complete contrast to the Taj Mahal; it’s a deserted city, and I absolutely loved it. Eventually.

When I read about this huge deserted city in the middle of nowhere, I pictured windswept desolation, an area of wonderful sunsets and ancient histories, a landscape of lonely citadels and cobwebbed mosques; but what I entered when I stepped off the bus was the Indian equivalent of an English seaside town in the winter, and like the English seaside in the winter, it looked like it was going to be a thoroughly depressing experience. I found myself wondering how the ruins were going to make up for the town around me, and I was more than a little concerned.

With the mercury touching the upper forties, tourists were staying away in their droves. This meant the desperation of Agra’s touts had infected the local guides, who were so eager to enlist my employment that they practically begged me for my money. I was hot, tired and unimpressed by both my hotel and the lame excuses for restaurants lining the streets, but eventually I tracked down a guide who spoke good English and who didn’t seem too pushy; the only problem was that he didn’t have a licence (‘It’s being renewed,’ he claimed), but after he promised that he could still enter the complex because everyone knew he was an official guide, I said I’d take him but he wouldn’t get one rupee if he wasn’t the best bloody guide in Fatehpur Sikri. He said I wouldn’t be disappointed. I said I’d better not be.

Of course, I was. There’s a Chinese saying, ‘We can always fool a foreigner,’ and I think that the guides in Fatehpur Sikri might have adopted it as their motto; it turned out that my guide had lied about being able to get into the whole complex, had lied about having ever been a guide, and had lied about there being no shade in the ruins (which was a major reason why I’d waited until 4pm to set off exploring, when I could have easily gone in the midday sun and relaxed in the cool shadows). I was pretty annoyed; it’s indicative of the awful nature of northern India’s tourist traps that the man was blatantly lying and knew he would be found out, but he still went on with the scam. He clearly couldn’t care less. But I could; he’d wasted my precious time.

So I ditched him and gave him Rs20 for the tour he had given me of the Jama Masjid (the mosque part of the old city that is still in use, and is freely enterable by anyone), telling him when he asked for more that he was lucky I’d given him anything at all, the lying toad.

Keeping my eyes dead ahead to make sure I didn’t attract the unwanted attention of any other guides, I went off on my own into the real ruins, and that’s when I realised that a guide was not only unnecessary, it was a downright disadvantage; old Fatehpur Sikri’s beauty lies in its silences, its hidden nooks and crannies, its feeling of Marie Celeste desertion. It has to be one of the most incredible sights I have ever witnessed.

When it was built, Fatehpur Sikri was the capital of the Mughal Empire. The Emperor Akbar started construction in 1569; he was childless and, having tried all sorts of solutions to his plight, he ended up visiting a Sufi saint, Sheikh Salim Chishti, for help. Soon a son was born and, impressed and overjoyed, he started building on the site where he met the saint. Fatehpur Sikri then became the capital of Mughal India between 1570 and 1585.

But things didn’t work out and, owing to a serious problem with the city’s water supply, the Mughals simply left Fatehpur Sikri after just 15 years and moved to Agra, where they built the fort and later the Taj Mahal. Meanwhile Fatehpur Sikri stood untouched, a complete mediaeval city of red sandstone that was left pretty much uninhabited.

The old town is still pretty much uninhabited and it’s simply marvellous. Fortresses are one thing, but Fatehpur Sikri has everything from huge central squares and exquisitely carved multi-tiered pavilions to precise gardens and amazingly detailed stone latticework, and everything is still immaculate. Wandering round the city with hardly anyone else in sight makes you feel as if you’ve been shrunk and placed into an architectural model; there’s no litter, no pollution, no animal life, no people and no hassle. The trees are perfect and regularly positioned; the buildings have divine symmetry; birds flock from spire to spire, outlined against the pale blue sky; high-domed ceilings cover cool terraces, overlooking the decidedly Romanesque central forum; and throughout it all you can picture the inhabitants living their everyday lives. I couldn’t get enough; having marvelled at the Islamic brilliance of various defensive structures throughout the realm, I was finally exploring the place where the architects lived. I felt I could have lived there myself.

Though as I watched the sun setting over the forum I was rudely reminded of where I was, not the reserved Middle East or strict Pakistan, but India. I spent the dying embers taking photos for an Indian man and his mother as they posed with typical solemnity in front of the various buildings. I couldn’t refuse, but I couldn’t help thinking that even in this show of politeness, I was being used. If anything sums up my experience so far northern India, it’s that feeling.

Later that night, the locals of Fatehpur redeemed themselves when I came across a group of them gathered round a camel. It had fallen down a sloping ditch and couldn’t get up, and they were trying to push it out. They enlisted my help, thoroughly entrancing me with their friendliness and willingness to incorporate a total foreigner into the carnival event of shifting a braying camel onto the road. I guess it’s just impossible to generalise about the people of India... though after Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, I know what I think about touts and guides, and it isn’t pretty.

Service Station Hell

Written: 26 May 1998   

To get anything resembling a decent meal in depressing off-season Fatehpur Sikri, I had to walk some three kilometres out of town, beyond the old city walls. It wasn’t long before I found myself in the bowels of hell.

Indian service stations – for that is where I found the restaurant – are utterly demonic. Of course, ‘service station’ is a western term and is purely euphemistic when applied to India; there’s lots of servicing going on, but precious little station. Lining the dirty streets are garish Indian Tata trucks (the Tata company is India’s biggest local manufacturer of vehicles, among other things), painted with Sivas and lingams and beautiful country scenes that scarcely bear any relation to the heaving rust buckets they adorn; perhaps the scenes are there to remind the driver precisely what it is his truck is systematically destroying. These trucks aren’t as big as western lorries, but their sheer numbers make up for their lack of size and besides, the Indians manage to pack so much into them that they probably manage to carry as much as Australian road trains.

In an Indian service station the concept of a ramp for servicing vehicles is totally alien. Trucks with missing wheels are propped up on piles of stones; sump oil is drained onto the street where it collects in black, dangerous-looking puddles that even the cows won’t drink; engines are tested regularly, revved up to high speeds while they churn big clouds of noxious fumes out into the street (Indian trucks have their exhaust pipes out of the side, so if one passes you while you’re walking, prepare for black trousers); meanwhile truckers try to catch some sleep in their cramped cabs, somehow managing to ignore the hellish clanging going on all around. It’s a 24-hour event and at night the whole scene, only lit by headlights and the occasional fire, takes on an unearthly air as men walking in front of headlights cast huge shadows in the fume-filled air.

I walked the gauntlet and, to my amazement, found the restaurant I was looking for to be very good. Sure, the power died every five minutes and the beer wasn’t cold, but the food was excellent. But as I walked back, the beer pleasantly numbing my senses, I thought back to my experiences around the ruined city and vowed to leave early in the morning, never to return. Old Fatehpur Sikri is paradise; new Fatehpur Sikri is hell.

Rajasthan

Jaipur

Written: 28 May 1998   

After a journey from Fatehpur Sikri that is best forgotten, I arrived in Jaipur. Like other cities in this part of India, Jaipur has a bad reputation for its rickshaw mafia, who will refuse to take you anywhere unless there’s a commission involved, but I managed to avoid this by getting dropped off at the main post office, ignoring the driver’s hotel recommendations and finding my own place.

I spent the rest of the day relaxing in the grounds of my hotel, the Evergreen, and trying to recover from yet another bout of bad guts. Overwhelmingly western in its clientele, the Evergreen seems to be a collecting point for all the weirdoes and freaks of the Rajasthan trail: dirty dreadlocks mingle with tattoos on bodies covered only by flimsy sarongs; ears display more rings than Saturn; and the talk round the breakfast table is of last night’s acid binge and how fucked up everyone was before they went to bed (and this below the sign declaring that drugs are not tolerated). I didn’t find it threatening, but it was a bit of a surprise to see such a large collection of alternative lifestylers in one place; it felt a little like Glastonbury, but without the dogs on string.

Having evacuated my unwell intestines as far as possible, I decided to tackle Jaipur. Fully aware that it is unfair to criticise a city when you’re feeling under the weather (which was itself a major concern, the heat wave continuing unabated) I went in with an open mind, and I didn’t find it as bad as I’d imagined it might be after the stresses of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri. But then again I hardly left myself open for the average con man; I think I’m developing a pretty thick skin.

The Sights of Jaipur

Jaipur is a shopper’s paradise, which rules me out; given the choice between shopping for souvenirs and watching paint dry, I’d go for the paint because it’s less tiring. But that’s where Jaipur’s main tout scene hangs out, enticing tourists into carpet emporiums, jewellery shops and clothes stalls, and I simply clammed up whenever anybody mentioned buying anything. I also avoided the rickshaws and walked everywhere, mainly for the practical reason that a jittery ride in a three-wheel nightmare would have stirred up a tender colon that didn’t need any more excitement, so I found Jaipur fairly pleasant as far as the legendary touts went.

It still isn’t the most wonderful place I’ve been, but the sights are worth stopping off for, seeing as Jaipur is en route south; I wouldn’t go out of my way for them, though. Top of the heap is the Jantar Mantar, an odd collection of huge astronomical instruments built in stone by the founder of Jaipur, Maharaja Swai Jai Singh, from 1728 onwards. It’s reminiscent of those wonderful paintings of the masters of early astronomy, with their huge sundials and large azimuth-measuring machines, and even in the intense heat it conjures up plenty of night-sky images. Without some kind of guide it appears as some sort of huge children’s playground – there’s a 90 ft sundial dominating the proceedings that looks for all the world like a giant slide – so I bought a book from a local drinks stand and set off to explore.

The book proved interesting in its own right; the standard of its grammar and spelling was nothing short of appalling, and served to confuse the hell out of me despite my fairly sound grounding in basic astrophysics. The preface read as follows (with all spellings faithfully reproduced):

From long gack there is no book which can help to the tourists to understand Astronomical Instruments there self, by help of this book. One can see and understand every thing (all the instruments).

Intrigued, I read on, trying to understand the basic definitions given in the text, such as:

Equinox: The bigger circle of the ecliptic interects the bigger circle of the celestial equartor.

I was learning new and strange terms by the dozen: ‘heavely bodies’ rotated round the ‘glob’, and one instrument was useful ‘to find out the aware of the fact that, the Jaipur time is observed solar system’. I thoroughly enjoyed trying to piece together any sense from Ashok Choudhary’s epic guidebook (‘He knows English French & German languages’, according to the preface) and I hope I can pick up some of his other tomes; I idly wondered whether he’d had anything to do with the crazy commentary in the planetarium in Hyderabad...

Next to the Jantar Mantar is the City Palace and Museum, with an entry charge of Rs70 plus Rs50 for a camera, but despite this extortion it’s nothing on George’s collection in Gwalior. Palace guards witter on about irrelevancies and demand baksheesh, underemployed boutique owners try to sell you carpets and trinkets, and the only display which caught my eye was a collection of ancient astronomical books written in the scratchy Arabic script associated with Islam; but it’s not a bad place to visit, and like every other Indian museum I have ever visited, it at least provides a place for the staff to sleep. In the corner was a man snoring gently into his cupped elbow; in yet another room a man in white kurta pyjamas nodded off on his plastic chair; even those who were animated enough to punch my ticket looked like they were fighting a losing battle with drooping eyelids. The entry fee doesn’t seem to sting so much when you consider that you’re providing a useful social service for tired museum attendants.

I rounded off my wanderings with a visit to the Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, which is a classic piece of flamboyant Rajasthani architecture that looks over the main street of the old city. This garishly pink five-storey façade, from where ladies of the court used to watch the world go by, is typical of Jaipur; the old city is known as the Pink City because most of the buildings are painted pink, an unusual choice of decor and one that I found particularly intriguing. The guidebooks rave about how beautifully the pink catches the sunset, but I wasn’t that convinced – I thought it looked a little tacky, to be honest, but it’s different, and in India, that’s quite an achievement.

Street Encounter

While wandering back through the pink streets, I stopped to watch a demonstration by the Bank Workers’ Union, whose members obviously put far more effort into their rallies than they ever do behind the counter, and that’s when I fell into conversation with a local student... or that’s what he told me he was. His second question after he’d ascertained my citizenship status was more of an indication of the state of play in Jaipur than anything I’d yet encountered. It was verging on the paranoid.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Why is it that most tourists I see here don’t want to talk to Indians?’

‘Ah!’ I thought, ‘so the tourists are biting back, are they?’ I decided to be candid.

‘Because most of the people your average tourist meets here are liars, commission merchants or simply after your money,’ I said. ‘And a lot of them pretend to be students,’ I added, purposely goading him to see what the response would be. His brow darkened.

‘So you lump me together with those people, do you?’ he said. ‘I am a student; how else would I be able to speak English?’

‘Are you telling me that only students can speak English here?’ I said. ‘What about all those bloody rickshaw drivers who take you off into the middle of nowhere only to dump you at a shop that’s miles from your destination? That’s the first thing a lot of tourists get to see in Jaipur, and it makes them trust nobody.’

‘The rickshaw drivers are uneducated,’ he said. ‘They get one tourist who gives them US$100 for a ride, and they realise it’s good money to keep doing it. But why does that mean you don’t trust me?’

‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘If I come across five people who try to rip me off, of course I’m going to be cagey about the sixth. What can you expect? A small minority are ruining the whole tourist thing for the lot of you.’

‘But why should tourists be rude? We are not all alike.’

‘Listen, I can go to almost any city in India and meet wonderful people who are genuine. Why should I bother to open myself to the touts in Jaipur? I’m not short of friendly Indians to talk to, you know. The country’s full of them, but Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur... you can keep it.’

‘But you still don’t believe me. I have no shop; I work in the telephone booth here, I see many tourists, but they don’t trust me.’

‘Well, blame it on your city. It’s not my fault. And I thought you said you were a student, not a telephone booth operator...’

And off he stomped, looking pretty annoyed. He had been getting quite worked up, as if he was blaming me for the tourist attitude here, but what could I say? Jaipur deserves its fate, if you ask me; maybe the legitimate operators will do something about it, but I doubt it. Like the man said, tourists who give US$100 for a rickshaw ride really screw it up for everyone, locals and tourists alike.

The weirdness continued as I returned to the Evergreen. Poked under my door was a photocopied leaflet proclaiming that the world was being prevented from entering the New Age of Human Harmony by the Dark Forces who were installing mind control devices throughout the world in the form of televisions, microwaves, computers and newspapers. For some reason this piece of well-articulated rubbish fitted in with Jaipur’s atmosphere of paranoia; I was paranoid of every movement in my belly, the people of the city were paranoid about the tourist attitude, and the tourists were paranoid of the Dark Forces.

I decided to leave as soon as I could. The feeling was getting infectious...

The Heat Wave

At this point it’s worth talking a bit more about the heat wave. Unseasonable and unwelcome, it has already claimed 136 lives, 86 of them in Rajasthan. The highest temperature recorded in the country so far has been 49.5°C, Delhi recently had its hottest May day on record, and when I passed through Bharatpur on the way from Fatehpur Sikri to Jaipur, the mercury was hovering around 49°C (120°F).

According to the paper (which also carried news of India’s first ever sex-change operation and a severe shortage of beer in Delhi) it isn’t just the northwest suffering; Orissa¹ is sweltering in temperatures of 48°C, and Chennai is up to 43°C, some seven degrees above normal. Coupled with the humidity down south, it must be unbearable; at least Rajasthan’s heat is dry.

Is it any wonder people are going off their rockers? It sounds like the Dark Forces and their microwave brain scanners are starting to win...

It was enough to make me hit the trail for Pushkar, despite the state of my intestines.

¹ I was to read a week later of 400 heat-related deaths in Orissa alone, 100 of those in one day.

Pushkar

Written: 2 June 1998   

Being ill is miserable at the best of times, but being ill on your own in a foreign country when the temperature’s pushing fifty is nightmarish. I decided I had to get out of Jaipur, despite a downturn in my condition, so I clenched my way down to Pushkar.

When you are well there is nothing quite as interesting as arriving in a new place; when you are ill there is nothing quite as depressing. My bus dropped me off in Ajmer, where I took a rickshaw across town to the bus to Pushkar. I didn’t bother to squabble with the rickshaw driver over his extortionate price of Rs20, and I told him to stop going on about taking his buggy all the way to Pushkar for Rs250, because I was taking the Rs5 bus, thank you very much. On arrival at Pushkar I grumpily told the waiting touts to get lost and headed for a hotel I’d been recommended, only 100m from the bus stand. (‘It’s at least a kilometre,’ said one boy with a push cart offering me a lift; I told him to get lost too. Being ill can make you brutal.)

Here I shut myself up in my single room (complete with air cooler, a good enough reason on its own to justify the journey south) and alternately ran to the toilet, drank rehydration salts and drifted off into disturbed waking dreams, my incredibly sore throat shaking me awake whenever I swallowed in my slumber. I abandoned all my plans, started a course of antibiotics and lay down to wait for an improvement. With serious diarrhoea that’s the only way: drink loads, squirt loads and do your time. I saw my carefully crafted plans of exploring Gujarat evaporating in smoke, but I didn’t care; in this state, all you want to do is stay put.

Luckily I had lots of books, even though one of the side effects of my illness was an inability to focus my left eye. This might have been the cough mixture – I had a mild bout of cold-like symptoms to coincide with my diarrhoea – which the man in the chemist had insisted wouldn’t make me drowsy, but which patently did. I was hungry, but alive; when I lay on my back, my stomach curved inwards towards my spine, reminding me with unnecessary clarity of TV pictures of Ethiopia.

I thought of the Bada Valley, I thought of Rantepao, I thought of Singapore, I thought of Puri, I thought of Hampi, I thought of the Bhopal-Gorakhpur train, I thought of Annapurna, and I thought that if all else failed I could write a book called Colourful Places in Which to be Ill. But as per usual it was simply a matter of willpower; I didn’t have a temperature so it wasn’t malaria, and from past experience I knew I’d be all right before a few days had disappeared. I just had to shit it out.

Lazing in Pushkar

My hotel at Pushkar, the Peacock, was quite beautiful. The rather pleasant rooms were centred round a courtyard containing a garden and a swimming pool (complete with water slide), and hotel’s supply of black tea and plain toast provided me with ample rejuvenation without me having to move more than ten feet from my room and its adjoining ablutions. I read Theroux, Forster and Stephen Hawking (my left eye having sorted itself out); I wore shorts and bare torso without feeling rude; and I vowed to do nothing until my strength was up.

All the local energy was taken up by the hotel’s population of black-faced monkeys. Bigger than any monkeys I had seen so far, the Peacock’s resident troupe were notable not so much for their mischievous shenanigans as for their effect on the staff. Monkeys would run across the lawn and up a tree, knocking something over in the process, and the staff would rush out from their habitual slumber and start to shout short, sharp admonitions into the branches. The monkeys would take not a blind bit of notice, and after a couple of minutes it was hard to tell who were the troublemakers here; certainly the staff managed to make as much noise as the simian pests, if not more.

This is a classic Indian attitude. Where the Chinese simply eat everything that moves and people like George shoot and stuff them, the stereotypical Indian either kills them for money (witness the failure of the Project Tiger protection scheme which, through corruption and poaching, has actually seen a drop in tiger population in India’s National Parks) or taunts them. In Darjeeling, the director of the snow leopard sanctuary, a division of the zoo there, said it was a conscious decision to make the snow leopard and red panda enclosures a separate area from the zoo with a separate entrance, because the treatment of the animals in the main zoo by Indian visitors would be completely destructive to the sanctuary’s aims. He didn’t hold back; he said Indians weren’t welcome in the snow leopard sanctuary, and that in general Indian attitudes towards animals were terrible. Not surprisingly it is a male problem, there being some kind of bravado involved in taunting animals; women rarely get involved, and children simply follow their parents. It seems that Indian zoos are pretty dreadful places.

But in the Peacock the monkeys always won, and the staff would give up their grunting and go back to their siesta; what can you do about an animal that can climb a tree faster than a man can run? At least it meant the monkeys weren’t vicious, for which I was grateful after my experience in Gunung Rinjani.

The hotel was almost empty (a common occurrence in this, the off-season hit by ridiculous temperatures) and the only other people in the hotel were three couples; one couple (from northern England) sat in their own spot and eyed any other visitors suspiciously when they thought nobody was looking, and the other two failed to materialise for quite a while (because they were also ill, I was to discover later). Normally this would have made me lonely or bold, but for once I was grateful for the solitude; I sat in splendid isolation, enjoying the feeling of strength ebbing back into my body. I didn’t feel good, but I felt improved, and sometimes that’s enough.

While I lounged, a thin, wiry man planted grass cuttings in the sandy lawn, worn bare by the heat and the effect of people. His spine was a series of knots, sitting prone on his back like nodules on a baby dinosaur, and he slowly and methodically dug small troughs in the sand with a sharp metal instrument, putting in lines of grass before covering them up again. It was hot where he worked, but he hardly sweated at all, something I’ve noticed among the Indians during this heat wave; while I swim in my own juices, the locals manage no more than a faint film of perspiration (unless they’re fat and middle class, in which case they seem to sweat just like us westerners). My clothes get tidemarks while the locals shine in their garish colours and beautiful sarees; I suppose that acclimatisation is unavoidable when you’re born into this kind of environment, but I still marvel at their resilience.

On my second day I met the two more sociable couples in the hotel – Michael and Rachel from New Zealand, and Mark and Philippa from England – and swapped tales of illnesses. This gave us common ground and, still failing to meet the gaze of the third mysterious couple, we spent afternoons round the pool, sipping Coke and rehydration salts and swapping travellers’ tales.

Pushkar is a classic travellers’ destination. It has ghats around a holy lake, where a large LED screen welcomes you to ‘HOLEY PUSHKAR’ and warns you not to ‘WASH CLOTH, USE SOAP OR GARGLE IN THE LAKE’. Around the lake are restaurants, shops, pilgrims, cows and, in the heat wave, precious little activity or toutish behaviour. People are pretty friendly, and they’re certainly colourful; it’s a perfect place to unwind. Strict rules cover the city and especially the ghats; Pushkar is totally vegetarian and alcohol-free, even to the extent of banning eggs, and nefarious activities like wearing shoes, showing affection and baring your torso are strictly forbidden within 30 ft of the lake. This is hardly a drawback, though, as the main activity in Pushkar during the hot season centres around the hotels and their swimming pools, where wearing skimpy bikinis or brief shorts is tolerated and provides a surprising shock to the traveller who hasn’t seen a bare thigh for weeks.

While in Pushkar I did nothing of merit except eat, sleep, celebrate the return of my appetite and drop bits from my plans. I had hoped to explore more of Gujarat, the state to the south of Rajasthan, but I’ve realised that time is running out, and if I want to visit northwest India, I’m going to have to rush it if I want to see everything I originally included on my list. In this heat, rushing is evidently bad for the health, so I’ve pruned my original plan to just those places that I really want to see, and I’ll leave it at that. It will feel much more pleasant not to be careering round like an American in Paris; I feel I can (and should) allow myself to relax.

This sounds a little dictatorial when written down, but it’s the way I travel. I’m quite hard on myself because I want to see lots of things, experience lots of different environments and be constantly stimulated. The flip side of the coin is to settle down somewhere for a few weeks and to really get into local life, and this has its advantages too; I’ve found, though, that this sort of semi-settling is much better if you have a companion, someone to share everyday life with and someone to provide conversation and justification for staying put. On your own it can be bit lonely, but constant movement and stimulation prevent this; perhaps that’s why I have seen so much and find it hard to kick back on the beach.

In fact, illness and apathy are the only things that slow me down, one being a physical limitation and the other a mental one. And as my physical limitation faded in Pushkar, so my desire to continue exploring grew. So eventually I did just that.

Udaipur

Written: 5 June 1998   

Udaipur is known for its beautiful lake, its intricate palaces and its holy Hindu temples, but on arrival you could be forgiven for thinking that the locals have dumped all their chivalrous Rajput history in favour of that more modern example of suave sophistication, James Bond. Restaurants advertise video screens showing Bond movies, guidebooks allude to 007 in their descriptions, and travellers distinguish it from other palatial Rajasthani cities by the city’s new creed, for this is where Octopussy was filmed, and the locals are pretty keen to point this out.

This of course has little bearing on the real Udaipur experience. Dragging bags from an overnight bus into the twilight of 5am Udaipur, I certainly felt shaken but not stirred, and when the rickshaw drivers appeared I wished I had a licence to kill, but that was about as far as it went. For only the second time in my travels – the first being the journey from Bangkok to Chiang Mai – I thought I’d try taking sleeping pills, and the Valium I bought in Pushkar certainly did the trick, knocking me out for the entire drive down.

Unfortunately I was still in a drug-induced idiocy on arrival, and I blindly and gratefully followed an English couple whom I’d met on the bus, who guided me to a hotel where I managed to sleep off the effects of the pills. I was impressed by the power and effectiveness of the drug, but I don’t think I’ll be doing Valium again; it took a good 24 hours for me to get my eyelids back under control, and that’s scary when you don’t really know where you are.

Having shaken off the worst of my chemical slumber, I stuck my bleary head out of my hotel window and realised that my English guides had chosen well, for there, laid out in front of me, was not just another beautiful Rajasthani city, but a really special one; Udaipur is charming. Dominating the city is the ornate City Palace, and placid Lake Pichola contains two little islands, Jagmandir with its perfect domed edifice and Jagniwas with its far from ancient Lake Palace Hotel, one of the most luxurious and romantic hotels in India. The old city is hemmed in by an ancient fortified wall, and when the sun sets and the lights flicker on in the palaces, it’s a scene of picturesque perfection.

The City Palace

Of course, below this grand surface things aren’t always quite so beautiful. Take the City Palace: the current Maharana (as the rulers of Udaipur are called) still lives in one portion, which is closed to the public; two other areas have been turned into luxury hotels, so although they’re open to the likes of you and me, it’s only with the accompanying guilt/jealousy crossover that five-star hotels bring out in those unwilling or unable to fork out such riches; and the remainder makes up the museum.

One can only assume, though, that the latter is the least impressive quarter; from the outside it looks like it should be one of the most interesting palace experiences in India, but it’s not. The past masters of Udaipur obviously had excellent taste in exterior architecture – cupolas, wonderful carved towers, marble arches and so on – but incredibly odd taste in interior design. Back in Gwalior, George managed to demonstrate one side of the Indian aristocracy with his collection of frivolous idiocies, massively grandiose gestures and impressive works of art. The City Palace, however, shows another side to the aristocracy, one verging on the nouveau riche in terms of taste (if not reality). If George and his ancestors were to build their palaces in the modern age, they would be inventive and modernist in the way that the Louvre pyramids are; if the Maharajas of Udaipur were to do the same, they would be into shag-pile carpets and flock wallpaper.

The interior design feature that best sums this up is the mirrored room, and there are plenty of variations on this theme in the City Palace. Without exception they are hideous beyond measure, the architectural equivalent of shell suits. These days the mirrors are starting to go black at the corners, an inevitable consequence of humidity and a lack of maintenance, but even in their heyday they would have been tackier than the inside of a cheapskate fortune teller’s tent. As if to rub in the repugnance of the rooms, a number of the connecting corridors have marble floors and white tiled walls, bringing nothing to mind so much as a public toilet. I couldn’t believe that inside this beautiful building was such a display of appalling taste as this, and despite a few pleasant respites from this psychedelic disaster zone (such as the swimming room with wonderful views over the lake through its latticed walls) I left the palace with spots in front of my eyes and a strange desire to stare at a whitewashed wall for hours.

Luckily the streets of Udaipur are a good antidote. They’re the usual pilgrim town fare, with small winding trails leading down to weed-choked lake views, and hotels and restaurants crammed into every corner, each of them claiming that they are recommended by the Lonely Planet and mentioning, in passing, that they show Octopussy twice a day. In the peak season I can imagine central Udaipur being an absolute hellhole of white faces and people who find garish mirrored rooms tasteful, but when I was there it was dead, and much the better for it. The touts were non-existent, the streets more natural, the effect of tourism numbed by the heat. I liked the place, even if its rulers managed to offend my sense of the aesthetic.

The Monsoon Palace

In Udaipur my umbrella caused a sensation. I’ve had plenty of reactions before – mainly ones of open-mouthed amazement at the sight of a maroon umbrella of almost Indian garishness adorning a foreigner – but I’ve never experienced jealousy before. The locals wanted to examine my umbrella, to understand how the silvering worked in keeping the heat of the sun off me, and eventually they wanted to buy it; I had offers of three hundred, four hundred rupees, far more than I’d paid for it in Calcutta. I wondered why they didn’t seem to have umbrellas in Udaipur, though perhaps quality umbrellas are at a premium because the monsoon lasts for three months round these parts.

That’s why on the horizon there’s a huge ancient palace topping a mountain range; where the Lake Palace was the Maharaja’s winter abode, the Monsoon Palace was his summer hideout, commanding as it does amazing views of his domain. I fancied a stroll and set off one morning to conquer the peak.

It was an extremely long way in the ridiculous heat of this unseasonable Indian summer: five kilometres to the base of the hill and then a long series of switch-backs to the palace perched on the top. On the flat stretch of road between Udaipur and the hill I was hailed from a rickshaw and offered a free lift to just below the base of the mountain, and fully aware that this would involve some kind of sales scam, I hopped in, savouring the challenge; and indeed, my fellow passengers turned out to be art students who worked for a co-operative on the outskirts of town and which just happened to be on the road to the Monsoon Palace. I smiled sweetly, admired their pleasant work (mainly miniature paintings on silk and marble), feigned a polite interest and told them that I’d think about it on my long walk uphill and, if I wanted to buy anything, I’d pop back in on my way down. I knew this was simply procrastination and so did they, but it did mean I had time to think of a plan if I was to avoid the hard sell on the way back to town.

All thoughts of miniature paintings were soon banished by the desolation of the landscape. Udaipur is beautifully perched amid its lakes, but outside of this watery zone the scenery is arid and uninviting. I loved it; craggy hills burn in the sun, occasional trees bent crooked by the sun provide scant shade by the roadside, and tiny mud brick huts club together in settlements that must be unbearably hot. And as the heat haze shimmers above the scrubby bushes dotted on the sand, the Monsoon Palace sits above it all, elegant and strangely out of place in this desert environment.

When I finally arrived at the top I found the large green doors firmly bolted shut. This was not what I had expected; it was supposed to be open to the public, and bolted green doors are a bit of an impediment as far as exploration is concerned, but after walking for an hour and a half you grow bold, so I decided to investigate. I raised the big iron ring on the door and hammered for a bit, convinced that I could hear voices inside, and sure enough after a while a doddering old man creaked open the bolts and peered out.

‘Can I come in?’ I inquired in my best sycophantic voice, the one usually reserved for train reservation officers.

‘No,’ he said.

‘But I’ve just walked all the way from Udaipur, and it’s really hot,’ I whinged, screwing up my eyes in a pathetic attempt to look tired.

‘You’ve just walked from Udaipur?’ he said in the same way one might say, ‘You seriously like this music?’

‘OK,’ he continued, ‘you rest here for a minute, I’ll be back.’

Half an hour later I was still resting – I wasn’t going anywhere, after all – when the door opened and two flashy youths came out. They were obviously tourists, and I asked them if they’d been allowed inside.

‘Yes,’ said one of them. ‘It cost us twenty bucks.’

‘Twenty bucks?’ I cried. ‘You’re kidding!’

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Twenty whole rupees. It’s nice, though.’

‘Oh, rupees?’ I said. ‘I thought you meant American dollars...’

He just smiled. ‘No, twenty rupees. Bucks, rupees, same same.’

This was the first time I’d come across this particular Americanism, and it was odd. In their designer shades and western gear these two guys were obviously rich Indian tourists, but to call their currency ‘bucks’ seemed a little over the top. Whatever, the door was still open and another Indian was standing there about to close up, so I asked him how much to come inside. He looked me up and down and said, ‘Ten rupees. You get only half an hour, then you leave.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ I said, handing him a note before darting in the door.

The Monsoon Palace is now owned by the government, and it shows. Originally a stunningly picturesque piece of hilltop architecture, it’s now inhabited by more birds than humans, with the distinctive chalky smell of bird shit pervading every room and corridor. Plaster is peeling off the walls and remnants of coloured glass windows hint at its former Rajasthani glory, but in the end it’s just somewhere for the TV companies to stick their aerials, and the roof, from where the views of the desolate landscape are beautiful, is an eyesore of antennae supported by steel hawsers thoughtlessly cemented into the walls. One wall proclaims, ‘Navendra loves Anila,’ and another says, ‘I love you Ankita,’ and all the while the hot desert breeze ruffles through the open windows, blowing piles of old bird’s nests into the corners and flecking the remaining paint onto the floor. It’s faintly depressing; from below the place looks famously grand, but from inside it’s obviously just a shell.

I didn’t need my full half an hour, and I soon left to start the long walk down. It wasn’t long before I was sweating freely, and even under my maroon umbrella things were getting hot, but that’s when India saved the day yet again. Swooping down the road from the palace came two sparklingly clean white Ambassadors¹, and as they approached me the first one slowed down. The windows were blacked out so I couldn’t see a thing, but the heat played havoc with my imagination; I envisaged the rear window smoothly sliding down to reveal a beautiful blonde model complete with champagne on ice and an afternoon to kill, but nothing happened. I couldn’t see in and no windows slid down. It was a standoff, and I didn’t quite know what to think.

But the windscreen wasn’t blackened, so I poked my head over the bonnet and saw the Indian chauffeur gesturing me to the side door, and nodding vigorously I followed his orders; the door popped open, cold air rushed out and shocked my dripping cheeks and the two occupants in the rear seat squashed up to make room for me. In the lottery of life I’d scored another winner.

My kind saviours were three middle-aged men, dressed up in spotless white kurta pyjamas and looking like terribly important people. Their English was patchy and the chauffeur helped to translate, and between interested and heated discussions in Hindi they learned about my trip through India, my gratitude at their kind offer of a lift and how much I liked the Indian people. The car was beautifully clean, the air conditioner was a gift from heaven, and while driving through the cramped cow-ridden streets of Udaipur, I sensed the feeling of detachment that all rich Indians must feel; when you’re in a comfortable car and a chauffeur is driving, those dingy backstreets aren’t depressing, they’re a circus that you can watch but don’t have to suffer. The world becomes a movie and India becomes more than bearable, and the inquisitive stares of the locals through the blackened windows – beyond which they could see nothing but their own reflections – made me feel quite special. To my benefactors this was just a kind gesture, but to me it was a glimpse into another way of life, that of the rich Indian.

I thanked them profusely when they dropped me off in town, and they all eagerly shook my hand and wished me the best (a performance repeated by the occupants of the second limousine even though I hadn’t spoken to any of them); and all of a sudden I was back in the India I know and love, the one without air conditioning or soft suspension. I celebrated by pottering around, playing karom² with some locals on the street and checking out the various craft shops dotted around. But that night I experienced a side of Udaipur that can only be classed as magical.

The Lake Palace Hotel

I’d booked a table that night for dinner for three in the Lake Palace Hotel, the first hotel in the world to be built on a lake and one of the most amazing settings you could wish for; my dining partners were to be Phil and Alex, the couple I’d met on the bus, and we were to meet at 7pm at the Lake Palace ferry terminal. This gave me plenty of time to go on a cruise round the lake before my sumptuous dining experience, and I duly boarded the boat at six. If you think Udaipur is beautiful from the inside, it’s truly magnificent from the lake.

As I’ve mentioned before, Lake Pichola contains two islands, Jagniwas (which is now the Lake Palace Hotel) and Jagmandir. The tour took me round the lake, from where the City Palace really shows off its grandeur, and on to Jagmandir. Containing a picture-perfect Mughal garden with cupolas and graceful archways, the island is also home to the Jag Mandir palace, a beautifully symmetrical domed building that was said to have inspired aspects of the Taj Mahal, and which evokes a feeling of Indian perfection that would be hard to match anywhere else. The City Palace gleams through ornate lattice-work and the Lake Palace glitters behind a perfect archway, and as the sun goes down it casts an orange glow on the flock of huge bats that flies out onto the lake from the mainland, no doubt feeding on the swarms of insects coming out after the heat of the day. If one sight sums up the striking beauty of the Rajasthani aesthetic, it is Udaipur’s lake.

I was back on the Lake Palace jetty spot on seven, eagerly awaiting a culinary experience enhanced by one of the most perfect settings one could wish for. This being my birthday, I decided to ignore all concerns of budgets and exchange rates; I’ve met plenty of travellers who’ve said the expense of the Lake Palace was beyond them, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I had company lined up, I had the time and the money, and I was going to enjoy every second.

By half past seven I was beginning to wonder if one of my dinner partners had fallen ill. I’d bumped into them on their rented motorbike that afternoon and they’d got the times all correct, so what could be the problem? I thought back to the previous day, Alex’s birthday, when I had also booked a table for three and had arranged to meet them back at the hotel around four or five; but six o’clock had rolled by, then six-thirty, then seven, and I’d been kicking the walls by the time they rolled in at seven-thirty, but I just changed the booking, assuming it was a one-off. But waiting in the ferry terminal, I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one in this world who seemed to care about punctuality.

A pleasant Danish couple came and went, off for their own private romantic dinner for two, and still there was no sign of Phil and Alex; I figured it would be more pleasant to wait in the hotel bar, so I left a message with the porter and took the boat over to the hotel.

Even for someone numbed by two years of staying in hotels as part of a long-distant career, the Lake Palace Hotel is stunning. Little gardens with gambolling fountains and perfect herbaceous borders nestle between rows of white marble corridors, leading off to rooms whose sumptuousness I can but dream of; with prices starting at US$150 per night (and going much, much higher), I imagine they would indeed be special. The lobby is as perfect as a centre-page spread in Country Life and the bar is more conducive to decadent lounging than anywhere I’ve seen in India, so I settled down into a comfortable settee with a complimentary copy of Time magazine and an assurance by the Reservations Manager that everything would be fine, even if my friends were running very late.

By eight o’clock I was in danger of verging on the self-pitying. After all, the Lake Palace was one of my main reasons for visiting Udaipur in the first place, and having had the promise of conversation over dinner I was dismayed at being stood up. I felt dejected and rejected – is a phone call too much to ask when you’re over an hour late for a dinner appointment? – and in an environment like the Lake Palace, a place practically designed for couples and conversations, I felt was especially lonely. And that’s when my faith in human nature was totally restored.

Into the bar walked the Danish man I’d said hello to on the jetty. He knew I was waiting for friends, and he’d seen me tapping my heels and worrying, so he wandered over and said that if my friends weren’t turning up, I was more than welcome to join him and his girlfriend if I wanted. I could have kissed him; what a wonderful gesture. Of course, I accepted.

Brian and Lene were the perfect dinner companions. Interesting and interested, we talked our way through a sumptuous soup starter, ice-cold Kingfisher beer, a fiery chicken curry and more papads and nans than you could shake a stick at. They managed a dessert but I was bursting at the seams and settled for the decaffeinated coffee, an option I haven’t seen since Australia and which rounded off the meal perfectly. The waiters, immaculately turned out in white and red uniforms, were attentive and phenomenally polite, the quality of the spoken English was universally Oxonian, and in every way the experience lived up to my expectations. Through the glass walls of the dining room fairy lights illuminated the fountains as I paid the bill without thinking, even adding a well-earned ten per cent tip at the end.

Incidentally, halfway through the meal Phil and Alex appeared on the other side of the dining room’s glass wall, exploring the gardens. The first thing I noticed was that they hadn’t bothered to change from their everyday clothes; Phil looked untidy in shorts, thongs and ragged T-shirt, while Alex’s garb was simply plain (I had fished out my border-crossing clothes and looked pretty passable, while everyone else in the hotel looked as well turned out as you would expect in a high-class hotel). Nevertheless I waved to them to come in and eat, an hour and a half late though they were, and they acknowledged me and wandered off. That was the last I saw of them; they never came in to say hello, and they didn’t bother to tell me they’d decided not to eat there after all. I saw them the next morning, and apparently they thought it was ‘a bit too fancy, you know’. No, I didn’t know, but I held back from saying what I thought of them standing me up on my birthday, because there’s no point in wasting time on people whom you’ll never see again. Not surprisingly I didn’t exchange addresses with them, and for all I cared they could piss off back home to their world of poor manners and lack of taste. More fool them.

I did, however, exchange addresses with Brian and Lene, wishing them well for the rest of their four-week holiday in India. I reflected that out of miserable situations, good things often rise, but it taught me a lesson that I’ve learned again and again but seem unable to grasp fully: people are unreliable, and if you want something done, do it yourself. This is one of the reasons why I wonder if I’ll ever be able to travel with other people; there are so many people out that drive me nuts, and a fair few of them are travelling the world. Thank goodness that for every Phil and Alex there’s a Brian and Lene, or my faith in humanity would have evaporated a long time ago.

Oh, and just how much did this extravaganza of food and luxury cost me? I checked my bill later and found it was just under Rs700. That’s a shade over £10. Incredible, isn’t it; it makes the western excuse of ‘I can’t afford it’ as offensive as the rich Indian’s attitude at the Taj Mahal. Like I said, some people just don’t deserve to travel.

¹ The Ambassador is the most common car in India, and it’s as distinctive as a London cab.

² Karom is a game that’s also popular in Nepal. It’s a kind of finger pool played with draughts counters, where you flick the counters and try to knock others into pockets. It’s really entertaining to play, and it doesn’t require much effort, which is a distinct blessing in the pre-monsoonal heat.

Gujarat and Diu

Louis Armstrong

Written: 5 June 1998   

On Friday 5th, Louis Armstrong saved the day. I had tried to get a berth on the sleeper train south from Udaipur to Ahmedabad, but all I managed was a waiting list ticket; the last time that happened was back in Siliguri, and I really didn’t fancy having to squirm my way into some idiot middle manager’s good books just to get a reservation. Even so I idly asked about the VIP quota, and was told to visit the Area Manager, who referred me back to the Ticket Inspector, who eventually referred me back to the original ticket office. I decided to stuff the railway and get the bus, and joined my final queue for a refund.

When I got to the front of the queue there was nobody at the window, but hanging out at the back reading a list of computer printouts was a big, burly black man who looked exactly like an Indian version of King Louis. He saw me looking dejected at the window, came over, looked at my ticket and said in a deep, throaty voice, ‘No problem, sir, I am on that train. You just turn up and I will find you a place.’

‘You will?’ I asked, wondering if this would turn out to be an expensive exercise.

‘I am the conductor on that train,’ he winked, and turned back to his printouts. Even if he was setting me up for a major baksheesh kick, I felt he deserved to be taken at face value, and nine hours later I was waiting on the platform, wondering if I was going to be spending the night propped up in the toilet, nodding off on someone else’s shoulder.

But Louis was a man of his word. I spotted him holding court on the platform, went over and gave him my ticket, and he said, ‘I remember, from this morning. Berth six, that coach over there, OK?’ As he said ‘OK’ he flashed me a smile, and I wondered for a fleeting moment how much this was going to cost me; I would have to pay for a conversion from waiting list to berth anyway, and it would be a perfect opportunity for rubbing thumb and forefinger together in a meaningful way. Still, I figured he would deserve it.

