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On November 11, 2003 I made a trip to India, returning to a country I last visited in the winter of 1992/93.
This trip, like the last trip, was to last for six months, and during my stay I kept an online journal partly for myself, but mostly for my friends and family so that they might get a feeling for the country as I travelled around.
The title pays an obvious homage to Alistair Cooke's Letter from America which I always loved listening to. The words of this journal were sometimes written first in a lovely old notebook (that I rescued from my Grandpa's house after he died) and then transcribed on to the computer using nothing other than the power of Notepad and basic HTML.
Sometimes I wrote directly at the computer in the vast number of cybercaffs I had the dubious pleasure of visiting on my journey. And more often than not, the act of writing, working or trying to work in these establishments turned out to be quite a challenge. More on that later.
So, if you're all sitting comfortably, let's just get down to it and begin the beguine…
I arrived in Delhi after a long and arduous flight from London, long enough and arduous enough for me to get in training for the journeys ahead in India. Had a very cheerful ride down to the centre of the world for all tourists – the filthy grey rubbish-strewn streets of Paharganj. Booked myself into a fancy hotel with a large TV and slept for two days straight.
About all I could manage was the necessary trips out for chai and chow – I found a good place to get a good thali, and just took it very very easy, getting used to the sights and smells of India again. Talked to very few people, certainly more Indians and Nepalese than Westerners, and got the old Bruce Chatwin feeling of What Am I Doing Here? I can hardly write I am so tired, and I'm getting waves of fever and sore throat. I think it's the dust and the temperature change from England.
I need to get myself up to the train station and out of the big city. It seems like the whole world is right outside my front door and boy, they're persistent. London it ain't. Really looking forward to experiencing a blast of South Indian food and culture. Will write more once I get settled…
I've just spent 48 hours in a space just about big enough to die in. Just short enough that the legs cramp and just tall enough that sitting crosslegged means a crooked neck. And all the way I seemed to be thinking to myself 'just another 12 hours to go…' The journey from Delhi to Kochi by train seems to go on for ever, and glorious as a 2nd class sleeper sounds, on a journey like that, what I think you actually need is some kind of air-conditioned luxury Japanese-style hibernation chamber to sleep the whole way through.
The only thing I can say I really enjoyed about the journey was pulling into the beauteous lush green of Kerala state this morning. See, I had an upper berth, and there I was one inch away from three ancient fans bolted to the ceiling of the ancient carriage (think Brazil, think 1984), blasting tepid air on to me ceaselessly for a day, a night, another day, another night and half of this morning. That's A/C with a vengeance. Tossed and turned I did, ate next to nothing for fear of actually having to negotiate the grimmest squat toilets known to humanity, drank 'Koffee! Offee! Offee!' by the thimbleful, and read half of a great Bruce Sterling novel. Arrived at Ernakulam Junction to a dripping heat the like of which I have not experienced since I was in Thailand about 12 years ago.
So suffice to say, it's hot, it's bloody hot, it's the kind of hot that soaks you through after two minutes. Delhi seems like a dream in comparison. Perfect cool weather there, but one thing I most certainly do not miss is the grime of the capital, and the realisation that it ain't called Smelly Delhi for nothing. I actually got the gag response from some of the more colourful pools of liquid, whatever the hell it was, by the roadside there. But that's true all over India I think – dust, swill, and gag…
So now that I've got the morning out of the way, I think it's time to go back to my very nice guesthouse and take a refreshing shower, and think about what the next step is. I'm really craving peace and quiet and space at the moment, and a cold beer certainly wouldn't go amiss. Feel like I'm on a mission with no name, in a place with almost no other Westerners. The only people I've met, and these mostly in Delhi, were all young, and all off to Dehra Dun for some reason I couldn't quite figure out, or Varanasi, because that's where you go when you come to India isn't it? Quite a few 20-something hippies who look like they should be at college all wearing rags and smoking bidis and bragging about their travels. Made me feel my years. Made me want to close my ears.
But I have chuckled to myself over the simplest of things. In India a footbridge is called a 'Foot Over Bridge'. Think Pulp Fiction. That made me wish I had a camera. That's funny. The other thing that made me stupidly happy was managing to find a Sruti Box, one of those drone things, a small electronic device about the size of a travel radio that you can set to either Ma or Pa (cute huh?!) and a whole range of minute divisions to tune your sitar-like drone to – using an ancient dial technology. Then simply place in corner of room and sing bad ragas over said drone. That has made me happy. Goes with anything. Turns lonely ageing men into tuneless lonely ageing men…
More to follow. There's 'Chai! Chai! Char!' to drink and the endless symphony of carhorns and yabber to compose with… I can hardly wait.
My God! It was hot last night. I thought it was the end for me. I fell to sleep through exhaustion rather than anything else, even the big electric fan seemed to do nothing other than move the hot air around in my room. But I made it across The Great Water from Ernakulam on the most charming of ferries to Fort Cochin, the old Portuguese part of Kochi, where Vasco de Gama was buried for 14 years before he was returned to his native country. I walked into town along a very long road, a very long and very wrong road as it turned out, since the further I walked, the further I realised I was heading from where I wanted to be. So I stopped, nearly expiring from the heat, and got talking to a man with a corner shop, who used to live and work, until only very recently, in Manama, Bahrain. We reminisced about Sheikh Jolly Jack's beach (I was there in about 1980) and he helped me negotiate a cheap rickshaw back up to the centre of town where I called in at Kashi's Art Café – an absolute oasis of a place much more like something you'd expect to see in Spain or Australia rather than India. Open to the elements with a roof of dark stained wooden beams, whitewashed walls on three sides of the café and just the best music I've heard in ages. It was truly inspiring. The gallery in the front was quiet and humble with a lovely sense of proportion and space, and I thought, here's a place where you could really do something.
In fact, it's a place where they really do do good things. They have great food for a start. Friendly, smiley, mellow staff, and there are regular performances of Indian music. I love it. Feeling super-refreshed I took a wander up to the church of St. Francis, had a peek into its silent dark interior, and feeling suitably solemnified I wandered along by the fishing boats and the market, looking out to sea, watching the fisherman do their thing, hauling in the big nets and cooking up fresh fish in tiny shacks on the beachfront. Just like you imagine it. Only a bit smellier. Again the odd combination of something off combined with something absolutely mouth-wateringly delicious. I think I could safely say that's the smell of much of India. Like cooking a beautiful spicy meal in a kitchen that has rotting rubbish bags in it, perhaps with a touch of sandalwood burning for good measure. And I really do love it. Although the price is that you do get the old gag response from time to time…
Anyway, yesterday evening I went out for a bite to eat, and sat myself down in an almost empty restaurant surrounded by a buzz of activity from the four or five staff. There was the smell of fresh ghee warming to superhot. Looked like dosas. Hot and quick, very quick. On the way to eat I got my first feeling for insects, the whole road buzzing, pulsing with an unseen life. Strangely all the shops were open but the streets virtually deserted. Rickshaws go past and the odd bicycle, but I can only assume that everyone sleeps early in Kochi.
Forgot to mention the family I travelled down here with all weekend. A Keralan man, his wife, their two daughters and young son. They were after my precious upper berth, and I admit a fleeting panic came over me. One thing you don't want to be without on a journey like that is a place to lie down. But it turned out that their need for sleep came earlier than mine on that first long night – they doubled up and I got my precious upper berth after all, and the precedent was set for the rest of the journey.
And so, every now and then, as we rattled our way south through the endless unseen countryside and countless half-seen railway stations, I asked the father where we were. I remember Nagpur, in the middle of a very dark night. Then Vijayawada. Then more unpronounceable names, until, nearing their destination, more relaxed now as we passed through the stunning verdant beauty of Northern Kerala with its paddies and palms and beautiful picture-postcard hills in the distance, he told me they were making a very special journey to their home town for the last wedding in the family – that of the youngest son. The father seemed very happy to be away from the big city, the capital where he works in the shipping business. Quite what the connection is between Delhi and shipping we didn't get to. Suddenly they were gone, smiling and waving, and I was quickly surrounded, for the final hour of my trip, by a gaggle of very dark, very childish young men who were singing and clapping, jostling and joking their way home. I could tell I was in the south. The skin had got darker, the smiles bigger and I knew I was in for some serious heat.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
INDULGE IN ACTS OF SENSELESS BEAUTY!
Saw a great name for a hotel today, up by the central bus station in Ernakulam – Hotel New Rolex. Now that really does have that certain je ne sais huh? about it, doncha think? It looked more like a temple than a hotel.
Today I took great pleasure in going to an Indian supermarket. A clothes supermarket. Packed it was, positively thronging with people. 300 shirts all in a line, next to 300 pairs of trousers all in a line, next to a vast stack of underpants, t-shirts, and then counters filled with all manner of exotic cloths. A real bazaar of a place. In amongst the thronging hungry masses, assistants lurked incognito, suddenly offering their undivided assistance. I was after a dhoti, see, the piece of cloth worn by 99% of the men in South India, that looks a lot like a nappy the way they do it. Not that I'd dare to wear one outside yet meself. I think a few more months and a darker tan will have to be acquired first. Talking with my attentive assistant we surmised that I wasn't after the ladies one with the frilly gold edge, I wasn't after a double dhoti, precisely twice the price, I was merely after a single dhoti, a plain white piece of cloth just large enough to wrap around my lower half, one with a nice blue trim please in the teatowel tradition if you don't mind. Next came the exciting bit. With the assistant having been thanked and nods and smiles having been exchanged, I headed for the counter to pay for my goods. Hold up! Not so quick there old boy!
Firstly one must hand over the chosen item to a kind gentleman who writes you a receipt, and passes the item to another kind gentleman who puts it in a bag and points you over to the collection counter, as the receipt-writing man tells you to queue at the payment counter so that you can pay. This is quite a scramble in itself, but with my receipt now checked, verified and payment exchanged I am directed over to the collection counter where the real scrum ensues. One lovely lady stands there, eyes down, focused on what seemed like a thousand thrusting hands bearing crumpled white receipts for items to be collected. My brown, but not very very dark brown hand, must have stood out, she gave me the most cursory glance as she whipped round and sorted through the miasma of felt-tip numbered plastic bags, checked off my goods against the receipt with a deft tick and handed me my dhoti. I was lucky, I must have queue-jumped by about 30 people, and was aware of some very hot and fairly bothered looks from people who had obviously been waiting a hell of a lot longer than my good self. I managed to get served and out of the door and back out into the craziness of the street within what must have been a record-breaking 15 minutes…
Anyhow, I've decided to head south again tomorrow, taking the boat down from Alappuzha to Kollam. Maybe I'll stop by at the Mother's ashram for a hug…
Today I checked out of Ernakulam, and via an omelette in the super-mundane Spices Joint, walked my sweaty olde self and heavy bag up to the central bus station. Another quick look at Hotel New Rolex and then on to the large plot of cracked concrete and dust that serves as the station forecourt. Washed wet by the water wallah, buses that look like they've been on the road continuously for the last 50 years and probably have, tear into place, revving their knackered throaty old engines, as people scrabble and push and scram their way into the dog-eared seats. Actually it took a lot of asking to feel sure enough that the bus to Alappuzha was in fact the same as the bus to Alleppey, since they're one and the same place. Seems like they've got two names for everything round here, both of them likely to be pronounced (and spelt) in a huge variety of ways. Many 'Hello sir, what is your good name?' and 'Where you from sir?' 's later I got the answer I was looking for. It was that bus, the one right in front of me, the one pulling away. I resigned myself to wait for the next one, and then, suddenly a man dashed forward waving, determined not to miss it himself, waving frantically to the driver, who duly slowed and then I ran, got there, pulled myself up into the bus and slapped my bag and myself into the nearest half-seat available and then we were off, shot into gridlock and horn-blasting chaos.
Later, as we rattled, hurtled, through the Keralan villages and countryside, crossing rivers and passing through what looked like nothing more than jungle, we passed some great roadsigns in the middle of the road with things like LEFT IS RIGHT and SPEED THRILLS AND ALSO KILLS. All very reassuring stuff. Anyway, the breeze was a pleasure, and despite the weather remaining resolutely grey and muggy, it felt good to be on the move. After about an hour and a half we pulled into Alleppey, a much smaller and dirtier place than Kochi, and I walked to the nearest decent-looking hotel. On the way, down a very narrow alleyway, a taxi driver in a spotless white Ambassador nearly ran me down, at a very slow pace, and, leaning out of his window, his breath up close and sweating, reeking of brandy, asking 'Taxi? Taxi? You want taxi? Where you want to go?' I shook my head, declining, and he drove ahead… But there, in the hotel grounds, as I walked up a few minutes later, there he was, sauntering across to greet me, clasping my hand and shaking it vigorously, looking deep into my eyes through his red and rolling eyes insisting that should I need his services then he should be my very first port of call. I declined his kind, drunken offer and quickly checked myself in to the most godawful-smelling, rank-aired room I have yet had the pleasure of paying for.
I sat down on the bed and sighed. For a moment then, peace, and a clean towel and a bar of aryuvedic soap was brought by a smiley dark boy. I decided that I must make the effort to get my boat ticket at once, and almost straight from the hotel, two lads calling 'Hello sir! Hello sir! Backwater boating? Please, come…' So in I went and was charmed into exactly what I was looking for. I leave tomorrow for Kollam on the Backwaters Boat – a whole day trip through The Venice of India. Strangely, I feel a kind of Apocalypse Now dread of going down the river with an irrational fear of running into a crazed Marlon Brando like character lurking in some dark corner of the forest. But right now, all I can do is just sit back, open the window, listen to the drone of my sruti box and the twittering of the birds, and rest me wearies in my filthy blue hotel room.
