However strange life gets on the road, this traffic light in Delhi offers some very good advice: Relax
Here are some random reflections, penned while sweating through the heat wave in Bangalore.
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The smarter you look in Bangalore, the more attention you attract from the touts and beggars. I went out into the streets of the city in my smart trousers and clean shirt, and I couldn't believe the difference: by wearing standard western issue and being white, I was basically advertising the fact that I was 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 was freaky, until I saw how many white tourists there were in Bangalore, all gagging to be fleeced, saying things like, 'Well, it's only three pounds in real money you know, that's awfully cheap,' when a fairer price was nearer 30p. Duh.
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Being the clever dick 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 struck me all of a sudden that I'm simply a rich western bastard 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 – but not giving a few rupees to someone who is dying in front of my eyes is simply unforgivable, and in Bangalore I suffered a complete turnaround: 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 indeed has its roots in pure selfishness, 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.
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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. Think of this: my belt routinely contains in cash over one year's salary for the average Indian (about £200) plus a lot more than that in travellers cheques. Perhaps this is what they mean by a capitalist waistline...
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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 crap off the streets I'd say this place had a serious problem. I can hardly believe that in England, a stray dogs are rounded up and put down: here every dog is 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.
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I woke up this morning with what can only be described as a smoker's cough: hacking on the congestion in my lungs, I brought up all the shit I'd inhaled and finally made it into the ranks of the exclusive wake-up-and-expectorate club. It wouldn't bother me, 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.
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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 selling Pepsi and coffee line the sides, 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.
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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...
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I'm slowly becoming Indian, in some ways at least. Part of it is through necessity, part through resignation, but I now find myself spitting in the street, pissing 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 has made it a necessity to cough up the unpleasant, and as spitting is preferable to swallowing, I simply join the herd in a socially accepted gesture; I piss 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's the normal way to eat your food, and I always wash them first; and I cross the traffic with a new sixth sense 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.