The train pulled out only an hour late, and I soon discovered that not only was I in a separate compartment labelled ‘Ladies Only’ with lockable doors and only six berths, but I was in there with five other passengers who’d had similar experiences; they’d had no booking but had also ended up with a berth. I told them about Louis and it turned out that he had saved us all: one westerner, two Indians by birth who had spent their whole lives abroad and were on their first visit back to their homeland, and three obviously influential Indian upper middle class family members. I felt privileged and somewhat relieved; if there was to be any baksheesh, we would all have to pay.

Ten minutes into the journey Louis appeared at the door, beaming. He sat down in an empty space and boomed, ‘No charge for these berths for you; I like to help you all.’ He then proceeded to give money – presumably change – to the middle class Indian man, and idly chatted in Urdu for a while (in which all the others were fluent, the overseas Indians having learned it from their parents). Then he asked me a few politely interested census questions in English, said he was really happy to have been of help, and left us to sleep our way to Ahmedabad.

And as I drifted off I thought to myself, what a wonderful world.

Bhavnagar

Written: 8 June 1998   

‘Welcome to the city of Bhavnagar,’ said the man on the train as he hopped off, picking up his son whom he’d been trying to wake up for the last ten minutes but with little success. I’d changed trains in Ahmedabad, staying long enough only to admire the fast food joint at the station (the first I’d seen since the Wimpy in Bangalore), and had wasted no time in heading even further south. This is a new state, Gujarat, and I didn’t want my opinions to be tainted by the industrial black hole of its capital.

Bhavnagar is notable for nothing (at least, as far as the visitor to India is concerned). I decided to stay there as a base from which to visit the ship-breaking yard of Alang, some 50km to the southeast, but Bhavnagar reminded me not only of the delights of travelling in a rarely visited state in the off-season, but also of the main reason for my enjoyment of India: the people. I have come across wonderfully friendly pockets in India – Hyderabad, Thanjavur, Bijapur et al – but Bhavnagar wins hands down as the friendliest place I have been. English was almost non-existent beyond pidgin greetings, but communication doesn’t have to be in tongues; people ran up to me to shake my hand and to try to find out what I was doing here in India, children shouted out, ‘ElloElloEllo!’ for five minutes after I’d passed, and even the old men squatting on the side of the road smiled back with toothy grins as I greeted them (a rare occurrence: even in the friendliest places the older generation, those who remember British rule, tend to be too reserved or resentful to smile at foreigners). The man on the train had been the tip of an iceberg of warm generosity.

On the Saturday afternoon that I arrived, I decided to try to meet the locals. The best way to do this in India is to mind your own business, so I found my way to the central park, sat down in the shade of a tree and started reading a book. Sure enough within five minutes I had a crowd of maybe twenty young men goggling at me, gawping at the maps and pictures in my guidebook and listening in uncomprehending awe as I described my trip with hand signs and city names. After half an hour of this entertainment (tiring for me, riveting for them) I wandered over to the other side of the park, and as I was about to leave to go for a siesta, I spotted a group of old and middle-aged men under a neem tree, yelling and screaming like school children at recess. I just had to go and take a look.

They welcomed me into their group with smiles and invitations to sit down; not one of them had any English beyond the incredibly basic, but this didn’t matter. The object of their fascination was a game they seemed to call Aman Chache¹ which I will describe here in the same way that a North Carolinan might describe chess; after hours of watching I still had no idea of even the most basic rules of the game. But it was fascinating to watch...

Aman Chache (or Chopat)

Under the greenery of the neem² is a large square piece of sackcloth, on which is drawn a large plus-sign, each arm of which is divided into three squares across and eight squares along; three of these squares have Xs in them. There are four teams of four men each (it’s definitely a game for the boys), each team sitting or squatting along one side of the large sack cloth. Four game pieces are distributed to each team – the four team colours being red, green, black and white – with each piece made out of wood in the shape of a large, very blunt bullet. To complete the set is the shell of half a coconut and six small sea shells of the variety that are roughly oval in shape, with smooth white backs and evil slits in the other side, lined with ridges that under a magnifying glass would remind you of a shark’s mouth.

Each person takes it in turn to throw the six shells, which land jaw-side up, or smooth side up; by counting the number of jaws you get a number from one to six (so the shells do exactly the same job as a conventional die). And there my understanding of the game evaporates.

Some numbers are special, some not so special, but I couldn’t discern a pattern. Sometimes pieces are moved, sometimes not, but I couldn’t discern a pattern. Sometimes pieces are turned onto their sides, sometimes onto their heads, but I couldn’t discern a pattern. Sometimes pieces are taken, sometimes they are added to the board, but I couldn’t discern a pattern. And eventually someone wins, but even in that I couldn’t discern a pattern. ‘This an ancient Indian game,’ was how one spectator explained the rules; funnily enough this made everything quite clear.

But it wasn’t the game so much as the people who were fascinating to me. Sitting and standing round the board was the most assorted collection of Indian men you could ever hope to see. On one corner was a gaunt Muslim with his long chin beard, no moustache and white cap fitted over his short hair; he concentrated hard on the game, seeming serious but ever willing to join in the jokes and laugh along with everyone else. Opposite him was a man with such an incredibly hooked nose it made his moustache look like a furry caterpillar trapped between his upper lip and his nostrils. Just along from him was an evidently well-educated man who analysed the game, provided a running commentary on every move and tactic and, when he threw the shells, twisted his wrist in such a flourish that it didn’t really matter whether the throw was good or bad, because it looked so stylish; even taking other pieces was a display, as he smashed the piece taken with the victorious piece, sending the unfortunate one careening off into the dust.

Dotted about were four clowns who spent most of the game throwing stones at each other, pretending to get furious with each other and, on the point of throwing punches, collapsing into huge grins and belly laughs, dragging everyone else with them into their boyish humour. I imagined their conversations were along the lines of:

‘You hit me first.’

‘Didn’t.’

‘Did too, he saw it.’

‘You’re mad, mad as a monkey.’

‘Who are you calling a monkey?’

‘You, mad man.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well you’re just as crazy...’

The others kept nudging me, pointing at them and tapping the sides of their heads. Everyone loved it.

And all the while the men fished out beedis from their top pockets³, filling the air with acrid blue smoke that added a certain mysticism to the event, a ritual only matched by the frequent chai breaks and passing round of the cold water. After four hours of this amazing entertainment I had to leave to eat something, but I would return the next day on my way back from Alang, and I would again be beckoned over, invited to sit down, plied with chai and made to feel utterly welcome once again. I sent them copies of the pictures I took – which they thrilled to, posing like adult kids – and I hope they give them as much pleasure as they did me.

Elsewhere in Bhavnagar...

When I was there, Bhavnagar had all the fun of the fair, literally. Dominating the dried-up tank in the centre of town was a large Big Wheel, flanked by lethal looking contraptions designed to fling you around at gravitational forces beyond the healthy. This was an opportunity too good to miss; a real Indian fun fair, totally free of western influence and teeming with cultural sights and sounds that would make the rides themselves almost irrelevant. I eagerly paid my Rs2 entry fee and slipped quietly into the bright lights and noise of the dangerously clanking machinery.

I didn’t last long. Each ride was Rs5 a go, so I headed straight for the boldest ride of the lot, the Big Wheel. Creaking tremulously, it started up with eight of us dotted around the huge wheel – business was not exactly booming at the fair, to be honest – and although the ride wasn’t that thrilling on paper, my heart started beating pretty fast, because there isn’t any such thing as health and safety in India. Realising that perhaps the rides weren’t quite my cup of chai, I stumbled through the exit gate into the throng.

I was followed by one of the boys off the ride. Latching on to me, he tugged at my arm and said, ‘Dollar!’ I told him to bugger off. ‘Rupees!’ he continued, and I told him to bugger off. ‘Paise!’ he ventured, and when I told him to bugger off for the third time he neatly summed up his command of the English language by sticking the needle in the groove marked ‘Dollar! Rupees! Paise!’ and following me with his stuck-record mantra cutting through the noise. I tried another ride, a seriously spinning set of two-person cars that ensured the little Indian boy who ended up in my car couldn’t avoid being flung into the spleen of the funny white man next to him. He thoroughly enjoyed himself, but I felt pretty damn queasy afterwards and went for a wander round the attractions to clear my head, still accompanied by cries of ‘Dollar! Rupees! Paise!’

The fair was small but was obviously a focus for the single young men and women of Bhavnagar; to put it bluntly, it was the Indian equivalent of the pick-up joint. Stunningly crafted costumes adorned beautiful young women as they stuck together in giggling packs, while strangely out-dated young men in teddy boy haircuts and mundane clothes adored themselves in the vain hope that the women would follow their example. But was it a vain hope? Judging by the way the girls enjoyed this primitive display of male strutting, the course of true love can obviously still run smooth even if one half of the couple has all the charisma of a latter-day Elvis.

When my head had stopped spinning and the money mantra had drifted into the background noise⁴ I started off for home, but on the way I met a very friendly couple of young men on their incredibly cool moped who, after opening the conversation with the somewhat confusing ‘You want woman for sex?’ and an inquiry into whether I had any alcohol (Gujarat being a dry state), turned out to be as polite and interesting as the rest of Bhavnagar. They offered me a lift on their bike back to my hotel, which I took, and I soon found myself being paraded in front of their friends at the local Hindi tape stall, where I tactfully didn’t tell them exactly what I thought of Hindi pop, though I think they probably got the message. We all laughed, they took me back home and I fell into a deep, contented sleep.

¹ I’ve wondered for ages what on earth this game could be, and I haven’t been able to find any references to Aman Chache on the Web, but Nutan Mehta kindly contacted me via my Guestbook with the following information. ‘I am from Bhavnagar, residing in the US for the past forty-plus years,’ he writes. ‘The game you described has another name called “chopat”. “Cho” is a conjunctive like “quattro” for “four”, and “pat” is “plane” or “area”, thus “four-plane”. I think the game parcheesi is very close to chopat. The shells are known as cowry shells. I used to collect them as a boy. It’s not just a street game but was played in many homes. My grandma was crazy about it.’ Thank you so much, Nutan; I really appreciate you getting in touch, and it’s helped me track down an entry in Wikipedia on the subject, which explains the rules. That sound you can hear is the penny dropping...

² A fascinating and typically Indian tree, the neem is not just used for shading games of Aman Chache. Its leaves contain a mild poison that kills bacteria but doesn’t harm humans in very small doses, and as a result neem extract has been used as a kind of toothpaste in India for hundreds of years. Smearing neem on your teeth kills the bacteria that cause tooth decay, thus preserving your teeth so you can chew pan and really screw up the enamel...

³ The Indian top pocket in the ubiquitous Indian shirt is the equivalent of bank, corner shop, handbag and personal organiser all rolled into one. Beedi packets sit next to rolls of bank notes, mixed up with addresses, tickets, receipts and normally some little sweets to suck on. It makes some men look positively Amazonian with this huge bulge on their left breast, but it’s amazing what you can fit in an Indian top pocket.

⁴ Which included lots of hissing. Indians get each other’s attention by hissing instead of yelling, so every time you walk through a bazaar or a street where people want to talk to you, the air fills with ‘Tsss! Tsss!’ and you have to quell the western irritation that comes with being treated like a dog rather than a human. It’s not rude, though, it’s just another cultural difference, but it’s one that takes quite a bit of getting used to.

Alang

Written: 7 June 1998   

Wrecker’s yards, where cars go to die, are sad places. With twin headlights, a grinning radiator grille and a smiling curve to the bumper, your average car looks human, whether it’s the frog-eyed bewilderment of the VW Beetle, the blockheaded bouncer look of the Volvo, the cute innocence of the Mini or the slit-eyed sophistication of the Ferrari. Stacks of rusting and half-dismantled cars look depressing because we personify them, subconsciously succumbing to images of retirement homes, mass graves and the inevitability of death. I should know; I spent plenty of time in Australia searching for bits to make my car, Oz, king of the road.

What about ships, though? With their proud bows and blunt sterns they’re hard to associate with living creatures, let alone humans. Ships are sleek and ships are always female, but despite man’s long history of glorifying and waxing lyrical about boats and the sea, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to The Old Man and the Sea, they’re less human than vessel. The only personality I associated with Zeke – the yacht in which I sailed to French Polynesia – was that of gaoler, and despite the curves of the QE II and the gushing success of Titanic, ships aren’t people, they’re machines; that’s why Herbie and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang were cars, not boats.

But try telling that to someone who visits Alang. Stretching along the west coast of the Gulf of Camray some 50km southeast of Bhavnagar, Alang is the biggest ship-breaking yard in the world, and it has to be seen to be believed. Official statistics are hard to come by where Alang is concerned, not just because of the tendency of the locals to make things up, but because Alang has been the centre of human rights issues for some time and the government is more than a little sensitive about the whole thing.

However, gleaning what information I could from the local chai shop owners, I discovered the following. Alang consists of 400 breaker’s yards (known as platforms) where somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 workers dismantle ships by hand. An average ship has 300 people working on it at any one time, who take two months to break the ship down completely. The whole complex breaks about 1500 ships per year, and when I say ‘ships’ I mean everything from supertankers and war ships to car ferries and container ships. The statistics are impressive.

Getting to Alang

Because the working conditions are appalling and safety levels are laughably non-existent, Alang is a major draw for the poor of India who are desperate for a job, any job. People from Orissa and Bihar, two of the poorest states, make up a large percentage of the workers, but there are people from everywhere from Tamil Nadu to Nepal. I was waiting for the bus in Bhavnagar on the morning of Sunday 7th June – I took the phrase ‘it’s difficult to reach by bus, so take a taxi for the day’ in my guidebook as a personal challenge, especially as there were four or five buses each way per day – and while I was trying to work out the bus timetable a sadhu wandered up to me, saffron clad and clutching a bag and a plastic container half full of what looked like month-old yoghurt. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘Alang,’ I replied. ‘To see the ships.’

‘So am I,’ he said. ‘I’m going to start work there.’

We chatted for a bit – his English was pretty good – and eventually the right bus pulled in and we hopped on. An hour and a half later we were sipping chai¹ in Alang, looking out over the platforms where the ships lay in various stages of disarray.

The word ‘platform’ when applied to Alang is a euphemism; the platforms are simply beach. When a new ship is about to be broken up, the beach in the relevant yard is totally cleaned, even down to the last nut and bolt (nothing is wasted in this recycling operation), and then the ship is driven straight at the beach at breakneck speed so that it quite literally beaches itself. This part is finely tuned and has been done so many times that the ships are rarely more than a few metres off the desired position, which is a relief when you think of what would happen if they applied Indian bus logic to beaching a supertanker.

Alang is a suitable place for such crazy antics because it has a pretty eccentric tidal system. The tide is high only twice a month, which is when the sea covers the yards and new ships are beached; then for two weeks at a time the tide recedes, leaving the ships out of the water and easy to work on. And what work it is; everything that is detachable that can be sold is removed from the inside, all the engines are gutted and removed and then the ship’s body itself is dismantled, chunk by chunk. The road into town is lined with large warehouses stacked high with doors, lathes, engine parts, beds, entire kitchen ranges, life jackets and plenty of other salvaged jetsam; you name it, if you can find it on a ship then you can buy it cheap in Alang. Most of the bits are trucked straight out to customers, but there’s plenty left over for the high street stores.

The sight of a beached ship with half its front removed is both awesome and gruesome, because despite the lack of humanity in a fully intact ship, when it’s sitting there with its guts hanging out it’s hard not to pity the poor thing. It might be pity in the sense that we pity moth-eaten teddy bears or unlucky cartoon characters, but the sheer immensity of the beasts makes such pity harrowing.

I saw destroyers losing their final battle against the blow torch and hacksaw, I saw container ships sagging into the sand as the P&O signs were pulled down, I saw roll-on roll-off ferries rolling over and dying; even without an obvious face to each ship, it was slightly funereal.

But the appeal of Alang is also scientific. The whole place is like a huge, lifelike book of cross-section drawings, a real-life lesson in how the engines fit into a supertanker, how those millions of air vents and electricity conduits mesh together inside the hull of a navy ship, and how much of a ship is crammed with gear and how much is just empty space. In the West we are familiar with yards that make ships but not those that break them, and you don’t make a ship from bow to stern, you make it in parts; the hull is built first, then the structural innards, and then the pleasantries of furnishing. In Alang it’s a horizontal destruction irrespective of what order the insides were put in, and as such it’s a unique sight.

Visit to the Ashram

I was impressed by the view from the chai shop, but what I really wanted to do was to get inside a yard and nose around; I wasn’t stupid enough to want to climb around on a half-deconstructed ship, but some close-up views would have been great. My new-found friend said there would be plenty of time to worry about getting permission from the Port Officer later; first, it was time to visit his ashram.

This was an opportunity too good to miss. I’ve managed to avoid India’s ashrams totally so far, and the thought of seeing one in such a godforsaken place as Alang was intriguing. We tootled along the road, past yard after yard and ship after ship, and soon ended up at the Siva ashram of the Gopnath Temple, a ramshackle but friendly complex surrounding yet another Hindu temple tucked away from the main coast road. Inside were other sadhus sitting cross-legged on some mats, and so we joined them.

I’ve often wondered what makes sadhus tick, and my visit to Gopnath confirmed my suspicions: they’re a bunch of stoners. The man who was introduced to me as the big cheese at Gopnath ashram was puffing away on a chillum packed with charas (that’s a pipe packed with marijuana), and as we rolled up he offered it to me.

I declined because it was obvious that Alang was going to be fascinating enough without chemical aid and I didn’t want to get memory loss, but he packed another one and passed it round the circle, everybody inhaling right down to their toes except for me and a couple of guys who were having their palms read.

Five minutes later they were buggered but very hospitable, inviting me to dinner that night (which I also declined because I’d be back in Bhavnagar) and letting me take their pictures, as long as I promised to send them copies (which I did). But I wanted to see the ships, so I said goodbye to my now inert friend, who had decided to put off his job-hunting until four o’clock (though, come to think of it, he didn’t say which day), and strolled back to the surf.

The Yards of Alang

I had previously met a few westerners who had visited Alang, and their advice had been not only to avoid taking pictures, but to leave my camera at home; unauthorised photography was not tolerated and would result in the removal of your film and undoubtedly a big baksheesh bill. I’d brought my camera anyway, and was mighty glad that I had; possibly the fact that it was Sunday made a difference, or the fact that it was high tide and the ships were being smacked by waves, but there were no workers to be seen, just a few lazing gate keepers, and quite a few of them let me in to wander among the guts of ships from all over the world. Only one of them asked for anything – two Cokes, which I didn’t bother to buy him seeing as lots of other places weren’t asking for a thing – and another bloke took a fancy to my biro (which he duly pinched) but there were no officials, no baksheesh issues and no problems with taking photos.

So I took ’em. The hotel man would later say that I had been very lucky being able to take photos – most tourists are apparently stopped and denied permission – and I would later meet a woman who had been accosted by a policeman with no badge, no gun and no proof of status except for his uniform (which looked suspiciously like a bus conductor’s) who tried to charge her for her camera. I was lucky indeed; my experience was far from negative.

The yards were surprisingly clean; I had imagined oil slicks three feet deep and piles of rusting metal clogging up the environment. In reality the sea was fairly blue (inevitably it’s not going to be mineral water round a ship breaking yard) and the beach was recognisable as sand, though I recalled that most of the objections to Alang from the international community were over working conditions rather than environmental concerns. Whatever the case, it’s a good example of western hypocrisy because the ships keep coming, whatever the issues; dozens of ships were floating offshore, waiting their turn, looking well-used and battered in the way that only old ships can. For a fleeting moment I thought of homes for the elderly and waiting for God, but only for a moment. Ships aren’t human, OK?

Cricket Among the Ships

The inhabitants of Alang are, though, and they’re also incredibly friendly. As I wandered past the yards and admired the workers’ slums leaning against each other, I smiled and got smiles back, I wobbled my head and got wobbling heads in return, and I waved and got raised palms for my trouble. And halfway back to the bus stand I came across a handful of boys playing cricket across the main road – steadfastly ignoring trucks and cycles as they turfed up the wicket – and they insisted that I join in.

I must have played for a good hour, batting and bowling my way into the history books. I was wearing my bush hat so I became ‘Shane Warne’ to the locals, and one of the boys who was a pretty good batsman became ‘Sachin Tendulkar’. We drew a crowd and I drew on skills not used since school, but eventually it drew to an end, the heat killing my energy, ruining my spin and reminding me that I had to get back to Bhavnagar before I was stuck here forever. The people might be wonderful, but Alang isn’t the sort of place you want to be stranded in.

Finally, my Bhavnagar hotel just served to underline how friendly the area is. The previous night I’d dropped my bag onto a marble table and the bloody thing had come loose from the wall, smashing on the ground and shattering; even the Rolling Stones would have been impressed by my ability to ruin a hotel room so comprehensively. I assumed the reaction would turn into a barely restrained discussion on how much I would have to pay, but what was the reaction in Bhavnagar? ‘I am sorry, sir, would you like to have a different room?’

I was gobsmacked, and hardly wanted to leave.

¹ This is a different act depending on where you are sipping it. Normally chai is served in a glass, either in a small full glass or a large half-full glass, in which case you just drink it normally. If you’re served chai in a cup and shallow saucer, you should pour the chai into the saucer and drink the chai from the saucer. Finally (and this is more common in the south) if you are served chai in a cup and deep saucer, you should pour the chai into the saucer, then pour it back into the cup, and drink from the cup; this is to mix in the sugar that’s sitting idly on the bottom, so if you don’t like your chai sweet you don’t pour it and mix it up. Oh, and ‘service tea’ is the name for the way we drink it in England, with separate milk and a teapot, but that’s service tea, not chai. Chai is to tea what McDonald’s is to haute cuisine... except chai tastes great!

Palitana

Written: 9 June 1998   

So you want to build a temple? That makes sense. So you want people to come to your temple? That makes sense too. So you find a hill towering 600m above the dry scrubland of the Gujarat peninsula and stick your temple right on the top in the most inaccessible point of all, and then you build a 3000-step staircase for your flock to climb? On the surface, that appears to make no sense at all, but if you look at the world through the eyes of the Jains, it all starts to fall into place.

Jains in India number about 4.5 million, which is a relatively small number when you consider that the religion originated here at about the same time as Buddhism (500 BC). But take a trip to Palitana and you’d never know that Jainism is one of India’s minor religions, because the sheer scale of achievement on top of this hill is staggering.

If you think that intentionally building your temples in the middle of nowhere is a strange thing to do, then it would appear to be bordering on the insane to build a whole hilltop of 863 intricate temples in such a faraway place, but that’s precisely what the Jains did at Palitana, where the Place of Victory stands atop a huge hill in the plains. They did a similar job again at Junagadh, also in Gujarat, where there are 10,000 steps and even more temples, but Palitana was on my way south from Bhavnagar to Diu, so I decided to see for myself what drove these people to create so many temples in such an inaccessible location.

These were my thoughts as I dumped my bags and took a rickshaw out to the base of the steps, but whatever I was thinking about the Jains and their amazing architectural extremes, it’s almost as if their gods¹ were listening. From the second I stepped into the rickshaw to my arrival at the temple complex, it’s as if they did everything in their power to dissuade me from getting there, though perhaps they were simply demonstrating their belief that you have to put in the effort to get close to enlightenment. Whatever, as I headed out towards the hill of temples, it felt as if they were in control rather than me...

No Pain, No Gain

It started with the rain, a severe tropical downpour that flooded the streets, shot sideways into the rickshaw cab and soaked me to the skin. It stopped as I arrived, but the stone steps leading up to the temples (which are too far away to be seen from the bottom) were now like a skating rink. In an attempt not to offend the Jain religion I had left all my leather items behind, so I had no sun hat and no leather boots, just my umbrella and a pair of flimsy flip-flops. My flip-flops had absolutely no grip, especially on wet marble, which only helped to add to the fun.

Then the wind got up and decided to have a go. I barely managed to put down my umbrella in time as the few hardy trees lining the staircase bent double, clouds flew across the sky like impatient commuters on the motorway, and flicks of rain stung my eyes. Five minutes up the track and I had a throbbing headache from the wind battering my undefended ears.

As if these elemental displays weren’t enough, just before the halfway mark I felt a familiar stirring in my lower gut: diarrhoea. It would turn out to be a mild bout, lasting for only the rest of that day, but I couldn’t quite believe the timing; things were beginning to get worryingly difficult. I idly wondered what else the tirthankars would demand. Blood, perhaps?

They got blood soon after my guts started jumping about. Turning to wave at a friendly family who were sitting on the side of the stairs taking a break, I managed to stub my big toe on a marble step. The hard stone ripped a sizable hole in the end of my toe, stinging enough to elicit the mad hopping effect more normally associated with painful bangs to the head, and when the throbbing had subsided to a bearable level I saw that it was pretty nasty; a flap of skin hung loosely over a round hole, and it really hurt... and this in flip-flops, too, where all manner of grot and grime could infect the wound. I vowed to go on; smiling through adversity is a good trait in every religion, and I decided to show the tirthankars that I was worthy.

On the way I passed plenty of other struggling pilgrims², but they all seemed to be going downhill. Most sensible people make the ascent in the morning before the heat of the midday sun, but my schedule had seen me on a bus all morning, and I’d set off just after lunch. Those coming down, apart from saying, ‘You too late, very hot,’ all the time, were delightful, and most of them were only too happy to say hello and pass the time of day. One guy pressed Rs1.25 into my hand as he passed and said, ‘For the temple, give to temple,’ (which, of course, I did) and another waved me down for a rest and a chat. His English was as limited as his enthusiasm was unbounded.

‘Nem?’ he inquired.

‘My name’s Mark. What’s yours?’

‘Uh,’ he grunted.

‘Oh. Have you been visiting the temple?’

‘Uh.’

‘So, is it worth the climb?’

‘Uh.’

‘Ah.’

‘Uh.’

‘Um, I think I think I’ll be going up, then.’

‘Uh.’

‘Bye-bye.’

‘Bye-bye.’

His fluency was comparatively good. Most of the kids greeted me with an enthusiastic ‘Bye-bye’, much as they’d done in Mandu, while one came out with the wonderful ‘Hello-bye’ and others struggled through to ask, ‘Country name?’ But the friendliness of the Gujarati Jains shone brightly through the language barrier, and eventually I reached the top, intrigued to see what it was these kind people were worshipping.

A Whole Hill of Temples

It was worth the struggle. Jain temples are smothered with carvings in much the same way as Hindu temples, but they’re quite different on closer investigation. Hindu stone carvings of women are interesting, but the Jains make them so voluptuous they manage to convey the eroticism of Konark’s Sun Temple without any need for biological diagrams. Stone people play ancient guitars while old kings grimace through their beards and the prophets look passively happy (much like the Buddha), and the sheer impact of having so many temples crammed together in one place makes it a fascinating place to wander round, even for someone like me, who has arguably overdosed on Indian temples.

The best part about Jain temples are the idols. Sitting in the lotus position and variously smiling enigmatically or meditating heavily, Jain idols look fairly Buddhist but have one very striking feature: their eyes are made of clear and black glass that catches any stray light, making the dark interiors of the temples glow with eerie pairs of lights suspended in the black. It’s like something out of Scooby Doo, especially with all the bats that inhabit the dark recesses of every Indian temple. My lonely trek through the temples on the Place of Victory was really quite spooky at times.

After all the wonderful pilgrims and atmospheric idols, it was a bit of a shock to bump into the charge-for-camera-and-shoes scam; every template has a variation on this theme, and unfortunately Palitana is no exception. I have no objection to paying for entry into a temple, and I have no objection to paying someone to guard my shoes while I’m inside and barefoot, but at Palitana the people in charge of payment were such shifty characters that it somehow felt wrong to hand over the money to them rather than into a locked donations box. I strolled up to pay for a ticket and you could instantly tell they were going to try for more than just the Rs25 entrance fee; four fat men sat behind protective desks, exuding an attitude of ‘I’m in charge and if I can’t be bothered to let you in there’s nothing you can do about it’, and they instantly tried to squeeze things out of me.

‘You smoke?’ said the man with the shiniest moustache before I’d had a chance to speak.

‘No,’ I said, knowing full well he was after a cigarette and knowing full well that even if I had some, which I didn’t, he wasn’t going to get one. ‘Smoking is injurious to health,’ I continued, quoting the Indian government health warning stamped on every packet. ‘Do you smoke?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Then you will die young,’ I said, smiling furiously. ‘Can I have a camera permit, please?’

‘You have coins?’ he tried.

‘It’s 25 rupees for the permit,’ I said, ‘and I’ll give you one hundred. You give me 75 rupees change. No coins necessary. Here you go, 100 rupees.’

Seeing this, he uttered the war cry of every shop owner in India, irrespective of the status of their top pockets: ‘No change.’

‘Then I guess there is no money for you,’ I said and turned for the door, which immediately produced the expected result and the expected change. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Could you tell me where the donation box is?’ I asked, and they produced it for me to put the kind pilgrim’s coins in, grumbling at me as if it was a major effort to reach behind the desk for the box.

‘Honestly,’ I muttered to myself as I stomped out of the office, ‘so much for a friendly welcome.’ And perhaps this criticism of the impious placated the Jain prophets, because that second the sun broke through the clouds and stayed long enough for me to explore the main enclosure and get my money’s worth. It was amazing.

Back Down Again

The scams weren’t over for the day, though. Before long the clouds rolled back in and I rolled back down; on a clear day you might be able to see the sea from Palitana, but all I could see were puddles. It wasn’t unpleasant, though, and I took a slow horse cart back to the hotel for Rs20, handing over a pretty tatty Rs20 note at the end and wandering off.

‘No good,’ tapped a voice on my shoulder, and turning round I saw a young man holding out my battered Rs20 note; the old man who owned the tonga had obviously sent his young sidekick after me to get a better note. This is a common problem in India; notes become disgusting fairly quickly and hardly ever see the inside of a bank to get replaced, and if a note’s particularly lacerated you’ll have grave problems getting rid of it. Funnily enough you can have the most leprous note that nobody will accept, but put it inside a clear plastic sheath and staple it shut, and all of a sudden it’s fine. My Rs20 note was having more problems holding itself together than Michael Jackson, but I wasn’t in the mood for an argument, so I just said, ‘OK then,’ grabbed my note back with a smile, ducked under a horse’s head and sauntered off into the bus station to check some bus times.

That worked. Seeing your hard-earned cash disappearing into the crowd is enough to motivate even the most relaxed rickshaw driver, and sure enough the man came running after me shouting, ‘OK, OK, OK,’ and accepted the money. It felt good to win this argument for once, especially in a place like Palitana, which, the Place of Victory aside, is a fairly drab place that deserves no more mention in this travelogue.

I’ll also gloss over the journey from Palitana to Diu because this is supposed to be a family show and unnecessary swearing simply isn’t required. Unlike on the journey itself...

¹ Actually, Jainism doesn’t have deities, rather 24 prophets (known as tirthankars) who formulated a religious philosophy as opposed to a theistic system of belief. Jain temples may look quite similar to those of the Hindus, but the Jain religion is far closer to Buddhism. The statues of the tirthankars dotted round India are like huge standing Buddhas (but with more obvious bodily parts), while the temples are lively and as crammed with carvings as Hindu shrines. It’s an interesting variation on the theme.

² And plenty of pilgrims being carried down in pure comfort, sitting in dooli swing chairs lugged around by wiry men. Interestingly most of the people in doolis were fat, and I idly wondered whether the merit gained by a visit to the temples would be cancelled out if you paid someone else to carry you there and back. I rather hoped so, as I sweated my way up the marble slide.

Hindi Pop

Written: 19 June 1998   

There is only one music cassette in use on the buses in India, and I hear it everywhere; the result is that despite several months of inserting my ear plugs whenever the bus boys crank the latest Hindi pop hits up to eleven, I still know the songs backwards (which, incidentally, improves them).

It isn’t confined to the buses, either. I hear it in shops, I hear it in buses, I hear it in rickshaws, I hear it in restaurants, and on bad nights I hear it in my sleep. It’s a compilation of Hindi pop hits of 1998 and I’m almost tempted to buy a copy simply so I can glare at it.

The Hindi pop you get on Indian buses isn’t unique in being irritating; every country in the world has some kind of music that’s designed to make the ears ache. For example, the majority of the music in Australia and New Zealand is western, and as such has good bits and appalling bits, while the tribal music of the Aborigines and Maoris is highly emotive and well worth investigating; Polynesian music is also tribal, and it’s pretty interesting until the ukulele kicks in, which it unfortunately does all too often; Indonesian music is either abysmal pop from fat Elvis clones, or intriguing traditional gamelan music that sounds like the introduction to Peter Gabriel’s San Jacinto played on an out-of-tune set of tubular bells; Singaporean music is a melting pot of its neighbours’ efforts, but it is effectively being swallowed up by rock ‘n’ roll; I can’t really remember the music in Malaysia or Thailand, but I remember one bus journey – I forget which country – where the musical accompaniment bore a scary resemblance to the sound of a cat scratching its claws down a blackboard; and Indian and Nepalese music is wonderfully diverse, with traditional tabla music, the wonderful sound of the sitar, entertaining film music, and the kind of pop music that is chirpy, bouncy and annoying in the way that happy morning people are when you’ve got a nasty hangover behind the eyes.

So is Hindi pop more irritating than any other country’s pap? It depends; I remember almost gnawing my left leg off while putting up with Indonesian pop, I remember Thai videos on buses frying my brain cells, and I’ll keep my thoughts about the ukulele to myself. Hindi music, though, is close to winning, because the voices have an amazing way of cutting through any other noise, be it the rumble of the bus or the fascinating cacophony of life in India. The women who sing Hindi pop music sound like they are on helium¹ and the men basically shout, so whatever the lyrical and compositional subtleties, it sounds to the unwary like a kind of aural warfare. Add in string sections that sound like the Eeee-Eeee-Eeee from Psycho’s shower scene, and you have a musical experience that can only be described as invasive, which is a shame, because Hindi pop² is everywhere in India.

On top of this, Hindi pop songs are plugged so remorselessly that even if the music weren’t so invasive, it would still get to me; there’s no kind of music in the world that can stand that sort of constant playing. Especially not Hindi Pop Hits of 1998...

¹ Often this is due to a faulty tape mechanism playing the tape too quickly; I put one of my tapes into a supposedly posh Indian tape deck, and even Sheryl Crow sounded light and shrill. I’m convinced that if the local equivalents of Andrew Eldritch’s and Janis Joplin’s 40-a-day voices ever appeared on the Indian pop scene, they would be burned at the stake for heresy in much the same way that Elvis was for his earth-shattering hip movements in the fifties.

² I’m not talking about Hindi film music here, because although it might sound the same to the uninitiated, Hindi film music is really rather skilled. In the films, singer-songwriters are not common, and there’s normally a composer who writes the music, a lyricist who writes the words, a group of singers who sing the songs, and the actors who mime and dance along on the screen. The composition and lyricism is in a different league to bog-standard Hindi pop, and the dancing is, without a doubt, spectacular and highly skilled, and puts western boy bands to shame. If only all Indian pop was this impressive; unfortunately, it isn’t.

Diu

Written: 14 June 1998   

Diu feels like a frontier town; given both its distant and recent history, this is perhaps not surprising. Stuck out on a limb at the southernmost tip of Gujarat, the island of Diu was one of the few Portuguese colonies in India (the others being Goa and Daman). Between the 14th and 16th centuries Diu was an important trading post for the Ottoman Turks, but in 1535 the Portuguese took control on their second attempt, building a huge fort and settling in for a long old occupation. They finally left in 1961 as a result of Operation Vijay¹, in which attacks were launched by air and land on the Portuguese territories of Goa, Diu, Daman and the Anjidiv Islands. The operation was a success, and all four territories, including Diu, soon joined the Indian Union.

Diu is not part of Gujarat, however; it’s governed from Delhi in a similar way to Pondicherry (they’re both Union Territories), and this adds to the feeling of isolation. Not only is Diu geographically out in the sticks, it’s culturally different too, most noticeably in the availability of alcohol. Gujarat is a dry state – the only one left, as far as I can make out – but Diu is not only very wet, it’s very cheap (Rs30 for a 650 ml bottle of beer is not bad going).

This helps to explain the reaction of the Gujaratis I met on the way from Bhavnagar to Diu; when they found out I was heading for Diu, they asked if I had any drink with me, what was in my water bottle (water, as a matter of fact) and whether I liked to get drunk. Initially it didn’t click; ‘You go Diu? What is that you drinking?’ didn’t make any sense until I remembered the lack of alcohol in Gujarat. Then it started to irritate me, because everyone automatically assumed that because I was going to Diu, I must be an alcoholic.

This might be true for Indian visitors to Diu, as inevitably the cheap availability of booze acts as a magnet for Indian drinkers. This only serves to add to the frontier image; wandering into the bars, you’re greeted by pairs of blurred brown eyes, tinged deep yellow and hooded by sinking eyelids. At night the sound of drunken Indians singing is only matched by the sound of mangy dogs baying, often because they’ve been woken from their slumber by a pissed up Gujarati taking out his drunken frustrations on the local wildlife.

Restaurants open for breakfast are also open to Indians cracking into the local wine at 9am, while packs of westerners sit in the corner, marvelling at the alcoholic tendencies of the Gujaratis while nursing savage hangovers of their own. I even saw a man pass out in his seat at around midday and proceed to piss himself – and this in a fairly respectable place – as well as all manner of alcohol-induced fights; these were the same embarrassing displays of losing control and a desire to get paralytic that I saw in Pondicherry and French Polynesia. Westerners aren’t much better, but it still seems that although westerners tend to drink more, they don’t typically behave like this, whereas most Indians I see drinking heavily can’t resist acting the fool.

Exploring Diu

I arrived in this outpost of colonialism and clandestine consumption during the most god-awful storm I’d encountered in India². The rain drove into the bus, pouring through windows without glass and leaking through rivets in the bus roof, and even my umbrella proved scant protection inside the rattle-trap. Chai shops were flooded out, the whole state suffered from a power cut, and when I arrived in Diu late in the evening I couldn’t see a thing. I wondered what on earth I’d stumbled into.

Actually I’d stumbled into a wonderful oasis of beaches, colonial buildings and cheap alcohol, and although the latter was an attraction and made for some interesting late nights back at the hotel, I found the buildings to be the most interesting part. The beaches on Diu are pretty reasonable, but with all the terrible weather and the monsoon approaching, the sea was churning brown and totally unsuitable for swimming, and even if I had fancied a bit of sunbathing, then I’d have had to put up with the locals, as to the Indians, western sunbathers are like television: they’re worth staring at for hours. If you want beach privacy, avoid India and go to Thailand.

The fortress, easily the most impressive Portuguese building in Diu, is perfect frontier material. Surrounded on three sides by severe cliffs falling into the sea and sheer walls built to withstand the biggest army the Gujaratis could muster, the earliest parts date from 1535, with a lot of the building being done between 1546 and 1650. These days it’s uncomplainingly slipping into the sea, gradually mouldering in the tropical sun that seems as alien in this distinctly European building as the Portuguese themselves must have felt. If you ended up in Diu, you really were cut off from home.

Housing underground escape channels, cisterns, the governor’s palace, a prison, barracks, state offices and churches, the fortress is a complete fortified city. Cannons litter the walls, cannon balls quietly crack in the sun, ancient stone carvings are scattered outside buildings in various states of decay, and from the turrets and bastions the view over Diu is evocative. The channel, at this turbulent time of year, is a sailor’s nightmare, with spits of shifting sands and savage currents whirling round the headland. The fortress must have been impregnable back in its heyday, and now it’s a deserted delight on the easternmost tip of the island. As fortresses go, Diu Fort is colonialism at its most paranoid.

Following the cliffs to the south of the fort, you begin to understand just how easy to defend Diu must have been. The cliffs that line the southeastern coast are savagely beautiful with their pounding breakers spewing against overhangs and eerily moulded limestone formations. I was reminded of Victoria’s coastline in Australia, but here the danger is not so much the cliffs as the sharp shelf of limestone sitting a few scant feet under the waves, waiting to smash the hulls of any invading ships. The cliffs form a natural barrier, with the double moat of the fortress a man-made equivalent. Between them they made sure that nobody got in... or out.

Diu’s Churches

The cliffs are also home to a number of large caves dug into the ground; they’re the remains of mines where the Portuguese cut out blocks of limestone with which to build their edifices. The fortress is just one of the colonial constructions on the island, most of the others being (of course) imposing houses of God. Three huge churches tower over the town’s skyline, but only one of them is still used as a place of worship, and that sparingly. Once again, it smacks of frontier colonialism.

This church, St Paul’s, is monstrous, and its state of decay is almost endearing. Still decorated lovingly with lights and statues of Christ, Mary and various members of the heavenly host, the church is attached to the local school.

I wandered in, deposited some change in the donation box (something I tend to do in foreign Christian churches, though I don’t really know why) and took a look around, and out the back I discovered one of the most interesting notices I’ve ever seen in a church: the local price list for services.

Check out some of the following fees as set by Archbishop-Patriarch Raul Nicholau Gonsalves on 1 April 1994.

Church marriage | Rs50
Church baptism | Rs20
Blessing of a new house | Rs50
Blessing of a foundation stone, small chapels or crosses, vehicles, wells, nets, stakes | Rs20
Blessing of fields, new plants, corn, invocation against noxious animals etc. | Rs10
Pealing of bells (each) | Re1
Assistance at funeral service | Rs20
Any religious service at the grave | Rs5

And tucked away at the end was this particularly Christian attitude, ‘The poor will always be exempted partially or fully from the stipulated offerings/fees.’

Upstairs in the church was the school, deserted in the late afternoon heat. At one end of a corridor was a classroom scene so perfectly colonial you could be forgiven for believing it was set up specially for tourists, as the blackboard pronounced its algebraic message over a collection of tidy wooden school desks. To find an active Christian church in a windswept corner of such a remote Indian state was completely unexpected, but isn’t that the clichéd image of colonial education? It felt as archaic and obsolete as Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial or Melaka’s Stadhuys, and just as magical.

More churches were waiting to be discovered as I headed off on a bicycle ride into the heart of the island, accompanied by a friendly Frenchman called Michel. Diu island is long and thin³, stretching west to east for about 14km, bloating to about 4km at its waist, and managing to rise to a maximum height of 29m above sea level; it’s perfect for cycling. We explored Fudham Church (which holds one service per year, has no padre and is now a guest house inhabited by strange long-term travellers and humidity mould), Nagoa Beach (where most of the Indian holidaymakers hang out, the men swimming in their skimpy trunks and the women sheltering and sweltering in their sarees) and various rocky coves and honeymoon spots. In the high season Diu must be quite the place to be, but I was glad it was the off-season; it would be harder to imagine Diu as a frontier town with hordes of local tourists wandering around.