Last night the heat was thick in the room and I had a real Naked Lunch sensation that the entire surface of my skin was alive behind a film of sweat, pinpricks of movement and twingeing pain popping up and disappearing like lights flickering on and off. The horror, the incessant dank air of the fan and the mosquitos hunting for blood, all this… Somehow though, I fell into a deep sleep and dreamt curious musical images, half expecting to wake up in Brighton.
Morning came and started cool. I scraped the sweat and beard from my face in the most horrific worrying brown water that came from the taps, and actually left the hotel feeling fresh and relaxed. I wandered down to the boat jetty and took my place on the upper deck, watching quietly as the boat filled up with European holiday-makers and a couple of Indian families. By 10:30 we had set off down the most exquisite, idyllic canals lined with palm trees, winding our way, puttering along in a gentle breeze, past canoes and houseboats and villages, across lakes and around endless corners and mini peninsulas for what seemed like an eternity. In some places it really was a perfect Gauguin-like paradise picture scene. Exquisite and peaceful and very very alive. We stopped for lunch at a small place on an islet with simple huts and kind of thatched roofs. We were served beautiful exotic Keralan thali on leaves, washed down with pineapple and swigs of cold mineral water. I shared a table with an English woman and an Australian couple, all on their way to the beach at Varkala. It struck me that so many of the travellers are just constantly moving, endlessly moving from one place to another like hungry nomads in search of home. As for myself, I can hardly manage a route, an itinerary, and I tell people I am meandering my way up to Bangalore. The beach certainly doesn't appeal, but then again the never-ending cacophony in the towns, is, to say the least, wearing. But today, on the 8-hour journey from Alleppey to Kollam I fell into a reverie – peaceful and contemplative, feeling myself be carried along on the water through this delicate perfect landscape – enjoying the breezes and the people that we passed.
Amma's ashram appeared on the tree-fringed horizon suddenly around 4pm. Like two skyscrapers, actually two skyscrapers, so very very out of place in this tropical waterland. And at the foot of the skyscrapers the ashram, hidden behind palm trees, and locals standing on the shore smiling and waving at the aliens floating by. She was not there, apparently Amma is in Germany at the moment, and so nobody got off for a night in the skyscrapers. Just didn't seem worth it, not without a hug anyway…
From time to time as we chugged along we saw some lovely touching scenes – two kids running alongside the boat pointing waving smiling laughing and pointing again, then a group of kids playing cricket on a cricket ground of scraped flat earth under the trees. Entire villages sitting watching as we passed, them blaring out swinging Hindi pop music from very loud loudspeakers, us aliens all agog, smiling. Just perfect cinematic moments that defy words. Something for the camera that I don't have…
Pulling in to Kollam, with the sky turning quickly from sunset to darkness in a mottled fading rush, we passed The Goddess of Light statue at the head of the peninsula, lit up a fantastic ethereal blue-white, a very tall and cartoon-like naked Indian goddess with the cheekiest, pouting, sexy face – her hand pointing victoriously skyward like some crazy other-worldly Statue of Liberty holding her torch – her face almost smiling and turning to greet us, showing the way for the numerous small boats making their way in to Kollam through the black waters. As we weaved our way in towards the quayside with the little yellow light on top of the boat pointing this way and that, we made out the throng of rickshaw drivers at the jetty, waiting for their evening catch.
Quickly we were down amongst them, leaflets were being thrust into hands as bags were thrown off the boat, people gathering themselves together and disappearing off into the darkness in taxis and rickshaws and then there I was, suddenly alone again, walking into a hectic town at night, round a hectic honking roundabout surrounded by tiny little shops and cafés. People appearing from around the corner, everyone on their ways somewhere, and me blinded by the lights of the vehicles, intensely searching for the hotel. Out of nowhere one kind man, following me, dhoti drawn up around his waist, broke into a huge smile and showed me the way with a flick of his hand. His timing was perfect, faultless, and I walked a little further until I noticed out of the corner of my eye, beckoning me into what looked like a very bleak alley, a large, mustachioed, uniformed gentleman leaning out of his chair. I had arrived.
I signed in, and dropped off my bags. Room OK. Nothing special. I headed straight back out to eat the strangest vegetable biryani, with the most disgusting, mysterious, unidentifiable slices of sweetness ruining a perfectly inedible pea curry and rice mixture. I picked my way through the meal, selectively gathering every piece of nourishment I could. Just as I finished, a Belgian couple from the boat trip came in for their meal and suddenly blackout! Candles were quickly lit and I sipped my chai and dreamt of the ideal hotel room – beautiful whitewashed walls, clean linen, a spotless tasteful understated bathroom, a balcony overlooking the sea perhaps…
By 8:30, in the blackout pitch darkness I was lighting the candle in my drab little room, waiting for the fan to kick into action and the tube light to flicker back on. The mosquitos are out tonight and my clothes feel damp and stale. Behind the honking, rumbling traffic, Indian pop music snakes it way up to my window, and even the radio seems to pick up little more than static. Just the faintest hint of reception behind the squealing high-pitched warbling frequencies. I turn it off, enjoy the gentle whirr of the fan and force myself in to the shower. Tomorrow Trivandrum, then north.
Just got into town. Blue skies today, and let me tell you folks, it really is hotter than hot. Praise the Lord for air conditioning. I'm off for a much-needed thali and a spot of R'n'R…
I slept like a log last night in my favourite hotel room so far, after reading Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist in one sitting and feeling for the first time on the journey, truly quite inspired. So many perfect gems of wisdom in this one little book, and I felt really at peace with the fan whirring round and the insistent sound of the insects throbbing outside the window. Coehlo reminded me that 'in order to find the treasure, you have to follow the omens' and that, that I think is exactly what I needed reminding of.
Today the sky is back to its customary sultry gloom and it's muggy again. It's a Sunday, and it's noticeably quieter in town. Most of the shops were shut, shuttered shut. I walked past a church with hundreds of people crammed in and around it. A woman was throwing something that looked like garlands of flowers up near the front, and the entire congregation was chanting a low murmuring incantation, quite unlike anything I've ever heard before. Especially in what looked like a Christian church. Answers on a postcard please.
A word about food. Down here in the very south of the country, I have no idea what to ask for when I want to eat. I sit down, I say one thing, I get another, and I have become resigned, intrigued even to see what the meal will be. Today I had Barotta, which means two or three of the most amazing layered flaky flat breads served with a chickpea curry and some onion garnish. Just what I needed as it turned out. But I would absolutely love to have a proper English Sunday roast, if you know of anywhere that does them, do let me know! Anyway, it must be the heat, the endless sultry penetrating heat that makes everything feel dirty, and not just feel dirty but actually be filthy. Everywhere is layered with a film of grime, anywhere you look, everywhere. You couldn't possibly try to fight it. The trick must be in coming to terms with it, and I am practising, honestly.
Now it's time to hunt out that perfect Sunday lunch in downtown Trivandrum, and maybe do a few bookshops. Having read The Alchemist in one go, I now need another, and quick…
Going out today I realised just how quiet Trivandrum was yesterday. Today it was back to crazy busy mad – cars, buses and auto-rickshaws everywhere, all apparently heading straight for you, all amazingly avoiding everyone. It really is an act of faith to walk even along the side of the road in India. And I love it!
It has become a part of my routine to take siestas in the afternoon when it's too hot to go out, and this means that I'm feeling a lot more relaxed a lot more of the time. That thing about rickshaws heading straight for you is a case in point. In their quest for business they will drive straight at you, and fast, with a particularly menacing look of determination in their eyes as they do it, slowing just at the very last minute, curving their wheels ever so slightly as they pull alongside smiling, asking 'Rickshaw? Rickshaw?'. This used to really drive me mad, I found it an insulting, scary way to procure customers, but now I'm just plain impressed by the technique. There's a sense of humour about it, and even though I nearly jump out of my skin every time it happens, now I'm more amused than annoyed – the skill, and the precision of it really are a thing to behold…
And today has brought a real sense of peace and silence with it. I feel protected, must be the heat that's doing curious things to my mind, but really, I do. It's a gentle inner silence. No joke. I've decided to head up to Pondicherry in a couple of days, and am really looking forward to starting the journey north again. I'll have them Himalayas in my hand before long, I guarantee it…
This morning I took breakfast in what looked like the Tower of Babel – a circular 'Indian Coffee House' with a winding, steep sloping floor that goes all the way to the top of the building, and spaced at intervals, perfectly horizontal, and flush with the outer wall, tiered tables and chairs made of stone. As the café fills up, the white-uniformed waiters have to climb a little higher up the slope each time in order to serve the newest customers. And there are the waiters proper, with their fancy cummerbands and even fancier chef-like hats, that serve you tea and meals, and then the serving boys with simpler white uniforms, who are dashing up and down the slope continuously, with trays filled with plates and cups. It's a comedy to watch the place at work with its ridiculous, incredibly efficient staff running up and down the circular slope for its ever changing clientèle. Can't recommend it highly enough if you're ever in Trivandrum!
I also had a haircut from an extremely amused barber who seemed to have never cut a white man's hair before. He did a very good job for a very good price, and I felt truly refreshed and renewed. He was simple and straightforward with a lot of smiling, and an attention to detail that can never be a bad thing for a barber. I celebrated with a coffee in what looked like a totally Western bakery café – with a totally Westernised Indian clientèle eating – oddly for a bakery that serves amongst other things, black forest gateau – Indianised burgers and chips, drinking curiously Indianised cappuccinos and shakes… I found the whole scene quite depressing, truth be told. It seems that India will inevitably end up as Americanised as Europe after all. Nothing anyone can do about it. I shall have to make myself a promise not to go to these places in future. It's time for me to go and get my ticket to Pondicherry…
Thankfully, acquiring a train ticket to Pondy was a breeze, although in fact I have to go to Villapuram and then get a bus. It's a short 13 hour ride up there through the night, Thursday night. So, with ticket in hand, and feeling rather perky, I went for a wander. The weather was perfect, warm, but not too warm, the sky blue and still, and on the sports ground opposite the hotel some boys were playing cricket. Groups of men stand around watching, looking somehow furtive, and there is a peaceful atmosphere, whoops and yells from the players as they whack the ball and scrape their runs with obvious mirth.
I went in search of a beer and found myself out the back of the Hotel President, in a dark room with BAR painted on the dingy wall. Dark men talking animatedly in the gloom, the stench of strong alcohol, a wall filled with half bottles of brandy and whisky, and I'm offered a range of 4 cold beers from the fridge. I go for the Royal Challenge over the London Super Strength, look around behind me at the swarthy faces of the men sitting in the half-light of the Bukowskian room, and decide against having the beer opened for me. I couldn't even see the far walls of the place, they seemed shrouded, murky, and my God, the barman had given me the beer like he was dealing Class A drugs. I thanked him, paid the cashman in his disgusting cash booth, bagged the beer, and made my way quietly back out into the street. I think if I'd stayed there I would most definitely have attracted the wrong sort of attention. Drinking is obviously taboo in this culture, and the men in the bar seemed to revel in it – I'm sure if I was one of them, I would too.
Back out in the sunshine, everything goes along at a different frequency, the boys are cheerfully playing cricket, gentle beggars are begging with outstretched hands and pleading eyes, stiff uniformed policeman are strutting along with their batons at their sides, traders quietly trading in their shack-like shops… Outside I know, that no matter how furtive a man might seem, they are quick to smile, that they mean well. Back in that bar, in that squalid darkness, I really couldn't be so sure. I snuck on back to my room with the contraband and drank it down quickly, guiltily, and felt mighty fine, mighty fine indeed. Time for my afternoon nap…
Happy birthday Grandpa! If you were still here you'd be 101 today… I have to say I spent an unremarkable day wandering the streets, drinking chai, had a masala dosa, and then retired early to contemplate life, the universe and everything back in my lovely hotel room. I talked to the lizard that creeps around the wall, and breathed on some insects to see what would happen, but then at 6 o'clock sharp, from out of nowhere, after an otherwise perfectly ordinary afternoon, a wind got up and the heavens opened with a terrific roaring downpour of rain, as if the Good Lord Himself was emptying a billion buckets of water on to the town.
It came down in sheets as if it had never rained before, and outside the room the huge oversized palms channelled the gushing water down on to the parched earth out the back of the hotel. The rain fell as though it was never going to stop, and kept it up like this for a full hour and a half, until suddenly, somehow gently, it began to peter out until all that was left was the drip, drip, dripping from the trees outside. A strangled, awful yelping from the hotel dog marked a return to the insistent rhythmic thrumming of the insects, and then slowly the heat returned, as though someone was slowly turning up the dial on an oven, and throughout all of this, the huge distorted racket of Bollywood film music that seems to play endlessly from next door, came to a sudden stop, and it was back to just me, the insects and the whirr of the fan. Truly a stunning performance. Sheer poetry!
It was one of those days where the hours seemed stretched out longer than normal hours, and though I had a masala dosa breakfast in Trivandrum with a mellow Dutchman on his way to Colombo, and I 'did internet', and I returned to the Maveli (The Tower of Babel) for 'omlete(D)', 4 o'clock just took for ever to come. It felt so good to be on a train going somewhere, anywhere, out of the hot streets, and back on the Indian Railway System.
I was blessed with a surprisingly empty carriage. A gaggle of Keralan cable operators on their way to Chennai to buy equipment were my main entertainment, and much mirth ensued since my name sounds kind of similar to the cricketer Greg Matthews. They were very funny, funny guys, who obviously enjoyed a chance to show off their broken English. I only just declined the offer of sharing their rum with them. Glad I didn't… Best avoided, that kind of practise in my humble opinion. The sole curse of the journey was a neurotic, twitching French girl, with her patronising been-there-done-that half-baked yogic platitudes and her endless interrogating, grilling, pecking questions. My God, she talked and talked as though they were about to ban the spoken word any second, and after three hours I just had to politely say 'No more talking – I need to sleep…' with a yawn and a stretch and a very quick hop up to the relative sanctuary of my upper berth (opposite her upper berth). I slept on and off throughout the night on the way to Villapuram, spending many of those wee hours sitting crouched by the door smoking bidis, watching the state of Tamil Nadu pass by in the pitch darkness, passing through unpronounceable stations, the only two I remember are Nagercoil and Madurai because I can pronounce them… Thankfully 'she' slept like a log, and we awoke suddenly at 5.20am with the horrific realisation that we'd arrived. We grabbed our bags, still asleep, and jumped off the train with, as it turned out, easily 15 minutes to spare. It turned out to be one of those scheduled long stops, where everyone stocks up on Coffee! Offee! Offee!, and we sat dazed on the platform and had a quick chai in the drizzle. People seemed to be just standing around in the dark talking. Very Strange. Very Surreal. It was 5.30 in the very early morning. Just as we crossed the train tracks I looked behind me as our train pulled out of Villapuram station, and saw the signal man in the last carriage of the train. He was a small, slight and very very dark man in his fifties with a brown woolly hat on and he was waving a large metal box with a huge green lightbulb inside it, the box trailing a fat and dangerous looking power cable. What was funny was the way he leant out of the train, almost sheepishly waving this enormous light from left to right, as if he was waving 'goodbye' to us. I know he was only signalling the driver, but it was such a cute image!
So then it was out into the madness of the early morning night, the chaos of rickshaws and taxis, buses and bicycles, all of them after our business. We were lucky, after only two minutes of standing on this very confusing street being assured that the bus stand was 4km away by an extremely keen rickshaw driver, a brightly multi-coloured bus pulled up – wheels jacked up high, bad film blaring out, complete with packed crowd of earnest people trying to watch the movie, and all the newcomers jostling for their personal square centimetre on the bus, and the ticket man shouting somehow randomly 'Pondy! Pondy!'. We gladly climbed aboard into the tight crowd, and miraculously we were given pride of place up by the driver, right up by the driver. He set off a lunatic pace, revving like a madman, blasting his whistle, (a screamingly high-pitched variant of the equally deafening horn that most buses sport), making us both wince every few seconds with its intensity. We tore through narrow villages and utterly oblivious cyclists and cows and pedestrians, all as oblivious to the increasing rain as to the hurtling bus. The rain really came down like I hadn't seen before, and we tore through what at moments could have passed for a particularly green and wet English countryside, and meOhMy! some unbelievable travellers as we drove – three people perched on a bike cycling along in the now very pouring rain along a busy highway all three with their umbrellas up. Not quite sure who was cycling… Two men, drenched, umbrellas up, standing perfectly vertically upright on a cart being pulled by two old oxen with enormous multi-coloured painted horns. And all around, cars, buses, taxis, rickshaws tearing along this main road to Pondy as night broke into day in the absolute pouring, sheeting rain. And amazingly, thankfully, the French girl hardly said a word the whole way…
Arriving in Pondicherry in the middle of this downpour was a very sobering moment. Getting off that crazy bus at what looked like a junction but I assume must have been the bus stand, into a frenetic gang of rickshaw drivers all as eager for business as ever and even more eager to get out of the rain as quickly as possible. We struck up a terrible deal and were taken from place to place, fanciest to bleakest, and calmly told at all of them 'Sorry, all full. Maybe tomorrow…' The driver, desperate to offload us so he could find another tourist to pay his exorbitant prices, dumped us in the middle of town, and I managed to negotiate two cell-like rooms, one each thanks to a very surreal and misunderstanding concierge – who seemed to be quite happy to say 'yes' and 'no' at the same time, and mean mostly 'yes'. Rough stone walls with rough iron beds, evil strip lighting. No window to speak of. No light in the room they called bathroom (hole in ground, bucket nearby). Somehow, after filling in a very large form and paying a very large fee, we got the keys and dropped our bags. I don't think this poor girl could quite believe her bad luck. The rain was stressing her, the rickshaw driver had shouted at her because he wanted more money than she was prepared to give him, and then she had to pay over-the-odds for what was nothing much more than a very bleak prison cell. At least she'd stopped talking for a bit. We went for coffee in the fanciest place we could find and were welcomed in out of the rain by a beautiful smiling woman in her forties who chatted in perfect Hindi English and made us hot coffees. We really needed them since it had taken us over an hour of walking around in a very large circle in a very grim part of town in the pouring rain looking for somewhere, anywhere decent enough to guarantee feeling refreshed enough to go out again. By this time I was nearly dizzy from lack of food, and I just so wanted rid of this girl with her neuroses and her opinions. My prayers were instantly answered in the form of a friend of hers 'from the ashram' (beware the ashram girls) who took her aside and soon they were chatting away in French and laughing and drinking their cute little drinks. The sun even came out, and I smiled, said 'See you later, I'm off for a wander' and wander I did, up into town, quickly at first, just to escape.
I wandered until I had got my bearings enough to locate a reasonable rooftop eaterie, and procured myself an extremely mundane mutter paneer, rice and chapati. Feeling almost human, at least my body not screaming with hunger now, I decided to check out the bookshops. Nothing to report. This is an ashram town – everywhere you look it's Sri Aurobindo this and Sri Aurobindo that, and not being a particularly devotional type I passed on those. I passed on the novels too. Just trash. Overpriced secondhand trash.
So I went to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, but on the way I passed this most ridiculous temple street – a spectacular piece of devotional temple kitsch – many many pious pilgrims touching their heads and walking around in circles and buying sandalwood rosaries, and paying the elephant to have him touch their heads with his trunk. I know it's supposed to be lucky to have an elephant touch your head with its trunk, but if the elephant is ridden by a boy who kicks the elephant only when someone offers a rupee, then it's not exactly luck is it? This elephant, the first I've seen on this trip, was absolutely beautiful, he was definitely pocketing the rupees up his snout, I saw him, and he had enormous human-looking eyes full of kindness and gentleness. I was captivated by this scene, and stood watching until boy and elephant lurched off down the street, shopkeepers offering whole bunches of bananas which the elephant deftly tossed from trunk to open mouth. Very much down in one. I hardly noticed those pesky beadsellers shoving their wares in my face, and the mad zombie pilgrims all around me in this crazy street. That elephant was the best…
One street beyond, and now suddenly in deserted avenues straight out of provincial France with occasional cyclists passing old French colonial houses, and I was accosted by a very intelligent young computer student on his bike, who, after the usual 'Coming from please? Your country name sir?' etc. etc. gave me his perfectly scripted convoluted sob story and of course, inevitably, could I give him 1000 rupees please? (As I write it's about Rs.77 to £1). I told him 'Sorry, no…' and then 'No' again, and he thanked me with a long sad face and pedalled off down his beautiful French provincial street in search of another mug.
The Sri Aurobindo Ashram, or rather the place where they have his body entombed in samadhi is in a funny, sombre courtyard, constantly circled by the devout, policed by a busy, gentle old man who prods and guides the faithful around the tomb, making sure they don't stay for too long or start pressing too much of their body on to the very nice flowers that have been laid on his grave. They all said a little prayer, touched their foreheads, looked longingly and moved along nicely to sit in silent contemplation of this most famous of holy men. And the old man all the time making sure that the faithful keep flowing past. Lovely scene. For me, sitting watching non-plussed, bemused, it was just a little on the comical side. I had to give the old man my best rolling Indian nod as I left and headed for the seafront.
The Bay of Bengal crashes on a rocky old shore. Really does. On the gloomy horizon, greys, dark blues and greens all muddy together, and closer in, guess what, huge shoals of rubbish and filth. Edgy Indian tourists, and even some even edgier Westerners, perched along the thin strip of ugly beach, and up and down the promenade, hawkers hawking trinkets to an absolutely unimpressable passing trade. Me walking quickly along, towards the only thing of beauty on this most dilapidated of beachfronts – a huge bronze statue of Mahatma Gandhi – and a proper French plaque proclaiming their colonisation of this most faded of elegant towns. They must have been very proud of themselves I thought wickedly to myself. In Pondy there's 'the white town' – the French part, and then there's 'the black town' – the Indian side. The former, pristine, charming, perfect, faded, elegant – just like the guide books tell you. The latter, squalid, filthy, bustling chaos, just like they don't know how to tell you. I walked up through the gardens of Govt. Square where Indians squatted – some just squatted staring at trees in the baking sunshine, others gathered in groups playing a game with nuts and a bottlecap shaker on the dusty earth. The smell of sewage. A damp, thick heat.
Back over the canal, through the crazy shops and pouring rain that came from nowhere and suddenly I'm horizontal in my prison cell sleeping soundly. One momentary hour later I awoke in a sweat, having hoped that my exhaustion might take me through to the morning, but there I was, in my bleakest of rooms, and I needed to get out. One minute after stepping outside I'm treated to an absolute torrent. A humungous downpour. Everyone is running for cover, everyone suddenly looking in shops they had no interest in one fraction of a second earlier. I'm there looking at watches, clocks, digital watches, wallclocks, soaked, for a full hour, chatting to the friendly, relaxed, dry, understanding shopkeeper who gives his best rolling Indian nod when I leave. I ran to a hotel bar and bought myself one of those infamous Royal Challenge beers. I got back to my cell, tried to tune my radio into something English sounding, something without that intense screaming warbling frequency noise thing drowning out the nice man's voice talking about 'every American's duty' or something… and I read, re-read my one trashy novel until late. I think I'll be leaving Pondicherry tomorrow. In the morning. Early.
God! It was good to get on that 7:20am bus and out of Pondy. The rain stopped as though it had been pulled away by a giant unseen hand and Pondy was returned to hot, hosed down, dripping, soaked. Actually it was a lovely morning on the bus, racing along past flooded paddy fields and endless tiny villages along a perfect new highway with a fancy tollgate. I was the only European on the bus and I spent the entire journey staring blankly out of the window and occasionally chatting to my very much too close neighbour, our bodies crushed right up against each other the whole way on account of my bags, my goddam bags…
I managed to avoid the rickshaw touts at Mamallapuram bus stand and sat down to a perfect masala dosa and much-needed cup of tea in a delightful modern hotel restaurant, served by eager young boys who looked like they were working their first Saturday job. I checked myself into a simple room in a far simpler hotel than the one I had eaten in, and went down to the beach, passing a very, very fancy hotel with a swimming pool and proper tourists sitting there doing proper sunbathing. The beach here is large, long, but rough, and wild, and there's no people sitting here save for the fisherman mending their nets and doing their fisherman thing. I think the tourists must all cycle up the coast to the more desolate places… The place has a sleepy vibe, the sun is hot, and there are many small cafés and clothes shops, little shacks filled with carvers carving figures out of stone, all manner of handicraft and industry going on. Absolutely everyone is smiling and friendly and utterly insistent on giving and receiving a jolly 'Hello!' That I liked. Puts you at ease. And it didn't take very long for me to realise that that's all there is to it here. They're not particularly after anything, they're not on that mad push you see in some places where you know you're just being coerced into spending your money. So I settled in quick, and felt more relaxed than I have done for quite a while.
I sat for a long time in a beautiful French café listening to Frenchmen chatting, them smoking endless cigarettes, drinking endless beers and talking like only the French can. Such a laid back atmosphere here, and later when I went for a nap, I dreamed I was floating in the water going downstream a beautiful river. Woke up feeling deeply refreshed and calm and decided it was time for a beer at the infamous Moonrakers.
The place was packed, and as I walked in, I ran into The Mellow Australians from The Backwaters Boat, and suddenly the entire street lost its power, absolute pitch darkness blackout, followed by a brief silence, then peals of laughter and chatting and people lighting their lighters for those like us who could suddenly see nothing. We all made it stumbling upstairs and sat down for a beer – many beers as it turned out – and talked travelling nonsense about countries we'd been, and places we're heading for, and what do we do at home and what we want to do next and on and on until the place closed, and before I knew it I'd fallen in to conversation with two lovely young ladies, originally from Dakota, doing voluntary work with handicapped kids in a nearby village. They were up in Mamallapuram for the weekend, and they were out to have fun.
Before long, everyone was ushered upstairs to sit at long tables and continue drinking and talking. More French people, more drunken conversations on everything from gurus to Goa, and then the rum came out. We drank until two, and then it was five of us out in the street all arm in arm, walking along dark and rainy pathways back to French David's apartment. This French guy really did look like a younger, browner, smugger version of David Byrne, and there he was, laid back on his bed, smoking (like a professional), and talking and stroking the hair of one of The Dakota Girls, her kind of freaked out and kind of loving it, him going on about his guru, her tucking her hair behind her ear every few seconds, and the Indian guy from Moonrakers was suggesting a massage to The Other Dakota Girl, her now smoking constantly, fidgeting, losing patience, and it all started to turn into a kaleidoscopic, cinematic rush of subtle events and inuendos adding up, crowding in on us, and then me and The Dakota Girls had to leave the room and stand outside in the downpour just to try and get some grip on reality back into our lunatic minds. David Byrne was lying back on the bed, looking sad – looking pathetic in fact – and the Indian guy was preparing his room for the massage with too large a grin on his overjoyed face, and all of a sudden I was stumbling down stairs with a Dakota Girl on each arm, out into the dripping street, sloshing along in the middle of the night, and them talking nineteen-to-the-dozen about I-don't-know-what and us all laughing about the whole thing, about how quickly it turned, and especially for them, into something just Ever So Slightly Worrying, and our timing was perfect, our instincts were good. We were pleased with ourselves, and drunk, and I was happy, standing in front of my hotel in the rain with a Dakota Girl on each arm, them having walked me home like the perfect gentlemen that they are, and suddenly BANG! I can see that the shutters are down. It's 3.35 in the AM, the lights are off, and we're standing in front of a large gate, shuttered, locked, shut, in the rain, and they're laughing, and I'm agog, very much locked out of my hotel for the night.