World Cup fever also struck as the games took off in Paris, and nursing a sore pair of buttocks from the bicycle trip⁴ I settled down to lose myself in the football, not so much because I like footy but because TV is simply fascinating after so long away from it. I watched France beat South Africa – memorable because the French coach was called A Jacquet and the South African coach P Troussier – and I settled down into a lifestyle of relaxation and spirited drinking. It was frontier living at its best.

But as with all frontiers, you have to turn around and go back eventually, so on the Sunday night I boarded the night bus for Ahmedabad, starting the long haul north back towards Delhi and my flight home.

¹ For an excellent description of how Operation Vijay played out in Diu, check out Operations at Diu: The One Day War by Group Captain Kapil Bhargava (Retd), which is based on the personal recollections of Group Captain Micky Blake VrC (Retd), with input from Air Marshal Mally Wollen PVSM VM (Retd). It’s a very interesting read.

² I was to discover later that a cyclone had been approaching Gujarat from the south in the Arabian Sea for two or three days, and had decided to hit the mainland on the day I was travelling to Diu. It smashed the west coast of Gujarat, causing severe damage to roads, power lines, water supplies and life expectancy; in total over 1500 people would die, not as much as the official heat wave death toll of 2383, but still sizable. The cyclone would also cancel my plans to visit western Gujarat, the worst-hit area, which is fairly out of the way and challenging to travel even without the after-effects of screaming winds and flooding. It was a blessing that I was ignorant of the weather conditions when I left Palitana, or I might have not bothered with Diu at all.

Indeed, the cyclone in Gujarat was still turning up dead bodies a week after its departure, and although I’m not for one minute trying to equate the simultaneous physical deterioration of my travel possessions with such an ecological and financial disaster, it’s a coincidence that can’t be ignored.

As winds battered the west coast of Gujarat, they also battered my Palitana to Diu bus, which in turn battered my bags. Soon after my arrival in Diu my trusty old Walkman started to sound muffled, and my even trustier computer started ignoring certain keys. Armed with a Swiss Army knife and the confidence inspired by a lack of any other solutions I tackled both of them one humid afternoon.

Inside my Walkman a tiny screw had worked loose, detaching the playback head; it was the work of minutes to fix it back in, even though it still sounded terrible. My computer wasn’t so easy; designed to be as compact as possible, the Acorn Pocket Book was also designed to explode when opened up by Swiss Army knife. I’d seen the insides before, and soon tracked down a ribbon cable that had worked loose from its socket, but in the meantime I’d managed to attract a fair old crowd of Indian onlookers, all of whom were either genuinely interested, or drunk enough to find the magnetism of a crowd interesting in its own right.

Astonishingly, with the crowd leering over my shoulder, I did manage to fix my computer. I certainly deserved a drink after that...

³ This is quite unlike the inhabitants. Tourists and locals alike, everyone in Diu when I was there was fat. Beer bellies pushed shirt buttons to physical limits, sweat broke out quickly on even the most inactive brow, and fat middle-class drinkers ploughed through bottles of whisky, wine and beer at a rate that only the obese or the dedicated can manage. People don’t come to Diu to get fat; they come here to get fatter.

⁴ ‘No leak, no leak,’ said the man as I pointed out that my bike had a flat rear tyre. He pumped it full of air and promised me that it would be fine, which I didn’t believe for one second. Nine kilometres away from Diu town and my teeth were rattling in my head as all the air shot out of my back tyre. My buttocks weren’t designed to have a loosely padded razor blade inserted between the cheeks and shaken around for an hour, and they hurt. Still, what can you expect from an Indian bicycle?

Lies, Damned Lies

Written: 15 June 1998   

Visitors to India can’t help but notice the Indian tendency to be economical with the truth. This is often because Indians, and Asians in general, want to please you by telling you what you want to hear, even if it’s not the truth – either that or they’re trying to sell you something, in which case their economy with the truth is simply an extension of the approach used by East London market stall owners. I’ve always found this constant fraudulence illogical enough to be bordering on the irresponsible, but the other day I realised that I’ve been doing exactly the same ever since I came across the concept of the census conversation.

From Indonesia to India I’ve had to put up with uninspiring but polite inquiries from the locals; sometimes excellent conversations ensue and sometimes they don’t, but whatever the outcome, it’s a fact of life and it’s churlish not to get involved. Like most facts of life on the road, the traveller learns to minimise hassle and maximise happiness, which in the case of pidgin parleying leads to more than a little bit of white lying. Here’s a typical conversation I had on a bus in Gujarat (where my lies are denoted by numbered footnotes):

‘Hello, which country from you?’

‘I’m from England.’

‘Ah, England, beautiful country. Which city?’

‘London¹.’

‘First time India?’

‘No, my fourth².’

‘You like India, eh? Is good country?’

‘Oh yes. The country is so big that the people are different everywhere you go, there’s so much variety in the landscape from mountains to deserts to beaches, the food’s amazing, the religions are so different from western ones, and the people are so friendly... I can’t get enough. I love it³.’

‘You marry?’

‘No.’

‘Girlfriend?’

‘Yes, back in London⁴.’

‘England, you play world cup football at moment. You like?’

‘Yes, it’s great⁵. But I prefer the cricket⁶.’

‘Cricket, yes! Mike Atherton, Graeme Hick, good players.’

‘Not as good as Tendulkar, eh!’

‘Yes. He is best. What is profession?’

‘I am a journalist.’

‘What you write?’

‘I am a freelancer for magazines.’

‘Which magazines?’

‘Oh, various types. I used to work for the BBC⁷.’

‘Ah. What is this here?’

‘A computer.’

‘How much it cost?’

‘I do not know. It was a present⁸.’

‘Ah. You like this music?’

‘Er, it’s OK⁹.’

‘You see any Indian films?’

‘Yes, one. Dil to Pagal Hai¹⁰.’

‘Ah, Dil to Pagal Hai. Good’

‘Yes...’

And so on, ad nauseam... but at least they’re white lies, and it’s worth the effort just to bring a smile to the faces of the locals.

¹ I live in London for simplicity. Every Indian has heard of London, some know Birmingham, but none have heard of Staffordshire.

² If it’s your first visit and you happen to have fallen into a conversation with a con man, look out.

³ This is true, but I never mention the hassles of Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur, giardia, volume levels or cow shit.

⁴ I have no girlfriend, but saying I have one stops them from trying to set me up with an Indian girl, or from enquiring too closely about what I think of Indian women.

⁵ I couldn’t give a toss about football.

⁶ And I couldn’t give a toss about cricket, either. But if you don’t like cricket in India, you might as well be a Pakistani for all the respect you get.

⁷ True, I did work for the BBC, but this makes me sound like some big reporter, which I wasn’t. I only mention it to end the investigation into my past, because if you give a final answer to a question, the questions move on to a different subject.

⁸ Everything I own I say is a present. If you tell the locals the real cost of a camera or computer, they’ll realise just how rich you are, which doesn’t really help anybody.

⁹ Bus music is never OK, it’s always abysmal. But you can’t say that too often, because it’s needlessly offensive (a bit like the music, come to think of it).

¹⁰ I’ve never seen any Hindi films that I can remember the titles of, but I can’t admit that either. It makes Indians happy if you say you’ve experienced, enjoyed and remembered their culture, so why not make ’em happy? I’m only returning the favour, after all...

Rajasthan

Mt Abu

Written: 18 June 1998   

It didn’t take much persuasion for me to drop my plans to visit Bhuj and Junagadh in western Gujarat; the chaos from the cyclone has sparked fears of epidemic diseases (which are being denied by the government), but whatever the risk of cholera, there’s no doubt that the electricity, water and transport infrastructures are in all sorts of trouble, and I figure I could always come back another time. The journalist in me wants to investigate; the traveller in me never wants to see another bus ride like the last one. The traveller has won hands down.

An overnight luxury bus from Diu to Ahmedabad and another bus bound for the north¹ saw me arrive in the hill station of Mt Abu. The monsoon is doing funny things this year – it leapt from being from five days behind schedule to being ahead of schedule in just 24 hours, jumping across half the country in just one day having only dropped 45 per cent of the expected rain by this point. With this in mind, I settled in to enjoy the relatively low humidity of the 1200m-high plateau of Mt Abu.

I only stopped at Mt Abu to break up the long journey north – yet another overnight bus ride would have blown my mind – but it turned out to be one of the best moves I’ve made in a long time. Sufficiently off the tourist trail to be almost totally free of westerners, it is instead a haven for Indian tourists. Mt Abu is the honeymoon capital of Rajasthan, itself one of the most romantic states in India, and as a result it’s fascinating to someone whose concept of marriage is totally different to the Indian one.

A Marriage Made in Mt Abu

It’s obvious from the moment you step off the bus. Surrounding a small lake, just the right size for intimate boat rides at sunset, Mt Abu manages to combine a pleasantly cool temperature with a complete tourist set-up; ice cream stalls stand side by side with shops peddling sarees and Kashmiri trinkets², cute parks sit alongside piers hiring pedal-boats, and luxury hotels rub shoulders with cheap guest houses, all vying for a lucrative slice of the honeymoon market. And for once this tourist market is entirely Indian, and the differences between it and other more westernised tourist spots are interesting.

The first thing you notice is not just the friendliness of the people, but the way in which they are friendly. In developing countries it’s rare to feel that people are talking to you on an even keel; either they are slightly in awe of your western status, equating you with overseas luxury and the American dream, or they are middle class, in which case they tend simply to accept your existence and are interested in what you have to say, rather than fascinated by the simple fact that you’re talking. Mt Abu is overwhelmingly in the latter category; the people you meet are also tourists, on the same wavelength as you but simply in their own country rather than abroad, and as such, talking is easy. Conversation is from one tourist to another, nothing more, nothing less.

The general lack of westerners is one key to Mt Abu’s success; from an Indian point of view it must be a tourist hell, but for me it was a great place to watch the Indians at play without having to screen out the impact of western tourism. And they’re a funny bunch; no matter how long I travel round this country, I can’t get my head round the Indians on holiday. Seemingly biologically attached to each other, you never see an Indian holidaying alone; they always come in huge groups, whether with family or friends. Among Indian tourists, the universal reaction to the news that I am travelling alone is one of amazement, as if what I’m doing is slightly sacrilegious; this attitude is similar to the stereotypical Chinese and Japanese tourist, and in a similar way Indians always take tours with others instead of going it alone, they always take a guide at the attractions rather than getting a book and doing it at their own pace, and they even manage to take their honeymoons in huge groups. It’s hard to imagine that happening back home... but then again, in India the concept of sex before marriage is total anathema, so the whole marriage thing is another world to start with.

It’s a successful world though, if you throw away your preconceptions of what a marriage actually is. Indian marriages are, in the vast majority of cases, arranged; there are a few ‘love marriages’, but the fact that this category has its very own name indicates its rarity. People get married at fairly fixed times in their lives; it’s a shock to the Indians to learn that I am 27 and unmarried. The fascination with western liberalism is as universal as the Gujarati fascination with alcohol, but the desire to enjoy the fruits of western marriage is surprisingly rare; yet again the American media is an influence. Divorce is almost totally unheard of in India, but it forms a staple ingredient in hundreds of western soap operas, along with infidelity and the scourge of AIDS. Generally Indian marriages last until one of the parties dies, because the marriage starts from nothing – an arrangement for social and business reasons, not love – and develops from there. And the vast majority of marriages develop into successful ones.

Of course, you can look at it another way. Most marriages here work because the patriarchal society makes it so; the man is in charge, and he gets his way, end of story. Also, if society totally banishes and rejects divorcees, people are far less likely to get divorced; it is technically legal to divorce in India, but then again I once signed an agreement never to drive my cattle through the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which only goes to show that technical legalities are nonsense everywhere. I’ll never know how successful Indian marriage is in terms of my definition of ‘successful’, but few people here complain. I had imagined that I would meet young people pouring scorn on the idea of arranged marriages and wishing for western liberalisation, but I have yet to find someone who doesn’t equate the West with marriages failing. I can’t help wondering if they’ve got a point, with such a huge proportion of first time marriages in the West ending in divorce.

But these grisly thoughts are far from the minds of the happy couples strolling round picturesque Nakki Lake in central Mt Abu. As the sun sets over the lake, the people come out in their hundreds to have their photographs taken with the hills in the background; this being an Indian tourist spot, there are plenty of men standing around offering to take pictures for those who don’t own cameras, and film shops rent cameras by the hour. It must be a lucrative business; honeymooners are hardly going to visit Mt Abu and not want some recorded memories, even if they’re too poor to buy a camera, but you’d never see this in the West – it’d be as attractive a business proposition as a contract to sell fridges in Greenland.

And after the stroll it’s back up the hill to buy an ice cream, a saree or a .44 while the rest of the family settles in for a severely big evening meal (though, to be fair, the people in Mt Abu aren’t as half as obese as those in Diu), and then it’s off to bed for the traditional honeymoon pursuits. But I couldn’t help thinking what it must be like to have the clichéd First Night for real, for it to be a genuine consummation of marriage; if you could find a western couple for whom the First Night was also their first time, that would be pretty impressive, and besides, in our culture the thought of two people marrying without having spent time living together is, by my generation at least, frowned upon. How different these concepts that we both call marriage.

The Summer Palace

My intentions in Mt Abu were physical but somewhat less romantic; I had an aching body and wanted to do nothing strenuous for a few days. I couldn’t have picked a better spot because, according to my guidebook, there is precious little going on in Mt Abu, and that suited me fine. What I didn’t realise was that my guidebook is utterly useless when it comes to the reality of Mt Abu; it turned out to be one of the highlights of my trip.

I did indeed spend my first two days doing next to nothing, just writing letters, resting my aching toe (following my injury in Palitana), eating copious masala dosas in the local restaurants and ambling round the lake. My hotel, the Shree Ganesh, was so friendly and pleasant that I nearly forgot I was in India (especially as I had satellite TV in my room, a bonus in a room costing Rs150 a night), and I revelled in the holiday atmosphere. Doing nothing was never so much fun, but I can’t seem to do nothing for more than a day or my head explodes, so I decided that my foot would just have to suffer; Mt Abu had things to explore, and I was bloody well going to explore them.

Overlooking the lake is the Maharaja of Jaipur’s old summer palace, a mouldering old building perched on top of a sheer granite hill. I wandered up there the following morning, just for the view, and soon found myself chatting to the caretaker.

‘Want to come inside?’ he asked.

‘If it’s possible,’ I replied.

‘Why not?’ he said, and unable to think of a reason I followed him up to the roof.

‘I sleep here every night,’ he said, pointing to a beautifully constructed pavilion on the top of a tower, the highest point of the palace. Climbing to the top, I had a view of Mt Abu that was beautiful in the daytime, but which would be simply amazing at dawn and dusk.

‘You sleep here?’ I asked, unable to believe that a man with such a non-end job – looking after a building that’s used for nothing and doesn’t even see any tourists – could have such a stunning bedroom.

‘Yes, every night,’ he said, and winked. It wasn’t just the shaggy beard and George Harrison hair that made him look happy, it was his eyes. I was to come across quite a few other intensely happy people in Mt Abu.

Brahma Kumaris

One of the reasons for this is the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University, the headquarters of which are in Mt Abu. Purporting to combine all the religions of the world into one spiritual philosophy, this multinational collection of ashrams is totally funded by donations (evidently very large donations) and fills the streets of Mt Abu with white-clad people who are obviously quite at ease with life. I decided to float along to the centre’s museum where the basics of their mission are explained, just to see what the beatific smiles were all about.

It was a real groovy trip, man. Sitting alone in a theatre equipped with funky lasers and mellow soundtracks, I listened to woman with a delightfully English accent tell me that if my life was getting me down, I could solve it all by getting into meditation. I found out that if the rat race was proving a burden, I could commune with the one true God and get into real salvation. And then I began to lose track of quite what was going on.

Perhaps the problem is that my life isn’t getting me down, and the rat race is proving nothing but a distant memory, so I’m not really in the target market for Brahma Kumaris... but I still wanted to know what had made these centres spring up all over the world, providing guidance to a huge range of nationalities and creeds, so I kept listening. Unfortunately the presentation started to sink into the realm of sixties cliché, and that’s when I realised that every cliché has to start somewhere, and I’d surely found such a source. Meditation is not without merit, but it doesn’t half make some people start spouting nonsense, and the Brahma Kumaris does rather veer into this territory. I’d already met two kindly products of the university in the street who had practically begged me to drop by for a chat and to meet the only westerner currently studying there, an Australian painter called Dave; unfortunately for them, my idea of hell is something akin to being stuck in an ashram with an Australian painter called Dave, so I thanked them and made my escape. The museum displays made me feel that it had been a lucky one.

Here’s an example of what I discovered. A big sign sits in the museum, proclaiming the following:

Puzzle of Life Solved

All suffering is due to vices. Vices are due to ignorance. Ignorance can be removed by godly knowledge. Godly knowledge is imparted by God himself at the end of Iron Age (Kaliyuga). This is the end of Iron Age. Therefore, now you can attain supreme purity, peace and prosperity, which is your godfatherly birthright in the new Golden-aged world now being re-established. Now or never.

What on earth is that supposed to mean? If that one’s a little too esoteric, try this one. On another wall in the museum is the following list of entries in God’s curriculum vitae:

Who is God? Supreme father of all souls

Name: Trimurti Shiva

Form: Incorporeal point of light

Abode: Infinite divine light (Brahmlok or Paramdham)

Attributes: Purifier; Ocean of Knowledge; Bestower of Peace, Love, Happiness and Bliss; Almighty Authority

Occupation: Re-establishes one original golden-aged deity religion after destruction of numerous iron-aged degraded religions of the world

Time of Descent: Confluence (Sangam) of the end of Iron Age and beginning of Golden Age (at the end of every Kalpa – one Kalpa is 5000 years)

Whoa! So God is an incorporeal point of light, after all, and that’s what students like Dave get into when they hang out doing raja yoga in their ashrams (of which there are over 4000 in over 60 countries, incidentally). It all starts to make sense now... in a sense.

The Delwara Jain Temples

This is all different to what the Jains think; they’re more into going round naked and avoiding the accidental murder of defenceless insects (or, at least, that’s what the Digambara sect do; the less austere Shevetambara Jains wear white robes and aren’t confined to monasteries, but they still believe in the same philosophies). But irrespective of whether you think God is an incorporeal point of light, a burning bush, a man on a cross or the culmination of a philosophy of enlightenment, you have to agree that the Delwara Jain Temples in northwestern Mt Abu are quite amazing. They are, without doubt, some of the most incredible temples I have ever seen, and that includes all the Taj Mahals and Mughal tombs you can muster.

The two main temples at Delwara are the Vimal Vasahi, dating from 1031, and which took 14 years to build by 1500 artisans and 1200 labourers; and the Luna Vasahi, dating from 1230, which if anything is even more impressive than its neighbour. There are three other temples, which are pleasant but nothing on these two, and as I wandered into the complex I bought a slim guidebook and marvelled at its wonderful Inglish descriptions of the temples, wondering whether the reality could ever live up to the sales pitch.

‘The marble has yielded itself with a loving docility to fastidious chiselling,’ the book explained; ‘No description or drawing can convey an adequate expression of the great beauty and the delicately carved compositions of human beings and animal effigies of the interior of the temples which need a keen approbation,’ warbled another breathtakingly long sentence; ‘One can imagine the wonderful execution with rough and rustic instruments of those days,’ it continued; and ‘The minute chiselling and adorned motifs are unequal [sic] and matchless; the profundity of sculptured splendour is beyond fitting description,’ it chimed. With the temples inspiring such exquisitely constructed prose, I couldn’t wait to explore.

I wasn’t disappointed. Indeed, the marble carving of the Delwara Temples is, quite simply, astounding; the nearest description I can come up with is to imagine yourself miniaturised and put inside one of the most amazing ivory carvings you have ever seen, and even then it’s only an approximation. The perfection of detail is so intricate and well constructed that it is incredible to think that these carvings were being chipped out so many hundreds of years ago. The guidebook, overpoweringly effervescent though it was, turned out to be spot on.

The ceilings of the corridors surrounding the central shrines are the most amazing parts. Every square inch is covered in geometric designs, many-armed gods and goddesses from the Hindu and Jain pantheons, scenes of everyday life, excerpts from the lives of the tirthankars (the prophets of the Jain religion) and all sorts of other scenes; the sheer range of artistry is beyond imagination, and it is at this point that I have to say that to believe Delwara you have to see it. My descriptions would only serve to add verbosity to the above quotations; what can I say except, ‘The profundity of sculptured splendour is beyond fitting description...’

Interestingly the Delwara Temples are the only temples I have visited where photography is totally forbidden. There is no camera charge because there are no cameras allowed – it’s as simple as that. And for once I was pleased; not only did this save me reeling off an entire film trying to encompass the huge scale of intricacy I was witnessing, but it also saved me from discovering the hard way that it is impossible to record effectively such an immense work of art. No doubt the British archives contain some wonderful black and white pictures of the temples, but that possibility aside, the marble brilliance of Delwara lives only in the minds of those who have been there.

Unfortunately it seems impossible for some visitors to appreciate such beauty quietly. Demonstrating the exuberance that makes the Taj Mahal a cattle market and the situation in Kashmir a veritable tinder box, guides literally yell at their charges – groups of at least 50 people at a time – and shatter any atmosphere as surely as if they had stuck a jukebox in the corner and played ‘Viva Las Vegas’ on full volume. Luckily there are respites between the waves of sardine-cosy humans, but this being Mt Abu, bastion of Indian tourism, I had to take my time in order to discover the beautiful silences of the temples. Of course this exuberance has its silver lining, and I met plenty of very friendly Jains (all of whom seemed to have the same surname, Jain, in much the same way that most Sikhs are called Singh). Their smiles more than made up for any disturbance.

Shanti Shankar

Leaving the temples behind, I decided to climb a hill, as you do, and stocking up on Bisleri³ I headed for the Shanti Shikhar, a famous meditation spot overlooking the town. My guidebook proclaimed that it was ‘not advisable to come up here alone’, so I applied my Guidebook Theorem to the situation and headed straight for the track.

Shanti Shankar provides a beautiful view over the entire plateau, and the climb helped me to work up an appetite and provided a talking point as I joined Rich⁴, an American I had met at the temples, for dinner. Coincidentally another American was sitting at the next table and he soon joined us; it was then that I discovered what must surely be the biggest challenge of all time.

This second American, whose name I never discovered, was in India with a group of fellow students from the University of Chicago, effectively there to learn Hindi. I was intrigued; I hadn’t really thought whether America has any kind of cultural ties with India, though of course there are Indians living in America just as there are all over the world. But when I discovered what his purpose was in learning Hindi, I choked on my Thums Up and got what can only be described as a masala nasal experience.

When I’d stopped coughing, he continued. ‘I’m a psych student,’ he said, abbreviating the study of the brain to five succinct letters. ‘I want to learn Hindi so I can do some case studies on Indians and learn how they think and how their minds work.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing; you might as well admit that your aim in life is to discover a black hole and to stick it in a glass display case on your desk. Hindi has a massive range of words that deal with emotions, some of which can only be described as thoroughly esoteric, and even without the communication challenge, the Indian psyche bears as much resemblance to the American psyche as chapatis do to hot dogs. I was full of admiration for this young man with the exuberance of youthful academia on his side, and I idly wondered if he’d ever read A Passage to India; E M Forster’s description of the relationship between Dr Aziz and Fielding, which is arguably the core of the book, is a perfect encapsulation of the social gulf between the two cultures, despite it being over sixty years old and from the Raj era. Somehow I don’t think he had, or he wouldn’t have sounded quite so confident.

Still smarting from my cola burn, I wished him well, wondering what he would discover. The thought kept me chuckling all the way to Jodhpur, a seven-hour bus ride to the north.

¹ To underline that it’s not just western tourists who get stung by travel agents and touts, I paid Rs150 for my luxury bus ticket, while one Indian tourist on the same bus paid Rs120, and another couple Rs160. If you’re open for a scam, you’ll get sucked in regardless of skin colour, it seems.

² Although not one but three shops, right there on the main street, sells a huge range of ancient but effective guns. No doubt they’re for shotgun weddings and quick divorces.

³ Bisleri is to Indian mineral water what Microsoft is to computers: a big, bad corporation. Back in the days when the Indians were still cottoning on to the fact that foreigners want pure bottled water instead of dodgy tap water, Bisleri became the instant market leader. It was so ubiquitous that people in India still refer to Bisleri instead of mineral water, much as the English hoover their carpets, Americans eat jello and hippies roll joints with rizlas. But the whole empire came crashing down when it was discovered that one Bisleri bottling plant had simply been shoving untreated tap water into bottles and flogging it, and the competition seized on the opportunity; these days there are more brands of water available in India than there are people, from common brands like Yes to less common brands like Bisil, Kingfisher, Euro and Bailley. The story doesn’t end there, though; while I was in India, a spelling mistake crept into the bottle-printing machine and created a national joke; Bisleri’s slogan ‘The sweet taste of purity’ had been magically transformed into something very different. Whenever I bought Bisleri, which was as little as possible, I would now be buying ‘The sweat taste of purity’. Heads rolled, I am sure.

⁴ A great name for an American travelling through the developing world, don’t you think? ‘Hello, I’m Rich,’ is possibly not the sort of thing you want to shout too loudly round these parts. Then again, someone mentioned that my name is a type of European currency, so who am I to talk?

Indian Television

Written: 15 June 1998   

Hindi’s a funny old language, but it’s even funnier on Indian TV. Listening to it is like listening to any truly foreign language – the words are a mystery but the intonation is often familiar – but Hindi has the added oddity of having a large number of English words and phrases that have been adopted and incorporated as standard.

Television is a particularly good medium because the diction is fairly clear. Watching a soap opera one night on my hotel room’s TV (a rare luxury, especially if you can get anything beyond the standard terrestrial channels) I heard the following phrases in just five minutes: ‘Hello’, ‘That’s right’, ‘I’m angry’, ‘Try to understand’, ‘I am sorry, I am really very, very sorry’, ‘Murder case’ and ‘Mrs Sahid, please!’, all surrounded by unintelligible Hindi. The credits at the end were in English, and as they rolled up the screen the announcer gleefully introduced the next programme, the first in a brand new series for Indian television. It was a particularly hilarious sitcom, the subject of which was the life of an English suburban couple who decide to become self-sufficient.

That’s right, I was there to witness the introduction of India to The Good Life, taking its place among Heartbeat, Mind Your Language, ’Allo ’Allo and Are You Being Served? as classic English comedy being shown every night on Indian TV. Is it any wonder the Indian film industry is so different to the West, when Richard Briers is still considered funny? Goodness me...

Yogi and Babaji

Written: 20 June 1998   

In reading the story of Yogi and Babaji, bear in mind that throughout the experience I had a song going through my head, namely Sheryl Crow’s ode to kiss-and-tell journalism, ‘The Book’. Here’s an excerpt:

Never again
Would I see your face.
You carry a pen and a paper
And no time
And no words you waste.
You’re a voyeur,
The worst kind of thief,
To take what happened to us,
To write down everything that went on
Between you and me.

Is that me? Am I being a voyeur, stealing the (possibly) good intentions of two traders to provide me with an interesting story? I don’t think I am, but judge for yourself. Personally, I don’t think the following is so much ‘kiss and tell’ as ‘get him pissed and sell’.

In my travels I’ve met plenty of locals whom I trusted implicitly. Pavan, the man I met on the train to Gwalior, is an example; we conversed on the train through politeness, he invited me out for a meal and insisted on paying, and I trusted him. I knew that his motives were pure in that he was interested in meeting me and I was interested in meeting him. Similarly I trusted Kiran, whom I met on the train from Puri to Hyderabad, because he was incredibly genuine and honest.

But my visit to Jodhpur made me reconsider this blind trust, not because I had a particularly negative experience, but because with some people – in all countries, not just in India – you should only trust them as far as you can spit. And not being a habitual pan chewer, for me this is not very far.

Yogi to the Rescue

Let me tell you a story. On my arrival in Jodhpur – the town that gives the trousers their name (though these days you’ll see more jodhpurs in Gujarat than Rajasthan, as far as I can see) – I decided to book my onward train ticket straight away, to avoid having to rely on the local Louis to save the day again. Unfortunately the computers were down in the ticket office, so I joined the ‘Tourists and Freedom Fighters’ queue for what I assumed would be a long wait.

That’s when Yogi introduced himself. Sporting a pockmarked face, a beer belly and a jaw line that can only be described as an investment paying dividends, he was instantly amiable in the same way as his cartoon namesake. He chatted away, leaving me to mutter the usual politely distant rubbish of ‘Really, how interesting, I see, is that right?’ while the computers continued to refuse to kick into gear. He told me he taught the sitar, which interested me, and I humoured him. He was pleasant enough, and claimed he didn’t meet many tourists out here in Jodhpur so he was very pleased to talk to me (though I would later discover that in the high season the Mehrangarh Fort gets 400 foreign visitors every day, a pretty high figure).

After nearly an hour of standing around waiting for the technology to catch up with the demand, a not unusual situation in India, I was visibly tiring. The bus journey from Mt Abu hadn’t been unpleasant, but seven hours on a bus is a long time whatever the road surface and Yogi could tell, so he offered to get my ticket for me. I would meet him later for a beer and some food, and I would pay him for the ticket then, and because the ticket has the price printed on it, and the price is directly related to the length of journey, it would be impossible for him to rip me off. Grudgingly I accepted; I like to do my own dirty work, but the prospect of waiting for someone to hack into a PC network while the workers all sat around on an extended chai break filled me with something short of enthusiasm, so I agreed. Yogi would come and pick me up that night, and we’d go to his brother’s place for a feed and a couple of beers.

So far so good, and indeed Yogi turned up spot on time on his moped, complete with the promised ticket. We drove to his brother’s place because it is not permitted to drink alcohol in a room devoted to teaching music (this I had heard before), and we ended up in a machine shop just round the corner from the railway station. In this shop was a ladder, and at the top of the ladder was a trap door, which Yogi unlocked and pushed back. And before you could say, ‘Open sesame!’ we were in Aladdin’s cave.

The small attic was chocka-block with, well, things. Garish Rajasthani puppets hung in one corner; shelves of metal-cast models of Ganesh, Siva, Buddha and the rest of the boys filled another; a glass-topped counter containing jewellery ran along one side; and a sign proclaiming that they preferred Visa hung next to another that said, ‘We know you are trustworthy but we are forgetful, so please pay in cash.’ Every well-honed scam-detection circuit clicked into place and I turned to Yogi and said, ‘You do know I’m not interested in buying anything, yes?’

‘You are my friend,’ he said. ‘I already tell you my brother is in the export business, but we come here to drink some beer, have some food, not to sell. If you are interested, that is one thing, but there is no pressure. I promise you. You trust me?’

If there’s one thing I do not trust it is people who ask me if I trust them (as in ‘You trust me? I trust you...’); if there is one thing guaranteed to break a friendship, it is a constant querying of the status of the friendship (as in ‘You are my friend, no?’); if there is one thing that makes me suspicious, it is someone who is paranoid (as in ‘Why you ask all these questions? I tell you there is no pressure here.’); and if there is one thing that puts me on total alert, it is someone who takes me into their shop when a large part of our earlier conversation has been about how offensive I find the shop-touts in places like Jaipur and Agra. From the moment I entered the shop, I became a man alert to every scam in the book.

The problem is that after spending two days with Yogi and his brother Babaji, I still do not know if they were genuinely friendly or just out to get something from me. Because of this uncertainty I cannot say that I ever felt friendly with the two brothers in the way that I did with Pavan, but it is quite possible that they were indeed genuine and that all my doubts were the product of a cynical mind. So see what you think...

Evening Shenanigans

That night I sat with Yogi, Babaji and a friend of theirs called, somewhat interestingly, Bob, and I never let my guard down. In a pique of pleasantry I had bought a gift with me: my collection of ten cassettes had long lost its appeal and my Walkman had never really recovered from the bus ride to Diu, so I gave my tapes and stereo to Yogi. This sounds awfully generous, but I was about to ditch them on the next traveller I could find who wanted them, because they were bulky and low fidelity brings me down. It doesn’t seem to affect the Indian aural sensibilities though (judging by the quality of, er, hi-fi here), and I figured that Yogi, as a music teacher, might appreciate the gift.

The cynic would say that this unexpected gift knocked the wind out of their prospects for selling me things; the empiricist would argue that there is no evidence for there being any kind of set-up and that my own paranoia had invented the whole thing. Whatever happened, the gift went down well. I felt contented and socially at ease as I supped on my beer.

We then came to the meal, of which we were to split the cost. No problem: with four of us, that makes it a quarter each. So how did I end up putting Rs400 into the pot and getting one beer (Rs70, fixed price) and a quarter of two dishes and a couple of nan breads, a meal I could buy in its entirety for less than Rs150? The food was good, the beer was certainly strong, but was I being ripped off? And how come only two of us, Babaji and me, were paying? This was no four-way split.

But I chipped in because they were being so pleasant, and because they assured me that the restaurant delivering the food was one of the best in Rajasthan (and just happened to be next door to the attic office). The cynic might say I was being easily milked for a few extra rupees – no, a lot of extra rupees – because they figured I might not know the real cost of food in India. The empiricist might say that the meal was indeed that price, and that being rich Brahmins (Babaji owned two cars, a house and a shop) they were used to spending large amounts of money on food, and assumed that as a westerner I would find it well within my budget.

I rolled with it. The beer was taking effect, the ambience was fascinating as my paranoia fought against my faith in the Indian people, and I didn’t feel threatened at all. But things continued to get stranger and stranger, always suggesting a scam without necessarily coming to fruition. Was I being expertly worked and was simply proving too stubborn or too poor to con, or was it all a total figment of my imagination?

The next oddity happened when Babaji read my palm. Now, telling me my stars is about as pointless as telling a Christian to have a good time in the Coliseum; I don’t believe in the signs of the Zodiac, and I only read the stars in the paper if I’ve run out of news to digest. But out of politeness I feigned interest and submitted to scrutiny.

I have to say he did a thorough job. Out came the magnifying glasses, the tables of squiggles and symbols, and the generalised predictions about my past that were either obviously culled from my earlier conversation with Yogi (I had told him I lived in Birmingham, for geographical simplicity, and Babaji pronounced that I lived in a place beginning with B, which is untrue both for London and the place I’m actually from), general enough to be true of anyone (‘You are happy’, he told me, which was pretty obvious to anyone meeting me at that point), simply wrong (Babaji told me that I trust what people say too much, and this while I was constantly thinking how little I trusted these two characters), or obviously just what I wanted to hear (he told me that in two and a half years I would go travelling for at least nine months, a safe prediction and obviously in tune with my thinking at the time, although this would also turn out not to be true). I was unconvinced, but in the spirit of forbearance that I learned on board Zeke, I made myself sound thrilled and interested. That was possibly a mistake.

My reading ended after I had discovered various uninspiring facts about myself; I was ‘lucky’, I would make a large sum of money in the very near future, I would not marry until 38 but would meet someone special soon... the usual stuff that’s designed to please and is therefore easy to believe if you are willing enough. But there was more; my lucky stone tuned out to be a star ruby and apparently I should wear it in a silver pendant shaped like a crescent moon. I don’t wear jewellery, but it just so happened that Babaji had one such pendant left, and perhaps I would like to see it.

I simply said that this was obviously a hard sell and I wasn’t even interested, and that caused sulks the like of which I hadn’t seen since my visits to primary schools in New Zealand. ‘We are doing this for you, for your good luck,’ they cried. ‘You are friend, do you not trust us?’ I said of course I did (lying my back teeth off) but that I wasn’t going to buy jewellery. ‘If you don’t buy this stone,’ said Babaji, ‘it means you do not believe in anything I have told you.’ And he let out an almighty sigh, one of resignation rather than of sorrow.

What do you do? I looked at the pendant, reiterated my stand on buying nothing, and left it at that. They shrugged, looked hurt and put the stone away. The cynic would say that this was an obvious scam, so obvious I should have been rolling around the floor in glee at having stumbled on such a rich source of stories. The empiricist would say that they genuinely believed in astrology, it being a fundamental part of Indian culture and a very serious part too, and that they were sincerely trying to help me with my luck. I simply didn’t know which was true, but the decision was easy because they were talking around Rs500 for the pendant, a figure I would consider imprudent to invest in anything except a ticket out of Jodhpur or a very good book, neither of which were available in Babaji’s shop.

You must understand that my scam-detection units were all aflutter by now, having detected a potential chink in the overt friendship exuding from the brothers. I tried not to get cynical, but whenever money was mentioned, I firmly said, ‘No.’ But the greatest scam of the lot cropped up not half an hour later, and I still don’t know if I was being cast a line or given a real offer. The cynic would say this is the hallmark of the perfect con: the conned doesn’t know he is being conned until far too late. The empiricist would say that business is business, and what Babaji told me made a kind of sense.

The Gem Scam

Some background information first. There is a classic scam operated by gem dealers, mainly in Agra and Jaipur, which makes use of the tourist’s tax-free import allowance. Tourists from most western countries can import goods up to a certain value into their own country without paying import tax (currently the amount for the UK is US$5200); this is a fact, and it makes a lot of sense when you think of tourists buying gifts and souvenirs and bringing them home. The scam involves a gem dealer asking a tourist to import some stones for him, so the dealer saves paying the import tax, a portion of which goes to the tourist; all the gem dealer needs is a deposit from the tourist to cover the cost of the gems, and he will give an assurance that the tourist will be able to contact the dealer’s partners in his home country, and they will buy the gems off him for much more than the deposit. So the tourist makes lots of money, and the dealer is happy because he makes a good sale.

Of course this is complete rubbish. The tourist effectively buys a bunch of worthless gems off the dealer, often paying amounts like US$2000 for them, and when he gets home he finds the contact details are a complete fiction and that his gems are worth a fraction of what he paid. It’s a ridiculously obvious scam and one which even the lobotomised should have trouble getting sucked into, but on my trip I met at least two suckers who had fallen for it, and the stories abound of others stupid enough to give thousands of dollars in cash to complete strangers. Then again, these are the sort of travellers who think that karma is what you get after taking a sedative, and what can you do about that?

So when Babaji mentioned my import allowance and how I could help him import gems into England tax free, I couldn’t help laughing; I now saw that the part in my horoscope about me receiving a large sum of money in the next few months was simply a lead-in to this whole tax allowance set-up. I said that this was the most famous scam of them all, and that there was no way I would ever get involved, no way at all. He said that he would actually be posting the gems to me, and that all I would have to pay would be the registered and insured postage, but I looked at him and told him that if he was a real businessman selling the stuff in England, he would pay for absolutely everything, including a cut for me. He told me I had to speculate to accumulate, and I told him to drop the subject and, no, I didn’t trust him any more. How could I?

They were horrified, or good actors. They had never heard of such a terrible scam, they said. They were shocked to hear that I thought they were out to rip me off, they said. They promised to drop the subject, they said, and after bringing it up twice more in the evening, they eventually did. The cynic might say that they realised I was too clued up for their plan to work. The empiricist might say that they really wanted to avoid paying tax and saw a way I could help; after all, Babaji was supposed to be visiting England in a few weeks’ time.

Whatever the reality, the evening ended with a ride back to my hotel (with them kindly paying for a rickshaw to take me the last part home). I had arranged to meet Yogi at the railway reservation office at noon, and after a leisurely hangover-cure breakfast, I did just that. I was intrigued by my total uncertainty about the brothers, and I figured that if I took almost no money and no passport I would be safe; I had left all my documents behind in the hotel room the night before as a precaution, and I decided to stick to this plan to avoid heavy losses if they drugged my drink or took me down a dark alley (unfortunate accidents that happen to plenty of tourists in the backstreets of this dog-eat-dog world).

The Sitar Scam

The original plan for the day had been to take the bikes out to a Rajasthani village to show me some real Indian life, but it was far too hot to hit the desert for an hour’s drive, so instead Yogi and I settled in for a beer and a chat. I learned some interesting things, such as the fact that Yogi drank Rs200-worth of beer every day, which at least provided an explanation for his Ming-vase profile; but the most intriguing thing I learned was his total lack of understanding of my finances. He seemed genuinely surprised that I was not a rich tourist, and perhaps he realised I meant it when we got onto the subject of the sitar.

After receiving my gift the previous day, Yogi had insisted that he give me a present in exchange; I was flattered. He said he wanted to give me a sitar; I was overwhelmed. This was great! A sitar! One of the most insane instruments in the world, for me? As a gift? What a champion.

But the subject of money cropped up again, this time in the guise of postage. He wanted me to pay half the postage, which sounded fair until I found out that he wanted Rs1800 for my half, or about US$45. I detected another possible scam, and so I told him I was on a really tight budget, especially this near the end of my trip, and could never afford that much money. OK, he said, we could send it by cheap sea mail, but I would still have to pay US$20. I said I simply couldn’t, and seeing an opportunity to make my feelings known, I charged in with horns down.

I told Yogi that I had paid a huge amount for the meal the night before and felt ripped off. I told him that if I had a guest in my house in England, I would not expect him or her to pay a cent, unless they felt obliged to buy a round of drinks or to bring a gift. I told him I would never continually bring up the subject of money and buying items from the shop; this I would class as unforgivably crass and rude. I told him that I was interested in astrology, but I didn’t believe, so there was no point in buying a stone for something that I went along with for the fun of it, especially if a big guilt trip was laid on me.

Eventually we reached a compromise. He would pay the postage, and when Babaji came to England a month after I was back, I would meet him and buy him a bunch of beers. This suited me fine; there I’d be on my home turf, and by then I’d also know if the sitar had actually arrived, in which case it would be only fair to buy the man more beers than even he could quaff.

The subject of the village trip then cropped up, seeing as the day was wearing on and the temperature dropping. I was interested until I heard it would cost me something like Rs200 in petrol, a ludicrous figure given the village’s proximity and the average cost of petrol; once again I felt I was being offered interesting options, but only if I was willing to pay through the nose. I decided against the trip, and instead settled for a second beer. But the prospect of another expensive evening meal loomed, and I had to do something if I wasn’t going to be swallowed up by these financial vultures.

I said I couldn’t afford another meal, and that I would eat elsewhere and meet them later for a beer. This caused the usual offended demeanour, downcast eyes and drooping jaw line, but Yogi suggested a solution; we would visit a friend of his who lived on a nearby farm (yes, a farm in the middle of a city) and eat there for nothing; all I would have to do would be to bring the family a gift of sweets, and maybe buy the man of the house a beer. This was fine by me; farmer’s families are poor, and besides, it sounded culturally intriguing. I accepted gratefully.