And so it came to pass that I spent the night with The Dakota Girls in their beautiful room by the beach, with the perfect mosquito net, and the gushing of water coming off the roof, and the rain coming down, and the waves behind that, and the three of us curled up snug as spoons, all as lovely and innocent as the innocent children that we are. Morning came, and I peered out of the mosquito net, saw it was still raining, and decided against leaving until it had cleared up. There they were, two lovely sleeping ladies from Dakota, and then me in the middle, the third spoon in the set, and we slept on until 9:30, when the sun came out and we were returned to the land of the living. I thanked them, they had been gentlemen, they really had, and so had I. I really had. Last night was wild, there was madness in the air, it had been like a private party for the closest of strangers and I left feeling hung over, silenced, and stupidly happy.
With the rest of the day I nursed myself back from the dead with omelettes and coffees and cigarettes and sleep. Watched some unwatchable bad TV, chatted to new people, all of them on the way somewhere, all of them with a lifetime of stories to tell, and fought with mosquitos which were vicious and serious and wouldn't give in. Evening brought me a huge silverfish in a lovely sauce, a single beer, and a complete contrast to the night before. Just the quietness of a Sunday evening in a sleepy seaside village on the east coast of India, and I retired early to read my new book, swopped with The Alchemist, an American novel from one of The Dakota Girls, by Dave Eggers, called You Shall Know Our Velocity. Read it if you can – I am – and the writing is fresh, funny, messy and wild. The perfect book for a crazy weekend. And I still have to tell you about Ashèn, and then Simon – two Englishmen.
Two very different, very interesting Englishmen…
Ashèn is a happy chappy, yes he is, and he's been coming to India since the 70's. He's spent about 10 years in real time here, and he's been an Osho sannyasin for the last 25 years. But basically he's really into books, and I met him browsing a bookshelf of the tattiest books I've ever seen for sale, and we swopped, chatted, and went for a wander along the beach, musing on this and that, following the path around the Shore Temple to the next beach, then up Pound Shop Alley – a streetful of shacks selling all kinds of tat for only 60 rupees a piece – back to the busy bus stand and then up the main drag to drink masala chai and munch on cinnamon rolls. He talked of his encounters with enlightened beings – about meeting people who show absolute, unconditional mind-blowing love – and his own quest through meditation, yoga, drugs, prison, in search of same, travelling through India on his motorbike. He was a nice guy, he felt like someone I could talk to for hours, but he had to go. He had to get on his bike and drive down to Tiruvannamalai to walk round the mountain – Arunchula mountain – along with half a million other pilgrims who are about to descend on the place for a week long festival. They say that Arunchula actually IS Shiva. And the festival sounds like quite something. But I must head north to Bangalore. I have Vipassana to consider after all… But as for Ashèn – he's a man on a mission and a great mission it is to be on. I might just make it down there myself…
And so Simon. Briefly, Simon. This man I had a few beers with – we ate calamaris, we drank terrible coffee in the Tibetan place, we smoked Golden Virginia, and he told me about his life. Originally from Jersey he ran away to LA when he was 17 and tarted himself about working here and there for a few months. Came home broke, went back to Mummy and Daddy and Hated It. Scraped the cash together to go to India, age 18 with a friend, and he went with nothing, became a sadhu, grew his beard and wandered India until his visa ran out. Simon said he was totally accepted by the sadhus, became one of them, and told me some of them eat the human flesh of dead people. He'd spent time up in West Bengal, lived with tribal people, hanging out with a guy he began to distrust, a man so wild and carnal, so out there, a kind of Hannibal Lecter, who would fly into the craziest and most unpredictable of moods, and talk of eating brains, human brains… He didn't know if he could go back. He gave me a wild look. All this kind of madness, for hours and hours… And then, year after year, Simon kept coming back to India, slowly learning about stone-carving, and meeting the stone workers, and now he buys all kinds of stoneware and statues every winter and sells same every summer, back in Blighty, in London, to the rich, to the loaded in fact, and even to The Queen! Simon is, and it has to be said, a man to whom words come easily, and he talks his stories out of his mouth endlessly, tangents and timelines and the wildest of tales, critiques and opinions crossing over, mixing seamlessly into one another, all delivered in the most English of accents. A true character! A toast for Simon! And a toast to Mamallapuram – the most mellow of places!!! Is it really time to leave?
This morning in Mamallapuram, before getting on the bus to Chennai, I stopped by St. Mary's Health Centre, disturbing a lovely gentle old nun reading her Bible in her Indian green consulting room, and she took my pulse, prodded my stomach, listened to my breathing and gave me a selection of pills to deal with my bad stomach. I think I may have had a few too many chillies in the past few days and things are Not Right, things are All Wrong in there, and now I have to take a colourful selection of Indian medicines to Get Right again. Even after the first dose, sitting on the bus up to Chennai, I felt much better, more settled.
But Chennai is a city, and a big city – with a lot of traffic and a lot of people – and I took, on good advice, the 5 rupee, 45 minute bus across town from the bus stand to Central Station. I wanted to see it, buy a ticket out, then sleep, and that I did. It was manic up there, people streaming in and out from all directions inside the station, traffic coming and going in all directions outside the station, and I made myself buy, with a resigned kind of hunger, from the very nice lady in the Foreigners' Reservation Office, a ticket for tomorrow to Bangalore. I don't need to see this city, and I can be pretty sure that this city doesn't really need to see me. I rickshawed across town – down to Triplicane – and checked into Paradise, feeling shattered, hungry, alone.
A really very beautiful girl (American I think, and lovely!) desperately asked me where she could stay and I pointed her towards Paradise! She disappeared quickly with a kind of panicked look and I retired as early as possible having shooed away the beggars, and drank a final cup of chai in a funny little shack run by three funny looking guys. My room was decent enough, and it even had a TV for me to catch up on the news. But I did nothing, not even eat, and she, the lovely American had unsurprisingly disappeared into her room, so I fell asleep easily and quickly, the lights on, the fan going round… Tomorrow is, as they say, another day.
Today, the day of Brother Charlie's birthday, Happy Birthday Brother!, I sat in special masochist cheapest and best Economy Class on the 7 hour trip to Bangalore. I had reasoned to myself that maybe I should experience Economy Class at least once, it was a short journey, it wouldn't be too bad… Certainly started out okay, but after 2½ hours, with the large family sat opposite me (by one millimetre) eating non-stop eggy, leaking biryanis out of newspapers for what felt like forever, I started to really regret my decision.
They snacked at every opportunity, every half hour or less, seemed absolutely constant, disgusting it was, and each time was an operation, a real re-arrangement of the carriage, and the lovely little kid with the smiley sad face wouldn't stop fidgeting, sitting on, falling from, climbing on and off his smiling Dad's lap, face, arms, sister, grandmother… I read my book like a madman, breathing through flared nostrils, trying to practise patience and compassion and equanimity and just about anything that would make that sweet li'l kid stop kicking me gently with his foot in that oh! so perfectly innocent and sweet li'l way. And yes, the countryside was amazing. Huge landscapes with curious hills and vast sweeps of seemingly uninhabited land populated by solitary cyclists and grazing animals. But I have to confess, I was so glad, so very glad to finally arrive in Bangalore to the mad rush of rickshaw sharks waiting for me in the darkness outside the station, and I got my pre-paid ticket, and pushed my way through the seething mass of vermin-like drivers to my rickshaw and arrived off a Speedy Gonzalez highway into the disarmingly relative calm of a hotel courtyard. Atmosphere of disorganised, managing chaos and finally, finally, praise the Lord, I was roomed up, forms filled, monies paid and horizontal, sleeping…
Chennai seemed big, but Bangalore seems bigger. I went for a walk in the downtown area today, and it was hot, much hotter than I had expected. I had slept soundly last night but woke shivering, England-style, a blanket and a jumper wrapped badly round me. Out on the busy roads of the metropolis – walking the cracked and dusty pavements past huge multi-purpose buildings crammed with offices, banks, and hotels – within seconds I was dangerously parched, and I had to take refuge in a pizza and a bottomless coke (most expensive meal I've had in India so far).
And today I decided, after much consideration, and even though it may be a lot of fun and I might meet some interesting people, that I must go up to Goa, and probably go slowly down the coast over the border to Gokarna. It's a beautiful area, and I need to get a proper tan and eat more seafood. It ain't right to be in the cities when you don't need to be. I'm supposed to be on holiday.
I shall wander Bangalore over the next few days, and then I'll get myself a fancy train ticket to the coast. Best to be at least one step ahead at all times…
I've been wandering the city and eating like a king. Down by the City Station, I happened upon the busiest street I think I've ever walked down, just seemed like the whole world was there, and everywhere you look there's noise and activity and colour. It's an area where the normal rules of traffic don't apply, and so it's a serious challenge to simply walk down the street, dodging cyclists and auto rickshaws – people coming at you from every possible direction – the people swarming around you as you try and work out where you're going. Every available square inch of the dusty stacked-up buildings was taken up with signage for all manner of things from films to traffic warnings to hotel signs – just an unbelievable density of hi-colour faded graphics and sound. Somewhere off to the left a temple in amongst the shops, filled with people, all packed like bees in a hive, and the incredible throbbing noise of drumming and chanting, the sound blending with an absolute cacophony of carhorns and rickshaw meeps. Bewildering intensity and heat until I finally gave in, utterly exhausted and totally parched, and got myself out of there in one manic rickshaw ride, where for the first time the driver actually used his meter, and so up to the quieter, greener side of town and straight into a lovely Chinese restaurant where people dressed chic and talked relaxed, drank Pepsi and ate fantastic dishes that made me really aware that this is a thoroughly modern city – almost futuristic – everything a total blend of cultures and languages, technology and cuisine, everything available, everything negotiable…
In another very, very busy restaurant, welcomed in by a very, very overdressed, impossibly humble, smiling doorman, I spent a very pleasant hour with a Bangalorean computer programmer, both of us talking broken English and enjoying the most delicate, delicious, and downright amazing Andhran thalis of gentle curries and rice served on huge banana leaves. The food was served from big pots by smiling non-stop waiters and it kept on coming in the eat-as-much-as-you-can tradition and I left feeling good, stuffed, and went to the bottle shop to get a cold Kingfisher, the sugary, chemically Indian beer that guarantees hangovers if you have more than one, had it wrapped in newspaper, served in a plastic bag and enjoyed with an American movie back in my chilly hotel room. Bangalore is an inspiring, crazy city, but much as I love the energy of the place, I must say I'm looking forward to heading up country to the west coast – to sea, sunshine, and seafood. I'll arrive on my birthday, and this time I'm booked on a fancier class of train. It's a treat. My present to myself!
Happy birthday to me yesterday! And a huge thankyou Thankyou! to those of you that wrote to say hello, it means a lot… The truth is that it was a very secretive affair, a private party in my head which I honoured with a day of roasting in the blazing sunshine on the beach here in the mellow village of Benaulim on the coast of Goa. I drank all the beer I could, ate all the seafood I could manage, and talked to hardly anyone all day – wandering the beach, smiling at the hawkers hawking, the fishermen mending their nets, and all the pretty girls being bothered by the flockloads of Indian tourists…
The journey up from Bangalore was an inglorious affair. A huge stop-start rickshaw ride up to Yeshvantur Junction with a smiley meter-using driver who attacked the traffic revving through gaps and around holes with an urgency quite unbecoming… And then the overnight train to Goa, in special breezy air-conditioned fancy class, sitting next to a Goan father and son on their way back from Chennai for the father's medical checkup, him with some evil scabby, slightly weeping wound up his leg that my eyes kept coming back to. They talked non-stop the whole 13 hour way, blabber, blabber, blabber in their what seemed to me (after a sneaky and illegal Kingfisher drunk swiftly by the open door of the train before the fascist inspector in his far-too-hot uniform caught me and ushered me personally back to my seat, kindly overlooking said beer) an almost ullulating language, the stream of vowels seeming to outrun the consonants in a way that made it sound like the words were tripping over themselves in a race to reach the end of their sentences. Anyway, I slept deeply, switched their blabber off, and only awoke when during the night the train came to a heavy gentle halt in the darkness on the edge of a forest of tall thin white-barked trees, one or two people wandering along the tracks to look at the train and its sleepy passengers. A feeling of great silent calm and anticipation for the train coming towards us, its headlights approaching almost imperceptibly slowly from an umber horizon. Some passengers, smoking, walking on the tracks, watching. And then, almost as we had forgotten why we were waiting, the train was upon us, hurtling towards us on the line not three feet away, the trackwalkers scrambling up into the carriages, blurring lights and lives rushing south, and then our train slowly pulled away to the horizon, a gentle jolt as the carriages tugged away from stopped. Arrived as the light was coming up in the town of Margao to a sunny six o'clock morning and a beautiful gentle motorbike ride down to Benaulim along the country lanes, breeze-a-blowing and feeling good.
I've got a great room at Rosario's, and I'm going under the radar for a few days now, you'll have to wait to hear about a lovely couple from Cornwall who are off to the Andaman Islands soon (the recent throat-slitting murder on the deck of a ferry from there to Chennai be damned), and then the Englishman who now lives in Berlin with his German girlfriend but seems to distrust German women en masse, and the eccentric, somewhat lurching, chain-smoking Scotsman with a penchant for the flesh of young children, (there it is again – that cannibal theme), him with a deepening marriage to the alcohol, and stories coming out of his mouth at a rate of knots, promising us that the real crazies are on their way to Benaulim in the next week or so – that should liven the place up, I can tell from the way he told me. He's going off to the jungle in a few days to hunt not only tigers, but with a goal to eat monkey's brains. The man is funny, but funny-just-ever-so-slightly-worrying which makes him even funnier…
You can think of me spending days blankly roasting in the sun down on that sandy strip of beach, wallowing in the surf and then sometimes swimming out beyond the breakers in the perfect sea, sipping beers in beach shacks, eating those perfect spicy seafood dishes… It's a hard life, but someone's got to do it.
To put into words the slow days of the last week feels now more like a duty than it should, but I will try. I have come up to Margao, Metropolis, the big city, (actually the bustling little town), forsaking the beach, to sit in a crumbly old bookshop, listen to the BBC, and type away on this clunky keyboard under the breezy fan. The days are hot, dry and timeless. I have been roasting, reading on the beach, feeling like I'm living my side of a slowly cooking surface of skin. I imagine you there in the other world behind the screen reading this now in the cold. For me it's been a week of quite intense heat and considerable silence, a hallucination of continual dancing tinfoil light on the water and the horizon with its islands lined by a thin bright white horizontal stripe. Everything a small shift of the eyes away. Hours like minutes and minutes like hours passing by in waves, time meaning little other than the inevitable arc of a sun too bright to look at…
One day, in this kind of state, like a mirage, a huge painted elephant appeared on the sand led by three bearded orange-robed sadhus, the bulk of the animal in the heat seeming almost cruel as it lumbered along with its holy men in tow. And all along the beach, huge white browning Germans – their vast carcasses of meat cooking in the relentless slow heat – covered only with the smallest of costumes. But also perfect Baywatch beauties, almost naked to my eyes, walking silhouetted in the crashing surf as if for some ridiculous advert for white rum. Mostly paired or grouped. Some couples cycling along, just above the waterline, headed for the remote beaches, and me there paralysed by the constant sound of the waves dreaming whole paragraphs of spiralling verbose poetry in the heat.
I met a German cyclist who has just cycled (cycled!) from Stuttgart to Delhi. Five months across every kind of landscape, through all kinds of cultures and him telling me that he met a man who was walking (walking!) from Tokyo to London. Which just goes to show that there is always someone somewhere doing something more ridiculous than you…
One evening, with two English couples and the Englishman from Berlin, I went down to a beach party at Domnic's (yes, only one i required). Raced down there on the back of a motorbike to a huge fire and welcoming smiley staff. An evening sitting drinking on the windy beach, listening to the sub-Butlins band doing their cheesey renditions of classics like Lady in Red, us all falling around laughing and trying to play pool, each of us slowly unravelling our stories as the night wore on and the people came and went. In the background the constant turning crashing of the scary black waves. And a pair of exotically beautiful French sisters somehow talking impossibly of craquelure, and all the men with their tongues hanging on their every word. On the drunken way back, over the dunes, up the lane, on the bike, we raced up and down, protecting the walkers from the machete-wielding maniacs and seven foot snakes, practising turns and stops and racing as we went. Back at the ranch, rumours of The Sculptor, an Austrian artist who makes vase-like sculptures out of a local clay. He is said to never leave his room, smoking constantly, sculpting his sculptures and working for an exhibition. Often hearing the strains of blues music drifting across the courtyard from his place. Also the loud bleeping song of the crickets, cicadas, whatever they are, and the yelps and howls of the local dogs, and the snuffling awful human crying of the pigs in the darkness just before sunrise. The Belgian shouting 'Ja! Ja! Ja!' at the pigs and the nightwatchman in his flying dutchman hat and his dogs roaming, him sitting sleeping by the gate under the palm trees in the stillness.
One day becomes another on the beach, roasting by day, talking to people in the night, but one day I went down to Palolem on the back of the motorbike with the Englishman from Berlin. He had a crash a year ago, not far from here and lost a toe, had his wrist mashed into a stretched sewn joint of meat, his face filled with metal and thanks to the finest microsurgery has ended up with the look of a young Steve McQueen. I've never felt safer on the back of a bike. We took the scenic route down the coast along quiet, tropical country lanes, cows sitting unlikely in pairs in the middle of the road on the busiest bends. We passed by perfect Portuguese Catholic churches in ramshackle villages, out into forested countryside and all the way the sun burning hot, us saved only by the wind. We crossed the river on the ferry with a motley collection of cars and bikes, us looking out for crocodiles, seeing nothing and then heading towards them hills, opening up the bike on the high plateau-like roads, lush green trees below us in the valleys. And then, wending our way down from the hills down steeply curving dusty empty roads, the wind roaring in our ears to a point where you can see south for miles across a picture perfect postcard scene of deserted white sandy coves backed by lush jungle. And so on down into Palolem along busy narrow tracks – buses, bikes and tourists all edging forward in a cacophony of carhorns and shouting – each side of the road lined with endless shacks selling sarongs, lungis, and all the usual over-priced tourist handicrafts.
Palolem beach is set in a perfect sandy cove, enclosed neatly by a James Bond island just off the beach at one end and a headland near the border of Karnataka at the other, with no hawkers hawking (!) and plenty lovely ladies frollicking in the brilliant sunshine. So we sat ogling, drank water and enjoyed the scene. Palolem seemed to be filled exclusively with Beautiful People, and we sat watching them play, took a swim in that perfect warm surf, ate the most exotic seafood lunch and rested until mid-afternoon, me entranced by the paradise of it all. We flew back via Margao along the main road, really opening up the bike, and really feeling the power of the machine surging us forward around the cows, dogs, buses, bikes and meeping rickshaws all zooming north. And all the way the feeling of freedom an intense rush, that incredible overwhelming roaring of the wind in the ears, and the potholes and speedbumps insignificant in our race back to Benaulim. Back at the ranch we sat windblown, dazed, vibrating, still feeling the world coming at us headon at 160 kph. It was probably a good hour before we felt like we'd arrived, and I decided I was ready to go and see The Sculptor.
The Sculptor, being Austrian in a somewhat self-important way, with a command of English limiting his conversation only to himself and his work, talked about 'his art' and the struggle with the materials. I tired quickly as I always do with the self-obsessed and left him to smoke himself to oblivion. I heard that he set his bed on fire whilst he was out, which I think is not only quite an achievement, but very telling… His work is good though. His non-functional vase-like objects remind me of the banyan tree. Fired they will look beautiful. They may even sell…
One evening as I returned from another indescribably blank day of roasting in the sun down on Benaulim beach somewhere, my tan now deepening nicely thankyou, The Killing Man came in his van to the football pitch outside Rosario's, and tied up four squealing pigs by their hoofs. Men gathered around in the dusk, and the screaming, panic-stricken pigs with that particularly awful human quality to their crying that makes you feel their fear, were butchered one by one with a large crude knife, and then thrown unceremoniously into the back of the pickup, no doubt to be driven off to market somewhere. That sound is a particular thing – the sound of a pig that has a few seconds to live, that has just watched his fellow pigs scream and shudder and then go limp. But that don't make bacon anything other than delicious, and it's good to see death close up from time to time…
As for me, I have decided to stay here by the beach until I go mad, or black, or both. Which means at least until the New Year – there are beach parties and fireworks to look forward to, more people to meet, and I'll write again soon. It must be time for my swim.
Ho! Ho! Ho! And a very Merry Christmas! to all of you! Another week or so has passed and I can tell you one thing for sure – that Oxford's Concise Medical Dictionary has a very understated definition of Giardia, the bug that graced my system over the past week, liquidised the contents of my stomach and then ejected the foul-smelling fluid explosively from both ends of my body, so very nearly simultaneously that I was quite unsure which way to turn. It has been, therefore, a week in which my excursions have been limited to distances within reach of toilet facilities. And whilst this has enabled me to go to the beach, the gurgling and the painful knife-twisting stomach cramps have generally been the signal to make for the nearest toileterie at a most undignified pace.
The morning after the night before when I was emptying my body contents into the porcelain, I knew that even in my delirium I would have to make the long walk alone in the sun, staggering past the handicraft sellers, one foot in front of another like a dead man, all the way up to the crossroads to see the man in the Medical Shop. For the first time ever I was left alone as I made my way up there, stared at, watched, and later I was told by an earnest German that he didn't think it was possible for a man to go so green. I made it back to my room and slept for an entire day, praying that the drugs would work quickly. And they have worked, but slowly, and mostly I've been quietly resting in Rosario's, or reading on the beach, entranced by the heat and the gentle crashing of the waves, and it's been an almost serene, relaxing time, punctuated with bouts of nausea, and then periods of absolute normality where I've managed to eat delicious food in fine company, and in the last couple of days, even dare to drink a cold and refreshing Kingfisher. But it hasn't been easy. Giardia is a horrible bug that inhabits the human small intestine. They have four pairs of flagella, two nuclei, and two sucking discs used for attachment to the intestinal wall. And it doesn't die easily. I'm on the 10th day of medication now and just beginning to feel like I, my stomach, is returning to normal.
I'll write more in the next few days. I've got to tell you about the trip to Panjim (Panaji), the capital of Goa, and about a perfect day playing pool with The Slovenians and the German cyclist Peter, in whose honour we managed to have a very funny impromptu li'l party before he left to cycle from Delhi to Kathmandu. Then there's the night of Rosario's Christmas Party, the perfect Goan buffet, and the endless firecrackers and the drunkenness. And the days of silence, deep contemplation, peace even, as I slowly get better – times when I've felt I can see my whole life… All this and more to follow as soon as I have recovered properly. Have a great time over the festive season…
A very belated Happy New Year! to y'all out there. I'm still alive, having fully recovered from the evil Giardia bug, am still getting browner, and have just been enjoying a very welcome break from the computer.
Life here at the beach is so slow and easy that it's been easy to let the days drift by in a blur of heat and breeze. Jan the Belgian wins the prize for The Most Overused Phrase Of The Festive Season. There is a small bottle of beer here in Goa (here, beer, here) which is relatively light and relatively sugarfree (and some of them are evil, let me tell you) called Kings. Then there's the fancy cigarettes called Assos. Fancy in the sense that they cost more than Rs 8 a packet, and that they have proper filters like on proper cigarettes. Anyway, Jan has a great smiling, slurring accent and the way he would ask for "One Kings and a packet of Assos!" had everyone rolling around with laughter. So much so that he could no longer ask for One Kings! and had to resort to asking for One small beer – Kings please… which was even funnier, as everyone would drawl in unison and laughing One Kings!. Poor old Jan. He made his name with this one phrase. That and the concept of Stagging which refers to the drinking of the cheap and rough old brandy called Stag. Him and Savage Paul the Scotsman would often go out on these mad drinking binges, usually resulting in one or both of them staggering around in the middle of the night in search of one last One Kings! with the dogs barking and the bemused old nightwatchman politely shining his torch and opening the gate to let in the madness until the heads started rolling and the last drink led to the inevitable pre-dawn crawling shuffle back to the room. The sight of a staggering moustachioed stripey shirted lunatic wending his way across the sandy football pitch with those dogs snapping around his heels in front of Rosario's Inn at 4 o'clock in the morning looked like something out of a Buster Keaton film. You had to be there…
Another image that comes to mind is the day the whole village appeared out on the sandy football pitch (which bears a striking similarity to the pictures of the Martian surface come to think of it). Two boys were leading two huge water buffaloes into the centre of the dusty pitch where they set them facing each other, and the crowd, maybe two hundred people all shouting and betting, trying to push the buffaloes towards each other to get them to fight. But these poor creatures, coerced into something they didn't understand, showed absolutely no interest in fighting each other in the blazing heat of the midday sun, they just looked at each other, looked around at the jostling, laughing, shouting crowd and much to the cacophonous amusement of the assembled multitude, these two huge lumbering creatures, with their enormous curling horns, seemed to agree to lumber off back down the road to get back to their quiet shady spot under the trees down towards the beach. The crowd went wild and the buffaloes broke into a trot, and in a farcical scene the village chased the buffaloes back to their trees and the traffic weaved around them, horns blaring, people shouting and everyone laughing. What a scene…
And on that same football pitch, but this time at night time, and after a considerable number of drinks and merry-making, we enjoyed the amazing, the incredible Goan version of the traditional Cornish sport of Wok Riding. Take one wok, a good one, with strong handles. Attach said wok, using rope, to the back of a powerful motorbike and sit one person, arse parked down in the bowl of the wok, arms out in front holding the rope, and get the motorbike to take off across the sand at high acceleration. It's just like water-skiing, only funnier, and much much more dangerous. Seems best to keep your legs out to the side. I've never come across wok riding before, but if you have any pictures of people doing this bizarre sport, please send them in…
In the dead of the night with the insects throbbing their high frequency signals, and the dogs barking, defending their territory boundaries out to the left of the stereo picture, the view from the brown stone balcony overlooking the same sandy Martian football pitch is widescreen cinematic hi-fidelity surround sound…
And down on the huge stretches of desolate beach five brown eagles like vultures swooping over and around the shoreline hunting fish in the middle of the still, sun-bleached day. A gentle breeze for slow-crashing breakers, the occasional flickering silver in the water and along the golden sands the earcleaner from Pune, pockmarked and eyes-a-glinting with pocketsful of praise in his pockets, and there they are, The Maybe Tomorrow Girls, so it's walk in the water, and smile them away.