Meanwhile Babaji had returned, and immediately launched into the sort of psychological warfare that makes talking with certain Indians bear a striking resemblance to walking on broken glass. He asked me questions like, ‘Mark, what do you really think of me? Tell me the truth, now...’ And I answered truthfully in much the same way as I had with Yogi. So answer me this: how in hell’s name did I end up buying a tiger-eye stone from him for Rs151 (an auspicious number, I was told)? It was my lucky stone, to be worn next to my skin for good luck, and on reflection it was his apparently total conviction that this stone would be really good for me that made me fork out the money. You see many Indians with arm bands containing their lucky stones, so I suppose I thought what the hell, it’s a cultural thing, but it’s possible that I bought it partly as a token of my appreciation of his sales technique, and partly to shut him up. In the case of the latter it seemed to work, but the cynic would say I fell into the trap eventually, and that the sale had to happen sooner or later. The empiricist would say I didn’t have to buy anything, and hey, it’s a purchase with a story, isn’t it?

Urma’s Farm

That night Yogi, his farmer friend Urma and I hopped on the moped and span through the backstreets of early evening Jodhpur. This was fun; to give Yogi his dues he always drove slowly and carefully, an unusual trait in Asia, and we soon arrived at a sweet shop (where I bought a box of assorted sweets) and moved on to Urma’s house.

House is the wrong word. Imagine a small block of land, maybe 20m by 20m, stuck in the middle of a suburban sprawl. This block of land had no buildings on it save a small mud and brick hut in one corner, and tall walls of housing blocks loomed on three sides, the fourth being protected from the chaos of the street by a tall fence. Filling half of the block was a small herd of huge buffalo and a couple of cows, the buffalo attached by nose rings to stakes driven into the ground; along one side of the wall ran a roof covering large blocks of dried grass feed, one corner contained a huge pile of dried buffalo shit, patted together so that the handprints were still clearly visible, and another side held a roof under which some more buffalo sat, viewing the proceedings with a detachment only available to those who can fill their spare time by eating their last meal all over again.

It was, as promised, a milk farm in the middle of the city. Urma, his mother Rupei and his sister Nirma pottered around, wide-eyed and reduced to giggling fits by the presence of this white stranger, and when I fished out my camera and took a bunch of shots in the fading light, they posed with their buffalo like people who had never posed for a camera in their lives before (which quite possibly was the case). The instant I pointed the lens at them the smiles disappeared and they assumed the austere poses of Victorians, a sight I hadn’t seen since the pictures of Gwalior George standing over dead tigers, and it made me wonder at this universal effect of photography; in the West we are so used to pictures that we tend to relax more in front of the lens, but here it’s different. I promised to send them copies of the pictures, and made sure I did.

As the meal was being prepared – chapatis being fried in a pan over a roasting buffalo-dung fire – a goods truck pulled up and out poured a complete extended family: cousins, little children, uncles, the whole shooting match. Unintelligible conversation flew around me like smudges of mashed potato in a food fight, leaving me smiling in ignorance and wondering whether the discussion was about world politics, the state of the financial markets or the fact that the neighbour’s son had run off with the niece of the cat’s father’s milkman’s cow. I ate my plate of chapatis and fresh buffalo curd with ghee and glee, risked drinking the water (which would prove no problem) and thoroughly enjoyed the completely authentic atmosphere around me. Children marvelled at my funny language and funnier beard, old men tried their rusty English on me, and I sat on a charpoy staring at the scene as the sun disappeared and the night rolled in.

It was, as Yogi had said it would be, a cheap and thoroughly wonderful experience. We celebrated with a final beer back at the shop, but surprise, surprise, I ended up forking out to cover Yogi’s lack of financial solvency, and ended the night back at my hotel with my host owing me the princely sum of Rs85. This was not a lot of money, but this whole financial imbalance thing was beginning to wear me down.

Chance Meeting

The final chapter in this saga came the next day, my last day in Jodhpur, after I had visited the Mehrangarh Fort. Wandering back through the streets round the railway station, I saw Babaji wandering along and he spotted me straight away; Australian bush hats aren’t exactly common fare in India. We went through the usual social niceties, and then I asked him where he’d disappeared to last night. He said, ‘Oh, I was too hot, so I went home. Fancy a cold drink?’ Too right I did, so we ducked into a chai shop for a couple of bottles of Pepsi. It was good to chat, and amazingly enough Yogi chose that moment to wander into the same chai shop, just as Babaji was telling me that he was on the way to one of his factories to get a ring made for another customer who was paying Rs7000 for a star ruby set in a silver ring. This was very good business for him in the off-season, and I congratulated him on his luck.

So how the hell did I end up paying for all the drinks? Babaji said he had no change, only a Rs100 note, and before you know it I had shown him my hand and coughed up the dough. Why? This man was telling me all about his hot-shot business deals, and I was his guest, but I still paid. Am I that much of a pushover?

Finally, I arranged to meet both Yogi and Babaji at the railway station restaurant to say goodbye before I boarded my night train to Jaisalmer. I made sure I ate before I met them (to avoid any more financially draining food expenses) and turned up at the appointed time. Rather interestingly, for the first time they totally failed to turn up, leaving me sitting in the restaurant for a good two hours, free to enjoy peace of a sort. Babaji had said the lucky effect of my tiger-eye would be instant, but I didn’t realise it would be fast enough to spare me the ordeal of entertaining the Dodgy Brothers before having to board my overnight train. It’s marvellous stuff, this astrology, even if Yogi still owed me Rs85 at my time of departure, the shyster.

Incidentally, a couple of Australian guys I met in Udaipur and Diu told me that after hanging around with a group of locals for a few days, they’d needed an ‘Indian-free week’ to get over it. They were worn out by the constant social intrigues and petty offences they managed to cause, and decided to take a break. I didn’t understand what they meant at the time because all my Indian liaisons up to that point had been simply delightful, but as I got on the Jaisalmer train, I felt rather relieved to be escaping and totally understood the Aussies’ sentiments.

Needless to say neither Babaji nor the sitar actually arrived. Perhaps they ‘forgot’...

Jodhpur

Written: 20 June 1998   

Jodhpur isn’t only famous for its hard-nosed businessmen, it’s also home to one of the most staggering fortresses you will ever see. The Mehrangarh Fort dominates the city, sitting atop a 125m-high cliff-edged hill that catches the rising sun beautifully.

Not only that, my hotel, a beautiful 250-year-old haveli right in the centre of the city, was a classic of its type. A haveli is a traditional Rajasthani or Gujarati building, consisting of a number of floors based round a central courtyard. Most havelis used to be mansions; these days they’re more likely to be hotels, offices or home to many families, but a good haveli manages to retain its atmosphere and makes for an interesting place to stay, especially if you can get one of the lower rooms, tucked away from the searing sun.

After spending a couple of days being entertained by Yogi and Babaji, I finally found time on my last day to visit the fort, which was my main reason for visiting Jodhpur in the first place. I was by no means the first person to visit the place; in 1899 Rudyard Kipling wrote of the fort:

The work of angels, fairies and giants... built by Titans and coloured by the morning sun... he who walks through it loses sense of being among buildings. It is as though he walked through mountain gorges...

This might sound grandiose, but Kipling doesn’t overstate the immensity of the place. Huge walls sheer straight up from the cliff edge, serrated battlements provide ample room for huge cannons and view-hungry tourists, and even though her eloquence was hardly that of Kipling’s, Jackie Kennedy managed to sum up the fort with the wonderfully hyperbolic, ‘The eighth wonder of the world!’

The Money Man

On my way through the winding streets leading up to the eighth wonder of the world, I met a man. As per usual we got talking, but it was obvious from the start that this man had done his homework even more thoroughly than most.

‘What is your country?’ he asked.

‘England,’ I replied.

‘Ah, England. Prime Minister is Tony Blair.’

‘That’s right!’

‘Before that, John Major.’

‘Spot on.’

‘Before, Margaret Thatcher. Then James Callaghan. Then...’

And on he went, reciting the last few Prime Ministers backwards as if he were a kid in a history lesson. I lost track at Thatcher; I was nine when she deposed whoever was before her, and I felt a little embarrassed to see that this guy knew more than me about British politics.

While we were talking, a little boy slid up and sat down. He looked at me and started a familiar conversation.

‘What is your country?’ he asked.

‘England,’ I replied.

‘Ah, England. Prime Minister is Tony Blair.’

‘Er, that’s right,’ I said, smelling a rat.

‘Before that, John Major. Before, Margaret Thatcher. Then James Callaghan. Then...’

‘OK, OK,’ I conceded, beaten again. I looked at the man who was beaming with pride.

‘My son,’ he said, and ruffled his boy’s hair affectionately.

‘I have a collection of money notes,’ said the boy, and when I launched into my well-rehearsed monologue of how I had no coins or notes from home because I had been away for so long, he broke in and said, ‘Just come and take a look, I don’t want to take any notes from you. Just come and look.’ And charmed by his excellent English, I padded behind him into his home.

His mother made me chai and I looked at his note collection. It was huge; ‘The biggest in Rajasthan,’ my new friend Awatar announced. There were notes from Slovenia, Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam, Argentina, America, Canada, Italy, Sweden, Bangladesh, Nepal, Cambodia, Singapore and plenty of other exotic locations... it was fascinating.

I asked him where on earth he had got all these notes, and he said ‘tourists’ in such a plaintive way that I found myself promising to send him a note from England, seeing as he had nothing from the UK in his collection (I hope he received the mint £1 note I sent, itself an oddity¹). He was so pleased that I had to catch myself as he moved into scam mode.

I mentioned I was going home in July, via Amsterdam, and his face lit up. ‘Maybe you can help me,’ he said. ‘I have a friend whose mother is very ill in hospital, and needs money. He has some Dutch money, and maybe you can buy it off him for rupees.’

I asked him why he didn’t just change it at the bank, and he said that only foreigners could do that, not Indians, but I wasn’t into it at all. I didn’t know the exchange rate and he was talking about quite a large amount, so I refused and instead found him proffering two pound coins.

‘I got these from tourists,’ he said, ‘but I do not collect coins. You can use these at home; do you want to change these?’

This time I took the bait. The coins were genuine, I offered him Rs60 per coin (an offer slightly to my advantage) and he went for it. Emboldened by his success, he started jabbering away until we found ourselves on the subject of school, which was when he fished out a sealed clay pot with a coin-sized slit in it and gave me the usual blurb about collecting money to buy pens for the local school children, and would I like to donate? No, I said. He told me that Rs100 would buy five pens for the local school, which is an atrocious price for a pen (they’re not that expensive in England) and I realised that if I didn’t get out he would talk me out of all my worldly possessions and probably even more.

But what did I expect? This is Jodhpur, and the creed here is obviously salesmanship and money, as I’ve been discovering. Awatar’s note collection was evidently genuine and worth supporting, but even he couldn’t avoid the vocational calling of the genetic con artist, despite his tender age of nearly 15. It wasn’t malicious, it wasn’t even a con – everything he suggested was fair and above board, just pushy – but I was a guest in his house, drinking his chai, offering to send him something for his collection, and still he couldn’t resist trying to pull a fast one on the tourist. This is the sort of thing that leaves a slightly bad taste in my mouth, and it seems Jodhpur has made subtle deception its tour de force.

The Fortress

I finally escaped to the fortress, where the man at the gate asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said, ‘Ah, England. Prime Minister is Tony Blair.’

Wandering through the main gate, the guides waiting to be hired called me over, asked me where I was from and proclaimed, ‘Ah, England. Capital is London, Prime Minister is Tony Blair.’

And when I waited to have my ticket ripped for entry into the museum, the turban-clad attendant asked me where I was from and politely told me that the Prime Minister of England was the one-and-only Mr Tony Blair.

I felt quite exhausted.

But the fortress is certainly impressive, and the museum is one of the better Maharaja’s museums around (though it still pales when compared with evidence of George of Gwalior’s kleptomania). There are beautiful palace buildings, shady courtyards, intricate stone lattice works, and trademark Rajasthani rooms filled with mirrors and coloured glass (which manage to retain an air of taste, unlike Udaipur’s efforts). However, a lot of the fortress is closed to the public, so for my Rs50 entrance ticket and Rs50 camera permit I didn’t really feel I got my money’s worth.

It was still excellent to visit, but again I felt a little aggrieved at pouring money into the Maharaja’s coffers when government-owned sites like Mandu and Bijapur charge fees between two and five rupees for unlimited access. Awatar’s father had also expressed disgust; with Indians only having to pay a Rs10 entrance fee, he felt it was unfair on foreigners when for things like train journeys and hotels there is no distinction between Indian and foreigner. I have no problem with being charged more for being a foreigner – we have more money, after all – but I’m less happy when the only people doing this are the aristocratic owners of places like Mehrangarh Fort.

There is one feature of the fort that is definitely worth paying for, though. Standing on the battlements, the wind blows over the city and up the ramparts in such a way that you can hear all the noises of the city below you, as clearly as if you were standing in the streets yourself. Aldous Huxley, in one of his more lyrical moments, wrote:

...from the bastions of the Jodhpur Fort one hears as the gods must hear from Olympus, the gods to whom each separate word uttered in the innumerably peopled world below, comes up distinct and individual to be recorded in the books of omniscience.

That’s as maybe, but what I heard from the battlements was a calamitous cacophony of chaos from crashing clutches to crowded chowks and clopping cows. I idly wondered if Huxley ever visited the Golcumbaz, as Forster did; now that is a real ear on infinity.

And it’s a darn sight cheaper, too.

¹ Many thanks to Matt Kilsby, who left the following message in my Guestbook:

I’m currently travelling around India and have found your website really helpful and bloody funny as well!

I’m currently sitting in an Internet café in some backstreet in Jodhpur (it’s all a bit of a maze, though). This morning a friend and I went up to the fort, and who should accost us on the street? ‘Prime Minister Tony Blair... etc.’ I knew what was coming next because I’d already read your section on Jodhpur. Lo and behold, out came the foreign note album and I must say that it’s a fantastic collection! I was also offered a two pound coin. Six years later the cute teenager is now a fully fledged Indian businessman.

As to the note that you sent him... there were two one-quid notes in his collection, one from Jersey and the second a Royal Bank of Scotland one. If either of those notes are yours, then they are sitting proudly in his album (can’t remember the page number unfortunately!).

Anyway, thanks again for this great site. Keep up the good work. I’m off to get lost in Jodhpur.

Thanks for letting me know, Matt. Unfortunately the note I sent to Awatar was from the Bank of England, so I suspect it got lost in the post. Ah well, someone somewhere is a pound richer...

Pigs Over Jaisalmer

Written: 26 June 1998   

Having escaped from Jodhpur with my travellers cheques intact, I took the night train to Jaisalmer and found myself a delightful room inside the walls of the fantastic fortress, a perfect place for a spot of writing (it’s a great way to avoid the overpowering heat of the midday desert sun). Enjoying the strong southerly wind blowing through my window and out of my door, I was suddenly jolted upright by a loud, heartfelt screaming. It didn’t sound human, but it was obviously a distress call, amplified by the gusts as they blew headfirst into the battlements below and shot straight up into my penthouse.

I ran to my porthole and soon identified the source as a scuffle of dust clouds on the battlement slope. In Jaisalmer Fort the citadel walls stand on the top of an 80m-high sloping hill, so below the walls is a steep slope of scree that becomes vertical for its bottom 30 feet. This vertical bottom has been fortified by another wall, but there are no battlements here; if you were to be pushed off the citadel, you would fall from the battlements to the slope, roll down the hill and finally drop another 30 feet vertically down onto the plains (and no doubt plenty of marauders met their fate in exactly this way). It was from this slope that the noise was squealing.

The dust settled for a minute to show two dogs baiting a small piglet, no more than a foot-and-a-half from snout to springy tail. The dogs, one a patchwork of white and black and the other a dusty desert brown, had each got an end of the piglet and were throwing their heads to this side and that like lions ripping flesh from a wildebeest. But the piglet was still very much alive and bellowing, and running to the rescue were two boys.

Armed with slings and handfuls of stones they drove the dogs off the piglet and spent a good few minutes keeping them at bay. The dogs, however, had tasted blood, and at every opportunity they would grab the piglet and run off with it hanging from their drooling mouths, the poor thing squealing for its life. Eventually the boys managed to get between the dogs and the piglet, and began the long process of guiding their injured animal friend along the top of the lower wall, towards the gentle slope at one end that led down to the road.

It was during this slow escape that disaster struck. One of the dogs, evidently the hungriest, had run back down the slope and was tearing towards the pig. One of the boys spotted it and lobbed a well-aimed stone at the bugger’s flank, turning it away with a yelp, but the piglet hadn’t seen the sling and it panicked. It ran here and there, trusting neither dog nor human, and didn’t see the vertical drop until it ran straight into oblivion.

Right there below my room, the piglet seemed to float for a minute. Weighed down by its oversized head, it tumbled in a perfect arc, landing flat on its back after a drop of some thirty feet, raising a cloud of dust as it hit with a dull thump. The boys didn’t know what to do, and after throwing a few more rocks at the dogs in sheer frustration, they heeded the call of the injured and raced down to the roadside where the piglet lay twitching.

Hearing the shouts, a man came out of the house opposite, carrying a pail of water. His solution to the problem of a piglet with a broken back was to dump the contents of his pail over the poor beast’s head, which shocked it back to life and up into a few unsteady steps before it lay down again. But it was obviously in a terminal state, and as the man gently poured a second bucket on the body, the boys’ heads slowly bowed one by one, everyone avoiding each other’s gaze.

The piglet was dead, an insignificant death in a world where millions of animals die every year. But this one seemed poignant, because it showed the locals in a positive light; whether the piglet was a pet, an animal to be fattened and slaughtered or just an innocent caught up in a dog-eat-pig world, those boys, unsuccessful though they were, were supporting the underdog. It made a change from seeing animals being tied up and stuffed under bus seats, or worked to death in farmers’ fields, and it was good to see, despite the sad outcome.

One day all humans might be rich enough to be able to treat animals like this. And pigs might fly.

Jaisalmer

Written: 26 June 1998   

Jaisalmer is right out there on the frontier with the Thar Desert. Go west from Jaisalmer for some 100km and you hit Pakistan, but by the time you get halfway there you’ll have been detained or possibly even shot; the India-Pakistan border is hardly what you would call a relaxed part of the subcontinent. It certainly makes for an interesting area.

Perhaps it was the effect of the desert heat on the population, but I found most of the Jaisalmer locals to be either plonkers of the highest degree, sex maniacs, or both. It didn’t take me long, however, to develop a defence mechanism to this potentially infuriating attitude of a town tainted by western tourism but reeling under the off-season: I just laughed at everybody. It worked, too.

I laughed at the man in the bank who claimed the foreign exchange counter was closed until the end of September, despite the fact that I had met plenty of people who had managed to change money there in the previous few days. I laughed at the man sitting in the entrance to a beautiful haveli who demanded Rs2 entrance fee, while just round the corner stood a sign saying, ‘Welcome to Patwon ki Haveli, no entry fee.’ I laughed at the man in another haveli who tried to sell me his tourist junk with the sales pitch, ‘Just buy something small, only Rs500 or Rs1000.’ I laughed at the rickshaw man who wanted to buy my hat, so I offered it to him for Rs10,000 (over ten times its western price) and he said, ‘OK, I go and get ten thousand rupees.’ I laughed at the restaurant owner who, having produced a huge menu of vegetarian food, proclaimed that he had no vegetables, couldn’t provide me with any type of Indian food, and could only manage fried rice. I laughed at the young man who threw me a peace sign from behind his mirrored shades and yelled from inside his cluster of idiot-dude friends, ‘Hey man, if you want to talk to me, have a conversation man, come over here.’ The big difference between Jaisalmer and a lot of other places was that here I was laughing at the people, not with them. Something wasn’t quite right.

There also seemed to be a fixation with sex in town, and as it seems to be a well-known fact in India that all westerners have constant sex, I came across some very strange comments. As I was walking into the fort one day, a little girl of maybe seven or eight came up to me and said, ‘You are very beautiful man, hello.’ Walking down the street with Veronique, a Belgian now living in New Zealand whom I had met on the train from Jodhpur, we were followed by a group of astoundingly ugly young men, one of whom went right up to her back and grinned to his idiot friends as he walked in sync with her, only a foot apart; I spotted it and acted the offended boyfriend, but to them it was just a game, not sexual harassment. On the bus out of Jaisalmer to Bikaner, the young conductor announced that the driver was married, slept in the same bed with his wife and had lots of sex with her, a factlet that I could have lived without knowing. And I met an American couple, Nick and Rebecca, who fuelled my theory with two stories of their own; they had been told by a local that it was important that they only had sex once a week (‘Seven days, one fuck,’ was how the locals put it, to which Nick rather swiftly replied, ‘One day, seven fucks’); and one night they ended up with a local musician inside their hotel room, simulating sex on the bed with some rather embarrassing pelvic thrusts into a nearby pillow. It was all getting rather worrisome.

But despite the procreational obsessions of what is hopefully a small minority of the locals, Jaisalmer is a beautiful city. It is dominated by a huge and wonderfully picturesque fort, certainly one of the most attractive in India, and surrounding the hill is a sandy-coloured town of winding streets and desert buildings, hiding among its twists and turns some beautiful havelis, lakes with intricate temples, and a whole menagerie of farm animals from cows to goats to pigs to dogs to human beings. The inside of the fortress is even more intensely crowded, and is therefore even more fascinating, and once you’ve learned to avoid the slippery cow pats it’s a delightfully mediaeval place to wander round.

Even if every now and then you just have to laugh.

Camel, One Previous Owner

Written: 25 June 1998   

‘Ello there sir. You look like the sort of man who knows what he’s looking for, if I may say so. Let me be the first to say that you’ve come to the right place; here at Old Nick’s New and Second-Hand Camel Emporium we’ve got ’em all, from super-charged top-of-the-range ships of the desert to more affordable economy models.

Now what sort of camel were you looking for, sir? A new one perhaps? Let’s see, your baby camel starts at 3 ft tall, and all you have to do is to feed him cow’s milk until he turns into one of the strapping young lads we’ve got over there. If you’re looking for a nice adult camel, we’ve got ’em starting at Rs7000 and going all the way up to Rs20,000, depending on the strength and age of the model; I’m sure we can find something to suit your needs...

What’s that? Running costs? Well, you’ll get about 50km per day out of your average model, and all it requires in terms of daily consumables is 20kg of grass, which will cost you in the region of Rs100, and between 30 and 40 litres of water, depending on the weather. The beauty of your camel is his ability to go for a week without any water at all, so he’s great for the desert; if you don’t put any water into him for more than a week, the one-year guarantee’s null and void, but even the driest desert will have filling oases dotted about that you can get to in a week, believe you me.

Maintenance is simple; as long as you put in the food and water he’ll look after himself, chewing the cud at any available moment and parking himself for the night without a problem. We recommend you tie your camel up for the night, just as a precaution, but if you do decide to let him wander then he won’t run off, especially if you’re good and regular with the feeding. I know what you’re thinking: how on earth can something with all those joints and spindly legs not go wrong? Well, we get an average of 24 years out of each model, and I’m sure if you treat yours well he’ll give you even more years of satisfactory motoring.

See those legs? Two joints and three parts to each one, a brilliant bit of engineering, I must say. Looking from the side you’ve got your front legs on the left that bend in a Z-shape, and you’ve got your back legs on the right that bend in an S-shape, and there are specially hardened pads of skin in the right places, especially the bits that rub against the ground when the camel’s sitting. Give the ‘sit’ command and they fold up in a beautiful way, one that you wouldn’t believe possible; the camel kneels on its front knees, then folds its back legs up, and finally tucks the rest of its front legs under its belly. You won’t find a system so well designed outside of a Swiss Army knife, but try to explain it in a brochure and it’s like trying to explain how a compact umbrella works to someone who’s never seen rain.

At the bottom of your legs you’ve got your foot pads. No, they don’t need replacing either, or shoeing like your horse, and they’re good for all sorts of terrain. Look at him walking; they squash out like silicone breast implants, know what I mean sir? Beautiful work.

Not as beautiful as the face, though. Look at those lines, with the sleek, aerodynamic head and long neck for reaching all those tasty neem leaves; did I mention that you can fill up for free by letting your camel find his own food? A nice optional extra is the set of long eyelashes that give your camel that extra bit of appeal, and along with the flapping ears I have to say that almost everyone chooses this option; a camel without pretty eyes is like a donkey without a tail, wouldn’t you say so sir? What’s that? No, you don’t have to worry about your camel looking like a female; we only sell male camels for transport, because if you take a mixture of females and males out into the desert, the males will fight over the females, so we leave the females back at home, just like you do in your life, sir, if you’ll pardon my mentioning your wife. And on that subject, you don’t want to involve your camel with females without expert supervision, sir; with those legs, mating is a sight to behold, I can tell you! You just bring him in for his regular servicing as per usual and we’ll look after the rest...

No, he’s not in a bad mood, he just looks like it. Your average camel is a happy, docile beast; he just looks like he’s in a permanent sulk. It’s the lower lip, sir, hanging down like that all the time, as if something’s wrong. You look at the thing and all you can think of is Marvin the Paranoid Android or Eeyore the Donkey, but Terry Pratchett reckoned camels were the best mathematicians in the world, and Johnny Morris just loved them, so don’t judge a book by his cover, sir. Besides, if your camel does develop a bit of an attitude, tie a rope between his two front legs and let him go off into the desert with a friend, and they’ll wrestle it out of their systems. Yes, wrestle. Has to be seen to be believed! There they are like two lanky diplodocuses, wrestling. They start by crossing their necks, just like swords in a sword fight, and then the fight’s on. The idea is to hook your neck behind your opponent’s front legs, forcing him to kneel down. There’s lots of playful biting of foot pads, necks and tails, and a heck of a lot of noise, but don’t let that worry you sir, it’s quite harmless. If you don’t let them have a wrestle every now and then they might end up picking on someone else; I saw a camel try to pick up a goat in its mouth as a joke, but the goat didn’t see the funny side, if you see what I mean.

Did I mention night-time? That’s when your camel gets a lot of his cud chewing in; camels eat their food plenty of times, so don’t be put off by the night-time noise. You’ll hear farts, burps, rumbles and the regular clock-like side-to-side chewing of his huge teeth, and if you’re sleeping close by it’ll stink like a dodgy food disposal unit in a blocked sink. But after a while you’ll find it comforting, and it’ll be the nights that you’re not with your camel that you’ll have trouble sleeping.

So, can I put you down for one? Or would you like to take a test ride? There’s no manual, but it’s simplicity itself; steer with the nose-rope, and learn the commands for ‘stop’, ‘sit’, ‘stand’ and the speed controls. Easy, isn’t it sir? I just know you’re going to love it.

In fact, I’ve got one here that’s just perfect for you. One previous owner, low mileage and a personality that makes John Major look positively hyperactive. Would you care to make a deposit now, or would you like to pay cash...?

The Thar Desert

Written: 25 June 1998   

A lot of people come to Jaisalmer for the amazing fortress, and plenty of them come for the wonderful desert atmosphere, but it feels as if the majority of tourists come for the camel safaris on offer.

I was no exception, but visiting during the off-season proved to be a blessing. I’d met a friendly girl called Veronique on the Jodhpur train, and we were both interested in going on a safari, so we booked and waited to see if any more tourists would turn up. They didn’t, and as a result we had a much more personal experience than we would have had in the busy season; with just the two of us, plus two guides and three camels, it felt like a real adventure as we headed off into the stifling heat of the Thar Desert.

Of the three camels, I was on Sukia, a true ship of the desert who came complete with a branded ship’s anchor on his rear flank, Veronique was on Lula, and our guides, Ali and Sagra, variously rode and pulled Gula. Ali, an only child of Muslim parents (a rarity in this country of multiple-child families) was an interesting character; very clued up and with good English, he was an excellent liaison between the older desert expert Sagra and us complete novices. He sang Urdu trail songs, showed us his tiny home village, and always looked spotless in his white shirt and lungi. Sagra, on the other hand, was a Rajasthani Hindu through and through, with his twirled moustache, bright yellow turban¹, holey shirt and well-loved dhoti. He spoke little English (most of his conversations were in the local language) and although he was a quiet man, when he spoke everyone fell silent and listened to what he had to say. The chemistry between the two was magical: the young business expert and the old man of the desert.

Veronique was no stranger to the desert either. She and her husband (who gave up his job as a journalist to study the subject of wine for a year, and is now export manager for one of New Zealand’s top wineries) had toured southern Africa together, and she’d been on other trips there too, so luckily I wasn’t in the presence of a dweeby indoors person. Not surprisingly, we clicked well. This was a good thing; life in the desert is hard. Your drinking water is always hot (which I found reminding me of good times in Australia); you sleep in the afternoon when the only thing that moves is the heat haze; the food is basic – chapatis and vegetable curry – but Sagra and Ali managed to create such variety out of so few ingredients that it was more than passable; pans are cleaned with sand and fires are made from sticks and cow pats; and you sleep on the sand dunes, a romantic idea but not quite the picnic one would expect. I thoroughly loved it.

Desert Life

As far as deserts go, the Thar is somewhere between the Sahara and the bush. There are dunes, but they don’t stretch all the way to the horizon; you can see bush beyond the dunes, but they’re large enough to get a feel for the desert. Out trip was for three days and two nights, both of which we spent sleeping under the stars, but I found I wanted to go for longer. Just like in Australia, the call of the desert is still strong.

There are enough differences between the Thar and other deserts I have visited to make it a new experience. The landscape is dry and rugged, but there is a fair amount of greenery; it isn’t spinifex, but more like small, dry bushes. Trees dot the horizon, but not just any trees; these are mushroom-shaped neem trees, with the greenery stopping in a completely horizontal line some ten feet from the ground. I wondered how the science of genetics could explain that until I saw a camel munching at the green leaves; in the world of nature there’s normally a good explanation for what at first appears to be an inexplicable wonder.

Unlike in Australia, where most of the life lives under the canopy (and is therefore very small), there is plenty of life in the Thar. I saw cows, camels, gazelles, goats, dogs, crows, beetles, lizards, desert foxes and, of course, humans, but it’s still hard to see how anything can survive here in this arid land. I asked Ali if it rained much in the monsoon, to which he replied with a wry smile, ‘It is the monsoon.’ This doesn’t stop the locals from ploughing fields ready for planting wheat, millet and camel grass, though I still fail to see how anything can grow out here; the lone woman and her child chopping at clumps of grass with a hook-back spade makes for a poignant symbol of man versus the environment. This is where India meets Africa and the frontiers of the old Wild West.

The Dunes

Perhaps the most romantic and evocative aspect of the desert is the amazing sight of the dunes. We spent two nights sleeping on their gentle slopes, an experience that is unforgettable not just for the thrill of the outdoors, but because it is far from the idyllic image it suggests. If the wind is blowing you wake up with sand in your mouth, sand in your eyes, sand in your nose, sand in your ears, sand in your hair, sand in your toes, sand in your crotch, sand in your armpits, sand in your fingernails and, after you’ve eaten, sand in your stomach. And sand isn’t the soft surface you’d expect from all that sunbathing down on the beach; sand is just hard rock in little bits, and after a few hours of tossing and turning on a dune, you find that it’s just as comfortable. But the stars are unforgettable – as are the satellites; for the first time I saw two in the sky at one time – and drifting off to sleep under the whole universe is a sight to behold. One night I woke up to see the silhouette of my camel against the starry horizon, and I couldn’t help but start; this was a scene straight out of the books of Joan Aiken (and specifically the illustrations of Jan Pienkowski), a classic silhouetted scene of the type I grew up with in my imagination, and here it was, in the flesh. After an experience like that, it’s a wonderful feeling to wake up to a cup of sweet chai and a pale blue sky, with Mercury rising as the mercury rises.

The dunes aren’t just dead piles of sand, either; they’re alive. When the morning breeze skirts the gentle slopes of the dunes, they shimmer with waves that make Hollywood’s special effects pale in comparison. It is as if the dunes are pulsating with a kind of life, much as the plains do later when the heat stirs up the air to make trees, scrub and horizon waver in the haze. The whole dune system is made up of shifting sands, an impermanent collection of tiny particles piling up, collapsing and slowly eking across the desert in the direction of the prevailing winds, and it is in this sense that the dunes are truly alive. Like the camel trains and animal herds, the dunes are desert travellers, just in a different time scale.

More than once I was reminded of Thorung La, the snow fields on top of the world. There the wind blows streams of frozen water off the peaks and into the deep blue sky, and drifts of snow pile up over ragged mountain summits in a constantly changing landscape. And like the snow of Thorung La, the sand of the Thar Desert sucks in all sound, muffling footsteps and creating a silence that is beyond a pure absence of noise; you can hear your own body pumping, wheezing and gurgling, while all around the world is in golden silence.

It might be silent when the sun is baking the land, but there’s always plenty going on. You won’t see much wildlife in the severe heat of the midday scorch, but just look down and you’ll see the evidence of the desert’s huge variety of inhabitants.

There is the Pac-Man trail of the camel, a collection of croquette-shaped green turds in its wake; winding in and out of the dune bushes are squiggly lines made by the tail of a lizard scampering over the hot sand; hopping from foot to foot between the squiggles are the forked footprints of a desert crow; back on the path are hoof marks and the characteristic pat of a cow; scampering in the opposite direction are the cloven prints of a herd of goats, littering the ground in their wake with their bubble dung; following behind are the characteristic marks of two bare-footed humans, the prints deep into the sand from the weight of the water jugs balanced on their heads; and finally there is a slight movement among all the faeces as a dung beetle rolls a camel turd over and over, literally heading towards some secret shit-hole.

Desert Villages

More obvious signs of life dominate the far horizon: villages, dotted throughout the area, are easy to spot in this flat landscape. In this part of India, some 60km from the Pakistan border, the villages are mainly mixed caste, with all the Hindu castes living together with Muslims in one place. In the middle of the desert the people are simply stunned to see you; one day I skipped the midday nap and followed Noel Coward’s advice, wandering off into the barren wasteland for an after-lunch stroll. As I emerged out of the heat haze like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter and entered a lonely four-house village in the middle of nowhere, people came out of their front doors and stared as if I was a visitor from another planet, which in a sense I was; the desert is like nowhere else on earth, an inhospitable land made bearable by the construction of mud huts and wells. Some villages have water fed to them by pipelines, some have dug very deep wells to the waterline, and some even have the water flown in by aeroplane, but whatever the source, it’s the water that provides a grip on the environment.

The buildings change as you get closer to civilisation, as does the attitude of the inhabitants. As we clomped slowly in the direction of the main road, the children became more tourist-aware, asking for pens and chocolate instead of just standing open-mouthed, and the mud huts morphed into ugly breeze-block monstrosities. Although the mud hut is much cooler than a stifling brick house, the brick house has a higher cost and therefore a higher status, so if you can afford it, you go for bricks. This attitude isn’t confined to the desert; in Europe, we look upon stately homes as the ultimate luxury accommodation, but in reality they are difficult to heat in the winter, a nightmare to clean and a pain to maintain. But stately homes have a high status, and most people living in council houses would dearly love to upgrade; it’s the same for mud-hut dwellers when they see the blocky designs of modern brick houses, even if they look to a westerner like ghetto material. Desert building work is an on-going process and is as insane as elsewhere in India; even out here the schools have walls round their grounds, though logically that seems like a waste of manpower and materials.

Towards the main road, modern life impinges. We were approached more than once by a man selling what he referred to as cold drinks, but which were, in fact, warm bottles of Pepsi, Teem and Mirinda. Pepsi has a firm grip on rural areas and Coca-Cola dominates in the cities, and it’s nowhere more obvious than in the desert, where buildings display large painted Pepsi logos on their walls, clashing with the pastel colours of the surrounding desert. But that doesn’t mean the people are modern; they marvelled at my penknife (which was much better than Sagra’s blunt effort), inflatable pillow, eye shades, compass, collapsible cutlery set, bottle holder, sunglasses and even my cheap Indonesian sandals. But just as I thought I’d discovered one part of India where the West has no influence, the clock struck twelve and a chorus of digital watches bleeped to announce the turning of the hour.

Even out here, this is still India, with all its trappings.

¹ A turban is just a piece of thin material, about 1m wide and around 5m long. As Public Enemy will tell you, it’s all in the wrapping.

Bikaner

Written: 27 June 1998   

With my camel safari completed, I headed east from Jaisalmer to the town of Bikaner. I’d decided to stop here on the unavoidably convoluted way to Amritsar, and reading about it, it had sounded like a fun place to visit. In the event, Bikaner itself was overshadowed by the Karni Mata Temple in nearby Deshnok, which is one of the most astounding sights I’ve ever seen. A 30km bus ride out of town, the Karni Mata Temple is, on the face of it, just another Hindu temple, but go inside and it’s a scream. Literally.

In this country of animal worshippers, it’s obvious why some animals are holy. The cow gives milk, an incredibly useful product; the monkey makes for good stories; the elephant and tiger are wild, mighty and graceful; and the swan, garuda and others are slightly mysterious and look great in pictures and carvings. Indeed, worshipping animals has always struck me as a great way to ensure that devotees live in harmony with nature, and that’s a good thing, even if you aren’t a believer in the religion itself. But the rat has never struck me as a holy animal however hard I think about it, and that’s why Karni Mata is so intriguing.

The place is infested with rats, quite intentionally; the rats at Karni Mata are regarded as future incarnations of sadhus and mystics, which might go some way to explaining the ragged appearance of sadhus and mystics once they’re reincarnated as humans. Removing your shoes at the entrance to the temple isn’t so much a mark of respect to the Hindu faith; it’s more a test of endurance that even Indiana Jones would consider twice. Black rats scamper everywhere, crawling into holes, lapping up milk and water from bowls, nibbling at prasad (food given as offerings) and sleeping in the shade of the marble walls. At first the sight is a little disturbing, but it soon becomes apparent that the rats are more scared of you than you are of them, and the scene melts from something out of a James Herbert novel into yet another interesting cultural event.

Before setting off for the temple, I got into a conversation with some shop owners in Bikaner who told me about the temple. Brandishing a small painting of the temple’s Durga shrine, they pointed to the rats eating offerings on the steps; in the middle was a white rat, the only one, and they told me that just one white rat lived in the temple, and that it was a very special rat. If it looked at you it was very good luck, and if you touched it, it was even better. I thanked them for the information and headed off.

Imagine my amazement, then, when I wandered over to a corner of the temple where a small crowd was gathered round a pile of bricks, and discovered a white rat cowering inside the rubble. Hindus were bowing to the rat, holding their hands together in prayer and whispering to each other in excited tones. I sat around, fascinated that a rat could inspire such worship, and waited for something to happen.

Soon enough the people drifted away and the rat, sensing an escape opportunity, popped its head out and made a dash for it. I followed it slowly, tracking it down among a group of black rats, where it was trying unsuccessfully to blend into the crowd. As I ambled closer it seemed to stop, sniff the air and sense something; then it fixed its beady eyes on mine for about ten seconds before breaking contact and getting back to the business of trying to merge into the crowd. Slightly surprised to find myself excited by this symbolic event, I shuffled forward slowly, and after a few minutes of slow footwork, I managed to reach out and stroke its back. By this stage a few Hindus had followed me, ostensibly to see what the funny white man was doing (a white man among black men being as interesting as a white rat among black rats), and they soon started their prayers again. I snapped a picture and suddenly the white rat was gone, down a hole and away from the crowds.

My good luck didn’t start immediately, if it started at all. I sat down to contemplate my good fortune, and instantly the one-rupee-one-pen crowd homed in and started their litany. It was hot and I wasn’t really in the mood for this; the only sure-fire way to get rid of these kids is to pretend to lose your temper, but you can’t do that in a temple, and all I wanted was a bit of peace in which to watch the rodent seekers do their bit. Instead I ended up with a bunch of kids who understood no English and who wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer. The conversation went something like this.

‘Name?’

‘Mark.’

‘Ah, Marr. Town name?’

‘Birmingham.’

‘Ah, Burma. Father’s name?’

‘Ian.’

‘Ah, Ear. Brother’s name?’

‘Andrew.’

‘Ah, Anroo. Uncle’s name?’

‘Which one?’

‘Ah, Whichwun. Yes.’

At which point I gave up, found my shoes and the bus back to Bikaner, and went exploring the town itself. There’s only so much you can do with the one-rupee-one-pen crowd in the heat of an Indian summer...

Exploring Bikaner

As the afternoon sun sweltered its way across the sky, I found time to visit the maharaja’s fortress, and the old city bazaars with their windy streets. Unfortunately the Junagarh Fort cost a small fortune to enter, and then I could only go round in the company of a guide (who wanted baksheesh to show me all the rooms, which I paid in the vain hope that the ‘hidden’ rooms would be worth the effort, which they weren’t). The upshot was that yet again I poured money into the coffers of some fat landlord who had quite justifiably been axed from his feudal position and who was now bleeding tourists instead of serfs. Every maharaja’s palace I visit makes me love old George more and more; at least he had style.

But it wasn’t Bikaner’s fault that I didn’t enjoy myself, it was mine. Yet again I came across a town fairly untainted by tourism¹, and yet again I found wonderfully friendly people who wanted to talk, swap addresses and shake my hand. The problem was that I wasn’t in the mood; perhaps I was tired from my delayed and over-long ten-hour bus ride from Jaisalmer, or perhaps the heat of the plains is getting me down, but I felt totally uninspired and far from friendly. But you can’t inflict your moods on well-meaning and kind people, and having to keep smiling ended up as a bit of a strain. I even got invited into one particularly kind man’s hotel room where he introduced me to his son, who was sitting his medical school entrance exams in Bikaner, and of whom he was incredibly proud; he lost no opportunity in singing his son’s praises, he fed me bananas and chai, and he was eloquently fascinating. How can you be mean to people like that? I can’t, but I found my energy rapidly draining away.

I felt like you do after a miserable night’s sleep, a crappy day at work and a bad drive home, and then you have to attend a cocktail party that you don’t want to go to; the normal course of events is that you put on a brave face, and when you get home you announce to your spouse, ‘That’s the last bloody charity/school reunion/golf club party we’re going to.’ Unfortunately I have no spouse at whom to let off steam, so instead I smiled all the way onto the 1am train north.

So I think the white rat’s luck took a while to kick in. One thing’s for sure: I certainly felt ratty as I headed north to Amritsar.

¹ Though judging by the figures, Bikaner is on the up. In 1980, 1759 foreigners and 54,724 Indians visited the fort. In 1997 this had shot up to 21,809 foreigners and 158,180 Indians. It looks like Bikaner will soon change...

Nuclear Testing

Written: 27 June 1998   

One of the most common questions round northern Rajasthan is, of course, ‘What do you think of the nuclear tests?’ Regardless of my personal feelings on matters nuclear – which amount to an idealistic disgust at nuclear weapons, an intellectual fascination with sub-atomic physics, and a powerful appreciation of the shocking beauty of the mushroom cloud – I always answer in the positive, saying that I think it’s fair enough that India has done its tests and that Pakistan has reacted with their own.

From a completely dispassionate viewpoint, the whole nuclear situation in the subcontinent is understandable. India and Pakistan are mortal enemies, and defence is a major concern; this issue wins elections, a fact not lost on the BJP government, which is exceedingly pro-Hindu and hence anti-Pakistan. It’s obvious why Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee decided to run the tests, and Pakistan’s reaction is utterly predictable.