A million endless images too rich for words flitting through my brain, and as ever, no time…
So, here we are in Pune. I travelled up from Goa with a Canadian couple called Angelo and Esther – and it was quite a wrench to leave the mellowness of the beach for the harsh reality of the city. On the way up we passed by Dudh Sagar Falls, a huge snaking waterfall in a vast rocky canyon that the water wallah on the train described as like 'milk thrown on the earth by the gods'. A stunning and unexpected sight indeed that made me long for them Himalayas. Meanwhile, here in Pune the streetnames are all in Hindi, which means that finding your way round takes some getting used to, but at least the rickshaw drivers all seem quite happy to use their meters which means that most of the time bartering is not necessary. We went up to see Osho's garden in Koreagon Park, and it certainly has a very meditative peaceful atmosphere – all waterways and rockpools and bamboo groves. Everything you'd expect from a meditation garden, including beautiful stone buddhas looking serenely on. Except that the garden seems to be used mostly by young courting couples who lurk in every conceivable corner canoodling and smiling sheepishly. And then there's the Oshoites in their maroon robes, all looking like something out of a cheesy episode of Star Trek, awkward, self-conscious, ridiculous in their gowns…
I'm writing this from a dingy cybercaff that is playing the loudest heaviest rock music you can possibly imagine, and it's difficult to concentrate, but I do want to tell you about the trip we made yesterday to the Bhaja and Karla Caves. These caves are about an hour and half outside of Pune by local train, and they're Buddhist and Hindu temples dating from about 2500 years ago. We had to climb the side of a steep hill up hundreds of stone steps overlooking an ancient patchwork landscape to the caves themselves, hewn directly out of the rock into meditation chambers and wells and a large central temple. The feeling of peace up there was quite something and it wasn't hard to imagine a whole community living up there all those years ago, blissfully unaware of the noisy tourists that would follow them with their mobile phones and their disrespectful whooping and yabbering. The caves themselves had a certain resonance that really rang out when you found the right note and I could almost hear the monks who lived here all chanting in unison and that huge reverb echoing out across the dry valley…
On the way back to Pune on the slowest train I have ever been on we passed two trucks on the expressway, one a petrol tanker that had obviously exploded on impact with the other truck, and there was nothing left other than two smouldering skeletons of metal. I heard later that 5 people had died in the explosion, but what was strange was that the trucks had just been left there and the traffic was going cautiously around the wreckage. Anywhere else I imagine there would have been emergency vehicles on the scene and the road closed, but here, nothing other than utter devastation…
The heat in Pune is intense during the day and the city streets just reflect it all right back at you, so shade is a thing you actively seek, and water an absolute necessity. And at night it's surprisingly chilly – last night I woke up cold and it took a steaming hot (filter!) coffee to get going. And every morning a masala dosa – ah yes! – the masala dosa – India's greatest culinary invention! I could eat it morning, noon and night! Tomorrow morning we'll be taking the bus to Aurangabad, and from there on up to the Ajanta and Ellora caves. I'll write more when I can…
I've been neglecting this journal for quite a while and that's mostly due to very poor internet connections throughout Maharashtra and Gujarat, but now I'm here in Rajasthan I seem to be on a computer with a reasonably fast connection to the internet. Phew! So much has happened it's more than I can tell. I went to the amazingly ancient caves of Ellora and Ajanta which are between Aurangabad and Jalgaon with Angelo and Esther. At the Ellora caves you can really feel the age of the land. Goats wander the dry rocky hillsides and you come across scenes that seem impossible in the modern world. Caves that were dug out of the solid rock around 200BC, housing crumbling Buddhas carved over scores of years, entire temples inside the rock, some of them inter-connecting, once housing entire communities of monks and sadhus. Large rockpools and wells with frogs as the only inhabitants and a view across the brown parched plains to distant pyramid hills… Of course the place is overrun with tourists wandering around with their cameras, feeding the (very) cheeky monkeys. And they snarl if you try to shoo them away, and there's rickshaws and taxis going up and down the roads between sites, and there's the touts trying to sell you postcards and old Mogul coins, and outside the bigger, more impressive caves there are security guards telling you not to go here, but there, the whole place turned over from contemplation to tourism, which just seems so tragic for such a beautiful place. I think that both Ellora and the equally impressive Ajanta caves would be better looked after by living communities of monks. But of course historic places are just big business. Thousands come every year, and of course all non-Indians pay 25 times the price for the pleasure…
On the road up from Aurangabad to Jalgaon, a gruelling 4 hours in the most ricketiest rusting old bus bouncing over endless potholes we passed through a truly ancient, parched and patchwork landscape – biblical, brown and sparse with its pyramid hills rising as if from nowhere out of the plains. And all along these pockmarked honking roads, whole generations living meagre rough-shacked lives in the vast stretches of wilderness…
At the Ajanta caves, despite the tourism, we walked up to the observation point overlooking the caves in their horseshoe valley, poised on the hillside in a cartoon Shangri-la, and then crossing the dried up river and up into the dark caves themselves we came across Tibetan monks chanting in front of a large dying Buddha. And all around them, the cacophony of over-eager Indian tourists, and the more aged amongst them being carried by stick-thin wallahs in knackered old palanquins up and down the hundreds of steps under the fiercest of suns.
From the small town of Jalgaon we headed up into Gujarat passing through vast fields of black emptiness, suddenly lit by huge vertical striplights planted in the ground, spaced at huge intervals, tended by clusters of shadowy bodies wrapped in shawls industriously tending to something in the middle of the night, and the train ploughed on, to Ahmedabad – the smelliest, dustiest, and most frantic of cities with its endless stream of honking traffic, camels pulling carts, beggars begging forcefully, and somehow, in amongst it all, high up above the madness an oasis of peace and calm in the splendid marble-floored rooftop restaurant of Agashiye where we smoked from an apple-scented hookah at beautiful low wooden tables, sitting on perfect plump cushions, served by attentive smiling turbaned boys, who kept the hookah alight and made us feel like millionaires. Outside, down below, the noise of the city and the distorted wailing of the muezzin all faded away as the smart set came for dinner, and we prepared ourselves to travel on, up to Rajasthan.
We took the metre-gauge train, which is narrower than all the trains I've travelled on so far and we crammed ourselves into the smallest of bunks for the overnight trip, arriving at sunrise in the perfect fairytale landscape around Udaipur, where everything looks like it's in miniature even though the hills with their tree-lined horizons seem to stretch as far as the eye can see.
And here in Udaipur, overlooking the picture-perfect postcard scene on Lake Pichola with the famous Lake Palace Hotel as its wedding-cake centrepiece, I've been spending hour upon hour on the rooftops, just looking at the incredibly complex scene of jumbled buildings and minarets, everything happening everywhere you look. And as the sun goes down, everyone faces towards the Monsoon Palace up there on the hill and we all go quiet, as firecrackers and fireworks explode into the dusky sky, the wedding bands playing their ridiculously cheerful oompah music echoing across the valleys so that you can't pinpoint the origin of anything. This place is just an overwhelming feast for the eyes and a feast for the ears…
I spent an afternoon playing flute with the most amazing Rajasthani flute player. He is here, where I'm staying, with a Rajasthani Wedding Band, and every night, they play for hours on the roof, their music carrying out across the lake to be bounced right back off the hills, mixing with the never-ending noise of the city, the howling dogs and the hooting traffic. They're all virtuosos, with their large drum things and violin things and flute things. The flute player, dressed in white with a fantastic drooping moustache and Aladdin shoes, plays two vertical flutes at the same time, circular-breathing to maintain a low drone on one whilst pumping out the most incredibly creative rhythms and melodies on the other. Circular breathing on a flute is a very delicate affair, and this man can do it with the smallest of movements. It was a great honour to play music with him, and his patience and kindness as he showed me his exotic flurrying trills and countless fancy moves is something I'll never forget. They're going to be playing at the Lake Palace Hotel at the end of the month for the wedding of a famous Bollywood actress…
I had lunch one day in the centre of Udaipur, at one of the countless rooftop restaurants, overlooking the Shree Jagdish Temple, and down there, way below, in amongst the parping chaos of the rickshaws and scooters, seven tiny donkeys led by two brilliantly coloured saried women, the donkeys laden down with huge packs of building rubble, the ladies tapping them gently through the maelstrom, crossing the impossibly busy intersection, what with the women making for the temple steps, the women stringing devotional flowers for the pilgrims, the beggars with their long beards and filthy dhotis and begging bowls hopelessly following the shiny-eyed tourists with their brand new Indian clothes and fancy backpacks. And the sun beats down hard on the roads, everything too hot to touch. Two men on scooters, in amongst this total living chaos, stop to chat as buses honk their way through the most miniscule of gaps down the tiniest of crumbling streets as the one policeman looks on calmly and waves first one line and then another this way and that, everyone somehow accepting the madness, and there they are again, those seven tiny donkeys, coming back up the hill, moving more sprightly, their packs now empty, and weaving more expertly now through the constant, comical, beeping, roaring, belching traffic. When it's all too much in this heat, I retire to the shade exhausted by the intensity of it all. Siestas are the thing. An essential thing…
And later in the afternoon, back on my rooftop, I am, like the eagle I can see sitting perched high above me on another rooftop, sitting silently roasting, looking out across the peaceful lake watching the women washing, beating their brightly coloured clothes against the murky green water just down by the ghats there, the slapping echoing across the ever-so gently rippling surface of the lake as a puttering boatful of tourists passes by, and the birds twitter peacefully, and the cows flick their tails and park down in the quickly moving shade. Despite all the busyness, there's an indescribable sense of peace, as the musicians on the roof below start up their joyful Qawwali-like music for the third time today, and a child follows his mother as she lays out wet clothes on hot stone. A peace that is inevitably, immediately interrupted by a dark young couple with two smiling children chattering endlessly as two tiny stripey-backed squirrels scamper around the rooftop looking for scraps of food.
This evening, somewhere in the middle of this insanely stacked up town of endless rooftops and lives lived outside, as the big red sun went down over those fantastic camel-hump hills behind the Monsoon Palace, and the murky dusk faded into another hazy starlit night, the fireworks went off, exploding over the town and down below, beneath the courtyards and balconies, somewhere down in the street, the wedding party moves slowly up the hill, led by two clownishly uniformed sousaphone players, followed by a white painted cart pushed by three men blaring out the most terrible distorted musical racket, and behind them the drummers drumming and crazed dancers wheeling around in front of the groom, resplendent on his horse, all bejewelled and smiling, followed by a train of beautiful saris carrying electric candelabras, all of them swishing along in front of the man pushing the cart carrying its large and throaty generator, as they make their way up into the centre of the town, and all the time, motorbikes and rickshaws, cows and dogs and people all pushing past making their way wherever they're going… Everything here is a riot of colour and sound and constant activity, and I'm sure it's not just because it's the wedding season. Every direction you look a million stories waiting to be told, like the image of three children on one of the higher, very very high rooftops, five or more storeys above the street, playing cricket in a tiny space surrounded by a very very low wall. Them all laughing and yes, the ball went flying over, way down into some disgusting gutter, and one of them runs down to fetch it, and the other two watch as he appears and retrieves it from the filth, rinses it and runs back up the endless steep staircases to resume their game. Words are not enough to take all this in. Cameras could only suggest the vibrant intensity of it all, and every night I go to sleep exhausted, my mind teeming with unstoppable detail. I may well forsake the honeymoon hillstation of Mt. Abu and head straight for Pushkar. It feels like time to be moving again…
Holy Cow! Pushkar Smushkar! Arrived on the rusting, rickety old bus from Udaipur to the 5am streets of the holy town of Pushkar, and was walked through the darkness by a couple of hotel touts, first to a building site with a few stone huts attached, and realising that this was not where I wanted to lay my proverbial hat, then to Pink Floyd, a hotel where the boy in his groovy flared jeans explained that all the rooms were named after Pink Floyd albums, and they play, guess what, Pink Floyd, in the rooftop café. And non-stop. So I settled down in 'Animals', and after a siesta headed out down to the bohemian Sunset Café down by the ghats overlooking the lake where everyone gathers to watch the sun go down over the water. The lake at Pushkar is much smaller than in Udaipur and sitting drinking tea talking to a lovely old lady from Berlin I can cover the lake with the palm of my hand. Under the trees, an old man dressed in a dirty white suit with a dirty pepper-and-salt moustache (drooping as is the fashion here) with the cheekiest, most mischievous look in his wise old eyes, is setting up his drums and rattling around with his drumsticks as the boy, his apprentice, finds the master's rhythm, and they set off on the most amazing groove, virtuosic, energising and the sun does its job and melts down into a perfect gorgeous red as the moon comes up behind us, and the temple on the top of the hill above the lake lights its lights up to the summit.
And everyone is here – raggle-taggle sadhus mix with raggle-taggle hippies and the many Jesus-style Israelis with their various combinations of beards and dreadlocks, all sporting their regulation OM scarves and wraparound cotton trousers. There's even some Orthodox Jews knocking around in their black suits, hats and heavy beards, seeming to minister to the Israeli flock, and there's the awkward, perfectly turned-out bechinoed middle-aged tourists with their cameras and their edgy disapproving looks at the Western dropouts with their cigarettes and spliffs, dijeriduing and drumming…
With the sun down and the tea drunk, and the beautiful warm dusk firmly underway, everyone disperses up to Bhang Lassi Corner, in the centre of the town, a true Freak Street, and as the Lonely Planet rightly says, like something out of Wacky Races, where you can sit and drink tea at a filthy low table swarming with flies and watch the world go by with its traffic and cows and dogs and incredible mad bustling energy… With so much visual entertainment it's easy to do little other than eat, wander and sleep in Pushkar, and after 5 days, I really felt I'd had enough. I managed to get myself a new woollen blanket for the cold nights as I head north, and as I pulled out of Ajmer Junction on the night train up to Delhi it felt good to be escaping Hippy Heaven for the relative civilisation of the capital.
My God! That train ride up to Delhi was the journey from hell – I had the great good fortune of practising my equanimity with six (should have been five) of the loudest snoring people I have ever had the displeasure of travelling with. They all slept soundly, snored the whole 11 hour way, with me cursing under my breath and trying every technique known to humanity to block their godawful sounds out, until morning came and we pulled into Sarai Rohilla with me totally wired and tetchy, the carriage filled to brimming with the early morning commuters, and straight off the train into a smooth rickshaw ride downtown and into the sanctuary of my hotel room to sleep for a day and watch endless American movies on cable TV.
My few days in Delhi were spent organising my return flight home, running around various emporiums in search of a tailor to make me a coat, eating fine food, resting a lot, and eventually sorting out the ticket to Pathankot, the nearest train station to Dharamsala. Thankfully, despite the most hectic rickshaw ride and an impromptu tour of Delhi through the heaviest traffic I've ever experienced with whole miles of roads in total noisy gridlock, the journey north was smooth and easy. Old Delhi train station was confusing as hell, and swarming, just swarming, it seemed as though everyone was there and the Jammu Mail started out with many, many more people than seats. Two hours into the overnight journey, everyone seemed to have somehow sorted themselves out and settled down into their bunks or their various corners, and after an uneventful night we pulled into Pathankot bang on time at 7:50 am, exactly as predicted.
Feeling fresh and ready for the busride I joined a gaggle of Tibetan monks and nuns for the rattly four hour journey through Himachal Pradesh to Dharamsala and then up the mountain to McLeod Ganj, where HH the Dalai Lama has his home in exile. Despite concerns about finding a place to stay (I had been told that all the hotels were already jam-packed), for me it was easy – the first place I went to had a small single room with a balcony looking out over the valley – and I checked in, and sat there roasting in the bright sunlight looking at the view. The mountains rise up behind the hills, rocky and snowy, above dark green pine forests, the trees laced with prayer flags up and down the numerous winding paths, houses perched on terraced flats and dried-up streams flowing with rotting rubbish. And everywhere the familiar red robes of the monks and nuns wandering the muddy lanes of McLeod Ganj, the sound of the deep chanting rising up from the Dalai Lama's temple further down the hill, and in the main bazaar, countless shops run by wrinkled smiling people in their chubas and beads, endless mantras muttering as the prayer wheels flutter round. And at night-time it's cold. In fact, even in the daytime it's cold the minute the sun goes behind the clouds, but at night, when the sun disappears behind the hill, the temperature suddenly drops and you need layers, blankets, shawls, anything to stop the awful involuntary shivering. But the sky is clear, the stars are bright and it feels great to be here.
Yesterday, Michel the Frenchman and I had tea with a Tibetan refugee who had escaped over the mountains to freedom after being imprisoned for putting up Free Tibet posters. He got three years for this offence and one of the tortures he suffered was being hung by his feet and then having red chilli pepper kicked into his eyes. Surprisingly, he displayed no bitterness, but just a very cheerful determination to help his family in Tibet and get himself a good education here in India. As for me, I have registered for the Dalai Lama's teachings which start next week and I'm looking forward to exploring the area and also seeing if I can find the perfect tailor to make me that much-needed coat to cope with these chilly nights…
Countless power cuts, torturously slow internet connections and overly noisy cybercaffs have all thwarted several attempts at an update over the past week or so. Thinking back, I can report that I have fallen into a very simple routine. Every morning I have my breakfast on a nearby rooftop and sit warming up as the sun rises over the ridge. Daytimes are bright blue and sunny, and whilst the nights have been chilly in my small stone room at the Yellow Guest House, during the day, sitting on a balcony in part of the Tsuglagkhang Temple listening to the Dalai Lama's teachings, the sun gets so hot that we've all been covering our heads and drinking gallons of water. Imagine the scene as every day around noon thousands of maroon-robed monks and nuns, pilgrims and students gather huddled together in the large courtyard in front of the temple to listen to His Holiness. The Dalai Lama sits on his throne talking gently in Tibetan, explaining the various stages on the path to enlightenment, everyone listening as carefully as they can, all us Westerners tuned in on FM. HH has been talking about Patrul Rinpoche's Words of My Perfect Teacher.
Sometimes sitting there in the hot sun looking up at the snowy peaks the teachings seem childishly simple, obvious, and then you realise the overwhelming profundity of the Buddha's insight! And just how much work there is to do to even begin to experience the merest taste of it! The teaching sessions are 3 hours long and the best approach is to find a quiet spot with good radio reception, sit crosslegged and try to get into that 'firmly concentrated and loosely relaxed' state of mind and body. It is almost impossible to prepare for this. You just go along, find your place, find your way and sit. It is said that one 'should not feel discouraged when you get hungry or thirsty during a teaching that goes on too long, or when you have to put up with discomfort caused by wind, sun, rain and so forth. Just be glad that you now have the freedoms and advantages of a human life, that you have met an authentic teacher, and that you can listen to his profound teachings'. I have been both trying and failing to do this! It can be very gruelling, an act of endurance more than anything else, and despite feeling very inspired by what I've been learning I have now vowed! to see it through to the end, another 10 days or so, 'bearing heat, cold and whatever trials and difficulties might arise in order to receive these teachings'…
Circulating in amongst the crowd are the ever-present Indian police armed with their sub-machine guns, and the Tibetan security armed with their sharp suits and walkie-talkies, and at half-time monks come round and serve anyone with a cup the famous butter tea. I have to pass on that. It certainly isn't my cup of tea, although I have tasted it and really tried to enjoy it! By 4.30 every day the teachings have finished and everyone files out after the Dalai Lama has left, followed by the senior monks. The Karmapa brushed past me today which was an interesting experience. These highly-realised people radiate so much energy their presence alone is incredibly inspiring… And on the way back up the steep winding hill, the chaos of thousands wending their tired way home after a long afternoon's sitting, passing the lepers begging, the traders trading knick-knacks almost from the gutter flowing with filthy water, the trucks and rickshaws and jeeps honking their way through – the whole street just ahum with activity. One day on the road I met a man with only a square of hair on his head – an Israeli gentleman who had come from Rishikesh and had an amazing week high in a cave in the mountains with an ash-covered sadhu that had asked him to stay. We talked for hours and as he told me his story, I could relate to his fear of staying, of submitting. That really is something, more than I can put into words right now…
And I managed to find the perfect tailor to make me a jacket – a bandgala (closed neck). My former tailor, the man who made me my jacket when I was here in 1993, apparently became very successful, started drinking to celebrate his success, but ended up an alcoholic and losing his fortune through his addiction to drink. The man who sold me the cloth for the jacket said that six months ago the old tailor fell off a hillside blind drunk one night and died. My new tailor doesn't look the type (to drink) – Mr. Gupta is an ageing, smiling, delicate-looking man who operates out of a shack just large enough to turn round in and he promised me that my finest quality woollen long-sleeved bandgala will be ready in about a week. Can't wait… Meanwhile, think of me sitting on my balcony overlooking the valley each evening listening to the never-ending drumming, circling flutes and mad singing coming up from the Indian village, reading Words of My Perfect Teacher and trying everso gently to pacify the mind, this craaaazy mind…
The Dalai Lama's public teachings finished on Sunday, and the good weather along with it, since for two weeks the sun has been blisteringly hot and the skies a consistently beautiful clear blue – days so hot that it's been quite tough to sit and listen to the inspiring words of His Holiness. My resolve was strengthened by reading the texts in the evenings to the inevitable accompaniment of the lunatic musicians down the valley in the so-called Indian Village, where it seems wild parties have been going on night after night and the various sounds of throbbing drumming and the crazy joyous shouting singing carrying across the dark valley under perfectly clear and starry nights has been variously inspiring and also not inspiring! And the dogs! The dogs that never seem to stop yapping to their friends up the mountain, the cicadas humming fiercely in the background, the delightful retch of throats being cleared – the sense of never-ending activity has been just too much some nights! But the days have taken on their own rhythm, waking early, having breakfast at my favourite rooftop café, walking down the hill to the temple, drinking tea at the tea shack on the corner, dealing with the mellow security guards and bag searches, finding a place in the sea of people who've been attending the teachings, enjoying watching the wrinkly old faces of the Tibetans fingering their malas, sharing biscuits and tiny spaces with people who are just impossibly friendly for strangers, dealing with the hiss of the intermittently awful reception on the simultaneous translation, drinking in the wisdom that comes through, basking in the sunshine, loving every minute of it…
And at the end of each session the Dalai Lama walks through the devoted crowd back to his house, everyone sitting facing him with their palms together in absolute wondrous supplication to this amazing man, as his entourage of monks play the traditional ritual music and clouds of incense billow across the heads of the faithful, quickly followed by the incredibly charismatic 19 yr. old Karmapa, the second most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism, and he glides by, smiling his fiercely positive grin to the crowds, everyone's face lit up, and then The Rush as we all gather up our things and head for the exit, back out into the street, to practise what has been preached, to remember that we all want happiness and don't want suffering, to practice exchanging self for others, to maintain the wisdom realising the emptiness of all things, to show compassion by working ceaselessly for the benefit of all sentient beings!
And one day, walking with the thousands up the steep hill, having just heard about the inspiring life story of the yogi Milarepa, I noticed a group of monks looking up in the air to point at a handglider gliding, circling like an eagle above the crowd, flying just like Milarepa, the monks all with the astonished look of children seeing something for the first time.
Other noteworthy experiences include the beautiful Long Life Puja for His Holiness the Dalai Lama on the last day of the teachings; meeting Ling Rinpoche, the 19 yr. old reincarnation of the Dalai Lama's senior tutor; picking up my lovely new jacket from the tailors; the journey to the Karmapa's monastery – all of this will have to wait until the next update. I'll be heading down to Lucknow in 10 days or so to meet Bill and finally see The Dream Engine in action…
Oh, and I bought my first CD of the trip – Chö by Chöying Drolma and Steve Tibbetts, a piece of music I've heard part of and was really moved by, finally seeing it for sale in the Namgyal Monastery Bookshop. I can't recommend it highly enough…
There's just so much for me to catch up on it's difficult to think where to start. One thing I did neglect to tell you about was the day of the Holi Festival on the full moon at the beginning of March. It's a Hindu festival that I can't pretend to understand anything about, other than it's an excuse for everyone young and old to throw multi-coloured powders at each other. And it's madness – utter madness. The streets are filled with people running at each other throwing colour left right and centre until the entire population is moving around like a living Jackson Pollock painting! I actually found it almost scary, the crazy over-excited energy was just too much for me, and I hid in a café and just looked on in horror at the scene in the main square just the other side of the plate glass window. In fact, my friend Angelo (the Canadian writer I met in Goa) puts it well, talking about his time in Varanasi:
"Holi, also known as the Festival of Colours, (and not without reason), is a celebration of the onset of spring and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Merrymakers stock up on coloured water and brilliantly coloured gulal (powder) and proceed to pelt anything that moves, well, actually anything at all from people to dogs, cows, ducks, cars, trains and houses. The streets are speckled with a rainbow of colour and even the open gutters that normally flow with putrid raw sewage take on a celebratory hue… The normally squalid streets were alive with colour. Children ran wild carrying hand-cannons loaded with coloured water, men by the dozens hung out of rickshaws meant to carry two or three, others were piled on top of motorcycles. Those without some form of transportation danced through the streets, all of them caked in a crazy mélange of brilliant colours from the tips of their hair to the soles of their feet shouting: 'Happy Holi, Happy Holi!' Unfortunately… Holi is an excuse for far too many people to get drunk and make asses of themselves – many of the local papers warn of 'hooliganism' during Holi, and we certainly saw a fair bit of it. Luckily we were able to steer clear of the more sordid characters and enjoy Holi for it's purer elements, namely the unabashed joy of children…"
And I promised to tell you about a couple of other things. Firstly, the final day of the Dalai Lama's public teachings began around 7:30 am and by the time I made it down to the temple, there were already many thousands of people in place for the Long Life Puja, many Tibetan people who seemed to be in a state of absolute rapturous excitement, and it is a glorious ceremony, consisting of hours of the beautiful deep chanting that I can hear even in my sleep, everyone praying for the long life of His Holiness, and towards the end of the ceremony, bucketfuls of the tsog offerings are distributed to the assembled multitude by the younger monks, and it is total chaos as everyone rushes for a piece of these blessed items – with biscuits, chocolates, all manner of foodstuffs being handed out, the monks throwing packets over the crowd with wild and joyful abandon as the people surge this way and that, anticipating each throw, laughing as they fall on top of each other, everyone sharing out their catch to the people around them. It truly is a joyful occasion, and when the Dalai Lama left, with the incense billowing and the musicians blowing on their ritual instruments, everyone was just shining – a really beautiful sight to see…
That afternoon I took two rattly old buses – down the mountain and across the valley, taking in those breathtaking views of the hills – to visit the Karmapa's monastery on the edge of the small village of Sidhbari, where the unlikely sight of a fully fledged Tibetan temple sits above the various buildings of the Gyuto Tantric University. As I arrived, everyone was leaving, and I realised that I'd just missed one of the Karmapa's weekend public teachings. Putting it all down to karma, I had a look inside the amazing temple, soaking up that oh-so powerful energy that was there, and headed back up to Dharamsala to see if I could see the tailor.