Arguments about the ideological idiocy of nuclear weapons testing don’t cut much ice with the Indians, and I understand why. I also feel that the West’s reaction – sanctions and widespread condemnation – is not only misunderstanding the political situation here, but is hypocritical in the extreme. In 1995 France blew up bombs in the South Pacific, and they weren’t put under sanctions outside of the voluntary boycotts of French wine in Australia and New Zealand (the former country being the source of the uranium used in the tests in the first place). Nobody in their right mind would welcome more nuclear bombs into the world, but why alienate the country concerned when you’re penalising them for something that you’ve already done yourself?

My reaction, therefore, is this: doing the tests was fair enough, but if either country actually uses the weapons conceived, that is completely unforgivable. The Indians I meet generally agree with this, but they don’t hold back when it comes to President Clinton; I’ve met Americans who say they’re referred to as ‘the enemy’ by locals, and there’s no invective spared when Indians talk about the good old US of A. England, on the other hand, has come out of it reasonably well, though I don’t know why.

But the man in the street here has a fairly flimsy grasp on the facts. I passed through Pokaran, the site of the tests, on my way from Jaisalmer to Bikaner, and in both cities I discovered incredible ignorance. One young man in Bikaner, a medical student at the local college, claimed that the current heat wave was entirely due to the nuclear tests, and that in Jaisalmer the water had turned red because ‘atoms go into the water’ (but then again, he also told me that Hindi films were exactly like real life, so who’s to say he was sane?). This is simply uninformed and illogical, especially coming from someone who studies elementary chemistry and physics as part of his course.

So perhaps the question should not be whether the nuclear tests are a good or a bad thing, but whether Indian democracy is effective. I trust the Indians, but I’m not sure I trust their government, and despite the free press and democratic semblance, a few fat and corrupt politicians in Delhi can play with atoms, bombs and buttons to their heart’s content. That’s the concern, but I can’t very well tell that to the locals, can I?

Punjab

Amritsar

Written: 1 July 1998   

As pupils in school history classes we barely touched upon colonialism, an amazing omission given the importance of the British Empire in the continuing arrogance of the English abroad; if we did study it, it was only to mention British successes (such as the Battle of Plassey, the explorations of Captain Cook and the glory of Hong Kong) or to paint a vivid picture of the hardships forced upon us by the conquest of the developing world (such as the Black Hole of Calcutta, the Zulu wars and the exploration of North America).

But the British abroad were hardly angels; one only has to read Orwell’s Burmese Days to see a different side to the glory of Mother England and her supposedly benign influence on her subject countries. I am constantly surprised by how biased my education was; I expect such a thing to happen in countries with oppressive and dictatorial regimes, but in Britain, the Land of Hope and Glory, the inventor of parliamentary democracy, the epitome of fairness and high morals? I’ve begun to explore the other side of the coin, and it’s an ugly story. It seems I was fed propaganda at school.

It happens everywhere: CNN isn’t neutral and unbiased, and nor is the BBC, but we like to think that they are (most people will get very heated if you question the ‘correctness’ of their news programmes). Nothing is neutral; I know this because I am a journalist, and as a journalist I know it’s practically impossible to write something that’s completely objective. But my religious education was a Christian education, and we never learned about any other religions, a major oversight that has thankfully been rectified in the modern curriculum; my history lessons were conveniently selective, even though history is supposed to teach us to learn from our mistakes; geography lessons were selective too, avoiding concepts of famine and ecology in favour of motorway names, county boundaries and the main products of Canadian territories. I know you can’t teach everything, but you can at least try to teach a balanced syllabus.

So I have been discovering another side to life through my interest in colonialism. At school I never learned anything about Malaysia or British Borneo, but their histories are fascinating, and are a good example of petty squabbling between advanced nations, irrespective of the effect on the people originally living there. Travelling through Australia and New Zealand opened up the worlds of the Aborigine and Maori to me, and Polynesia is a perfect example of colonial control that is both vindictive (nuclear testing) and beneficial (France pumping money into the country). I had to find out about this myself, and although it’s been fascinating for me, it makes my education look worryingly incomplete.

Amritsar, the spiritual capital of the Punjab, is a perfect example. The Punjab is the home of the Sikhs, the easily recognised Indians who wear turbans, grow their hair and beards long, and who have set up very successful communities in places like Birmingham and the USA. The Punjab is now a peaceful state, but this is a recent development; until the early 1990s it was dangerous to travel here, and the region’s history is a long story of armed struggle and bloodshed.

The Development of Sikhism

Sikhism was founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539) who was, reading between the lines, a genuine hippy. He looked at Islam and Hinduism, and although he liked certain aspects of both religions, he was a serious liberal and wholeheartedly rejected the caste system of Hinduism and the intolerance and sexism of Islam. The result was his creation of a new religion, Sikhism, which blended the good parts of Hinduism and Sufism (Islam’s mystical branch) into a religion of tolerance and universal appeal. Nine more gurus followed Nanak, each building on the faith and forming a loose nation of Sikhs in the Punjab area, the spiritual centre of which was the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

This all happened during the Mughal reign, and under the progressive Emperor Akbar and his successors, Sikhism flourished. But the last Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, was a fanatical Muslim and spent most of his time tearing down Hindu temples and building mosques – thus alienating his subjects and paving the way for the end of Muslim rule in India – and Sikhism was suddenly under fire from the ruling class. This coincided with the leadership of Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708) who turned Sikhism around, creating a militaristic and highly organised sect that vigorously defended its right to exist and which elevated the concept of martyrdom to new heights. The result was a whole population of men who were honourable, valiant and seriously tough, characteristics that, one can argue, are still predominant in modern Sikh society.

With the demise of the Mughals and the advent of the comparatively tolerant British rule, the Sikhs expanded their empire. The Golden Temple, which had a chequered history of being repeatedly captured by Muslims and being subsequently recaptured by Sikhs, stayed in Sikh hands from 1767 onwards. By 1839, under Ranjit Singh, the Sikhs ruled the Punjab, Kashmir, Ladakh, Balistan, Gilgit, Hazara and the Peshawar Valley (in other words what is now northeastern India and northern Pakistan) and had pushed the Afghans right back to the Khyber Pass. Ranjit had agreed in 1809 not to intrude on British territory, in return for being left alone by the Brits, but his successors flaunted this agreement, and in 1846 and 1849 the British fought two bloody wars with the Sikhs, eventually winning, and the Sikh empire was incorporated into British India. The Sikh culture, though, was allowed to continue unharmed, and Sikhs were included in the British army, much like the Nepalese Gurkhas.

This bloody history is an important part of Sikhism, if only because it is the reason for their distinctive appearance. Being on the move all the time, the Sikhs were unable to waste time on beautification, a stylistic nicety which has stuck: the knife, or kirpan – which is always carried and is exempted all over India in signs proclaiming, ‘No weapons allowed, except for Sikh kirpans’ – is an obvious symbol of armed struggle; and the traditional short trousers are worn instead of lungis because lungis are pretty useless if you need to run quickly over rough terrain. But surely the most impressive consequence of the Sikhs’ armed past is the long history of martyrs, all of whom are revered like latter-day saints.

The Golden Temple, being the central Sikh shrine, has a whole gallery devoted to Sikh history and its martyrs. Occupying five rooms above the northern entrance to the temple, the museum consists of paintings of the key events in the history of Sikhism, and although it starts off with some pretty mellow historical scenes, it soon gives way to the violence and bloodshed that marks this particular struggle for religious freedom.

The first sign that something is up is a painting of a man being boiled alive, closely followed by another man being sawn in half from his head down. In each case it depicts a devotee being killed in the presence of his guru, but to me it wasn’t initially clear if these pictures were showing religious persecution or an extreme test of bravery; what follows, however, puts one in no doubt that these are depictions of some of the more unpleasant ways in which Sikhs were killed by those of different religious persuasions (mainly Muslims) in a brutal attempt to convert them from their faith. There are pictures of Muslims butchering hundreds of Sikh babies, chopping off brave Sikh warriors’ heads and, following on from these religious atrocities, a depiction of the 1919 massacre of an unarmed Sikh crowd by the British.

Of course, given its location in the holiest of all Sikh shrines, the museum can’t avoid falling into the same trap as my own education. The theme throughout is the persecution of Sikhs, and although this is a well-documented part of the story of Sikhism, there are other areas of Sikh history that are perhaps more controversial. The modern era has spawned the Sikh extremist, some of whom are willing to go to terrible lengths to fight their cause. It’s a truism that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, but it is, after all, only a few years since there was peace in the Punjab, and today you still see photograph displays of Sikh extremists in bus and train stations, each of them holding a prisoner number in front of them and wearing a defiant expression. For some people, wars are never over.

But it’s hard to imagine the Punjab as a war zone. The change of scenery from Rajasthan to the Punjab is stunning; from desolate arid desert, you pass into a green and fertile land filled with fields of rice and wheat and criss-crossed by bulging rivers. The man next to me on the bus pointed out of the window and said, ‘Is like England, yes?’, and although I can’t recall many paddy fields or palm trees in sunny Staffordshire, I can see what he meant. It is pure green; the Punjab produces 22 per cent of India’s wheat and ten per cent of its rice, and it is home to the world’s biggest bicycle manufacturer, Hero Bicycles. The Sikhs are master mechanics, and are renowned for their tolerance of other cultures and religions and their friendliness. This is not the product of terrorism, surely?

The Golden Temple

It’s even harder to think of negative aspects of Sikhism when you visit the Golden Temple itself. A celebration of architecture, aesthetics, equality and piety, the Golden Temple is not only one of the most delightful temple complexes in India, with its large tank and glittering gold and white marble buildings, but it’s also one of the friendliest. In most Hindu and Muslim temples there’s a slight feeling of intrusion; as a non-Hindu you can’t go into a Hindu temple’s inner sanctum, and you might not be allowed into a mosque at all, especially if you’re female, but Sikhism makes a point of its tolerance. Anyone and everyone can visit the Golden Temple regardless of colour, caste or creed, and the four entrances surrounding the complex symbolise this freedom. It lends a relaxed atmosphere to the interior; you can go anywhere, see anything and the only ‘price’ to pay is to take off your shoes and cover your head. Would that all religions were so tolerant.

The temple itself is a stunning piece of architecture, an ancient structure rebuilt so many times after destruction and war that it combines the old and the new in a successful union. A huge square tank, filled to the brim with dark water and huge carp, is surrounded by buildings, all done out in white marble and gleaming in the sunshine. The walkway surrounding the tank is wide and, even in the direct sunlight, cool; and dotted throughout the complex are marble plaques and carved memorials to Sikhs who died in wars, Sikhs who want to be commemorated in their holiest shrine, and other plaques containing details of large donations. Every space has its value printed on it, from Rs500 to Rs50,000, and each one has a story to tell, from lists of dead soldiers to New York Sikhs announcing their departure for their heavenly abode.

In the middle of the tank is the Golden Temple itself, the Hari Mandir (literally ‘the Temple of God’). A long marble walkway leads to this square block of a building, whose lower walls are covered in inlaid flowers in patterns reminiscent of the Taj Mahal. The roof of the building, a melee of bulbous spires and domes, is totally smothered in gold, and manages to offset the marble quite beautifully in the architectural equivalent of milk and honey. It seems almost contradictory, but these garish whites and golds manage to give off a decidedly peaceful atmosphere; sitting round the edge of the lake watching the world go by is one of life’s more relaxing experiences, especially as you don’t tend to get interrupted quite as much as you do outside the temple (other visitors will of course talk to you, but they are polite in the extreme).

Throughout the day loudspeakers sound out the constant singing of the Sikhs’ bible, the Adi Grantha, and where the equivalent in a Hindu temple would probably be insanely lively, the Adi Grantha chanting is a glorious synthesis of styles. I’ve listened to plenty of Indian classical music, but I’ve rarely come across music as evocative as that in the Golden Temple; I kept thinking of Harrison’s ‘Within You and Without You’, itself a mixture of western Beatles music and classical eastern sitar. With its simple combination of keyboard, tabla and voice, I sat and listened for hours, marvelling at the complexity of a nation that can invent both wonderful classical music and infuriating pop.

The Golden Temple is a rich place, too. It’s obvious when you look into the glass donation box, where people donate their spare change to contribute to the re-gilding of the temple’s roof (most of which is being financed by donations from Birmingham’s Sikh community). In one cursory glance I saw US$50, US$20, US$10, US$5 and US$1 notes, rupees from Pakistan, £20, £10 and £5 notes, German marks, gold rings, bracelets, earrings and a whole pile of large denomination Indian rupee bills. The buildings are sparklingly clean, the restoration work goes on tirelessly, and the sense of community is tangible.

A lot of this is down to the Sikhs’ no-nonsense attitude to communal living. Pilgrims get free accommodation in a number of buildings dotted around the temple, and the communal kitchen, the Guru Ka Langar, serves free food at intervals throughout the day. Sharing showers, sharing meals and sharing dormitories makes for quite a change from a life of single hotel rooms, your own table in a restaurant and en suite bathrooms, but with the Sikhs being so friendly, I never felt embarrassment or any intrusion into my personal space while I stayed in the temple.

But even in this egalitarian society, we westerners were in an enclosure with good fans, lockable lockers, our own washing line and a guard or two at the door at all hours. Nobody could look in, so we could prance around in our underwear if we wanted, so in one important sense we weren’t really a part of the community, because we could get our seclusion whenever we wanted. But it still felt good; finding genuine peace outside is impossible for tourists, and as for sleeping outside on the concrete, even the hardiest westerner would have problems with that...

Surviving India

Written: 28 June 1998   

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when visiting a country like India is to try to apply your own set of values to society. Hard though it seems to be for some westerners to believe, Indians don’t live by our rules, they live by their own, and this is probably responsible for the most discord between travellers and Indians.

It is sometimes difficult to appreciate that when you land in a new country, your own set of values is irrelevant and simply not applicable. If there is one reason why the British failed to turn India into a duplication of Victorian England, it’s because Victorian values were just not relevant to India; you might as well try to get a cricket fan interested in the footy scores. In India the things you’ll notice the most are the different personal habits, a complete lack of personal space, the flexibility of truth, the sheer volume of life, and a totally bizarre concept of taste... and after a while, you’ll start to celebrate the fact that things are not the same as back home. It’s all a part of what makes India so enduringly fascinating, but everyone who visits has to go through the confusion of throwing out their preconceptions and starting again.

It’s absolutely worth the effort, though.

Personal Habits

The difference in personal habits between India and the West can be quite obvious at times: there often seems to be no taboo about spitting, coughing, farting, burping, pissing, shitting, picking your nose or even dying in public, but if a woman even thinks about showing an ounce of bare flesh below the waist, it’s the height of indecency. When some people eat in India, they make as much noise as is humanly possible with one pair of molars and one swallowing mechanism and nobody seems to bat an eyelid, but showing any kind of man-woman affection in public is unacceptable (though men can hug and kiss men, and women can hug and kiss women). It’s quite a change from the West – in India, it’s clear that different things are acceptable.

Then there are the people who drop litter anywhere and everywhere, even if there is a bin nearby (in which case take a photo, because you won’t see many bins in India). There are those who burp loudly in public, and again nobody seems to care. You see people blowing their noses straight onto the pavement, wiping their noses on their hands, and then wiping their hands on their clothes. People chew tobacco and betel nut mixtures, and spit the red goo anywhere they like. They cough and noisily bring up phlegm before spitting it out, wherever they are. But just because this is deemed rude in the West, it doesn’t mean it’s rude in India; it’s just different.

If the strange personal habits get to you, consider this: how would you have turned out if you’d been brought up in a place like India? Probably exactly the same...

Personal Space

Personal space is a concept that has never been able to develop in India. When you have nearly one billion people rubbing shoulders in a country this size, you have two options. The first one, the western choice, is to bury yourself in your newspaper on the train, and to steadfastly ignore other humans when you’re walking along the street, creating a concept of personal space that is sacred, unbreachable and almost solid enough to touch. The apocryphal story goes that a couple was having sex on a British train in a crowded carriage of six, but everybody pretended not to notice, looking away as the shrieks of joy throbbed round the train; but when the loving couple had finished and lit up a post-coital cigarette, one of the passengers leaned forward and said, ‘Excuse me, would you mind putting that out? This is a no smoking coach.’ True or untrue, the very fact that this story is an urban myth demonstrates that the concept of personal space is ingrained into western society, and particularly British society.

But India seems to have no such concept. This manifests itself in a number of ways, but the two most obvious to the visitor are those of staring and conversation starting. Wherever you go you will be stared at, sometimes for hours, sometimes just for a short time, but each stare is penetrating, intense and profoundly unnerving. And as you sit there minding your own business, people will come right up to you, look over your shoulder and stare at what you are reading or writing, oblivious to any concerns for privacy you might have. Often they will come up and start a conversation, just like that, even if you are already talking; it’s not uncommon in Anglo-Indian conversations for the local to interrupt when he loses interest in what you’re saying, or has lost the thread through the language barrier.

You will encounter this sort of thing a lot if you’re an obvious tourist and off the beaten track, but how surprising is this? Westerners are conditioned to know about the world from international TV and holidaying abroad, but this is far from the case in poverty-stricken India. I’m sure I’d stare if I saw something as strange as a differently coloured person if I hadn’t been exposed to them through media, immigration and an ability to explore the world. Staring isn’t rude, it’s just the locals displaying an interest, but to those of us conditioned not to stare as kids, it takes some getting used to.

It’s not just personal, though. India manages to shatter any concepts of generalised privacy by blaring music at high volumes on buses, by cramming you into a bus or train until the sides are splitting, or by forcing you to piss in public through a lack of public toilets (something which is far more of a problem for women than men). I once sat on a train for hours while one man played Hindi film music at full volume on his ghetto blaster; I was cringing and inserting the ear plugs, but nobody else batted an eyelid. If they hated it, they didn’t show it, perhaps reflecting that if they’d wanted to play their own music, they could too, and criticising the young man would amount to an invasion of his privacy. Who knows? Whatever the logic, to the westerner this loud abuse of everyone else’s personal space appears invasive and amazingly rude, but when there are this many people, what other solution is there? A nation this big, full of people with British reserve, would be too depressing to contemplate...

Searching for the Truth

In India, it often appears that ‘truth’ isn’t absolute, it’s analogue: ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ are just part of a whole family of truth values that include ‘It’s possible’, ‘If you like’ and the famous head wobble. No wonder tourists get confused when they travel here; even the concept of basic communication has been altered by Indian society.

For example, in Ajanta, Ian tried to find a Pepsi, and despite constant claims by various vendors that they indeed had cold Pepsi, none of them actually managed to produce one that was chilled. ‘We have Thums Up,’ they invariably said once we’d parked ourselves in their café, but Thums Up wouldn’t do for Ian; it had to be Pepsi, but just like the Indonesians and, to a lesser extent, the Thais, some Indians are more than flexible with the truth if they think they can make a sale.

This is just one example from millions. Ask for the time of a bus, and you’ll get as many different answers as there are people. Ask if something is available in a restaurant, and the answer will be ‘yes’ until you actually try to order that something. And when I think of the number of times I’ve tried to get directions and have been told simultaneously by two people that the hotel is both in that direction and in totally the opposite direction...

But it’s not that people seem to lie more than anyone else, it’s that they want to please you by telling you what you want to hear. If you want a Pepsi, they will tell you that they have one, because that is what you want to hear. If you ask if that is the direction to so-and-so, they’ll nod, because that’s what you want to hear. If you need to get to somewhere, then ‘it is possible’, because that’s what you want to hear. The fact that there’s no Pepsi, you’re going in totally the wrong way and there’s no bus for two months because of the monsoon is quite irrelevant, at least as far as the head-wobbling masses are concerned; they have no idea that you’d be much happier if they told you the truth, because to them a negative answer will annoy you (‘No, we don’t have Pepsi, sir’ ‘Damn’) so they don’t tell the exact truth in order to avoid making you unhappy. It’s their way of being kind.

So never ask, ‘Do you have Pepsi?’, instead ask, ‘What soft drinks do you have?’ Never say, ‘Is this the right way to so-and-so?’ say ‘Where is so-and-so?’ Don’t try, ‘Can I get to Indore from here?’ try ‘How do I get to Indore from here?’ If your question expects a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, beware, because the answer will almost always be ‘yes’, because that’s what the Indians think you want to hear.

As another example, Ian was sitting in a café in Mamallapuram one day, and asked for ‘one Pepsi’ in his broad Yorkshire accent. The little man ran off without blinking an eyelid, and quite a time later he came back with a Pepsi bottle, wrapped up in a napkin. Ian felt the bottle and it was really quite hot, as if it had been standing in the sun all day; when he asked what it was, the little man replied, ‘It is warm Pepsi, just like you asked.’ In his eagerness to please, the waiter hadn’t even considered the fact that nobody would ever drink warm Pepsi; he just did what he thought the tourist wanted.

On top of this, often you will ask a question that the non-English speaking Indian will not understand, and with you going, ‘Is it there? Is it there?’ and pointing, he’ll just nod because he figures that that’s what you want to hear. So what do you expect?

Of course there are plenty of dodgy salesmen around, especially in the heavily tourist-influenced areas. But are you telling me that there aren’t people out to fleece you in the West? Of course not, and it’s no different here.

India is Loud

You might be forgiven for thinking that most Indians are deaf; everything is so loud that if deafness isn’t the cause of the din, it’ll soon enough be the effect.

India has to be the noisiest country I have ever experienced. Stereos only have one volume setting – LOUD – and Hindi music without distortion simply doesn’t exist. Horns don’t just blare; they make your ears bleed. And as for the music itself, regardless of the singing, those string sections are designed to cut through any din, right to the base of the spine.

But despite the traffic noise, shouting, singing, expectorating, piercing music and out-of-tune motorcycle engines, you can’t buy earplugs in India. Indian workers use pneumatic drills without ear protection, because ear protection costs more than a replacement worker. Indian voices manage to slice through conversation without needing to shout; the men selling chai on the trains can be heard advertising their wares from three carriages away, and they’re guaranteed to wake you up every time you pull into a station. Horns don’t just shake the earth; they come in a number of different tunes that will indelibly scar your eardrums. The buses come complete with deafening Hindi music played at full volume, drowning out even the grind of the gears and the smash of the ruined shock absorbers. And a traditional game played by travellers is ‘I wonder what strange noise my room fan will make tonight?’ It’s not the best game in the world.

And asking anyone to turn the music down will earn you a look of incredulity, as if you’ve just asked the driver if he can stop using the brakes. You could say they turn a deaf ear...

A Different Taste

Indian taste is, well, different, and I’m not just talking about their pop music.

The clothes sported by so-called trendy Indians look amazingly out of date by western standards; even in the seventies these guys would have looked embarrassing. Indian role models are more like roly-poly models, with their porn-film moustaches and strangely phallic poses that they strike for the camera, and even the gods aren’t allowed to get away with austerity; the shrines you see on the taxi dashboards have flashing lights and garish silver and gold borders, a homage not only to Ganesh and Co., but to the kitsch religion of tacky plastic. India can, at times, be an aesthete’s nightmare.

But look at the women: they have impeccable taste. From gorgeous sarees and delightful hairstyles to simple but effective jewellery, Indian women shame westerners into simplicity, so perhaps it’s just the men who are responsible for making India such a wonderfully tasteless place. Whatever, it’s loads of fun; you might not want to decorate your London pad like India, but in India it somehow feels just right.

Roll With It

All these frustrations with personal habits, personal space, truth and so on are simply down to a difference in social values. Most people don’t seem to mind the spitting, noisy eating, pissing and so on because they are not brought up with Victorian values being shoved down their throats: mothers don’t scream, ‘Don’t eat with your mouth open and don’t talk with your mouth full’; society doesn’t turn up its nose if you cough up a greeny on the pavement; and policemen don’t arrest you for urinating in the street. In the West we have managed to fill ourselves with values that, on the whole, I agree with, but this is a truism; I have no choice but to agree. I have been brought up to think that eating with your mouth open is rude, and as such seeing someone masticating with abandon can’t help but annoy me; I sometimes feel jealous of the Indian who, not having been brought up with this imposed value, has no hang up about eating. The problem is mine, all mine, and it can only be isolated by going into a society where my values are all wrong.

Personal space is another huge frustration. I hate people staring at me; I cannot help but feel that it is rude. But here it isn’t rude; it’s totally acceptable to stare. Mothers don’t chide children with ‘It’s rude to stare’, often because they’re too busy staring themselves. I sit there, silently fuming as yet another urchin sits down for his own private viewing of Traveller TV, and again it is my problem; I am imposing my values on a little boy who has a totally different outlook on life. He is not being rude, but I am being quite illogical.

It took me six months in India to develop this insight, and six months to develop the tolerance to accept it not as something designed to annoy me, but as an integral and fascinating part of the Indian psyche. The tourist spots are awash with foreigners who don’t appreciate the concept of Indian values, and who flaunt their bare legs in public, hug each other outside temples and complain constantly at the habits, personal invasions and outright lies that they perceive. But that’s the key word: ‘perceive’. If your perception of India is through western eyes, you’ll never, ever understand, and not only that, life on the road will be very, very hard.

Perhaps this is why I laughed when I met the young American in Mt Abu who wanted to psychoanalyse India. To really do that, you have to be born here and to have your own personal values developed within Indian society... otherwise you’ll always be an outsider. And how can anyone expect to travel in a different culture without some culture clashes? Precisely. Celebrate the differences, rather than criticise, and you’ll fall in love with India too.

Schrödinger’s Cat

Written: 30 June 1998   

One thing I find hard to tolerate in the long-term traveller is the sense of the past always being better than the present. I am constantly meeting people who harp on about how excellent Goa used to be before all the tourists arrived, and how Manali used to be just a couple of huts before the hotel builders turned up. It’s faintly depressing, and makes me wonder why on earth these people keep coming back to places that they say have been ‘destroyed’.

It’s hypocrisy of the first degree. These people lament the coming of the backpacker age, harping back to the sixties and seventies when you had to drop out of society to get on the trail; these days easy air travel and a more relaxed attitude to the concept of ‘career’ means everybody with a little bit of motivation can hit the Asian trail, even if you don’t want to hang around in an ashram and dig Ganesh. But who’s responsible for the tourist invasion? It’s the people who are at the forefront of the invasion, the vanguard of the tourist attack: the explorers. The nostalgia addicts rant at the Lonely Planet, blaming every spoiled place on their proliferation of the facts, but guess who started the Lonely Planet? Vanguard travellers...

I’ve even found myself falling into the trap. I hear people talk of Indonesia, and I project this nostalgia with comments like, ‘The Togian Islands are beautiful now, but in a couple of years they’ll be ruined’ and ‘Check out the Bada Valley, it’s undiscovered now, but soon it’ll have McDonald’s restaurants and highways.’ It’s pretty dumb because if I really cared about these places I’d keep quiet, but how can you do that? If you see something special, you automatically want to tell people about it.

And in doing so you open it up for potential destruction. But what’s the point in harping on about it? This is hardly a small world, is it?

Himachal Pradesh and Delhi

Dharamsala

Written: 9 July 1998   

Within two hours of arriving in Dharamsala I had booked into what seemed to be the only available room in town – a depressing pigsty, to be honest – and was sitting in a café on the outskirts of town listening to an astoundingly posh English accent spout the following:

‘You know John Doe¹? Well I definitely could have slept with him, you know. I was working in York at the Opera House, doing the Merchant of Venice, OK, and we just developed a kind of a connection, like. You know, he’s not like an old man; he’s really young at heart. Like once, yeah, he took me out in his convertible Mercedes, pulled out a spliff and I thought OK! That’s cool! He said to me, “I would like to have sex with you”, but there was no pressure, like, and it was fine with him that I didn’t want to. He phoned me all the time... yeah, completely... but he wanted to go this way and I wanted to go that, I just wasn’t interested, you know. But he’s a very attractive man, a very charming man, yeah.

‘Anyway are we going to get more spliff, or should we detox?’

The conversation went on to cover the actress’ career, how impressed she was with herself, and how awful all other actresses of stage and television are. To witness such a display of self-love in a place devoted to the destruction of the ego and the proliferation of universal compassion was not just depressing, it confirmed what I’d been told to expect.

I had been warned by Paul, a clued-up and wonderfully cynical Aussie whom I met in Amritsar, that Dharamsala is a bit of a traveller hell, but I didn’t realise it extended to include John Doe’s harem. Everywhere you go are Americans following in the footsteps of Richard Gere, looking for enlightenment, and hippies wandering around with bare torsos (an offensive thing to do in India, let alone Tibetan India), vomit-coloured baggy trousers and idiot accessories. Conversations are dotted with the yuppie mantra of ‘Oh God, really’ and continue with discussions of the wonderful properties of Buddhism and the peacefulness of meditation. Nobody seems to be caught up in the samsara of suffering here, but everyone is looking for salvation.

Talk about Tibet Inc. – Dharamsala is a total sell-out. I suppose it’s not Dharamsala’s fault, as it’s an obvious consequence of the trendy tourist invasion. One thing is certain: Dharamsala is about as far from India as I can imagine, with its combination of hill station climate, beautiful green mountains, Tibetan locals and tourist-pandering restaurants, hotels and shops. Where is the madness of India, the craziness that challenges your values, the insanity that makes the whole Indian travel experience a joy? It went the same way as Nepalese culture and Thai pride – down the tubes – and all the time young globetrotters are landing in Dharamsala, convinced that they are experiencing something genuine.

Take Contact, the local community newsletter. In its July 1998 issue (Issue 5, Volume 1) is the following piece (I have left in all spelling mistakes and grammatical niceties):

Take a piece of Dharamshala with you

Now that you have visited this hilly region, so called ‘Little Lhasa’, capital of Tibetan diaspora, you have felt the mountains and the trees, cold rivulets of Bhagsunath, the chantings of the monks, the temples, the silent images of Buddhas, chupas and apron clad people – a society on the verge transformation.

Your experience – your heart ensconsed in a bud, has loosened to a flower. You have deciphered the serene notes of the mountains and the clouds. Let not the memory fade away once back at your material world. Take along with you the audio and visual of the world you have just experienced. In your daily strife, do remember us, play the cassettes and feel the difference. You are not all alone...

[List of tapes and videos deleted]

Nice, eh; the genuine Tibetan experience in your living room, complete with stereo sound and Dolby noise reduction. Then again, this is from the same newsletter that has an article on ‘elf immolation’, and contains the following new-age bullshit in an article entitled ‘Healing in Dharamsala’ by the delightfully named Fleur Wood: ‘Looking for a spot of Spontaneous Healing, Reiki, Aura Cleansing or Past Life Therapy? Well, you’ve come to the right town.’ Reading this, my stomach began to sink.

Escape to Bhagsu

Despite being forewarned, I decided to tackle Dharamsala for two reasons. First, I’ve had enough of hot weather, and the last cool winds I remember are those of Darjeeling; and second, being about to immerse myself back into the West, I figured it would be instructive and helpful to see if I could acclimatise myself back into western values. Besides, being a sarcastic soul, I rather thought it would be entertaining to hear lots of white folk harping on about finding The Truth™.

What a shame that I couldn’t take it. Instead of being able to sit back and just laugh at all the pretension, it drove me mad. These people are incredible. It’s as if all the ashram arseholes have decided to descend on Dharamsala, but even the weirdest casualties I’ve met in the rest of India aren’t as pathetic as these Buddhist ‘dudes’, if only because someone who sticks themselves into a meditation programme for weeks in the middle of nowhere is sincere. I suspected the Dharamsala crowd might be confusing sincerity with celebrity.

Luckily I managed to get out of Dharamsala and find a room in a local family’s house in the nearby village of Bhagsu, and with its rustic simplicities, candle-lit bedrooms and genuine peace and quiet, I felt relatively removed from the serious business of posing going on in town. I wanted to spend time here, but even one night in Dharamsala itself was too much. The suburb where everyone stays is called McLeod Ganj; it is separate from Dharamsala itself, and it’s well named. If there’s one thing McLeod Ganj is full of, it’s clouds of ganja.

On the other hand, the further out you go, the further out the people become, and this can be even more disturbing; plastic ideals and trendy causes are one thing, but the real long-termers are possibly the most disturbing aspect of the whole sham. It especially worried me when I found a mirror; there I was, a long-haired beardy-weirdy, and I realised that if I met myself on the street, I’d assume I was a far-out space cadet hippy. But how can I emphasise the difference between me and some of the other long-term travellers I met in Dharamsala?

People stay in Dharamsala for weeks and often months. This is not only a result of the large number of monasteries around, but also of the easy availability of marijuana, and as a result there are quite a few people around who have lost their sense of reality. Now I’m the first to support the theory that reality is a fairly subjective concept, based more on our personal and societal value systems than a concrete specific, but on the other hand it’s not hard to tell when someone has lost a part of their mind to drug abuse. In Bhagsu there are plenty of casualties.

Very, Very Scary

The scariest was an English woman of 32 who was staying opposite me in my first village home; she was the main reason for my scooting further up the hill to find another farm cottage to hang out in. Normally sociable and interesting (if a little full of her own self-importance), Keeleigh proudly told me that she had been stoned every single day for eight years, and couldn’t remember a day she hadn’t spent smoking. As she puffed on her mixed opium-hashish joint, she changed from docile socialiser to agent provocateur. Nothing I did or said was acceptable; the fact that she had an incredible hatred of journalists and computers only managed to fuel her tangential rants against the modern world. At one stage she was trying to explain how evil computers were and how disgusting it was that people used them to communicate with each other, but I was adamant that not only are computers simply a communication medium, but they have created a new arena of language and semantics with their lack of face-to-face contact, lack of sarcasm and tonal operators, and an almost forced use of semantics over implied contextual meaning. She wasn’t having any of it.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘you’re reading this magazine and it’s just another communication medium. The writer is communicating things to you by printing them on paper; it’s just dead wood.’

She looked at me with the sort of look one might reserve for convicted rapists or child abusers caught in the act: sheer hatred. ‘There is no such thing as just dead wood,’ she snarled. ‘When I see wood, it is never dead, even if it is chopped down. Wood has an energy, an aura that can never die.’

This tangent was getting somewhat off the subject, but that was a characteristic of talking to Keeleigh; she had no concept of conventional argument, hardly surprising when you consider that drugs destroy the whole concept of convention. I failed to mention that she’d managed to burn quite a bit of ‘aura’ in the fire that she’d just used to make her chai, but instead tried to pull the thread back to the original argument.

‘Fair enough,’ I lied, ‘but don’t you see a computer is just a means of communicating? If you had been alive at the time of Caxton’s printing press, would you have been declaring it was heresy? Or would you approve of the ability to spread a message to the whole world?’

The look returned. ‘I cannot put my mind into that situation,’ she claimed. ‘How can I answer that?’ And turning back to her copy of Cosmopolitan she started to read the picture captions. I settled back into blissful apathy until a scream shattered the serenity.

‘Unbelievable! Just not now!’ yelled Keeleigh, turning to her friend Shayna and throwing her Cosmo onto the ground. She stomped off holding her head as if the evil nature of the whole world had been revealed to her. I glanced at the magazine; in an article about men dating women, drugging them, taking them home and raping them while they’re under the influence, was a caption talking about a man convicted for aiding and abetting such a rapist by procuring the drugs for him. He had learned how to create a suitable drug cocktail on the Internet, hence Keeleigh’s outburst.

When I saw Keeleigh again she had come down; at least, she was back to a relatively normal level. But it was too much; a symptom of Dharamsala and the long and winding road, Keeleigh represented everything I don’t like about the hippy movement. I support the liberal idealism; I enjoy the personal freedom preached by the dropouts; I think it’s good to explore religions, philosophies and your own place in your own universe; I don’t even have a problem with drugs; but taking too many drugs is just dumb, because you lose everything you want to preserve. And if there’s a magnet for the fuckwits of the long-term trail, it’s places like Dharamsala.

It’s all a bit depressing, really. The majority of tourists in Dharamsala are either short-termers looking for a conveniently packaged spiritual-solution-cum-world-saving formula, or they’re long-termers who have stayed put for too long and have begun to lose the point. I met people who had only been to Goa, Manali and Dharamsala, even after months in India. I marvelled at their staying power, before realising that a joint for breakfast every day makes such a life almost inevitable. How hollow.

Perhaps instead the seekers should heed the following section from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha:

‘When someone is seeking,’ said Siddhartha, ‘it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.’

Rain Stops Play

The monsoon finally caught up with me in Dharamsala. Wandering through the lush fields and down the Tibetan streets of McLeod Ganj and Bhagsu, the heavens would open with no warning and throw down water at a rate only unsurprising to those who go through such torrents every year. Clouds rolled in on my farmhouse, and every afternoon and evening I would retire to a safe haven to read, write and dream of going home.

I had originally planned to explore the hills round the luscious valleys, but India’s varied cornucopia of intestinal inhabitants struck one last time: giardia gas suddenly appeared, so I chugged down some Tinizadole and settled in for my body to recover, a difficult proposition when the weather’s cold and wet, the shower is freezing and the bed constantly damp. I slipped into the apathetic mode of the truly relaxed and did precious little except eat, sleep and socialise with people I met; this was my main reason for hitting the hills in the first place, after all.

It doesn’t make for a very interesting read, though, and soon enough I was heading downhill to Delhi.

¹ I’ve changed the name to avoid libelling the man in question. The person being referred to was a successful pop singer from the late 1950s/early 1960s, and that’s all I’m going to say...

The Dogs of Bhagsu

Written: 9 July 1998   

Walking into Bhagsu, the suburb of Dharamsala where I was staying, I saw a sight. The three members of the local dog mafia – big, black bastards who had already terrorised the poor mutt living in our house on a number of occasions – were standing in formation, barking wildly at a cow. Two of them were standing back-to-back – though butt-to-butt is probably a better terminology for quadrupeds – and the third was baring his teeth from behind this barrier, leaping at the cow whenever it lowered its horns to charge.

I stayed to watch, silently supporting the cow; after surviving Asia, I can’t help thinking that a mass slaughter of dogs would be a sensible move. It was then I noticed that the dog’s formation wasn’t so much tactical as coital; the two dogs standing butt to butt were welded together at the base of the tail.

When dogs mate, the female grips the male’s member with her vaginal muscles, otherwise he’d have no hope of finishing the act¹. This is a common procedure in animal mating rituals, and is all fine and dandy as long as you’ve got a nice undisturbed love nest in which to complete the process; if you’re interrupted, however, it’s a pain in the arse. These two dogs had obviously been going at it hammer and tongs in the middle of the road when the cow had decided it wanted to wander past them, and in a mouth-foaming display of territorial possession the dogs had reacted, the male leaping off his mate only to find that he was still inextricably attached.

The result was the canine equivalent of Dr Dolittle’s Push-Me-Pull-Me. What made it even more bizarre was that the third dog, another male, was obviously quite turned on by his friends’ convoluted constriction, and kept trying to mount the female with a predictable lack of success. Meanwhile the cow kept attacking, the dogs kept freaking out and scaring it away, and the poor lovers kept yelping louder and louder as their bizarre love triangle stretched parts that simply don’t stretch that far.

Finally the frustrated third dog decided he’d had enough of his friend blocking the tunnel of love and went for him with bared teeth and furious growls. This did the trick; scared shitless, the female managed to let go her fatal grip and limped off into the bushes to lick her injuries, leaving the bruised male to roll around on the ground, groaning the groan that any member of the male sex who has had his nether regions subjected to unwanted strain knows only too well. The voyeur, however, was having none of this, and decided to pursue the argument with his sexual competitor, leaping onto the poor bastard and ripping at him with bared fangs while the released lover teetered between self-pity and self-defence.

Quietly watching from nearby, the cow soon spotted that the dogs were scattered and no longer united, so it attacked. Neatly scooping up the fighting males on its horns to the sound of scared yelps and extreme confusion, it turned on the bitch and routed the canine camp. The dogs, realising their position was helpless, ran for it, and obviously determined to ram home its dominance the cow chased after them, demonstrating once and for all that the image of the cow as a fat, lazy cud-chewer is hopelessly inaccurate. Momentum managed to carry it past the dogs at one point, scaring the hell out of the already badly frightened mutts, and before you knew it the whole melee had disappeared round the corner and Bhagsu was a peaceful little hamlet once more.

Except for the muted sniggering of the local dog population, that is.

¹ When dogs feel in the mood, they first go at it ‘doggy-style’, and once the male has ejaculated, he lifts his leg up and slides around until he is butt-to-butt with the bitch (this position is known as a ‘tie’). The happy couple stay in this position for 10 to 20 minutes, during which time the bitch’s constrictor vestibuli muscles contract behind the bulbus glandis of the male’s penis, preventing withdrawal. Clearly, this is no time to pick a fight with a cow.

Delhi

Written: 15 July 1998   

Delhi reflects the schizophrenia of modern India perfectly. Split into New Delhi and Old Delhi, the capital manages to sum up everything that was futile about colonialism and everything that is chaotic about the developing world.

New Delhi was the last architectural monster of the British Raj. Conceived and executed in much the same way as Canberra (and at about the same time) it has the same concrete ghost-town image of Australia’s capital and, incredibly enough for India, about the same amount of character. Huge boulevards are lined with grassy parks (with lush green meadows and virtually no cows) while toweringly pompous buildings stand at either end of the main Rajpath Road, dominating the skyline and making New Delhi look for all the world like a European city. I couldn’t believe it; New Delhi is easily the least Indian sight I’ve seen, and although it’s fascinating and grandiose, it’s totally alien to the concepts of comfort, habitation and the joy of life.

Old Delhi, however, is typically Indian, and after six months of seeing pandemonium personified it held no surprises for me. Luckily it does hold some good examples of Mughal architecture; after basing their capital first at Fatehpur Sikri and then Agra, the Mughals decided, in one last attempt at creating the perfect city, to try Delhi, and Shah Jahan started building the Red Fort and Jama Masjid soon after completing the Taj Mahal. Unfortunately his son, Aurangzeb, stole the throne and screwed the empire into the ground, so these huge monuments to the most powerful pre-British empire stand as rather lonely reminders of the proud grandeur that comes before a fall; it’s ironic that both Old Delhi and New Delhi should be full of architectural homage to arrogant failure.

The Red Fort is still impressive, but with its swarms of visitors and despicably run-down buildings, it’s not a patch on Fatehpur Sikri or (surprisingly) Agra Fort. The Jama Masjid (the Friday Mosque) is another story and still manages to impress; it’s the biggest mosque in India and feels like it, but I found the atmosphere somewhat shattered by western tour groups. Bare legs in mosques are not on, so visitors who arrive in shorts are forced to wear lungis to cover themselves, but with their money pouches and cameras belts it gives the impression of sexually excited men wandering around in bath towels; and in a display of bacterial paranoia that even the Americans couldn’t beat, one French team entered the foray wearing blue elasticated plastic hospital shoe covers, eliciting stares and belly laughs from all around. The mosque is pleasant, but the tourists are simply beyond belief.

As with Dharamsala, I did almost nothing in Delhi. I saw the sights, I got Delhi belly for a couple of days, and I prepared to fly out. I was surprised at how much I wanted to leave; after a year of knowing the date of my flight, I was geared up for it and couldn’t wait. It was by no means a reflection on India, it was more a reflection on me; I wanted to go home, rather than wanting to leave India.

So I did.

Interlude

At this point in my journey I left India to go back home, but nearly a decade later my partner Peta and I visited Kerala once again, and this is the story of that trip...

Kerala

The High Commission

Written: 15 February 2007   

I hadn’t expected my second visit to India to start a month before I flew there, but it did, and in true Indian style. Welcome to the wonderful world of the Indian High Commission in London.

Getting a tourist visa can be one of the great hurdles of modern travelling, as anyone who has tried to travel through Africa will tell you. Some countries insist on reams of paperwork, backed up with an entire album of photographs, before they’ll even consider letting you darken their door, where some don’t even bother to look up from their newspapers as you wander through the ‘Nothing to Declare’ channel, but so far on my travels I can’t remember actively enjoying the visa process before. For my first trip to India, I didn’t get the six-month visa myself, as the Thai travel agent from whom I bought my flight to Calcutta offered a visa service at a very reasonable fee; perhaps, if I had, I’d have wondered just what I was letting myself in for.

They say that the ground on which an embassy stands is considered to be a part of that embassy’s country, and while this might legally be the case, it’s still only conceptual. The Indian High Commission in Aldwych is surely the exception, because from the moment you step through the door to the moment you emerge, three hours later, clutching your passport and your aching sides, you feel not only have you just been transported directly into the madness of India, but also that you nearly didn’t get back. It’s a hoot, and I highly recommend the Indian visa process as a thoroughly realistic introduction to the insanity that makes India such a great destination.

The Queue

It starts off with the queue, which snakes out of the High Commission’s visa application door, across India Place, onto the curve of Aldwych, past the front door of India House, past the front door of the BBC World Service, and if you’re lucky enough to witness a really healthy queue, all the way to the back doors of Australia House. Luckily this part of the visa process is most definitely on British soil, so the queue is orderly, tidy and almost smug in the knowledge that, despite the sight of people stretching out as far as the eye can see, everyone is perfectly happy to stand in line, waiting for things to move along. Sure, there’s the odd person who joins the end and can’t quite believe that this really is the queue for tourist visas, but any frustrations are short-lived, because even out here, the helpless resignation one feels when confronted with Indian bureaucracy starts to creep in. Happily, it’s also where the fun starts.

At 8.35am I joined the queue outside the main entrance to the BBC’s Bush House – where, incidentally, I worked for two years before escaping to West Africa – and instantly made some friends. Behind me was a charming Sikh gentleman from Gravesend whose eyes smiled whenever he spoke of Amritsar, and behind him was a delightful Indian man from Harrow, who turned out to be an expert on the Indian visa process, having stood in this very queue more times than he could accurately remember. They had both moved to England at different times in the 1960s but had gone back to their homeland on many occasions since, and we idled away the time talking about India and how much we loved the place, despite – or, perhaps, because of – the kind of madness that we were about to jump into.

It might have been the entertaining conversation, but despite the immense length of the queue, we made swift progress, and by 9.20am we’d shuffled back past the BBC, past the entrance to India House, past a smaller queue that my new friend from Harrow told me was for enquiries about Indian passports rather than tourist visas, into India Place and up to a small window by the back door of the High Commission. This was where the first cracks started to appear in the neat queuing system that everyone had, by this time, grown rather accustomed to.

‘Yes,’ said the man on the other side of the tiny window that separates Indian territory from the logic of London. It sounded more like a statement than a question.

‘Um, yes,’ I replied. ‘I’m here to get two tourist visas for India. Hopefully, anyway.’

The man picked up two yellow tickets from a pile, spun them through the small well under the window, and flicked his hand sideways towards the entrance. And with that, I had my tickets for one of the most amazing thrill rides you can find on diplomatic soil, so I took a deep breath and jumped in feet first.

The Crowd

The tickets the man had given me – one for each passport – contained two numbers, D6 and D7, and said that my applications would be processed between 10.30am and 11.00am. They didn’t say quite how this process would occur, but my friends and I followed the queue upstairs and into a doorway, where the madness of what would be our home for the next few hours revealed itself. For on the other side of this doorway was what can only be described as bedlam.

‘Please move forward!’ came a shout from the bottom of the stairs, but the queue was stuck, and nobody quite knew what to do. The security guard from the back door stomped up the stairs, looked at me standing in the doorway and pointed inside. ‘Go that way, inside,’ he said, and the slight semblance of order onto which we’d been clinging fell apart as the queue disintegrated and we shuffled bang into a group of people who were crowding round a small window, right next to the entrance.

‘35, 56, 57, 68!’ yelled a woman’s voice through a crackling loudspeaker above the window, in the kind of tone that sounds like the back of a hand thwacking you out of a childhood reverie. ‘45, 46, 55!’ it continued, while crowds buffeted us about like driftwood on the Ganges.

‘This way,’ said my Sikh friend, and pointed into the corner, where our neighbour from Harrow was trying to squeeze away from the chaos. We climbed behind a row of seats that was full of people but kept the pressure of the growing crowd off us, and once on the other side of this barrier we managed to get a little breathing space as well as a good view of the room.

It was absolute madness. There were rows of plastic seats, all full, with people standing shoulder to shoulder in the aisles and in big clumps in front of the row of six counters along the side of the room. At the other end of the room, another four counters seemed to be even more crowded, and all the while the crush by the entrance teemed with people arriving from the outside, only to be met with the kind of crowd you associate more with last orders on a Friday night.

‘We have to wait for the number over there,’ said the man from Harrow, pointing to a decrepit indicator in the far corner of the room. Along the top were five letters, A to E, with the letter B lit up, and underneath was the number 60. It buzzed, and the number flipped over to 61.

‘What number are you?’ I asked the Sikh.

‘D3, D4 and D5,’ he replied. ‘Some time to go, then.’

‘Yeah,’ I thought, calculating that with 99 numbers per letter, we had just over 140 people in front of us in the queue. I glanced up at the clock on the wall, which said five past four, and idly wondering why they’d set the clocks to show Indian time, I asked the man from Harrow how long he normally had to wait.

‘It varies,’ he said. ‘An hour, maybe?’

And so we waited while the numbers ticked slowly by, the crowds got thicker and the bemusement on people’s faces slowly turned to amazement that this bizarre place was, indeed, the queue for Indian tourist visas.

To the Counter

On the way in, I’d noticed a dull ache in my stomach that I vaguely recognised, but it wasn’t until I was being buffeted around by the crowd that I realised I was trying hard not to laugh. The sides of my mouth involuntarily twitched upwards, and a familiar feeling from my last visit to India crept up on me. There’s a wonderful release that occurs when you realise the path of least resistance is the only sane option, and once you decide to float along the river instead of trying to swim upstream, life suddenly makes much more sense.

‘It’s a game,’ pointed out my friend from Harrow, and I couldn’t help agreeing as the counter clicked round from B99 to C01 and we let out a little cheer. Time goes so much faster when you’re having fun, and at times the counter seemed to be racing along; partly this was because each number represents one application form – so if someone has five passports, one for each member of a family, then the counter jumps forward five places once they’ve been processed – but mainly it was because I’d moved on from thinking about deadlines and processes, and now viewed the whole system as an entertaining whole, much like a Heath Robinson contraption or an Escher painting. As the numbers climbed towards D6, we got more and more excited, like children in the queue for the biggest ride at Disneyland.

When the counter reached C90, we starting edging forward towards the chaos of the counters, and as soon as it flipped over to D01 – again, accompanied by a little cheer – we headed for the front line. I glanced at the clock, which still stubbornly insisted that it was five past four, and then at my watch, which said 10.45am. We’d been waiting for our numbers to come up for nearly an hour and a half, and suddenly the pressure was on.

It turned out that the crowds milling around the counters were mainly people still engulfed in their own private stakeout of the number counter, people who had tried to queue up at the counters only to be told in no uncertain terms that they had to wait for their number to come up, and that they should ‘take a seat’ (this said with no hint of irony). The lady who was manning the counter nearest the entrance had obviously been chosen for her ability to take no shit off anyone, because people kept asking her what on earth they were supposed to do, and she was clearly growing tired of having to tell them to wait their turn. She’d even put up a sign on her counter saying ‘No Enquiries’, but this didn’t stop people asking her what was going on, and it didn’t stop her staring at them with a look that would wither limbs, before shouting at them to ‘take a seat and wait for your number to come up.’ I figured I’d take my chances with the next-door booth, whose proprietor seemed a lot cooler.

Unfortunately he also turned out to be a lot slower than his manic neighbour, and it didn’t help that the queuing system at the counters involved the traditional Indian method of pushing in from all directions and completely failing to observe any kind of order. Luckily the individuals concerned managed to cling on to some sense of decorum, and a very kind man let me go in front of him because my queue number was before his, and the official behind the counter took my forms, photographs, passports and money, and started tapping into a computer.

A couple of minutes later he handed me two printed receipts and said, ‘One hour,’ and left it at that. Luckily I knew what he was talking about; he meant than in about an hour, my number would be called out by the woman whose loudspeaker had greeted us on the way in, and in theory I’d then get my passports back, custom-fitted with Indian tourist visas. I smiled my thanks, took a last breath and dived back into the melee, heading back to the corner where we’d watched the numbers flipping past.

Mission Accomplished

The minutes continued to tick by, even though the clock on the wall still insisted that it was five past four. The crowds grew and shrank, and the parade of confused and bewildered visa-seekers continued to pour into the room, all of them going through exactly the same process that I’d gone through an hour-and-a-half before. People scribbled on visa forms – I was very glad I’d downloaded my forms from the High Commission’s website and filled them in at home – and others joined the small queue at the first counter, only to get yelled at to ‘take a seat.’ It appeared to be mayhem, but underlying the mayhem, there was clearly a method at work, even if the method felt more like madness.

Of course, this is a fantastic idea. What better way to prepare potential visitors for the daily fascination that is India than to subject them to the Indian visa process? I can’t think of anything more effective than to take a bunch of people off the streets of London, crowd them into a dusty and slightly weather-beaten room with a broken clock on the wall, expose them to a mysteriously bureaucratic system that ticks along in its own way but is never explained to anyone trying to follow it, and all the while bombard them with cryptic number counters, loudspeakers shouting out random digits, and counter staff whose advice is to take a seat in a room where seats are as rare as hen’s teeth. The staff must be very proud, because in one fell swoop they’ve managed to crystallise everything about India that makes it what it is – it’s bonkers and brilliant at the same time, much like the mother country.

I was so happy in my little daze, watching the Indian visa machine at work, that I almost missed the loudspeaker shouting out my numbers. I glanced at the clock – it was still five past four – and tried to push my way through the crowd of people blocking the counter where the loudspeaker yelled, ‘D6, D7!’ The crowd parted, I handed my receipts to the lady, she checked through three piles of passports before finding mine, and a few seconds later she handed over my passports, complete with the tourist visas I needed (which I was careful to check before leaving the building). I waved at the man from Harrow and headed down the stairs, pushing my way through the crowd of people who were just starting their own personal visa vigil. My watch said 11.35am, exactly three hours since I’d joined the queue outside the BBC, and with that I slipped outside and back into London.

Outside I bumped into my Sikh friend, who was also checking his passports, and as we shook hands, we smiled with the camaraderie of those who have just survived a major onslaught. Somehow, as I walked to the tube station, the world didn’t seem quite as bright as it had inside the dingy High Commission, but deep in my stomach I could feel the ache of India waiting to burst out, and I realised that even though I still had a month to go, my trip to the subcontinent had already started.

Falling into Place

Written: 11 March 2007   

It’s a wonder that I ever manage to leave the comforts of home, because if there’s one thing that travelling does, it’s scare the hell out of me. No matter that I spent six months travelling round India back in 1998; the thought of leaving home and heading out into a totally different culture really gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Presumably, though, this is all part of the attraction; it’s like a really scary ride at the amusement park. Deep down I know that flying out to pastures new is no big deal, because I’ve done it so many times, but that doesn’t stop some strangely devious part of my brain from getting paranoid. Peta has been banging on about wanting to visit India as long as I’ve known her, and now that we’ve finally got it together to visit my favourite country on the planet, I’m scared. People say, ‘Where are you staying?’ and I reply, ‘I don’t know,’ because it’s true: I’ve booked a flight, and that’s it. There’s nothing booked, there’s nothing planned, I’ve only got a vague idea of where we might want to visit, and when you mention this to others, they look at you as if you’re mad. ‘Ah,’ says Peta, ‘but it’s OK, because Mark is looking after all of that,’ and I smile confidently, relying on the fact that ten years ago I would have been fine with this, so perhaps I can still wing it.

Of course, it always turns out OK in the end, particularly in India. We’ve just flown to Trivandrum in Kerala, right at the southern tip of India, stopping off on the way for a couple of hours in Muscat, the capital of Oman. Muscat International Airport sports a Costa Coffee, a Papa John’s pizza joint, a Dairy Queen burger stall, a duty free shop, and practically no exotica to hint that this is the Middle East rather than the Edgware Road. Indeed, the only thrill of the whole journey was following the route of our plane on the screen in the back of the seat in front, as it flew along the western border of Iran towards the Gulf of Arabia, skirting the Iraqi border, just a stone’s throw from Baghdad and Basra. I looked out of my south-facing window and figured that as it was a clear night, then technically some of the light from the troubles in Iraq might make it to our plane, but as all I could see was an inky blackness with the odd lone sodium light peppering the dark, even my paranoia couldn’t claim to be flying over a war zone.

So we landed at Trivandrum airport at 6.30am on Sunday morning, flew through immigration, picked up our backpacks from the screeching luggage carousel, walked through customs, changed some traveller’s cheques at the Thomas Cook counter, booked a fixed-price taxi for the train station at the fixed-price taxi counter, arrived at the station, joined a queue of two people, bought two tickets for the express train to Varkala, wandered through to the platform, bought some water and settled back to wait for the 8.10am train.

And as if this wasn’t easy enough, we then got talking to a very friendly young man who was on his way to visit his grandmother, and who was taking the same train as us and would be happy to show us where to go. A 90-year old man also sparked up a conversation with us, though knowing no English he spoke through the young man, saying how excited he was to talk to us, and how he remembered the British and how different things were in this modern world. We smiled and made small talk through the haze of jet lag, and I felt rather stupid at having felt anything other than complete confidence that things would work out in the end.

Because, after all, that’s the point of India. The travelling is easy when you don’t really have a plan and don’t really have an itinerary. We fancied heading to the beach for a few days, just to get over the stress of travelling halfway round the planet, and before we knew it we’d arrived at Varkala train station, taken a taxi to Varkala beach, found a spare room in the Kerala Bamboo house (the first place we tried), and fallen into a deep sleep to the sound of crashing surf.

And how easy was that? Exactly... but it still won’t stop me feeling just as nervous the next time I jet off to pastures new, with nothing planned and no idea what I’m doing. Perhaps that’s why I keep doing it, in the end.

Varkala

Written: 13 March 2007   

If you’re looking for a peaceful beach experience that has yet to be completely spoiled by mass tourism, then Varkala is a little piece of heaven. I loved it; sure, it’s a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of the real India, but this means it’s a great place to relax, get away from it all and recover from a long flight. Evidently I’m not the only person who thinks so, because Varkala is, basically, white (or, to be more accurate, salmon pink), and the only cultural experience you’re likely to get is from bumping into fellow Europeans. Still, it’s a great place to do it, and the locals are completely charming, and not just because that’s the best way to relax their customers into spending a few more days chilling out in the restaurants, shops and guest houses that make up Varkala.

Varkala consists of a crescent-shaped beach, backed by a steep cliff, and it’s along the top of this cliff that most of the action happens. There’s a promenade along the precipice edge – though as you get the odd taxi or rickshaw bombing along the path, horns blaring, I suppose it doubles as a road – and behind the promenade is Varkala village (though as Varkala town is actually 2km away to the southwest, perhaps ‘Varkala tourist village’ is a better name). Most of the accommodation is tucked away in the backstreets behind the promenade, as the sea views have mostly been pinched by the bars and restaurants that line the cliff edge, looking over the beach below and staring west into the sunset.

For me, sitting in a cliff-top bar and sipping cold lemon sodas is one of life’s great pleasures, but I’m more than happy to leave the surf to those who enjoy it. It’s not a crowded beach – at least, not in the shoulder season of mid-March – but because the sea off Varkala has an evil rip-tide that can (and does) carry people off to a watery grave, you are only supposed to swim between the red flags on the beach. This concentrates the action into the centre of the beach, and has the added attraction of turning the officials who man the red flags into an entertainment all of their own. Give a man a whistle, and just like a five-year old, he can’t help blowing it, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the beach is home to a mad crowd of ravers, as the constant peeping of whistles travels up the cliff on the sea breeze.

Perhaps this is because, in India, rules don’t really seem to be rules, they’re more like guidelines (at least, this is how it appears to those of us who are passengers in the rickshaw of Indian life, where driving on the left seems to be more of an option than an obligation). The more the officials peep their warnings, the more the people ignore them, until the level of whistling reaches such a fever pitch and the dancing of the officials gets so animated that eventually the wayward swimmers notice that yes, they mean me, and they move back inside the red flags, accompanied by a gentle but temporary lull in the whistling. And so the cycle begins again, like the bizarre ritual it is.

Decisions, Decisions

The most challenging part of waking up in Varkala is trying to decide what to do with the day. Perhaps an afternoon at the beach? Or maybe a morning spent wandering around the tie-dyed boutiques, looking for bargains on kaftans and slippers? Or even a day guzzling seafood in front of the dazzling Arabian Sea? Ah, the decision is difficult, but Varkala is the kind of place where time stretches out and you end up spending days doing what feels like almost nothing.

But what a pleasant place in which to do almost nothing. Whiling away the hours with a fresh mango juice in one hand and a book in the other is one of life’s little luxuries, particularly as hints of India still manage to creep into the otherwise rather global atmosphere of Varkala’s travelling scene. For example, it’s hard not to smile at old favourites, like the wonderful use of English on restaurant menus. The best menu we found was at the Sun Rise Restaurant – a misnomer in itself, as the restaurant, like all those in Varkala, faces west and therefore can never see the sun rise – which proudly serves Chicken Merry Land, the popular pasta dish Spagathy, that favourite of the beach the Sandwitch, a choice of Fired or Plane rice, and a dish for which people will presumably be back, Lobster Termindor. And as if this isn’t enticing enough, you can round off your evening meal with a cocktail or two, though I have to wonder how many people order the Salty Dog, the Bledy Merry, the Agg Nog, or the particularly fetching Gin Jizz. Happily the Sun Rise, which looks over North End Cliff and has a fine view of the beach, is actually a great spot for a feed, and the uppumavu and banana we had for breakfast – uppumavu being a kind of spicy semolina – was great. Add in the fact that you can see schools of dolphins jumping out of the distant waves while brightly painted fishing boats head south in search of the day’s catch, not to mention the sight of sperm whales migrating north, their dark shadows slowly moving from left to right in the near distance, and you have a seaside spot that’s hard to resist.

The day’s catch is an important part of evening life in Varkala, as the sun set brings to life one of Varkala’s charms – the seafood. Walking along the cliff top in the early evening is an adventure in visual fishing, as the restaurants lay out the catch of the day in an attempt to lure you in. Huge marlin and swordfish lie alongside red snapper, tuna, butterfish, pomfret and barracuda, all surrounded by king prawns – large and small – and squid. Most of the fish really is as fresh as they say, with the bright eyes and clean skin of recently netted fish, rather than the milky, sunken eyes and slimy, ammonia-tinged skin of the fish that has seen better days. You pick your fish and decide how you would like it cooked – in the tandoor with fine Keralan spices, or simply cooked in butter and garlic – and take a seat overlooking the waves, with the sun setting in the distance.

It’s delightful, sipping a beer while waiting for your fish, and when it comes, it’s utterly divine; the calamari we had at the Sun Rise was absolutely the best calamari I’ve ever tasted, cooked as it was in wonderfully light, tempura-style batter that brought out the flavour of the meat. It melted in the mouth, which is something you can’t often say about calamari in England.

The freshness of the catch is plain to see as the sun goes down, as the horizon darkens to reveal strings of distant lights, flickering in and out as the fishing boats they’re swinging from rise and fall with the swell. If you’re lucky enough to experience a power cut while you’re eating – something that is relatively common, judging by the slick way in which candles appear out of nowhere within seconds of the lights dimming and giving out – then it looks for all the world as if the stars have fallen from the sky and landed on the sea, lighting up the waves like distant, floating lanterns.

And before you know it, that’s another day gone in paradise, and the next day it’s another difficult choice between swimming in the warm sea, soaking up the sun on the beach, drinking lemon sodas in the cliff-top breeze, and watching dolphins and sperm whales swim through the ocean from which tonight’s meal has only just been plucked. As a way to kick off a holiday in a totally relaxing and unchallenging way, Varkala hits the spot perfectly.

Hippy Heaven

Written: 13 March 2007   

If you sit in a cliff-top café in Varkala, close your eyes and let your mind drift, then it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to drift off to Indonesia, Ghana, Thailand, or any of a whole host of travellers’ haunts the world over. The sea breeze is warm and keeps you cool as you shelter from the hot afternoon sun; the surf crashes onto the beach below; the sound of trance music throbs gently from speakers sitting on the sandy floor of the bar; and contented travellers wander past in their little huddles, showing off far more flesh than is considered polite in the country outside. But it doesn’t matter here, because in the same way that major cities have a Little India, a Chinatown and a Latin quarter, most countries have at least one Hippy Haven, where westerners can drift in and kick back, well away from the pressures of life on the road.

Hippy Havens are a natural part of the life cycle of tourism, and Varkala is a good example of a Hippy Haven that’s about halfway through its life span. Broadly speaking, travelling spots go through a fairly predictable set of stages. The first stage is anonymity, where you only find out about the charms of a particular beach or village by word of mouth; next, the locals cotton on to the fact that there might be some business to be done here, and the odd tea shop or restaurant starts up, possibly with some rooms by the beach, or even some basic huts on the edges of the sand; soon enough, the man from the Lonely Planet hears about the place from some particularly chatty travellers, and notes it down as a possible attraction for those en route, but gives it little more than a tiny mention; as travellers discover it for themselves and the number of guest houses and restaurants grows, the guidebooks give it a bit more of a write-up, and more and more people take the detour; eventually it’s a big enough draw to warrant a map, by which time it’s fair to say that we’ve got a genuine Hippy Haven on our hands; and the next stage is that things start growing out of all proportion, the concrete hotels start to spring up, package tours start creeping in at the corners, and before long your Hippy Haven has become a Proper Destination, and most of the attractions of the original solitary bay have been lost in the process.

Varkala is probably a shade past the cusp of being a perfect Hippy Haven. It has enough guest houses and restaurants to enable visitors to cut themselves off completely from the harsh reality of travelling in India, and it is utterly beguiling because of it, but at the southern end of the beach there are ominously permanent concrete structures creeping up, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see Varkala turning into a genuine brochure destination over the next few years, losing a good deal of its charm as it does so.

Right now, though, Varkala is a classic, template-based travellers’ haunt. It has a pretty little beach where the locals seem to tolerate bikini-clad women with a reasonable lack of leering, and the touts, such as they are, are mild-mannered and happy to take no for an answer, as they try to sell you bongos, maps of India and magnetic stones that make the sound of a cicada as you throw them up in the air. The bars lining the top of the cliff are – at the northern end – distinctly bohemian in their approach, with colourfully decorated bamboo shelters overlooking the Arabian Sea, their coloured light bulbs and mandala throws practically insisting that you sit down, kick back and take a big hit on the sea breeze. It’s the Buddha Bar, it’s the Café del Mar, and it’s exactly the kind of safe, alternative lifestyle that these days every self-respecting twenty-something should have on their CV. Hell, there is even dope here, and the gentle waft of marijuana smoke is as much a part of the atmosphere as tandoori fish, or the waft of the increasingly polluted cliff slopes, with their growing collections of empty bottles, plastic bags and yelping dogs.

So Varkala is completely generic, and as Peta and I lapped up the delightful atmosphere, the lovely seafood and the gentle thump of the trance, we could have been anywhere. What a great way to ease one’s jet-lagged mind into the prospect of exploring India; bravo for the Hippy Havens out there, even if they’re sometimes rather hard to tell apart.

The Shirt off My Back

Written: 13 March 2007   

Some people were born to shop. I, on the other hand, shudder every time Christmas comes round, not to mention the January sales, the Easter sales, the summer sales and the autumn price drops. The only reason I still haven’t run screaming from the building is the Internet, without which I would still be wearing the same pair of socks I went to school in. I hate shopping and shopping hates me, and frankly we’re both stubborn enough not to want to rock the status quo.

But you try buying hot weather clothes in London in February. Jumpers, no problem; thick jeans, come this way, sir; thermal underwear, here, there and everywhere. But super-lightweight cotton trousers and breezy short-sleeved tops are understandably in short supply as the wind howls down Oxford Street, and the outdoor shops of South Kensington and Covent Garden are only useful if you want your trousers to have more zips and pockets than a fetishist’s weekend outfit. The solution? Buy your holiday clothes in the summer, which unfortunately requires the kind of planning that is rather at odds with the cold sweat that falls over me as I wander into clothes shops. I buy my clothes either when the last batch has reached the point of no return, or when my girlfriend starts dropping hints. No prizes for guessing which comes first. (‘Men,’ I can hear her sigh, and she is, of course, totally right, except she’s as allergic to shopping as I am, so I can’t even play the ‘hopeless male’ card.)

Luckily for the visitor to India, there is a solution that is not only guaranteed to save you money, but opens up a whole new world, that of shopping in the developing world. With my finely honed and pathological fear of shopping, I’ve managed to travel the world quite successfully without filling my home with trinkets from abroad; I justify this to myself with the mantra ‘take only photographs, leave only footprints,’ but I know that the main reason I don’t flock to markets or haggle in carpet shops is because it scares the hell out of me. I might be able to climb volcanoes and sail oceans, but I can’t shop. Happily I’ve just had my hand forced by the complete lack of suitably tropical attire in my backpack, and I am now the proud owner of a set of Indian clothes of dubious sartorial qualities, but high quality stitching. Oh, and they’re thin and airy, not unlike their new owner.

Suits Me

It’s hard to travel through India without spotting Indian tailors hard at work, sitting in the fronts of their shops, pedalling their cast-iron sewing machines into a frenzy among piles of colourful material. If you’re at all clothes-minded, this must be like heaven, but for those of us whose travelling clothes have long sleeves purely to keep the mosquitoes from biting, and whose trousers are dirt-coloured so they don’t show the dirt, those precious weaves of cream, ochre and crimson look less like an Aladdin’s cave and more like the warning colours on the belly of a particularly poisonous frog. So it was with some trepidation that Peta and I set out to scout out the tailors of Varkala, in search of trousers, shirts and, above all, a painless shopping experience.

As with most things in India, it would have been a breeze with hindsight, but even with a level of ignorance matching that of a modern-day celebrity, we managed to buy what we wanted, and without feeling too used. The first tailor we popped into was run by a very softly spoken chap, who asked us how he could help.

‘Well, I’m looking for a pair of trousers and a shirt,’ I said. ‘Collarless, like this one over here.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘let us look at the material. How about this one, it is good in the heat. You know it is getting very hot now, today it is, I am thinking, 37 degrees, but in April it gets to... oh, let me see, 45, I am reading in the newspaper. You want a good, thin material, like this one.’

‘Yeah, that’s not bad,’ I ventured. ‘I quite like this pattern here, on the cream one.’

‘That is good, sir,’ said the shopkeeper, pulling down a shirt from the rack above his head. ‘Let me show you the stitching we do, it is very high quality indeed, very important for keeping clothes a long time. Here, look at this seam, this is very good double-stitching, and here we make sure we make this part very strong to avoid wear. Is this the kind of thing you are looking for?’

‘Yes, it does look good,’ I said, drawing on my long experience of tailoring standards and stitching methods.

‘Then we measure you,’ he said, beckoning over an old man from the back of the shop, who had been busily cutting lengths of cloth with a huge pair of scissors. Out came the measuring tape, and the old man called out numbers in Malayalam as he measured me in places I’d never been measured before.

‘Do you want a tighter fit than this shirt?’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Or loose might be better for hot weather? And do you want three buttons at the top here? It will look good.’

‘Um, yeah, sounds good,’ I thought, feeling that helpless ache in the pit of the stomach that the big fish gets when he feels the first tug on the line. And before I’d had time to breathe the old man had also measured me up for a pair of trousers, I’d picked out a particularly fetching shade of dark green cotton to make them from, and that seemed to be that. Now, I assumed, we’d start haggling.

Unfortunately, I’d ignored the first rule of bargaining, which is first to try to work out what a fair price is, so you know vaguely where to aim. I had absolutely no idea at all how much shirts and trousers might cost, and not only that, I was starting to reach that point I reach in every shop where I’d rather gnaw my fingers off than extend the experience any further. Luckily, shopkeepers know how to deal with this particular ailment: they go in for the kill.

‘Let me see,’ he said. ‘They will be ready at 8pm tonight, and the cost for one pair of trousers and one shirt will be... 750 for the shirt and 950 for the trousers, which comes to 1700 rupees.’

‘Ah,’ I said, trying desperately to remember how this bargaining lark works. ‘I’m looking to pay about 1000 rupees,’ and with that I realised I’d got things slightly wrong, because you’re supposed to offer about one-third of the original asking price, rather than two-thirds, and now I was going to pay the price. ‘I should have said 600, I should have said 600,’ I thought, as the shopkeeper sucked in his breath at my price, presumably to make me feel better, as I’m sure he already knew he’d make a killing.

‘I can do a special discount for you,’ he said. ‘I can do 1500.’

‘1200,’ I said, wondering where this was going to end.

‘1450,’ he said. ‘It is a fair price.’

‘1300,’ I said. ‘It is the end of the season for you, and it’s a good price.’

‘OK, 1300,’ he said, and we shook on it, both of us smiling, but only one of us with a glint in his eye. I’d walked into the shop simply to try to find out what sort of price clothes might cost, and I’d already done a deal. ‘What a muppet,’ I thought, but a little voice in my head reminded me that yes, this might not be the best price, but I could afford it, and it meant I’d have some clothes to wear, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel glum. And hey, perhaps it was a fair price after all? Who knows...

A Second Attempt

I could probably have relaxed a bit more if we still hadn’t got Peta’s clothes to buy. She hadn’t seen any suitable fabrics in the first shop, so we wandered down the road, popping into a couple of shops that sold clothes, but they didn’t appear to have a tailor in tow and their clothes were completely the wrong size, so they were short visits. A little further on, though, we were accosted by a man who tried to gain our trust by putting on the worst imitation of an English accent that I’ve heard in a long time, and instead of warning us off, we found ourselves drawn in by, of all things, a man clad in a dhoti saying, ‘Lovely jubbly,’ in an utterly banal voice. What were we thinking?

Not very clearly, it seems, as although we were supposed to be shopping for Peta, it only took ten seconds before the man was measuring me up for another shirt and another pair of trousers, while Peta stood by, saying that, yes, that blue wasn’t bad, but no, that brown was totally wrong. By the time we moved on to her wardrobe, I’d apparently agreed to buy another two shirts and a pair of trousers, all for an as-yet-undisclosed sum.

‘So, that’s two shirts for you and one trousers,’ the shopkeeper said, after going through a number of fabrics with Peta and deciding on how she wanted her clothes to be cut. ‘And for you, madam, two shirts and two trousers.’

‘Actually, I think I’ll only have one shirt,’ I said, desperately trying to sound in control. ‘In the white,’ I ventured. ‘Yes, the white.’

‘OK,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘that is a total of two shirts and two trousers for you, and one shirt and one trousers for you, so six in total, so that is a price of 3800 rupees. Ready tomorrow evening.’

‘I’ll give you 2000,’ I said, again failing to go for one-third of the asking price, but confident that I could at least get better value for money than in my last feeble attempt.

‘3300,’ said the man. ‘It is a fair price.’

‘2500,’ I said, wondering if that was too much of a leap, and realising too late that if I thought it was, then it probably was.

‘3000, my final offer,’ he said.

‘Let’s make it 2700,’ I said. ‘We are buying a lot from you, after all.’

‘OK, 2700,’ he said, and we shook on it.

And was I ripped off? I have no idea, but the second man turned out to be 50% cheaper than the first, though the second man hadn’t been quite so proud of his stitching. Only time will tell whether either of them is better than the other, and whether either of them represent value for money, but at least we now have some summer clothes, and right now I am absolutely delighted with them, if only because I won’t have to buy any more for some time to come.

And hey, it’s not as if I ever come out of a bargaining session feeling as if I was ever in control... which just shows that some people are born to shop, some people are born to sell, and some people don’t know they’re born at all.

That’ll be me, then.

Lagging Behind

Written: 14 March 2007   

It’s a major stroke of luck that I have a lazy streak as wide as the grin on an Indian salesman’s face. It means that although I love planning my travels and enjoy poring over guidebooks and maps, when it comes to actually making a decision and booking anything in advance, I’m a total ditherer and tend to avoid the issue until I’m faced with an ultimatum. In the case of this two-and-a-half week visit to India, this meant that I booked a return flight to Trivandrum... and precisely nothing else. I figured we could make it up as we went along, as that’s what I managed to do quite happily for six months back in 1998.

This turned out to be a very good move, because I’m finding it hard to acclimatise to the heat and the time zone, but luckily we’re sitting in a friendly beach resort where we don’t even have to crawl out of bed if we don’t want to. The combination of hot weather and jet lag has completely sapped my energy, and if I had to plan another trip to the tropics, I’d totally fail to plan anything in exactly the same way again.

Things are made worse by the fact that we flew here from England. India is five-and-a-half hours ahead of GMT, which means we’re lying awake at night until the wee hours and fighting to get out of bed before lunch. Add in temperatures in the high 30s and a humidity level that is tempered by the sea breezes but still manages to feel like the inside of a long-distance walker’s leather boots after a long day, and I’m starting to feel like I’m on a particularly harsh detox regime, lying each night in damp sheets, dreams peppered with images of suffocation and mild panic.

It isn’t helped by India’s casual attitude to noise pollution. I’d forgotten how oblivious the locals are to noise, and as a result the thumping bass of the nearby bar’s trance music rattles through the small hours of the night while crickets screech and fans swish above. This morning wins the prize for the most cacophonous wake-up call, not because of the distorted muezzin’s call to prayer that blasted through the still morning air at 5.30am and again at 5.45am, but because of the effect it had on the local wildlife. Shocked into life like the rest of us, the local crow population – who are large, very black and have the same sullen behavioural problems as the dysfunctional seagulls of English seaside towns – thought they’d fight back with their own call to prayer, and for a good hour they screeched and screamed and yelled at each other, sounding for all the world like a theatre full of children, all laughing along with the funny man in the panto in that slightly over-zealous way that only five-year-olds can muster.

But none of this is a shock, and I have to keep reminding myself that this is actually India Lite, and has practically no relation to the hard, dusty and utterly rewarding travel experience I had nine years ago. In fact, I know that in a few days, when we’ve done a little more travelling and stayed in a few urban centres, I’ll look back on our nights in the Kerala Bamboo House with great fondness. After all, who remembers the sleepless nights when you’ve got such enjoyable days in between? Precisely...

Blowing the Budget

Written: 14 March 2007   

There is one habit from my previous trip to India that I am finding hard to break. When I last visited, it was towards the end of a three-year jaunt around Australia, Oceania and Asia, most of it funded by money I had earned en route. One of the effects of travelling for so long is that you learn to budget mercilessly, because each penny you save translates into more time on the road.

It’s a simple equation, and it makes it easy to slip into a pretty mercenary attitude to budgeting. I stayed in the cheapest hotels, and was quite happy to live with the noisy fans, suspect linen and friendly cockroaches; I ate in street restaurants that served the most delicious food and charged a pittance for the pleasure; I avoided buying tickets for the more expensive air-conditioned sleeper trains and instead went for plain old second class; and I rarely drank alcohol, bargained hard with rickshaw drivers, and avoided organised tours whenever I could do it myself. It made me happy, and my average expenditure on food, accommodation, transport and entrance fees came to a whopping Rs250 a day, or – at the then rate of 50 rupees to the pound – about £5 a day.

This time I’m on holiday and I have my partner in tow, but the ingrained budgeting of nine years ago is still there, laying on the guilt every time I reach for the wallet. Frankly, this time round it’s annoying, because I’ve already experienced low-end India (and loved it), and I now want to experience mid- and top-end India, if only because I don’t want to be single when this is over. Add in a rise in the exchange rate – £1 is now worth Rs85 – and thing get even more difficult. A stunning meal of freshly fried calamari, followed by a whole butterfish with rice and vegetables, plus four 650ml bottles of Kingfisher beer, comes to Rs985, and I haven’t even mentioned the sea view and delightfully friendly service. That’s just over £12, for two, which is really something when you’re used to London prices, and yet as I peel off two Rs500 notes, and add another Rs50 for a tip (a distinctly optional affair in India, but something that is always appreciated and, in this case, richly deserved), I can’t help thinking that I’m peeling off four days’ budget for just one meal.

This is plainly stupid, because this time I’m on holiday, and my old daily budget is little more than an historical side note. Hell, as we walked back to our room in Varkala the other night, we walked past a fellow traveller using her laptop on the porch of her bamboo hut, which just goes to show how times have changed. But I guess long-term travelling can have long-term effects, and sometimes you have to consciously shake them off, so wish me luck as I bravely get through my therapy by having, oh, OK, just two more beers, and maybe another one of those fine cocktails, thank you very much.

Perhaps I could get used to non-budget travel after all...

Beer, What Beer?

Written: 14 March 2007   

Not every restaurant in Varkala has a licence to sell alcohol, but that doesn’t seem to discourage them from doing so, and it’s one of Varkala’s more amusing traits. ‘We also have beer, yes,’ is a common enough introduction to the menu, at least at those restaurants whose menus completely fail to mention alcohol. At restaurants such as this, the waiter is only too happy to bring you a bottle of slightly chilled Kingfisher, though depending on how jittery the restaurant owner is feeling, it might either be served in a glass, or if there’s been some recent interest from the authorities in the illicit selling of alcohol, you might get a large ceramic mug with a big handle that’s large enough to hold half a bottle and a generous head.

‘Please,’ says the waiter as he delivers your beer, ‘in case of police,’ and with that he puts the bottle on the floor by the side of your table, winking at you conspiratorially.

This is all fine and dandy, until the police actually come a-calling. We were enjoying an under-the-table beer at one of the sea view restaurants in Varkala one evening, when a policeman wandered past and started talking to the Tibetan shopkeeper below, his neatly pressed khaki uniform with its black shoulder braid looking even more authoritarian when surrounded by the slapdash lungis and dhotis of the local businessmen. The wave of gentle apprehension that swept through the restaurant was visible, the diners exchanging looks and wondering what was going to happen next.

‘Police,’ whispered the waiter, stating the obvious as three more khaki-clad heavies wandered down the path.

‘So what do we do?’ asked Peta. ‘Do we drink all our beer? Or pretend that we brought it in ourselves?’

‘Maybe they will not come up,’ said the waiter, surprising us with a big grin. Meanwhile the police chief waved up to the restaurant and the owner, an old man in a particularly well-loved dhoti, wandered down and started talking to the policeman’s shoulder braid, avoiding the officer’s eyes and looking for all the world like a naughty five-year-old who’s hoping his mother won’t find the empty cookie jar.

‘They came last week,’ whispered the waiter, ‘and gave us a warning.’

‘Ah,’ said Peta. ‘So what happens if they find the beer this time?’

‘Then it is bad trouble for the owner,’ he said. ‘Legal trouble. But look, they are leaving.’

‘That’s good,’ I said.

‘But they will be back in half an hour,’ he smiled, appearing to enjoy the conspiracy. ‘We must be careful.’

And off he went, returning a few minutes later with two ceramic mugs, into which he poured the rest of our bottles, taking the bottles away and hiding them out of sight of any prying officials. No matter that exactly the same ceramic mugs are used to hide beer by all the unlicensed restaurants along the strip, or that they’re much more suited to hot chocolate than the kind of drink you would have with your evening meal, because evidently it doesn’t take that much effort to satisfy the police. When you consider that illicit beer appears on the bill as ‘pop’ – albeit pop that costs Rs80 a bottle, some five or six times the price of a bottle of Coke – and that those restaurants who break the law would surely have a rather incriminating stash of empty Kingfisher bottles out the back, let alone a profit margin that wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny, the conclusion has to be that the police know it’s happening and tolerate it to some extent. Presumably they give out the odd warning and maybe come down hard on those who step out of line, and they probably also take the odd bit of baksheesh to make sure the machine of commerce remains well oiled, while still looking fierce when walking around town.

Whatever the reality, it’s clear that there’s a balance that benefits the restaurant, the tourist and, somehow, the police, as in some places the pretence wears pretty thin. Despite their warning, the restaurant in which we were enjoying our ceramic beers proudly sported Kingfisher tablecloths and Kingfisher ashtrays, and the glasses we’d been using before switching to the hot chocolate mugs were emblazoned with the Kingfisher Strong logo. You can almost picture the scene, with a red-faced policeman saying, ‘Are you selling beer here?’ while the restaurateur looks at the ceiling, whistling nonchalantly and trying to push a box of brightly coloured Kingfisher merchandise under the table with one foot.

But hey, this is India, where the rules are so flexible they can sometimes appear bent, and if it means you can drink a cold beer while the sun goes down, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing after all. Cheers!

Cash Card Crisis

Written: 15 March 2007   

Sometimes I make a really piss-poor traveller, you know. Hot weather makes me irritable and lethargic, especially when it’s humid; if I don’t get a good night’s sleep, I get irritable and lethargic; I get ill at the drop of a hat, which makes me irritable and lethargic; and I suffer from regular bouts of homesickness, which would probably make me irritable and lethargic if it wasn’t too busy wallowing in self-pity. On most short trips, this homesickness peaks around day three or four, and it happens regardless of what I’m doing – it even kicks in on skiing holidays, which is frankly bizarre. It’s a wonder I manage to leave home at all, to be honest.

Being day four of our south Indian jaunt, today was destined to be a disaster from the outset. Throughout our stay in Varkala, the combination of heat, humidity, noisy all-night bars, 5.30am calls to prayer and ear-splitting dawn choruses from the local crows has ensured that we’ve had pretty much no sleep since landing in India, and considering that we came straight off an overnight flight, we’re both suffering from the effects of sleep deprivation. It’s slightly worse today as we decided to get up early this morning to catch the train to Kollam, so we’re even more bleary-eyed than we’ve been all week. On top of this, I stupidly forgot to put on any sun tan lotion the other day when we went for a swim in the sea, and despite it being only a short dip, my shoulders are red raw and the pain kicks in every time I turn over on the sandpaper sacks that our hotel has substituted for pillows. In fact, you could say I’m irritable and lethargic, which is at least true to form for this stage of the holiday.