Ah! the tailor! The first time I went down there (on the agreed date I might add) frustratingly I found the shop open (which really is no more than a tiny wooden shack with a couple of sewing machines in it) and my nearly-finished jacket hanging up on the rail, but no tailor to be seen, and I waited for hours that time, so it was a great pleasure to suddenly see his wonderful smiling face as I walked up the street towards his shack. He made me try the coat on and fussed around checking this and that, with his impeccable manner, and I paid him and made my way home feeling really ready for anything the weather might throw at me.
And the day after the teachings finished, the weather did in fact make a turn for the worse – bringing grey skies, intermittent rain and biting cold winds. It was as if all the old obscurations came back to cloud our minds, after having been so blessed with the clarity of perfectly sunny blue skies for two whole weeks. That morning I climbed the steep track up from McLeod Ganj to the Tushita Meditation Centre, where Ling Rinpoche, the 19 yr. old reincarnation of the Dalai Lama's senior tutor, had come to give a short question and answer session and enjoy a picnic in the lovely garden. I found it so amazing to sit and listen to him answering questions with his look of a young man and the wisdom of a truly advanced being. My impoverished mind is still trying to get its head round the concept of reincarnation, and the only thing that I can say is that the feeling I get when I meet these tulkus is one of absolute faith, certainty in the reality of rebirth. It's just beyond words…
The next day was the first day of the 10th Shoton Festival up at TIPA, which is set in a large courtyard high on the hill overlooking McLeod Ganj. The event was attended by the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa, Ling Rinpoche and many other high lamas, and naturally many Tibetans came to enjoy the singing and dancing, the incredible merrymaking and almost operatic style presentation, with both young and old performers swirling about under the huge tented canopy. The festival has been going on for a week and from my balcony I have been able to hear the sounds drifting across the valley – a perfect soundtrack to this dramatic skyline with the view of the snowcapped mountains behind the tree-lined ridge, with the huge eagle-like vultures and hawk-like kites swirling across the valley searching for food. I can't begin to tell you what a very beautiful place it is here…
The last few days have been quiet, and the sun has returned, so it's been great just to wander the cafés, to bask in the sunshine and drink in the spectacular scenery, to go the local widescreen movie theatre (I've seen The Gospel According To Mel now and was really very moved by it), to sit around talking to friends new and old, to do a slow circumambulation of the Dalai Lama's residence, turning the many prayer wheels filled with their millions of Om Mani Padme Hum's… It's been a peaceful time and I know it's going to be hard to leave all this and head back into India proper. I hear it's hot down there, and I go forward really in a spirit of adventure, interested to see just how much/little of these wise teachings I'll be able to put into practise… #:) haha
The slow journey down the mountain from McLeod Ganj on that rickety old bus was a sad one – I kept looking back at that amazing skyline with the clouds gathering round those snow-capped peaks and knew it would be a while before I would see a sight like that again. And the bus wound its way down along the pock-marked roads through winding valleys of terraced flats for five long hours until we finally arrived at Patankhot railway station. As the train trundled down through the night heading south-east through Uttar Pradesh, the heat gradually intensified, becoming closer, sucking the oxygen out of the air, the mosquitos got busy, and I learnt again how to submit to discomfort. It seemed like days, an endless stretch of interminable hours before I finally pulled into Lucknow station. It was early evening and dark outside. The place was buzzing with activity, and fighting off the rickshaw wallahs I dragged my self and heavy bags to the nearest hotel – the most certainly not to be recommended Hotel Mayur. At first, collapsing on the bed with the windy fan whirring and sipping a cold Pepsi, I felt relieved that I'd arrived, but soon I realised that the mosquitos weren't going away, the fan was merely moving the hot air around the room, and the bathroom was crawling with huge, inquisitive, disgusting cockroaches. I blocked up the door as best I could, turned on the TV and somehow slept through till morning when I resolved to get myself somewhere decent to stay.
But this would turn out to take another whole day to achieve, since I still had to suffer the Hotel Ramkrishna, where I soon learnt that with them not speaking hardly a word of English, and me not speaking hardly a word of Hindi, we were just bound to be in for some misunderstanding. And again, the room was disgusting, and the fan was too windy, and I had a fever, and the night seemed to last for ever. They tried to charge me twice for my dinner, they looked at me with the incredulous look of people who had never seen a European before, they nodded yes when they meant to say no, they tried to come in to my room at the strangest of times, they just seemed to have no understanding of anything! By now, in my weak and frazzled state, I was determined to get a really decent place, and to hell with the cost, so I got myself cycled across town to Capoors, a marble-floored air-conditioned oasis in the middle of the busy MG Road, and checked myself into a clean and quiet room with attentive room service, a gentle cool AC unit and a good colour TV. I hadn't realised quite how ill I had become, and ended up spending the next 3 days sweating out a fever, eating cautiously, tending to my liquidised stomach, and just waiting to feel normal again.
And then Bill appeared, walking straight into the deserted restaurant one morning as I was sipping on a lime and soda, him smiling from ear to ear, his friend Will Cleary cheerfully shaking my hand and their friendly English acccents bringing me out of my stupor and suddenly back to the present. Before long we were chatting away, drinking fancy coffees in Baristas, shopping for pop music in the market, and arranging our next meeting up at Sahara Shahar where they are working on a show for the unbelievably wealthy Mr. Subrata Roy, whose flower-bedecked, beautifully lit village, his private helipad, his vast expanse of greens and exquisitely laid out gardens, is reminiscent of some fantastical royal mediaeval past. When I went up there the next day I felt like I was entering the surreal world of The Prisoner, or perhaps NeverLand, as we drove up the wide empty avenues leading to perfect international bungalow chalets laid out around a huge cricket ground, passing gaudy painted statues suggesting more than a dash of Las Vegas kitsch, Mr. Roy's private swimming pool with its waterfall cascading over a fake rockery, his palatial dome-toppped mansion set in perfectly-tended green gardens. This is the land of the super-rich, of the impossibly wealthy, where everything is display and excess.
I was here to see The Dream Engine – the company that Bill, Les, Will and Kirsty all work for – which features an aerialist suspended from a helium-filled balloon that drifts over the audience in a kind of aerial dance. As dusk approached, thousands of well-dressed Saharan staff gathered on the cricket ground for the evening show. All the trees were lit up, the huge stage with its showbiz lightshow and huge videoscreens was set, the glitzy compère introduced the dancing girls, and before we knew it we were launched into some bizarre Eurovision style song and dance event, complete with every possible kind of razmatazz, the crowd in a kind of ecstasy over the sheer glamour of it all. And I wandered through the food stalls watching people feasting on every possible kind of dish, picknicking on the grass, gathered in groups and enjoying the festivities, the glorious unnerving excess of it all. And as the evening came to a close, Mr. Roy himself ended the show with a rousing song to a pumping EuroPop beat, and the faithful rushed towards him, to touch his feet and get his autograph, forming huge unruly queues, policed by uniformed guards trying to contain the excitement, whilst I sat bemused, as off to the side as it was possible to be in this mass of people, as Kirsty in white floated and turned over our heads dropping roses from her white balloon, to drop the last one to the big man, the living god, Mr. Subrata Roy himself.
I left Lucknow just utterly bemused by the whole event, amazed that I could have been there at all, and fresh from the cool waters of Mr. Roy's fabulous pool, I was launched crudely back into India proper with an unexpected 6 hour night-time wait on Lucknow train station with the heat as close as could be, the mosquitos biting, the rats scurrying around me, a headache thumping behind my left eye. And again, the close quartered carriages of another filthy train as I was trundled painfully slowly up to Delhi, sleeping as much as possible, arriving to another cheap hotel room, wandering what's next. I have confirmed my return flight, I'll be in London in the first week of May, and now I must decide what to do with the rest of April. It's warm at the moment, the fans just swirl the hot air round, and I'm tempted to get back up north in search of cool weather. It looks like I'll be heading for them hills again…
Sitting in the calm and empty air-conditioned atmosphere of the spacious Zen Restaurant in Connaught Place, the cool breeze I have been longing for put me in a calmer state of mind than I've been for quite a few days. As some of you know, I have been ill again with what I now refer to as an 'unsteady stomach', the details of which, too gruesome to recount again, you will find earlier in this journal. Suffice to say that I've been sweating in solitary tedium in my hotel room, lying horizontal, sweating under the windy fan as it pushes the warm oxygenless air round the room, dealing with my unsteady stomach in the company of endless American movies and sloppy room service, looking forward to returning to Europe, dreaming of cool breezes and the smell of the sea.
It's been a slow and surreal time somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, but yesterday morning, stepping out on to the ever-crowded streets after days of being holed up in my room feeling like death, I found myself doing the familiar weave past the cycle rickshaws and stallholders, around the puddles of filth and the dozy dogs with their awful distended bowels; avoiding the motorbikes rushing up and down the busy alleys, smiling at the cheerful shopkeepers in their tiny colourful shacks in the close sticky heat, and gradually I become aware of an approaching clatter of drums and shouts and suddenly two huge elephants looming large in front of me. I rush to find a place to sit on a small wooden stool next to a colourful stall selling saris, squashed against a corner between a junction of two tiny and impossibly busy alleys clogged with people, and marvel as these elephants, dressed in jackets of Indian flags, carrying a whole backload of smiley boys punching the air and shouting (pre-emptively convinced by the exit polls) victorious BJP chants, followed by a raggle taggle bunch of drummer boys belting out cacophonous cross rhythms leading a convoy of trucks loaded, and I mean loaded, with people shouting and chanting in the most excitable manner. All around them people stopped and stared and for a moment the scene seemed frozen as if we were all posing for a portrait, but within minutes the procession had passed and it was back to the shove as people poured into the alleys as motorbikes and carts streamed out in the usual brutal, noisy, gentle tangle that is everyday life here.
I follow a backlog of cycle rickshaws as they swell up the street towards the railway station and find myself being called over by a very smiley moustache – a rough rag turbaned cycle wallah who beckons me to sit and we pull away from the madness, him straining over the potholes and down to a wide tree-lined avenue away from the noise, to the sound of twittering birds, past sleeping cycle rickshaw wallahs laid out horizontally across their bikes, oblivious to the heat, and we roll down to the madness of the ringroad around Connaught Place with its endless traffic roaring past and people waiting in the bright hazy airless sunshine for the lights to go red. And I walked down through to the Inner Circle with its wide circular walkways, its fancy Western shops selling Nike and MacDonalds, its well dressed city folk promenading around the circle lazily window shopping, and into the cool paradise of Zen with its smiling suited waiters serving perfect oriental dishes to the tune of Lionel Ritchie's Endless Love played on tinkly synthesisers.
Soon after I arrived in Delhi I fell into conversation with the avuncular Nazir, a kindly old fellow from Kashmir with a sweet smile and a gentle manner, who told me about his brother, a Savile Row trained tailor who makes suits for many of the top officials at the British High Commission and the Indian government. Eventually I agreed to go and pay this tailor a visit, and one morning Nazir and I took an auto rickshaw across Delhi to somewhere in the area known as Defence Colony to his brother's house. Huffing and puffing, and exclaiming "Too hot… Too hot…" he led me up four flights of narrow stairs into a small apartment where we were greeted by another relative and a woman who asked us if we would like a drink and quickly brought the most delicate cup of tea as we sat on the floor and waited for the tailor. And in he bustled stroking his beard, dressed in a long shirt and pants in the Muslim style, carrying a large folder, followed by his cousin carrying an armful of suits. And we sat and he showed me his letters of recommendation, and his father's letters of recommendation from the 30's – lovely faded documents from another age – and explained, with the gentlest of interjections from Nazir, how his family have been tailors for generations, how he trained in Savile Row, how he only uses the finest and best quality cloth, how he pays careful attention to detail, hand-stitching everything, how happy his customers are. He is known as Savile Roy, changing just the last letter of that famous London street in order that he might associate himself with only the best. And I saw his work – beautiful hand tailored suits with a classic cut made of cloth that was almost delicious to touch.
And even without Nazir's smiling and supportive recommendations for his brother's work, I was already convinced – completely won over by the gentle and professional manner of the man – and before long I was leafing through swatches of lovely wools and linens, umming and ahhing and eventually settling on a very fine, very subtle, very delicate herringbone design in a dark charcoal-grey wool. I also chose a creamy rough Irish linen for a summer suit, had myself measured up, paid a deposit and left the building feeling like a million dollars, secretly happy, smiling on the inside, pleased to have allowed myself such an extravagance for perhaps a quarter of the price that two tailor-made suits might cost in England.
That was about 11 days ago and tonight Savile Roy delivered the suits, which I'm very pleased with. They're packed in their suitbags, the man has been paid, and I am all set. And I still have to tell you about The Fugitive, this amazing American who has more stories in him than anyone I've ever had the pleasure to meet. For that you will have to wait. It may even be more than is possible to write down…
/ENDS
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