It snowballed today, too. This morning I wasn’t really concentrating when I booked our tickets for the train to Kollam, and we ended up in third class, jammed up in the sardine tin that is non-sleeper train travel. It was only a short journey and our fellow passengers were smiley and charming, but in this sort of mood, sleeper class is a much more sensible option. Luckily we fell out of Kollam station and into a travel agency who had a highly recommended houseboat available for the next four days, so sensing a silver lining and the chance to while away our exhaustion on the tranquil Keralan backwaters, we booked our places and headed off to the ATM in a rickshaw to withdraw the necessary funds, with the travel agent in tow.

Credit and debit cards are the way to travel these days. When I was last in India there were no ATMs to speak of, and the only way to carry your cash was as traveller’s cheques or foreign currency, both of which took hours to change at the bank. These days you just need to flash your plastic at one of the many ATMs around, and it’s all done in a matter of seconds... or that’s the theory, anyway.

I thought I’d covered all the bases in bringing both a Barclays Connect card (a Visa-branded debit card) and a NatWest Mastercard, so I fished out my Connect card and tried it in the HDFC bank’s ATM, just round the corner from the agency, keying in my PIN and asking for the maximum withdrawal amount of Rs25,000. ‘System error,’ the screen flashed helpfully, ‘it has not been possible to complete this transaction.’ Oh well, I thought, let’s try the Mastercard, and keyed in my PIN again. The machine spat this card out even more quickly than the first one.

I tried again, but to no avail, and the man standing outside the ATM started impatiently banging on the window, so I went back outside and told the travel agent that I was having problems. He looked like a child whose balloon has just been burst, but gainfully he suggested we try the Federal Bank ATM up the road, a short hop in the rickshaw through Kollam’s hectic traffic.

‘Transaction declined,’ it beeped, rejecting both my cards again. ‘Contact bank, code 068,’ it continued, cryptically.

All-too-familiar pangs of panic started to well up in the pit of my stomach, as the thought of being stranded in India with no access to money sunk in. ‘Shit, what do we do now?’ I asked Peta, and she suggested we pop back to the bags to try her credit card.

‘To the ICICI Bank,’ the travel agent told the rickshaw driver, trying to sound positive. ‘And go via the office,’ he said, and so we headed out for our final attempt at securing funds for the houseboat. My cards both failed again – so much for third time lucky – and the official from inside the bank could only offer a head wobble and the helpful observation that ‘perhaps it is the card, or perhaps it is the ATM,’ which I couldn’t deny, but which didn’t exactly help matters. And then, with palpable relief, Peta’s First Direct Visa card hit the jackpot and out rolled Rs25,000 in crisp Rs500 notes, enough to pay for our Rs16,000 houseboat trip, and to see us through for a few days afterwards. Thank goodness for girlfriends; men might be useful for some things, but saving the day evidently isn’t one of them.

Postscript

In Kochi, things would get rather worse, as even Peta’s cards would stop working. It appears that these days, most banks will freak out if you try to process a transaction from countries like India or China, and they will freeze all overseas activity there and then. Barclays and NatWest had done just that with my cards, and First Direct decided that as withdrawing money in Kollam was not in Peta’s normal routine, they’d better freeze both her credit and debit cards.

Luckily she was able to ring them up and they switched them back on there and then, but clearly there is a golden rule when travelling abroad with cash cards, and that’s not only to tell your bank where you’re going, but to make sure you’ve also got a way of contacting them in case anything goes wrong. Ah well, you live and learn...

The Keralan Backwaters

Written: 17 March 2007   

I first travelled the Keralan backwaters back in 1998, when I took the tourist cruise from Kollam to Alappuzha, and I loved it. The serene waterways that lie just a stone’s throw from the sea are relaxing, smothered in coconut palms and perfect for unwinding. Given my complete lack of ability to acclimatise to India’s heat and noise without throwing a tantrum, the backwaters seemed like the perfect place to relax for a few days.

We hadn’t meant to jump straight onto a boat, but India being India, things just fell into place (well, apart from some hiccups with my credit card, but let’s leave that for another time). We took the train from Varkala to Kollam, fell into a rickshaw to the DTPC tourist information centre and started talking to a man about houseboats. He didn’t have anything available until Saturday, which was far too far off, but he sent us round the corner to the office of the Visit Kerala representative, who produced photographs of a houseboat and a book full of glowing handwritten reviews from travellers dating from 2005 (‘The current book is on the boat,’ claimed the agent), and said the boat was available now to hire for as long as we wanted. We said we’d like three days, and he suggested an all-inclusive itinerary, costing Rs16,000 for three nights and four days, going from Kollam to a quiet halfway point on the first day, then to Alappuzha on the second day, and then around Alappuzha for the third day and night, ending in Alappuzha at the end of the trip. It sounded good, we checked out the boat and liked the look of it, and then I tried to bargain, which completely failed to work as he had ‘already given you my very best price.’ Too tired to argue, we paid up and headed for the boat.

Ah, the Keralan backwaters. They live in a time zone of their own, and although our trip from Kollam to Alappuzha followed the same route as the ferry I took back in 1998, there’s something wonderfully relaxing and, dare I say it, decadent about doing it in your own boat, with the smells of cooking wafting up from the back of the boat while you sit in the shade of the veranda like kings and queens of the river. It’s delightful, and even though it took a while to seep into my pores, it eventually took my black mood, tied it up in a bag, dropped in a big, heavy rock, and threw it mewling and whingeing into the luscious green waters of the backwater canals.

I should point out that, given the price difference – Rs300 for the tourist cruise, compared to a houseboat being of the most expensive attractions in India – the tourist ferry comes out of it very well. For the first two days of our trip, I saw nothing that I didn’t see back in 1998, if you ignore the new developments that have sprung up in the meantime (such as the construction work surrounding a couple of huge bridges that will one day join the outer land spit to the mainland). But I remember the tourist cruise being, well, rather touristy and a bit too busy, and if you’re a couple looking for a romantic interlude, or you’re a large party who would rather hang out with each other in privacy, then a houseboat is absolutely the way to go.

Great Expectations

Our boat, the Thamanna (or Expectation), was run by a three-man crew of smiling but relatively silent chaps, who ran the boat with the kind of relaxed efficiency that comes from working as a team for a long time. Anil, the chef, would prove to be a magician with food; Shaji, the engineer, charmed us with his smile; and Retheesh, who steered the boat, was quiet and slightly more aloof, perhaps because he was the new boy, having worked on the boat for just one year (the others were old hands, judging by the comments in the onboard visitors’ books). They kept themselves to themselves, hovering around enough to make sure we were perfectly happy and to have little chats now and then, but without ever feeling clingy or invasive. Indeed, I wouldn’t have minded if they had been more chatty, but perhaps on the backwaters, leaving the tourists to mind their own business is a sensible move.

For the backwaters are a drifter’s delight, and it started from the very first day, when we set off from Kollam in the hot, early afternoon sun. As soon as we left the mooring, just round the corner from Kollam’s somewhat fragrant abattoir, the breeze through the front deck blew away all memories of crowded trains and hot, sticky city centres, and just like that we reached the second largest lake in the backwaters, Lake Ashtamudi, whose waters stretch out into the distance, deep and green all the way to its palm-strewn fringes.

Soon after crossing the lake, we tied up to a pole in the middle of the channel, and out came lunch, the first of many spreads that we would both marvel over (I’m not ashamed to say that we took photos of our meals before ploughing into them – they really were that well presented, and they tasted as good as they looked). Our first lunch consisted of fat-grained south Indian rice, dhal, diced green banana, green beans, cabbage, soya beans and two whole fishes, which Anil said had come from the lake we’d just crossed. Whatever their origin, they tasted delightful, and each of the dishes was presented in its own red terracotta bowl, with its own unique recipe and mixture of herbs and spices. Indian cooking has a reputation for being fiery and spicy, but when it’s done well – as it was on our houseboat – you can taste the individual spices, and the sum of the parts adds up to an inspiring taste of its own. Each of Anil’s terracotta bowls was worthy of an ovation, and we did them justice as best we could (though each meal was so large, even two hungry mouths could only dent the mounds of food we were presented with, though I’m sure nothing went to waste).

After a short siesta to see out the hottest part of the day, we resumed our drift northwards, passing houses that lined the canal on both sides. One of the strongest memories of my previous visit to the backwaters was the insanity of the children, who would run along the banks, shouting, ‘One pen! One Pen! Give me one pen, please!’ in the hope that we would copy the hordes of tourists who throw pens at the locals, thus making things worse (the official advice is not to hand out pens to children, but to give them to a local school instead; throwing pens off your boat only encourages the children to yell, ‘One pen! One pen!’ every time they see a white person, which doesn’t achieve anything). One child was so enthralled by his mantra that he kept running along the side of the bank, leaping along the tops of the concrete stumps until they ran out and so did he, his legs wildly pumping the air as he fell, still screaming, into the river; he kept shouting as he surfaced, determined to get his reward, though I think on this occasion his efforts were in vain.

The ‘one pen’ brigade are still in evidence some nine years later, but it feels to me as if they have calmed down in the intervening years (though perhaps this is because they save their biggest efforts for the tourist cruise, as the odds are better, and don’t pester houseboats quite as much). Instead, the happy smiling of the locals is the most common sight, and people waved gleefully as we chugged past, happily waving back. All this waving and the smiling appears to be completely genuine on their part (it definitely was on our part), and the women and children reacted brilliantly when Peta said hello, something they were less keen to do with a solitary male all those years ago.

As the afternoon wore on, we sailed past a mineral factory and fishing boats moored on the shores, and the cantilevered Chinese fishing nets for which the area is famous. We finally arrived in the small village of Alumkadavu at about 5.30pm, where we pulled up by the Green Channel hotel – all but empty in this, the shoulder season – and Shaji said we were more than welcome to explore the village, if we wanted. And, of course, we jumped at the chance.

Again, this is something that you don’t get from the tourist cruise, and it turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. We wandered randomly through the village, along its main road with all manner of shops crowding the sides, from the ironmongers, the saree shop and the men’s tailors, to the rope shop, the chemists, various food shops and, oddly enough, a shop selling western-style toilets. A lone television sat in a shop window showing Tom and Jerry battling it out in space, and children and old men sat around on the dusty ground, engrossed. Further on a line of auto-rickshaws gleamed in the afternoon light, their owners waiting for a fare, and all around people stared at us, some returning our smiles, and some just staring.

We took a right turn at a T-junction for no particular reason, and were soon overtaken by a small boy of about ten on a rather impressive bicycle. It had tinsel around the wheel hubs and the shiniest seat you’ve ever seen, and he slowed down as he went past.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello,’ we chimed. ‘How are you?’

‘I am well,’ he replied. ‘What are you doing?’

‘We are just walking,’ we said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I am just riding my bicycle,’ he said, and waved as he rode off. And that, we thought, was that.

A little further down the road the same boy popped out from nowhere and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Hello’, we said.

‘This is where I live,’ he said, pointing to a small house just off the road. ‘Would you like to come in?’

How could we refuse? So we wandered in and perched on the edge of the front porch, while our newfound friend said his name was Renju Bhavan, and introduced us to his mother, father and grandmother. We made brief and rather stilted conversation while slowly other boys wandered in, all giggling and hiding behind their hands. They let us take their pictures, insisting I appear in at least one of them, and while Renju went inside to write down his address so we could send him the prints, Peta went to talk to a group of girls who had gathered next door, and got taken off to see their home while I sat there, smiling and bobbling my head as if to say, ‘I’m happy to be in your home, even if I can’t speak a word of your language and you can’t speak a word of mine.’

Before long Renju emerged with a pen and his school book, and decided that it might be quicker if he dictated his address to me to write down, so I jotted it down as best I could, and he then asked me for my autograph, which Peta and I both gave him. This opened the floodgates – everyone produced their own school books, which we dutifully filled with our signatures and, in Peta’s case, a smiley face that went down particularly well, and after a few more photos and promises that we would send them copies as soon as we got home, we floated back to our boat, the smiles and happy waves of the locals of Alumkadavu a reminder of how genuinely friendly and open the locals of rural Kerala are.

And that evening we ploughed into a feast of masala chicken, rice and spiced aubergine, reflecting how it’s always the unscripted parts of the trip that produce the best memories.

To Alappuzha

Unfortunately, our first night on the houseboat proved to be rather less tranquil than we’d hoped it would be. The noise of a small engine (or possibly a large transformer) throbbed throughout the night just beyond our bedroom wall, and although we started the night lying in our cabin with the mosquito net coiled up above our heads, I woke up in the wee hours with itches that turned to scratches, and we had to spend the rest of the night huddled in the still air under the net. After finally dropping into a troubled sleep around three o’clock, we both woke to the shock of the muezzin’s call at 5.30am, after which the local Hindu temple decided to play catch-up with a woofer-blasting rendition of its own that went on all the way to breakfast, accompanied by loud, sharp bangs that we would later discover were firecrackers. Apparently our first full day on the backwaters happened to be a Hindu festival, and nobody sleeps when there are colourful gods to be celebrated.

So day two started in a haze of exhaustion, brought on by yet another difficult night adjusting to the heat and the noise of India. It can take the body up to two weeks to acclimatise to this kind of heat, and six nights in, neither of us had managed anything approaching a proper night’s sleep. Thank goodness we were on a houseboat, then, because there is absolutely nothing to do except kick back and relax.

Giving up on our sweat-drenched bed, we spent the early hours of the morning watching the village wake up. Just in front of us the river taxi man punted his canoe back and forth between the banks, ferrying people and bicycles between the main village and the houses on the opposite bank. Back and forth he went, sometimes carrying sedate clutches of colourfully clad women, and other times carrying groups of men who seemed to be able to talk without drawing breath. Meanwhile, we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast on the front deck, consisting of masala eggs, nests of rice noodles, baked plantain and sweet tea. At dawn the air had been completely still, made hazy by the smoke from the morning fires, but over breakfast the air slowly cleared, the humidity of the early morning replaced by a feeling of impending high temperatures as the sun felt its way towards our houseboat. Setting off for the day’s cruise not only brought something else to look at, but a welcome breeze that made life bearable once more.

After an hour on the backwaters, heading north along a wide canal surrounded by thick coconut forests, we stopped briefly at the Matha Amrithanandamayi Mission, where about 2000 people live and follow the teachings of one of India’s few female gurus. Known as Amma (‘mother’), she is best known for her darshan (or her ‘blessing’), when she hugs thousands of people, one after the other, in long sessions that can go on all night. We wandered round, feeling slightly self-conscious, as this is one of the more popular ashrams for westerners, and there were plenty of white faces, decked out in the simple clothes of ashram devotees. They looked happy enough, though looking at the tall, pink tower blocks which house the throng, I knew that this wasn’t for me. I like the bad things in life too much to become an ashram devotee, though if I ever feel tempted, a hugging guru is probably the way I’d go.

A little further on along the backwaters, we pulled up to a wooden pile in the middle of the canal, surrounded on both sides by thick jungle and the sound of Hindu celebrations. Firecrackers cracked, drums drummed, and it felt for all the world like the build-up to a cannibal scene out of an H Rider Haggard novel. We idly fantasised that we were being fattened up for the exotic celebrations, because lunch was truly something. Little bowls held masala prawns, beetroot with yoghurt, a lovely spinach dish, sambar, ladyfinger, beans, rice and crunchy poppadoms, and we polished off as much as we could to the tune of a cold beer while the drums thumped out a tune to aid the digestion.

After a siesta we struck north, and soon sunk back into a set of smaller waterways with picturesque houses dotted along the banks. People waved and smiled, with only a minority of the children shouting, ‘Please give me one pen,’ and after a short chug we pulled in to the banks and were whisked off to see the locals making rope from coconut fibres. This rope is made from coconuts that are submerged in water for three months, which makes it easier to separate the nut from the fibrous shell. The fibres (known as ‘coir’) are separated out into huge piles of thick, hair-like strands, each only a few inches long, and the ladies who make the rope weave the coir using a simple contraption that spins four large needle-like hooks along their axes (these days these machines are electric, though they used to be hand-cranked before the arrival of electricity). They attach a few strands to each needle and twist it to form a short rope, and then two of them take two ropes each, one in each hand, and walk backwards, away from the machine, feeding more strands into the twisted fibres and creating a thin string as they go. After 10m or so, they stop and join the ropes they’re holding in each hand together, thus creating two loops, and they attach these to a similar machine at that end that twists each pair of strands into two lengths of twisted-pair rope. Considering that these ropes are made by simply twisting short strands of coconut fibre together, they are incredibly strong, and the ladies reckoned they could produce 25 to 35kg of rope a day, no mean feat in this weather.

It’s a skilled job, too, as became quite clear when we tried our hand at making a short length of rope. It isn’t easy to feed small strands into a twisting rope without losing the momentum, but the ladies of Kerala make it look like a breeze. Hats off to them, I must say.

As you approach the Alappuzha end of the backwaters, there’s a sense that the waterside developments are, well, slightly more developed than their equivalents down towards Kollam. Although most of the houses are still small and modest, the number of larger houses increases, and you get the feeling that there’s a bit more prosperity at this end of the waters. The landscape changes too, moving from the coconut forests of Kollam to a more open, agricultural layout, with large, flat paddy fields stretching out beyond the banks of the backwater. The paddy fields are separated from the canal by long, thin strips of land, with the occasional irrigation gate providing a means of flooding the paddy fields at the start of the growing cycle, when rice needs to grow in shallow water. Water pumps and large plastic pipes allow the farmers to pump the paddy fields dry, so that by the time the rice is ready to harvest, the fields are no longer waterlogged.

Rice growing is much in evidence in the northern backwaters, with canoes plying the water, bursting with huge piles of harvested rice, ready to head over to the threshing site where the rice grains are separated from the grassy stems. But there’s an awful lot more going on than just rice growing, for this is still a bustling place where people live. Boys dive into the water as your houseboat floats past, racing to see if they can reach the boat before it passes (it’s futile with petrol-driven boats like this, but it’s the taking part that counts); women bathe by the banks, coyly clad in their sarees, while men bathe further downstream in just their lungis; further along, a group of boat builders is working on the skeleton of a new boat, its curves reminiscent of a ripe banana or a sultan’s moustache; boys play cricket under the palm trees, yelling ‘how is that’ amid a torrent of Malayalam; men squat on their haunches in circles under the shady trees, embroiled in heated discussion while women walk past in pairs, their bright clothes looking immaculate in the bright sunshine; the thwack-thwack of wet cloth on stone fills the air as the women of the house stand knee-deep in the water, doing the washing in the time-honoured way of smashing wet clothes on flat washing stones; lone canoes paddled by wiry old men pass larger boats weighted down to the waterline with piles of sand, collected in the morning by men with baskets, diving down to the bed of the canal; a solitary tantrum rings out, the intonation of both mother and child instantly familiar to anyone who has children of a certain age; river taxis punt from bank to bank, some carrying bicycles, and some carrying women hiding from the sun under their umbrellas; the shrill sound of a saw rings out from a riverside saw mill, where logs are bundled onto the back of a waiting truck; women bend over in rice paddies, scything ripe rice into bundles that the men carry away on their heads; and a man in a small canoe makes ‘oo-ee’ and ‘kak-kak’ sounds as he herds a large flock of ducks from one side of the canal to another. Life on a houseboat might be lazy, but all around you can see the quiet pace of life unfolding before your very eyes.

And that night, as we dropped anchor in a quiet stretch of the river just south of Alappuzha, we finally managed to get a good night’s sleep, after a week of trying. At last, we felt human...

Romantic Cruising

Life on a houseboat soon becomes quite mantra-like. Breakfast starts the day, lunch punctuates it, and dinner rounds it off, and in the middle there are more drifting sights and chances to doze off as the sun climbs through the sky. The scenery around Alappuzha is almost entirely flat and made up of paddy fields, and as such is lacks some of the charm of the winding coconut forests of the south, but by this stage it doesn’t really matter, as everything plods along in the manner to which it has become accustomed. People are just as friendly and are always happy to smile and wave, and although the evidence of labour is right there in front of you, rather than tucked away behind the palm trees, the atmosphere is still just as relaxed. The sun is hot, the breeze is welcome, and the pace of life is delightful. ‘A perfect spot for a bit of romance,’ you might think, as you flick through the visitors’ book and read the comments of couple after couple after couple.

Well... yes and no. There’s no denying that life on a houseboat is romantic, in a kind of ‘just the two of us on a boat in the middle of a palm-encrusted tropical paradise’ kind of way... except that reality isn’t quite that simple. It’s so hot and so humid that you break a sweat just by standing up, let alone standing to attention; meanwhile there are three burly men manning the boat, and although Anil, Shaji and Retheesh were terribly respectful of our privacy, these boats aren’t exactly huge and the walls aren’t exactly thick; or if you think a quick spot of fun in the middle of the night is a good idea, then beware the silent canoes that paddle past, just feet from your open bedroom windows, their candles and torches lighting up the inside of your room in glorious, high-definition night vision for everyone to enjoy, while the stench of ingrained fish wafts in on the still night air; and even if you close the curtains or decide the fishermen can get stuffed, you try getting romantic under a mosquito net without catching it with your feet and ending up like two dolphins in a tuna net. Luckily, what you do get are bottled memories that you can take away with you, ready to be cracked open on cold evenings at home and savoured in front of the log fire, far away from the crowded melee of modern India. Or that’s my plan, anyway...

The only stop we made on day three was the village of Champakulam, 18km from Alappuzha and home to the Kalloorkad St Mary’s Forane Church, which was founded in the fifth century AD, but now uses modern technology to get its own back on the local mosques and Hindu temples. When we visited, the loudest sound system this side of Mecca was blasting out a Christian service, and the church was jammed with a congregation that spilt out into the church grounds, men standing on the left of the church and women on the right. The service was clearly Christian, but the words were in the local language and the pace of the service was definitely Indian, bearing about as much relation to staid English church services as do the happy-clappy churches of Ghana. And although I’m used to mosques ruining the peace of the wee hours and Hindu temples being as noisy as the country of their origin, it’s a shock to hear Christians before you see them. But who can blame them in a country where even the religions have to shout to be heard?

Our final evening passed like the others before – quietly and pleasantly – and all too soon morning had broken and, like the first morning, we arrived back into the chaos of India in the form of Alappuzha. After tipping the crew and saying goodbye, we hopped into a rickshaw to the bus station, caught the bus to Ernakulam, jumped on the ferry to Fort Cochin, found a room in a very pleasant homestay, and lay down for a bit of peace... though, truth be told, there are few places in India as peaceful as the backwaters, and that’s all part of their charm. What a place.

The Beer Shop

Written: 15 March 2007   

The sun sank slowly behind the palm trees separating the backwaters from the Arabian Sea, the evening meal on board our houseboat was a sublime mix of chicken in Keralan spices, aubergine chutney, chapatis and large-grained rice, and as we sat on the prow of the boat, watching fireflies wink past and enjoying the rare treat of a peaceful evening in India, Peta said,’ Do you fancy a beer, then?’

‘Sure,’ I said, and wandered down the end of the boat to ask Anil, the chef, whether we could have a bottle of Kingfisher.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘We do not have any beer on board.’

‘Oh,’ I said, momentarily taken aback. I thought back to when we’d booked our trip. ‘The price includes everything, including food and water,’ said the man from the Visit Kerala travel agency. ‘Except for beer and sodas, which are extra,’ he continued, as we peeled off Rs16,000 in cash and slapped it down on the counter. This seemed perfectly reasonable, but unfortunately he had omitted one small detail – that we would have to provide the beers and sodas ourselves – although thinking back he had asked, ‘Would you like a beer?’ when we were sitting in the rickshaw, waiting to head off to the ATM. At the time I’d just thought he was being polite; clearly he was asking whether I’d like to stock up with beer for the trip...

‘The hotel may have some,’ said Anil, pointing to the hotel alongside which we were tied. ‘But it will be Rs100 a bottle.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said, and Anil stepped onto the jetty and headed for the hotel. Five minutes later he came back and said, ‘I’m afraid they do not have any beer,’ which I perhaps should have seen coming, seeing as the hotel was called the Green Channel and looked as if it hadn’t had anything to declare for months.

‘If you want beer,’ continued Anil, ‘there is a place you can go not far from here that sells it. You can go with Retheesh in a rickshaw if you want.’

‘Why not?’ I said, and Peta and I dutifully put on our shoes and followed Retheesh back through the village to the rickshaw stand at the top of town.

‘Not far from here’ meant a 15-minute rickshaw ride through pitch blackness, playing chicken with oncoming traffic, potholes and pedestrians who were invisible until scared out of the road by the driver’s incessant horn. As the minutes rattled by, the road became more and more urban, until we hit the main drag of a busy, bustling city, lit by the garish lights of shops, petrol stations, hotels, restaurants and, just over there on the left-hand side of the road, a small warehouse with a truck parked outside, unloading its cargo of cardboard boxes via the heads of a couple of wiry porters. This, it seemed, was the bottle shop in Karunagapally.

Retheesh indicated that we should follow him, and much to the amusement of the rickshaw driver, we disappeared into the chaos. After stepping around a couple of heated conversations and threading between the porters, who had boxes of bottles stacked on their heads and cried out, ‘Hey! Hey!’ as they sliced purposefully through the crowd, we entered the bottle shop and stepped right into the seedy end of the Keralan alcohol trade.

20 Green Bottles

Behind a counter at the end of a dirty, dimly lit, concrete room was utter mayhem. A crowd of men stood three deep at the counter, every single one of them yelling and jostling for position. At the left end of the counter a man took money off people in exchange for a receipt, and along the rest of the counter the customers waved their receipts until another man brought them their alcohol. Retheesh turned to me and asked how many bottles would I like.

‘Um,’ I said, trying to work out how much beer we’d want for a three-night, four-day trip, including a few beers for the crew, while all around locals stared at me as if I’d just teleported in from another planet. ‘Uh... 20?’ I said, wondering whether this was remotely close to the right figure. Retheesh sucked in his breath, smiled a conspiratorial smile and dived into the chaos.

A minute later he resurfaced, saying, ‘That will be Rs900,’ which I dutifully peeled off, noting with some glee that at Rs45 a bottle, this was as cheap as beer gets in Kerala (the bottles have ‘Rs44’ emblazoned on their labels, so we were clearly getting the local price, a bit of a first for this trip). Retheesh again disappeared into the crowd, and I stood back to wait while Peta hid near the entrance, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible (not an easy task for a fair-haired white woman in a dodgy bottle shop in urban Kerala, it has to be said).

While we waited, men flocked in and out of the shop, noisily changing their money for receipts and their receipts for bottles. They were all buying single bottles, mainly of brown spirits that looked like whisky or rum, and to a man they looked sheepish and guilty once they had their prizes, most of them tucking them away in their underwear before leaving the shop without meeting anyone’s eye. Clearly, with their mission accomplished, the next step was to get themselves and their precious cargo out of the shop as quickly as possible, so they could get on with the serious business of getting drunk.

While I was waiting, a man with bloodshot eyes indicated to me that I should be waiting in line at the other end of the counter, and he seemed to be getting more and more insistent when Retheesh came back with Rs100 change, and two boxes of rattling bottles appeared on the counter, moving over the heads of the throng like crowd-surfers at a punk rock gig. One of them landed in the arms of our rickshaw driver, who must have followed us in for the entertainment value, and Retheesh grabbed the other one and headed for the door, grinning wildly as the other drinkers looked at our stash in the same way that men stare at an unattainable woman as she and her curves walk past.

The journey back was punctuated only by a brief visit to a petrol station, where a banner proclaimed that January had been ‘oil and gas month’ and that ‘using oil is your right, conserving oil is your duty.’ Rickshaw drivers caught sight of us in the back of our rickshaw and smiled and waved, and with us smiling and waving back, we hit the road once more, the rickshaw clinking and clunking at every bump in the road. As we approached the village, at the end of another hair-raising 15-minute joy-ride through the suburbs, we had to try to stop the bottles from rattling quite so loudly as we drove down the main street and past the mosque of this evidently dry part of Kerala.

And with that, we finally got our beer under the stars, and boy, did it taste good. As it says on the label, ‘Kingfisher, India’s best selling Premium Lager Beer, is a rare pleasure.’ Round here, that sums things up pretty accurately...

Kochi

Written: 20 March 2007   

Now that I come to think of it, the last time I was in Kochi I spent a day wandering around the sights of Fort Cochin on the northern end of Kochi island, and another day killing time in Ernakulam, eating in the Indian Coffee House and enjoying a James Bond movie in the company of the locals. I didn’t hang around, and two days was probably one too many. I’m glad to say that, nine years later, Kochi is still the kind of place that forces you to kick back and relax.

I say ‘glad’ because India is currently suffering from a heatwave, and when India suffers, I suffer along with it. According to the very friendly man in the Dal Roti restaurant in Lilly Street, Kerala is currently five degrees hotter than it should be, and even the locals are finding it a bit much. ‘It is like April temperatures in March,’ he said, and boy, I can believe it. As I write this, sheltering from the midday heat in the covered veranda of our homestay, I’m literally dripping with sweat, and all I’m doing is moving my fingers.

It’s doubly hard, because for both of us, Kochi rocks. Unfortunately it also rolls, pitches, lurks and yaws, because even though it’s 48 hours since we hopped off the houseboat, the whole planet feels completely unsteady under our feet. I really thought that the backwaters would have left us by now, but the humidity seems to be perpetuating our sense of giddiness, and the thwack-thwack of fans everywhere adds to the constant feeling of movement. Perhaps we will get back home to find that southern India has officially turned to jelly in the heat; it certainly feels like it has, anyway.

So we’ve been hiding from the heat, and I’ve been desperately trying to stem my natural impulse, which is to don my bush hat, pop open the umbrella, and go walking in the midday sun. The dogs aren’t bothering, so perhaps, just this once, Englishmen shouldn’t either.

The Beach Front

Instead of trying to brave the daytime, we decided to wait until the sun had dipped before venturing out into Fort Cochin. It appeared that we weren’t alone, for Sunday night is clearly promenade night in Kochi.

The island of Fort Cochin is the quiet, touristy cousin to Ernakulam’s crazy city vibe, and it’s where everyone goes for a romantic seaside stroll before the evening meal. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone, because the beach promenade is absolutely teeming with visitors, almost all of them Indian. As a result, it’s a great place to explore, though perhaps not from a romantic perspective.

Let’s not beat around the bush; the seaside in Fort Cochin is pretty squalid. The sea is grey, but not in the way that it’s grey in England; in Fort Cochin the sea is grey in the same way that the water in the open sewers around town is grey. The foam is grey where the waves break against the rocks; the sand is grey on the two small beaches that litter the promenade; and the slime that clings to the rocks is the kind of radioactive green-grey that makes your immune system wince. On top of that, the grassy patches behind the promenade are completely smothered in litter, from plastic bottles to wrappers from the ice cream stalls that do a roaring trade in the tropical heat, and the nearby beaches are a disaster zone, smothered with bits of polystyrene, old flip-flops and the garbage equivalent of the hair from the bathroom plug-hole. It’s not exactly paradise, though I guess that’s all part of being at the entrance to a busy port.

Happily the locals crowding the shore are way more colourful than the seas of grey water and sun-bleached rubbish, and elbowing your way through the crowds is a fun way to reach the main drag in Fort Cochin itself, where fishermen demonstrate their Chinese fishing nets and sell fresh fish that you can eat in the restaurants set up right next to the seafront. It’s atmospheric and fun, though I am assured that this is one place where being a white woman attracts the kind of opportunistic cop-a-feel local that us men simply don’t come across. Perhaps romance is possible on the seafront after all...

Top-end Kochi

For our first evening meal in Kochi, we decided that eating fish plucked from a quagmire was perhaps a treat best saved for another night, and decided instead to follow a recommendation we’d been given to try an evening meal at the Brunton Boatyard, the poshest hotel in Fort Cochin. We’ve thus far been happily staying in mid-range homestays and guest houses – a serious step up from my budget level travelling of nine years ago, but still a long way off the standard of international western hotel chains – and I’ve been delighted at what you get for your money. From something in the region of Rs1000 to Rs1500, you get lovely double rooms in period houses, with en suite bathrooms, comfortable beds and a complete lack of cockroaches. However, you also bump into the lower end of the travelling class that gives us all a bad name. I’m talking about those who still seem to think there’s a British Empire, and treat the natives like subjects.

I witnessed a typical example in the bar at the Brunton Boatyard, where a pasty-faced Englishman with a pinched nose was arguing with the barman over the price of a drink. Clearly the man had ordered one drink and had got another, and he was refusing to pay the higher cost of the drink he’d had, and insisted on paying for what he had ordered. ‘Nothing wrong with that,’ you think, and you’re right, but it wasn’t the fact that the man was complaining that shocked me, but the completely rude way in which he was doing it. He refused to make eye contact with the barman, and just talked at him, rather than engaging in any kind of two-way conversation. ‘That is what I ordered, so that is what I am paying for, and that is that,’ he said, pomposity visibly ballooning in his upper chest like an elephant seal fighting for territory in the mating season. The barman looked furious, but he simply accepted with good grace, walking over to serve me, where I waited to pay my drinks bill. I tipped him heavily, by way of apology for my fellow countryman’s utter lack of breeding.

This wasn’t the first contretemps we saw in Kochi. A couple of days later our hotel manager could be seen effing and blinding at a rickshaw as it pulled away from the front door, the white arm of one of our fellow guests protruding from the back. The hotel owner was threatening to call the police, and although I have no idea what the problem was, the man in the rickshaw had been treating the hotel staff with an all-too-familiar disdain that I found as disconcerting as that in the Brunton bar. It seems incomprehensible to me that a hotel owner in a predominantly white tourist area would kick off such a public display of hatred without some kind of justification, and although I’m clearly guilty of jumping to conclusions here, there’s a pattern of behaviour in mid- and top-end range accommodation that you very rarely see when you’re travelling at the budget end (perhaps because budget travellers’ expectations are lower, or perhaps because those who hate the locals don’t want to live with them, and that’s all part of the charm of living in a Rs50-a-night fleapit).

I don’t know if there’s any connection, but only the other month a British tourist was found murdered in Mumbai, purportedly because he had asked a woman where he could find somewhere to sleep, and the locals had interpreted this as a come on and had sorted him out (though the man had time to leave a message on his parents’ answer-phone saying that he feared for his life, so the argument obviously simmered for some time). One can’t help feeling that there is more to this story than meets the eye, and Kochi provided us with lots of fuel to add to the speculative fire.

But I digress, as we had yet to enjoy our meal at the Brunton Boatyard, and after drinks in the outside bar – a set of tables by the waterfront that was caged in on all sides, presumably to stop birds from swooping in and stealing the expensive hors d’oeuvres off the menu – we were shown to our table on the Seafood Terrace, a pleasant balcony overlooking the ferry terminal. The service was very attentive and the fish chowder made a pleasant starter, but as we waited for our main course, first one, then two, and then three or four large raindrops landed on the stone floor, each of them evaporating within two seconds of landing.

The diners all looked up at the same time, wondering what was going to happen if it rained; the only shelter was provided by a set of washing-line wires strung above our heads – again, to stop birds from swooping down and making off with the seafood platter – and as more drops started to fall, the lady on the next table asked the waiter, ‘It’s raining – what do we do?’

‘It is not raining,’ said the waiter, as droplets fell with increasing attitude onto his head.

‘Yes, it is,’ she said.

‘It will be fine,’ said the waiter, but clearly even his optimism couldn’t save the day, for suddenly the taps turned on and a serious tropical downpour hit the Seafood Terrace, throwing everyone into a state of amused panic. The waiters seemed caught completely off-guard and initially huddled together under the awning near the door to the terrace, before realising that perhaps they should be doing something, namely rescuing people’s meals and moving them inside.

Unfortunately the inside of the restaurant was full, and as the terrace diners filed inside, the maître d’ looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights, as all his careful table planning went up in smoke. Luckily he managed to save his reservations system by channelling us all down into the bar, where we sat out the rest of our meal to the tune of air-conditioning and irritatingly piped chill-out music in the form of Enigma, Germany’s contribution to the art of lift music.

The main course – the seafood platter – turned out to be very disappointing. Compared to the amazing fish in Varkala and the wonderfully homey cooking of the houseboat, this was bland, anonymous and utterly forgettable. The fact that it cost four times as much as a meal overlooking the sunset of Varkala only added to the irritation, but this is where I have to grab myself and remember that I’m not in the target market for posh hotel restaurants, so perhaps I just shouldn’t frequent them. I like earthy eating holes and I don’t aspire to haute cuisine, which is possibly why I spent most of my previous Indian trip rushing to the toilet and drinking oral rehydration salts. I can imagine that if I wasn’t much of a traveller and I’d arrived at the Brunton Boatyard straight from an air-conditioned coach, then the strange sounds of the world outside would freak me out, and the thought of going down the waterfront to buy a fish from a fisherman and have it barbecued in front of me... well, it would scare me in a way that a fairly amorphous hotel restaurant experience wouldn’t. Luckily I know enough about India to know that the world outside the hotel window is far from scary, but then again I don’t believe there’s still a British Empire, and I spend most of my time in India smiling, rather than sour-faced.

So we tipped the waiters handsomely, wobbled our heads to them as we left, and ducked out into the now-clear night air once again to soak up the post-thunderstorm atmosphere of the world outside the hotel.

Exploring Kochi

The following day we visited the same tourist attractions that I’d seen nine years before, braving the heat to visit Jewtown and Mattancherry Palace, as well as the area round Princess Street, which has blossomed into a completely backpacker-oriented part of town. There are loads of tourists in Kochi, and they continue to pile in in their air-conditioned coaches, looking slightly worn out and rather oppressed by it all; one wonders if Coachy would be a better name for this part of town, as yet another dark-windowed coach empties its pale occupants into the sun, blinking and looking rather dazed. Luckily the backpacker scene has its advantages, and one of them is that there in the middle of Burgher Street is a little piece of Hampstead, perfectly preserved in every detail. I’m talking about the Kashi Art Café, which the Lonely Planet calls ‘something of an institution.’

It’s an oasis, is the Kashi, and if you ignore the hot weather, it’s easy to transport yourself home, because it’s a classic bohemian coffee bar from head to toe. The chill-out music is direct from Europe; the customers dress in what the locals consider underwear, but we consider to be shorts and tight T-shirts that leave little to the imagination; laptop computers are much in evidence, as is the hallowed Lonely Planet; the menu serves lattes and filter coffee served in a cafetière; and people chat away on their mobile phones, sipping pineapple juice and swapping travellers’ tales.

And that sums up Fort Cochin, really. It doesn’t feel like India, it feels almost continental, and as a result it’s not quite as exciting as other more Indian destinations in Kerala. Happily there are pockets of excellence, and we fell in love with the aforementioned Dal Roti restaurant, which served excellent north Indian food in a quiet backstreet some distance from the main drag. Then again, the proprietor speaks perfect English, lived in London for six years, used to own a house in Epping, and returns there twice a year, so even here, you get the feeling that Fort Cochin is a world away from the hustle and bustle of India.

Still, that’s half the appeal, I suppose, and as a place to wilt from the heatwave, it hit the spot. We sat around soaking up lime sodas by the dozen, we went to a kathakali performance – an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours – and we recharged our batteries, ready for the next journey. Mission accomplished, then...

Munnar

Written: 22 March 2007   

Ah, that’s better. The oppression of India’s mini-heatwave has been really grinding me down, and like the British before us, we’ve taken refuge in a hill station. Munnar, which the British Raj made their southern capital in summer, is 1500m above sea level, and like all India’s hill stations, it lets you function. The novelty is palpable.

Munnar is clearly taking off as a tourist destination – both Indian and foreign – because the outskirts of town are under construction to a considerable degree. High-rise blocks are propped up by hundreds of straight pieces of scaffolding, while whole gangs of workmen drill, mix, bang and blast, slowly filling the concrete skeletons with red brick walls and grey concrete plaster. Unfortunately, we followed the advice in the Lonely Planet and started looking for a homestay to the south of the main town centre, only to end up in a hotel that was perfectly pleasant, but which turned out to be stuck in the middle of nowhere and a long walk from town. ‘Never mind,’ we thought, and fired up with the energy of those who have just escaped the heat of the plains, we strolled into town, ate in the bazaar, walked back to the hotel and decided we’d celebrate the ambient temperatures with a beer. And that’s when things started to go a bit wrong.

When we tried to find the hotel bar, we discovered they didn’t have one, and so we took the concierge’s advice and hopped into an auto-rickshaw for the Hotel Isaac’s Residency, home to the only bar in town. I’d forgotten how amazing the bars are in southern India; indeed, I’d forgotten just how frowned upon alcohol consumption is in general, and the bar at the Residency is a good example of why south Indian bars don’t win any prizes for hospitality and ambience. Worst of all, I’d had the nerve to bring along a woman, and as we slunk into the dimly lit room and sat down, a palpable wave of bemusement ran through the all-male crowd.

Keralans go to bars to get drunk; they go there to consume a drug, and any pretensions to socialising over a beer after work would go straight out of the window, if the bars had any. I thought at first that the drinkers propping up the bar were diluting their large measures of whisky with a surprisingly large amount of water, but they were actually mixing it with a clear liquid that calls itself brandy, but is clearly a local interpretation of the genre that has nothing to do with its European origins. People were clearly getting drunk, and quickly, and in this atmosphere we tried to order a Kingfisher and a Kingfisher Strong from the waiter, so we could compare the two different varieties of India’s premium lager.

The waiter looked pretty confused, and he brought over the Kingfisher Strong first, and I tried it; it wasn’t bad. Peta waited patiently for her beer, but it didn’t materialise, while the frenetic buying at the bar – which reminded me of the London Stock Exchange on a busy day – continued on apace. Eventually we realised that he wasn’t going to bring a beer, so I called him over and asked him for another Kingfisher, pointing to Peta. He looked horrified, but went to get the beer anyway, clearly unused to serving women in any shape or form.

The striking thing was just how naughty everyone looked. I say ‘naughty’ because that’s exactly what it was; they were like schoolboys breaking the rules, hoping that nobody would see them. Huddles of conspirators hid in the dim light, while a handful of solitary drinkers downed glass after glass of whisky, slowly sinking into their chairs in defeat. One young man at the table opposite us tried to pull his collar up when an older man came in and stared at him in total disapproval; the young man eventually went over to the older man and tried to undo whatever offence he had caused by being there, but the man wasn’t having any of it, and however much the boy nudged him as if to say it was all right, the old man kept a straight face, utterly offended.

Funnily enough, we didn’t savour our beers. Instead we drank them down fairly sharply, and figured that this was probably why I hadn’t drunk much beer on my last visit. Somehow, making alcohol a thing of shame makes it taste rather bitter. It’s perhaps no wonder that the locals drink to get drunk, because goodness knows there’s no other reason to go out for a beer here.

Around Munnar

I forgot to mention that we hired a car and driver in Kochi to get us around for the next five days. After all, this is supposed to be a holiday, and spending hours and hours on bumpy Indian buses is a luxury only those with time on their hands can afford, so we’ve spent Rs6500 on a gleaming white Ambassador Classic, a very friendly driver called Sajeeve, and an itinerary from Kochi to Munnar, then on to Periyar and Kovalam. It’s a great way to get around, even if it does reek slightly of decadence.

The best thing about having your own car is being able to decide exactly where you want to go, and when. On our only full day in Munnar, we decided to head over to Top Station, a point on the border between Tamil Nadu and Kerala that offers spectacular views over the Western Ghats, the mountains that separate Kerala from its western neighbour. This sounded exciting enough, but we hadn’t realised that the journey there would be so beautiful.

The area round Munnar is absolutely stunning. This area is famous for having some of the highest altitude tea plantations in the world, and once you leave the overactive and slightly dingy town centre, the hills open up and the beauty of the High Ranges becomes apparent. And what a delight it is...

Most of the reason is tea. Tea was introduced to India from China in 1780, and large-scale planting had taken off by the mid-1830s, after the discovery of the Assam tea plant in 1823. Cultivation in central Travancore (as Munnar used to be known) started in 1875, and the High Ranges were cultivated in 1878, leading to the tea estates we see today. Because tea leaves are picked from the tops of tea bushes, the bushes quickly assume a squat stature and a flat top, giving the fields the appearance of a perfectly assembled jigsaw. Tea bushes are a beautifully deep green, and there are paths between the bushes where the tea pickers ply their trade, so it’s as if the hills have turned into huge, complex tennis balls, albeit tennis balls smothered with meticulously manicured topiaries. Or, to cut the description to a minimum, the hills around Munnar are simply gorgeous.

The beauty is enhanced by a collection of reservoirs, which the road to Top Station winds past in an increasing state of disrepair. These reservoirs form part of a hydro-electric system that provides tourists the opportunity to take pedalos out onto the water, and afterwards to shout at the tops of their voices at a place called Echo Point, so called because – you guessed it – the reservoir shore echoes back whatever you care to yell at it. This being India, you don’t have to try it out yourself, as there are plenty of noisy tourists about who can shout louder and longer than you’ll ever manage. Yes, this is the land of the Indian tourist, and it’s all the more fun because of it.

Indeed, the only problem with getting to Top Station is the road, which clearly gets a pounding in the monsoon. They’re currently resurfacing parts of it, which means you get to drive right through the middle of the whole process, dodging workmen and veering round turning trucks. In the West we can only glance at roadworks from the other side of an invasion of orange cones, but in India you get to participate. At one point, a JCB digger politely stopped dropping rocks onto the road ahead of us, just in time to stop the stones bouncing off the bonnet; at a contra-flow, manned by men with red and green flags, buses and four-wheel-drives with attitude overtook us by driving on the part-surfaced road, only pulling in when faced with stationary road-laying equipment in their path; and all along the sides men and women toiled in the hot sun, smashing rocks with hammers, sending sharp shards into the side of the car and doubtless into their companion’s shins. It’s a hard life, out there on the highways of India.

But the effort is worth it, as Top Station does indeed provide wonderful views of the Western Ghats, even if they’re a little hazy at this time of the year. And best of all, you get to repeat the journey on the way back; the tea plantations, reservoirs and roadworks are just as wonderful second time round.

We ended our tour of Munnar with a visit to the Tata Tea Museum, a slightly uninspiring introduction to the tea-making process that takes you through the various stages in an accent so heavy that most of it gets lost in translation. Happily the process turns out to be the same in Munnar as it is in Darjeeling, with the raw tea leaves being dried by having air blown through them, before being rolled and chopped by what’s called a CTC (Crushing, Tearing and Curling) machine. The goo is then oxidised – or fermented, to use a more common term – where the tea turns brown (green tea is not fermented, so it stays green). It then passes through a machine called a Ball Breaker, whose function I couldn’t quite understand, and finally the tea is dried in a hot air stove before being sifted into a range of sizes, from powder to leafy (the powder making stronger tea than leafy tea). It takes 4kg of leaves to make 1kg of tea, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is that.

Hill Spices

We’d been so uninspired by the location of our first hotel, that we tracked down a second one for our second night. Perched on top of a hill next to the Mount Carmel Church, bang in the centre of town, the Kaippallil Homestay was much more our kind of thing. Our room had a balcony overlooking Munnar, the homestay served ice-cold beer with no guilt attached, and the rooms were cheaper – you can’t say fairer than that.

It was also a very short walk from the homestay to the centre of town, which meant Peta could buy a large bag of he spices for which the area is famous. As she picked out bags of cardamon, vanilla, white and black pepper, mace, mustard seeds and cinnamon, the young man behind the counter looked up and his eyes widened.

‘Last night,’ he said, pointing his thumb at his mouth, looking slightly guilty. ‘Last night, you were in the bar.’

‘That’s right,’ said Peta. It was the youngster who’d had the run in with the older man. ‘I remember you.’

‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘I was getting in trouble.’

‘Who was that man?’ asked Peta. ‘Was it your dad?’

‘Father, no,’ he said. ‘Uncle. Not pleased to see me there.’

‘Ha,’ I said. ‘But he was in there too, so he couldn’t really have a go, could he?’

‘I’m not supposed to,’ said our young friend, grinning conspiratorially as he handed us our bag of spices. And with that, we headed off to the Rapsy Restaurant, which proudly proclaimed on the sign outside:

Customers from 43 countries... Amiably taken care... Moreover astoundingly pleased... Their ecstasy is... Just with quality, not with looks.

Luckily, Munnar excels on both quality and looks. What a delightful place to take a break from the Indian heat.

Periyar

Written: 24 March 2007   

Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary is a funny old place. Yes, it might be one of the few places on earth where you can theoretically see tigers – though with only about 35 tigers in a 777km² park, your chances are slimmer than slim – but it’s also faintly depressing, particularly at the moment, because the veneer of tourism is so thick you have to dig quite deep to get away from it all. Luckily, when you do, Periyar is a delight.

First impressions are pretty awful, because most of the accommodation and restaurant action happens in the nearby village of Kumily, which is a forgettable slew of Kashmiri trinket shops, expensive resort hotels and unloved traveller hotels. The atmosphere, while still reasonably friendly and easy-going, is a world away from somewhere like Munnar, which is clearly a working town that happens to be popular with tourists; Kumily exists purely to service the nearby wildlife sanctuary and the tourists that flock here, and it feels like it. Walking the streets is an exercise in being as polite as possible to the incessant chants of, ‘Hello, where you from, come into my shop, just looking, good price, you come back later maybe, yes see you, thank you,’ all choreographed to head wobbling and ‘No thanks’ from the passing tourists. At this time of year, as the shoulder season slides into the off-season, the hassle is fairly mild and the shopkeepers are happy to take ‘no’ for an answer, but after an entire street has tried to entice you into their shop to check out their Kashmiri emporium of amazing pashminas and multi-armed statues of the Hindu pantheon, it makes you wonder what it’s like in the high season, when tourists pile into the park in their air-conditioned coaches.

After a long, four-and-a-half hour journey from Munnar, we were fairly exhausted from bumping around in the back of the Ambassador, so we headed for the Coffee Inn, which the Lonely Planet gives a gushing review, managing to squeeze the words ‘lovely’, ‘friendly’, ‘comfortable’, ‘laid-back’, ‘peaceful’, ‘great’ and ‘delicious’ into just one paragraph of description. Unfortunately the Coffee Inn turned out to be a faded, faintly tacky place with a building site above it, where the owner has obviously decided to build the Coffee Inn Hotel, thus missing the point of the original inn’s appeal by a country mile. Having met the owner, this doesn’t surprise me, as he was a pretty grumpy bugger when we arrived, showing us to a hut down the road with all the shoe-dragging enthusiasm of a bored nine-year-old. Tired, we checked in anyway, happy just to have somewhere to dump our bags.

Kumily has a lot more to offer than backpacker haunts that have lost their sparkle, though. As we had an afternoon to kill, we thought we’d wander round the posh hotels in town to see if any of them were worth eating in (we’d grabbed a snack in the Coffee Inn, and it had turned out to have mediocre food and incredibly slow service, the latter not remotely mitigated by the sign saying, ‘Please do not shout at the chef; good food takes time to make,’ particularly as there was only a handful of other people in the place when we ate). We started with the Spice Village, which feels for all the world like a package holiday venue, with an uninspiring buffet restaurant, polite but slightly bewildered staff, an air of concrete hidden beneath the palm-tree exterior, and an astonishing price tag of US$210 per night for a double room (at least the Coffee Inn is honestly priced, at Rs400 for a double, or around US$9 per night). Our next stop was the Taj Garden, a really lovely wooden hotel set in delightful gardens, with a price tag of US$169 a night for a room and a restaurant that looks utterly wonderful; and our final visit was to the Tree Top Hotel, which has pleasant doubles at Rs2500 a night and a great little restaurant selling the usual Indian favourites, like Butter Chicken, Chicken 65, Chilly Chicken and all the other stalwarts of hearty restaurants throughout the land. It seems that in Kumily, it pays to shop around, as accommodation can be extortionate while being far less interesting than the competition.

So that night we ate in the Taj Garden, which proved to be a wonderful place for a romantic tropical dinner, and slunk back to our crusty little hut, safe in the knowledge that if it turned out to be a mosquito-infested noise-fest, we could always up-sticks and move across the road to the comparatively luxurious Tree Top.

The Wildlife Sanctuary

Kumily is one thing, but the wildlife sanctuary at Periyar is another thing altogether. Kumily has the feeling of a place that is feeding off the tourist dollar, and you can see the effects in the more impressive hotel developments and some of the shops; one shop, Red Frog, is so beautifully presented that it looks as if it’s been beamed straight in from the King’s Road, with its large plate-glass windows, arty displays and modern lighting. It looks rather out of place in an Indian street, surrounded by rickshaws and stray dogs, but it would look even stranger if it moved 3km south into the wildlife reserve, because if there’s one thing Periyar is, it’s faded.

This is so often the case with government-run institutions, and Periyar is a great example. The buildings were no doubt impressive when they were first built, but now they’re covered in the black mould that afflicts so many of India’s concrete blocks, and it’s lucky that the complex that makes up the park headquarters is relatively small. The nearby hotel, the Aranya Nivas, fares slightly better than the rather limp information office and bedraggled restaurant, but apart from a stand of rabid rickshaw drivers, a small office for the park rangers, and a concrete jetty just down the hill on the lake, that’s the entire complex. This wouldn’t be a problem, except you’re not allowed beyond the edges of the park HQ and precious little happens in the headquarters itself. It’s a bit of a disappointment when you first arrive, really.

But dig a little deeper, and all is not lost. For those with only a day or so to spare, there are two options: you can hop on one of the many ferries that ply the lake at 9.30am, 11.30am, 2pm and 4pm; or you can take a three-hour nature walk in the company of one of the park’s rangers, who are from the indigenous tribe. We arrived a little later than we’d originally planned, as the 6am alarm we’d set made no friends at all and quickly got slapped into silence, a few extra hours’ sleep easily winning out against the recommendation that wildlife is more active in the morning (homo sapiens excluded, presumably). We’d thought that this would scupper our chances of joining a nature walk, as it was a Saturday and we assumed the hordes would have snapped up the available places, but as we sauntered into the park at 10am, idly wondering what we could do, a ranger called Shajimon popped up and asked us if we were interested in a nature walk.

‘Yes, that sounds great,’ we said.

‘There is one leaving at 11 o’clock,’ said Shaji. ‘Would you like to join it?’

‘Excellent,’ we said, and gladly filled in the form in which we absolved the park of any liability should we be ripped to pieces by tigers or stomped on by elephants. ‘So, are you busy at the moment?’ we asked.

‘You are the first walkers today,’ said Shaji, looking a bit crestfallen. ‘It is the quiet season, and very hot.’

‘Ah,’ we said. ‘Well, we’re certainly up for it,’ and with that Shaji started talking about the park, and how the hot weather had driven the animals deeper into the jungle than normal, in order to seek shelter, and how the level of the lake was really low, because the amount of water flowing down the river was less than in the past. The lake certainly seemed parched, looking like an ancient bath with dried-on stains up the sides and a sad-looking pool of water in the middle, an ambience which wasn’t helped much by the unloved boats pulled up the banks, listing on their sides as nature took her toll.

To kill time before our walk, we took a short walk about the headquarters, enjoying the sign that declared the park rules to anyone bored enough to read them (i.e. us). It told us in no uncertain terms that:

Tourists to a national park/sanctuary ‘should not’:

Take any pete inside the park/sanctuary

Honk unnessarily

Should or bease or chase wild animals

Organic merry making like camp-fires within the park/sanctuary

Just to make sure we got the message, it listed a whole set of rules, including the ominous Rule 7:

Leaving litters; smoking; consumption of ALCOHOL; illegal entry of vehicles; blowing horns; playing music systems; parking outside the parking zone; feeding, teasing, disturbing wild animals; bringing pet animals; unauthorized trekking and picnicking; firearms, wildlife traps, poisons substances; breaching in the lawful directions of the park, staff in the protected area are prohibited under section 33 of Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 and the violation is punishable with a fine of not less than Rs1000.

Or, to put it another way, Periyar is not supposed to be like the rest of India, though that doesn’t seem to stop it from trying. There’s a laudable ‘no plastics’ policy in place in the park, and it’s noticeably tidier than most Indian settlements, but lurking beneath the surface, it’s still India. The sign saying ‘No plastics as they are non-biodegradable’ is right next to the park shop, which happily sells plastic bottles of water, and there are still one or two plastic bottles floating in the lake, ready to cause a painful death to the wildlife, so I guess the plastic ban isn’t perfect. But it’s good to see them trying; this is a wildlife reserve, after all.

The Nature Walk

Our walk turned out the be an excellent way to experience the park. The three of us set off into the forest, crunching the dried leaves underfoot and weaving our way along thin paths until the noise of the small number of local but vocal tourists back at park headquarters had disappeared into the distance. Every few minutes Shaji stopped and motioned us to be quiet, and he’d stand still, looking into the trees, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that had alerted him. Even though it was the middle of the day, when most of the animals are sensibly hiding from the heat of the sun, he managed to spot a fair amount of wildlife, and each time he was full of information.

The first bit of wildlife we spotted was the blur of a mouse deer’s arse as it shot off into the bush, alerted to our approach by the crackle of the leafy undergrowth beneath our boots. A little later Peta spotted movement in the tree-tops, which turned out to be a macaque monkey, dropping through the canopy. A distinctive rustling in the distance turned out to be a large monitor lizard, which we stalked for a few minutes before it ran off into the distance, crashing through the brittle undergrowth in an attempt to escape the clutch of tourism. We also scared off a larger deer, which we saw running up the opposite side of a valley, and on a couple of occasions we came across jungle fowl rooting amongst the leaves, quite oblivious to us handing the binoculars to each other and marvelling over the colours of their bright head ruffles.

We also bumped into skinks hiding among the detritus; termites devouring an entire tree, hidden beneath the bark which, when pulled off, revealed thousands of tiny ant-like creatures, chomping on the wood; a tiny lizard, the length of my thumbnail and as thin as a thread, living among the termites and enjoying their company for breakfast, lunch and dinner; wild boar, bathing in a mud pool at the end of a long opening in the trees; giant squirrels lazing in the tree-tops, their big, black, bushy tails hanging down into the still air; and we saw huge bee and wasp nests way up in the highest trees, with pegs going all the way up the trunks so the locals could raid the bee’s honey store using smoke and long poles. And every few yards butterflies flitted past us in the heat haze, and birds flew past in the canopy above, the woodpeckers knocking out their distinctive calls on nearby tree trunks while white-bellied blue flycatchers, endemic to the area, sat in the branches, minding their own business while we watched from afar.

Of course, one lives in hope of seeing a big animal, like a tiger or elephant, but even though this is the part of the world that inspired Kipling’s characters in The Jungle Book, the chances of you bumping into such rare animals is practically zero (though Shaji insisted that it does happen, and that last Christmas Eve a party on the nature walk did see a tiger, which only helped to increase the sense of anticipation). The closest we got was a tree with an old set of scratches at head height, and one large, fresh gash at the bottom, with two smaller but equally fresh gashes at the top,

‘These are tiger claws,’ said Shaji indicating the scratches. ‘This is very old now, but these new ones are elephant. The bottom one is the foot, and the top one is the tusk.’

And just around the corner was a tree with a set of claw scratches leading up the tree.

‘And these are leopard marks,’ said Shaji. ‘Climbing the tree.’

So although we didn’t see them, we did manage to see where Shere Khan had sharpened his claws, where Colonel Hathi had cleaned his tusks, and where Bagheera had climbed a tree and sat there, wondering what to do with Mowgli. With a little imagination, Periyar stopped being a dilapidated tourist attraction and came alive, if only for three hours.

The Head of the Family

As we’d decided to devote an entire day to exploring Periyar, we thought we’d go with the flow and book a seat on the last ferry of the day, the 4pm departure, when we would have the best chance of seeing any wildlife peeking out of the forest as the sun headed for home. After a quick snack in the snack bar – where the only food available was dosa, so we opted for... well, dosa, then – and swatting off a clearly idiotic rickshaw man who asked me whether I wanted a rickshaw just as I was about to sit down to eat lunch, we wandered over to the ticket office and asked the man for a ticket on the top deck of the KTDC boat.

‘It is full,’ he said. ‘But I can open it for you,’ he smiled, removing the ‘Full’ sign from above the hole in the ticket booth. ‘You have come a long way, after all.’

I thanked him profusely and handed over the money, surprised that this ghost town of a park should have a fully booked ferry on its hands, and we headed down to the park office to wait. I thought I’d kill time by buying a photography permit for the boat, and in the process I discovered that there are in fact two different places selling boat tickets, the KTDC (or Kerala Tourism Development Corporation) and the park authority, who run totally separate boats, all at the same time.

As 3.30pm approached, tourists started coming out of the woodwork like termites from a tree, as coach-load after coach-load stopped at the car park a few hundred yards back towards Kumily, spilling their noisy occupants into the park. Periyar shocked itself from comatose into life in the space of a few minutes, and slowly the crowds milled down to the waterfront, some of us having the luck to be going from the nearby jetty, and others having to walk a good few hundred yards along the lake shore to their waiting boats.

In the end, five different ferries set off at 4pm from five different jetties, though not after a fair amount of jostling and queue chaos. India is no fan of the orderly queue, and for those of us who have queueing ingrained into our genes, it’s always a difficult concept to get our heads round. As if the barging approach to getting on a boat wasn’t challenging enough, our ferry – clearly the most touristy of the five – was host to one of my favourite Indian eccentricities, that of the Family Patriarch.

Middle-class Indian families on tour are fascinating, particularly if they contain a grandad. Men are the undisputed champions of Indian family life – as far as they’re concerned, anyway – and the chance to lead your family from the front is too much to resist for some Indian grandads. Ignoring the long queue of western and local tourists winding up the jetty, a grey-haired man walked down to the end of the jetty, holding his hand up and saying, ‘This way, come down this way all of you,’ beckoning to his family as if they were VIPs on a state visit. The family followed him down, and started positioning themselves in various tactical locations, so that when the ferry docked, they could leap on board, rush upstairs and reserve the front two rows of the upstairs deck for their entourage, simply by the Indian expedient of throwing a handbag or a piece of clothing on the seats they wanted. This, apparently, is viewed as a much fairer system than, say, letting those who’ve waited longest take first pick.

Of course, this kind of behaviour is like a red rag to a bull for those of us who worship at the altar of queueing etiquette, and as we’d actually been at the front of the queue – through sheer boredom at waiting so long, rather than by design – we decided to take on the patriarch’s family at their own game, and lined ourselves up for the kill. As the ferry docked, it became apparent that the aft door was going to be for those with upstairs tickets, and the patriarch broke ranks and ran to the back of the boat, yelling, ‘We are in the wrong place, it is over here!’

Peta and I spotted it and ran, years of London tube commuting paying dividends as the patriarch’s family scrambled for the aft gate, elbowing their way past any unfortunate souls caught in the way. ‘Come on, over here!’ screamed the patriarch, punching his way towards the front while trying to make sure his family were in the best possible position to get on the boat first.

Amusingly, Peta was there first, and as the gate opened, she shot up the stairs and I handed her the ticket, jammed as I was behind a particularly feisty couple of women from the patriarchal entourage whose elbows were a little too sharp for me to take on unprotected. And so, with a little bit of territorial jostling at the top caused by one of the girls plonking her handbag on the seat next to Peta and refusing to let me sit there – a situation resolved by me picking up the handbag and sitting down anyway, with Peta staring at the clearly furious girl and saying, ‘Absolutely no way!’ in a tone that broke through all international barriers – we managed to hold our own while the chaos of the patriarch’s family settled down around us to enjoy a gentle cruise round Periyar Lake.

Wildlife Spotting

When the British created the Periyar game reserve, they wanted to create a lake that would attract big game whose brains they could then blow out before retiring for tea and tiffin. They achieved this in 1895 by building the Mullaperiyar Dam, blocking up the Periyar River and flooding the valleys to create the 26km² lake we still see today. An interesting side effect of this is that the trees that were already there are, well, still there, sticking up from the lake bed, as dead as doornails but still resolutely clinging on to the lake bed. This makes Periyar Lake feel both beautiful and slightly eerie, as the ferry winds its way between these long-dead trees. Birds nest in the stark branches, a beautiful and tranquil sight as you sit there on the top deck, looking out for wildlife on the shores.

Well, it would be tranquil if this wasn’t India, for the tourist ferry round Periyar is one of the noisiest events this side of the muezzin’s call. We were particularly lucky to have the patriarch screaming out at every opportunity, pointing out wildlife he could see.

‘Look over, there, a bison!’ he yelled, and his whole family stood up, straining to see what was in fact a wild boar.

‘Wow, amazing, it is a hippopotamus!’ he screamed, and his family lurched to the side of the boat, only to find a distant deer.

‘Look, there, there, elephant!’ he cried, pointing to a big, grey blob that, with the advantage of youthful eyesight, I could clearly see was a rock.

His family seemed not to notice that the head of their family was a blind idiot, and busied themselves by talking loudly to each other about how amazing their new digital cameras were, taking shot after shot of themselves while wildlife hid on the shores, scared by the cacophony on board. When the elephants finally slid into view, catching the patriarch by surprise as he fiddled with his zoom lens, he yelled to his son, ‘Quick, quick, take their photograph,’ and jumped right in front of his son’s camera, grinning like a cat while trying not to get in the way of the distant beasts. Presumably a shot of a grinning fool with an out-of-focus blur in the distance is the correct way to record big game for posterity, as they all followed suit, more interested in snapping themselves than anything else.

This rigmarole continued as we spotted extremely distant elephant, bison, deer and boar, but after 40 minutes of floating through the previously serene landscape of Periyar, the family behind us started to tire of photographing themselves and decided that fidgeting would be much more fun. The woman behind Peta started rustling her unopened crisp packet, the man behind me started tapping an irritating rhythm on his camera box, and they all started gossiping about everything from the weather to what the people on the other boats were wearing. They were still talking incessantly as we docked, after an hour and a half of cruising round the lake shore.

Thank goodness we’d gone on the nature walk, or we’d have left thinking that Periyar was a complete waste of time. Happily it wasn’t, and we came away having enjoyed plenty of Indian wildlife, some of it even from the animal kingdom.

Ringing the Changes

Written: 26 March 2007   

I first visited India some nine years ago, and a lot has changed since then. India is developing fast, and it seems to be doing so without selling out its culture too much, which is a huge relief, because it’s the culture and the people that make India such a phenomenal destination. Here, in no particular order, are the things I’ve noticed that are completely different to 1998:

Mobile phones are everywhere, and don’t you know it. India is still at the stage where having a mobile phone is a considerable status symbol, so people let their phones ring as long as they can get away with it, so everyone knows that, yes, you’ve got a phone and you’re not afraid to use it. There’s also a complete lack of phone etiquette; you can be merrily talking to someone when their phone goes off, and without any comment or apology, they’ll answer it and head off into a completely different conversation, oblivious to you. I even had this with a tout who was trying to sell me a room – he’d started the conversation but got sidelined into a phone chat, but he still insisted I stay talking to him, the fool. Even in the Malabar House, one of the poshest restaurants in Kochi where two men sat cross-legged, one playing the tabla and the other playing the violin as if it was a cello, the curse of the mobile phone struck. As the sweet music lilted through the still night air, I could have sworn that the bleep of a mobile phone cut into the amplified sound... but then it disappeared again, only to appear again a few bars later. Judging by the slightly guilty looks on the violinist’s face, his phone was going off, but skilled musician that he was, he’d simply altered the raga he was playing to fit in with the ring tone until it finally stopped. Hats off to his virtuosity, but I’m not sure classical Indian music should really have that much in common with Nokia’s signature tune...

ATMs are also everywhere, and so are people using them. When I last travelled in India, getting money out of a bank was an all-day affair, but now it’s quick, easy and often air conditioned. Indeed, the march of electronics is not confined to the banks: conductors on state buses now have electronic ticket machines that whirr out a printed ticket, along with your point of departure and destination, and most train stations now have computers that can book tickets instantly, something that was in its infancy ten years ago, and crashed as often as it worked. It all makes life a lot easier, I must say.

India has gone crazy for energy-efficient light bulbs, and even in the most dilapidated shacks you’ll see the complex squiggles of fluorescent tube-based bulbs. This is impressive, especially when you consider it was only a couple of weeks ago that the EU decided to phase out the traditional light bulb in favour of energy-saving devices. On this, India is well ahead of the game.

Travellers in India seem younger and more technological than ever before, though perhaps this is more an indication that I’m ten years older and middle age is approaching. That said, in the space of two weeks, we saw three travellers with full laptop computers, sitting there in traveller cafés or outside their bamboo huts, uploading pictures from their digital cameras or checking their email. When I set off in 1995 with a palmtop computer, a modem and an acoustic coupler, people thought I was a spy; these days, the mandala-covered paper diary has been replaced by mobile technology and blogging. I wonder what’s next...

But despite the changes, India remains, at its core, the same entrancing country that it was in 1998, with the same attractive qualities and the same irritations. It will be interesting to see how things develop, as India’s global influence gets ever stronger and her economy grows. Getting on an international flight out of India provides an insight into the challenges India faces in integrating into the world stage without losing her identity; whereas flights in Europe or North America are fairly reserved affairs, flights out of India are a chaos of coughing, snorting, hawking, sniffing, belching, sneezing and barging, and you only notice it because this is an aeroplane, where this sort of behaviour is generally regarded as impolite. In India itself, the incredible noises of its inhabitants are insignificant compared to the cacophony of culture that surrounds you at every turn, and it’s only when the West bumps up against the wonderful madness of India that you notice just how different it really is.

And long may it continue. Where the cultures of southeast Asia are in danger of disappearing in the face of increasing tourism, and the whole world wants Coca-Cola, fridges and MTV, India is still unique, and shows no signs of stopping. Bravo.

Kovalam

Written: 27 March 2007   

Kovalam has something of an image problem, at least among backpackers, who think it’s far too touristy and is probably best left to people who like egg and chips for dinner and their culture packaged up and delivered along with a rep. This is rather unfair, because although Kovalam does have a slight air of package holiday about it, it’s still a charming little place with much to recommend, particularly if you’re looking for a restful and stress-free spot for a few days before moving on elsewhere.

It was good timing for us, too, because Peta announced as we left Munnar that the Coffee Inn would be the last budget place we were going to stay in, and that was that. Apparently she took exception to the carpet being sticky enough for her to lift it up off the floor along with her foot, and the large spider we discovered in the bed on arrival didn’t earn me too many brownie points either, so I hung up my travelling boots and decided we should take a look round a number of places in Kovalam before picking the one that Peta was happiest with. After wandering along the sea front and checking out four hotels with swimming pools, we plumped for the Hotel Sea Face at the southern end of Hawah Beach. It was easily the most expensive hotel we looked at, but the extra money was worth it, as the decidedly non-sticky air-conditioned room had a balcony that looked directly over the hotel pool, which itself looked directly over the beach and into the sunset. Boxes ticked, we settled in for some relaxation before our flight a couple of days later.

Kovalam consists of two beaches, the aforementioned Hawah Beach at the northern end, and Lighthouse Beach to the south. The two beaches join up seamlessly – although there’s a rocky promontory between the two, the seafront promenade doesn’t even stop to check its footing as you walk from one beach to the other – but there’s a distinct difference between the southern end of Lighthouse Beach and the developments where the two beaches join. If I had to guess, I’d say that development in Kovalam started at the southern end of Lighthouse Beach, because this is where things look most faded. As you move north, things get bigger, cleaner and rather classier.

Don’t get the impression that Kovalam is a huge beach development, though, because it isn’t. There aren’t any high-rise hotels and the two beaches are pretty small, and although things are obviously developing, it isn’t the rampant builders’ yard you might be expecting if you read the guidebooks. Instead, it’s a bit like Varkala, but with more comfortable accommodation and without a cliff separating you from the beach. The biggest difference, though, is in the clientele, because where Varkala is full of twenty-somethings and hippies, Kovalam appeals to the kind of traveller for whom Speedos weren’t a good idea when they first wore them in the 1970s, and most definitely still aren’t. It’s a resort for empty-nesters, and perhaps the most noticeable thing is that a large proportion of the tourists are fat. Varkala, in contrast, was full of bright young things, sporting the latest size zero hippy fashions, but Kovalam doesn’t win any prizes for good looks; beer bellies are de rigeur, debatable sartorial taste is par for the course, and proof that gravity always wins is all around... but on the upside, you also don’t get to overhear conversations between gap-year travellers who think they know everything there is to know about the world without having actually experienced it.

This more mature atmosphere also means the toilets are cleaner, the food is slightly more expensive, and the touts are just that little bit more insistent. Oh, and when we’d checked into our hotel, we discovered that it was home to Thomas Cook’s very own Kovalam rep, a cheery girl called Lorraine who popped round every morning to check that her guests were having a good time, and to ask whether they wanted to go on the elephant ride this Tuesday, or to pop down to the southern tip of India this Friday. Perhaps that’s why the toilets are so clean; if so, then thank you Thomas Cook, because you’ve helped make Kovalam a great place to get away from the reality of India, and after a couple of weeks in the heat of Kerala, that’s something I really appreciate. And no, I’m not being sarcastic.

Beach Fishing

One of the unexpected benefits of staying at the Hotel Sea Face was that the pool overlooked the beach, which meant we were treated each morning to the sight of the fishermen dragging in their catch. As entertainment goes, it was even good enough to clear the grumpy cobwebs from my morning mind, which is really saying something.

The fishermen practise beach fishing, a method that is used the world over; they even do it in parts of northeast Scotland still, though in the West it’s long since been replaced by more efficient mechanised fishing. The concept is the same wherever you are, though. The first stage is to load up a boat with a large, mouth-shaped fishing net, with two long ropes attached to the sides of the mouth. Once the net is coiled up neatly, it’s time to launch the boat from the beach by pushing it into the sea as the waves break on the shore. The boats at Kovalam are paddle-powered, the oars ending in circles rather than the long, tapered faces of a canoeing oar, and presumably this gives them quite a bit of leverage, as once the boats catch the tide, they’re off with a cry and a yelp and an impressive kick of speed.

Once afloat, the fishermen throw the ends of the two ropes to those waiting on shore, and the boat heads straight out to sea, laying one rope to port and one to starboard, and dropping the net in once the rope has run out. As the ropes have white polystyrene floats attached every 10m or so, this creates a large arc of rope into the sea, with the two ends held in the safe hands of the fishermen on the beach, and a mouth-shaped net at the furthest tip of the arc, all reaching a good couple of hundred metres out into the bay.

This is where the long haul starts, with 15 men on each rope, standing some 20m apart. They slowly haul the rope up the beach by walking backwards, one step with every beat of the chant they sing. The man at the end of the rope lays down his part of the rope in a neat coil and walks down the beach to the head of the line, picking up the rope and starting all over again. It’s like a very slow millipede, gently clawing the two ropes towards the beach to the sound of a fishing song whose words may be in Malayalam, but whose meaning is universal. It’s the sound of men working together, and it doesn’t take long before the arc shrinks and the net starts to take hold.

When the arc is close to the beach, four men leap into the water in a line across the mouth of the net, jumping around and slapping the waves with their forearms, driving the fish deep into the net. Slowly the tempo of the fishing song rises, until you can see the light brown of the net itself rising from the waves like a cloud from the deep. The last few hauls are careful – the whole process takes a good hour, so it’s important not to let the fish get away – and eventually the net reaches the sand, where the men wash the sand away with the lapping waves and crowd around to examine the catch.

Actually, it’s a disappointment. The net is so fine that it catches everything in its path, from miniscule minnows the length of a little finger to larger fish the length of a forearm, but given the amount of time and effort, it seems a paltry catch, and one that surely can’t do the marine environment that much good – I may not be a marine biologist, but even I know it’s not a good idea to kill off shoals of baby fish in order to catch ten or 20 larger ones.

But this doesn’t seem to bother the fishermen, who untie the ropes, shake out the nets and lay them out to dry on the beach, while another boat, net coiled, sets off into the surf to drag the sea a little further along the bay. Later, the fishermen will coil up their nets and ropes and stow them in their fishing boats, pulled up on the beach, and in time-honoured tradition they’ll lie down in the shade under the bow to see out the hottest part of the day, dreaming of the ones that got away.

As spectacles in India go, this has to be one of the more relaxing ones on offer, particularly when sampled over tropical breakfast. Long may it continue...

On the Beach

Kovalam, however, isn’t notorious for its fishermen, but for the gangs of young men who stroll along the beach, desperate to catch a glimpse of pale, western flesh. My first exposure to this was in Kochi, when I popped out early one morning to take a picture of the beach, or, to be more accurate, a picture of the amazing amount of rubbish strewn along the sand.

‘Hello, morning,’ said a voice from behind me as I snapped away. ‘Where you from?’

‘England,’ I said, turning around to find a couple of young men doing star jumps, fully clothed. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Kochi,’ said the shorter of the two. ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a journalist,’ I said, realising too late that perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, seeing as I was taking pictures of how shitty their local beach was. ‘I’m not working now, though, this is a holiday. I’m just taking pictures of your lovely beach.’

‘It is fantastic,’ he said, with absolutely no hint of irony. ‘Where have you been in India?’

‘Let’s see, we started in Varkala,’ I started, ‘and...’

‘Varkala,’ he interrupted. ‘It is good, Varkala?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s very nice.’

‘Lots of western women there?’ he said, a glint in his eye.

‘Um, yes, it’s pretty crowded,’ I said.

‘Many women to see?’ he said, making the universal sign of the bosom with a sly grin. His companion stood there silently, grinning like a schoolboy.

‘Well, yes, I suppose there are lots of women there,’ I said, sighing at the direction the conversation was going.

‘And they fuck, yes?’ he said.

‘I don’t think so, no,’ I said, trying to look as disapproving as I could. ‘You’re not one of these people who goes round staring at western women on the beach, are you?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

‘Well, you do know that staring at western women is no way to pull, don’t you?’ I said. ‘You have to be nice to women, kind and polite, or you’ve got no chance.’

‘Oh, I am kind and polite,’ he said, ‘but my friend here is an angry man. Last time, in Kovalam, he went up to one woman and said, “Do you want sex?” just like that. He is crazy.’

Judging by his friend’s grin, he had a point. ‘That’s not very nice,’ I said.

‘So we are going to Varkala this weekend,’ he said, repeating his impression of a busty siren. ‘To find lovely women.’

‘Well, be nice to them,’ I said, ‘or they’ll just think you’re idiots.’

‘I will be,’ he said. ‘I am not sure about my friend, though. He is an angry man!’

And with that I bid them goodbye and went back to photographing their ‘fantastic’ beach, while they did star jumps on the promenade and grinned at each other at the thought of their impending trip to stare at the girls of Varkala. Visiting Kovalam, it’s easy to see how men like this get their kicks from the beach, because like all good beach destinations, the bikini is queen. Or it is for western women, who soak up the rays in the skimpiest attire, sometimes without first consulting the Bumper Book of Taste.

Kovalam is also a popular spot for proper Indian tourists, especially on a Sunday when both beaches are heaving with locals, but when Indian women go swimming, they do so in full attire, making sure they don’t show off any more parts of their body than they do in the high street. It’s bizarre: on one hand you have bikinis that seem to disappear at certain angles, and on the other you have sarees in the surf. If the latter is what Indian men are used to, it’s no wonder they come to Kovalam with their tongues hanging out.

But it can get annoying, as can the touts, who waltz along the beach front, trying to persuade you that, yes, your life really isn’t complete without a map of India and a packet of counterfeit cigarettes. In most places a quick shake of the head is enough to put the touts off – Varkala was particularly laid-back, I thought – but in Kovalam they are much more insistent, though they still have a long, long way to go before they can appear on the same bill as the touts of Morocco. More irritating are the stares you get when you wander round in a bikini, a problem that I can’t confirm first-hand, but which was fairly apparent by the way gangs of ten or 15 young Indians would walk in front of a bikini bather on a sun lounger, their heads turning left in a precision movement that would have a Sergeant Major wiping a proud tear from his eye. Let’s be honest, every single person on the beach enjoys looking at the beautiful people – both male and female – who grace the sand, but there’s a difference between peeking from behind one’s sunglasses, and standing there as a group, gawping like 14-year-olds. There used to be a sign on the beach at Goa that said, ‘Easing oneself in public is strictly forbidden,’ and one wonders whether such a sign will one day be necessary in Kovalam, as the number of lechers increases.

Even escaping to your hotel pool is no guarantee of privacy. On our second day in Kovalam we decided to relax by the pool, with me typing up a few notes in the shade of a cocktail umbrella while Peta lay on a sun lounger, catching the rays. While I was lost in my own little world, hammering away on my fold-out keyboard, Peta was getting increasingly frustrated with an Indian guest at the hotel, whom we’d seen for the last couple of days sitting on his own, ploughing through bottles of Royal Challenge beer and smoking cigarette after cigarette. In order to walk from the bar to the toilet, he had to walk past the pool, and each time he did so, he would stare at Peta’s chest like a pubescent schoolboy sneaking a peek at the top shelf in the newsagents. After a few such toilet breaks, Peta decided to confront him.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, putting on her politest voice. ‘Would you please stop staring at my chest every time you walk past? I consider it to be extremely rude.’

‘Ah, um,’ said the man, looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights. ‘I wasn’t staring at you, I was staring at your book. It looks really interesting.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Peta, switching to a voice with steel barbs. ‘Well, just stop it.’

He still kept sneaking glances, until Peta came over to me, and I started staring back at him. And then, incredibly, out came a woman with a young child, who turned out to be his wife, and we wondered how she felt, knowing that her husband had come to Kovalam to drink beer on his own and ogle at the women in the hotel. I wondered idly whether he was the kind of man who would ease himself on the beach, but figured he was just a common-or-garden wanker.

That said, if you develop a reasonably thick skin and practise the art of saying ‘No’ to the touts, Kovalam is a pleasant spot to soak up the sun, and it’s a good place to relax. After all, even the touts in India have a smiley side, something you really can’t say about every country.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 28 March 2007   

Yet again, India managed to tug at the sides of my mouth and make me smile, even though I took forever to acclimatise and spent most of the 18 days of this visit feeling sorry for myself. The homesickness kicked in big time on the backwaters, the humidity and heat totally drained me in Kochi, and the effects of budget travel wore us down in Periyar, but despite all this, India refused to tolerate my bad mood and jumped around, tugging at my shirt sleeves as if to say, ‘Don’t be glum – look at what fun life is!’

So yet again, India has charmed me, and I’m delighted to say that she’s also charmed Peta. Tired of hearing me harping on about what a fantastic time I had travelling round India in 1998, she persuaded me to organise this little batch of exploration, and even though Kerala is almost an India Lite, with its easy travelling, coastal paradise and fairly advanced tourist facilities, it’s proved to be a good taster of what India has to offer. She wants to go back, which is an endorsement that places like Morocco completely failed to win.

As for me, I didn’t create the kind of itinerary that I would typically go for. I love crazy Hindu temples, serene Islamic architecture, desert fortresses, holy cities and long train journeys, none of which figure in a typical journey round Kerala. As a result it took me a while to get into this trip, because the subtle joys of houseboating, beaches, hill stations and wildlife parks are... well, a little more feminine than thrusting Dravidian gopurams and dead bodies in the Ganges. But eventually Kerala won me over, and I’m glad we took the slow option.

As Peta kept pointing out, this was a holiday, not long-term travelling, and there’s a big difference. Luckily, India is such an amazing destination, she can cater for holidaymakers just as well as budget travellers. I have no doubt that we’ll be back, again and again. That’s what happens when you fall in love...

Further Reading

If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from www.moxon.net/ebooks, covering 25 countries and six continents:

The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Thoughts Before Arriving

Calcutta

Puri

Hinduism and Indian History

Konark

Travellers in India

Religious Tolerance

Hyderabad

Golconda

Hyderabadi Conversations

Music on the Brain

The Indian Film Industry

Chennai

Buying Music in India

Mamallapuram

Slowing Down

Pondicherry

Trichy

Thanjavur

I’ll Have a Limca, Please

Madurai

The Sound of Indian Politics

Kodaikanal

Travellers’ Opinions of India

Madurai

Kollam to Alappuzha

Kochi

James Bond in India

Mysore

Bangalore

The Post Office

Reflections in Bangalore

Kama Sutra

Hampi

The Holi Festival

Bijapur

Aurangabad

Ellora

Daultabad

Ajanta

Cricket and India

Mandu

Bhopal

Sanchi

Thoughts After Three Months

Interlude

The Toy Train

Darjeeling

The Power of Authority

Death of the Ganges

Varanasi

Death on the Platform

Air Coolers

Gwalior

Agra

Fatehpur Sikri

Service Station Hell

Jaipur

Pushkar

Udaipur

Louis Armstrong

Bhavnagar

Alang

Palitana

Hindi Pop

Diu

Lies, Damned Lies

Mt Abu

Indian Television

Yogi and Babaji

Jodhpur

Pigs Over Jaisalmer

Jaisalmer

Camel, One Previous Owner

The Thar Desert

Bikaner

Nuclear Testing

Amritsar

Surviving India

Schrödinger’s Cat

Dharamsala

The Dogs of Bhagsu

Delhi

Interlude

The High Commission

Falling into Place

Varkala

Hippy Heaven

The Shirt off My Back

Lagging Behind

Blowing the Budget

Beer, What Beer?

Cash Card Crisis

The Keralan Backwaters

The Beer Shop

Kochi

Munnar

Periyar

Ringing the Changes

Kovalam

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading