Homeward bound (or The End)

In less than 24 hours, I will be home.  For now, I’m back in the maddening sweat-box that is Mumbai, patiently awaiting the flight which will transport me from these Indian shores back into the cooler climes of the United Kingdom.  For the first time in weeks, I have hours to kill, and nothing to kill them with.

All the ingredients are set, therefore, for a mammoth post, bringing people (and of course my future self; this blog has served, in a secondary sense, as an old-fashioned diary) right up to speed.  But for some reason, my motivation is lacking.  I’m as full of words as ever, and as eager and willing to write as your next expat blogger, but the idea of recounting the last week’s activities fills me with a sinking sort of woe.  I can’t even begin to arrange the days into any sort of reportable order.  They’ve been wonderful, but I have not the willpower to reduce them to words on a page.  Not properly.  Not here.  And not right now.

My diagnosis is that the post-travel blues have hit early.  Returning to the simple mundanity – and anywhere else, after India, can only ever be simple and mundane – of life in the UK, of the years-old patterns of work and play, feels close now.  I have one foot in the air already.  The slogging through the heat is finished; the pull of the road has relaxed itself again.  No more new sleeping spots.  No more new sunsets.  No more street cricket.  No more rattling bus rides past kalediscope-coloured temples.  Just a long flight and then a sinking back into the fold of my dull-and-getting-duller homeland, where everyone is still recovering from frantically lining up like medieval peasants to deliriously fawn over their royal masters, and where I will have to (eventually) earn a damn wage again.  Essentially, in my mind, India is already behind me.  And God knows I miss it.  For that reason, replaying the last week feels like a terrible idea; like going over in your mind your final days with a wonderful but tragically departed lover.

Still, I’ll give a basic outline, not least to trigger memories in the future.  The whole rest of my trip was spent in the state of Kerala.  For my politically/culturally interested friends, Kerala is a pretty fascinating place.   In 1957, it became the only place in the world to ever freely elect a communist government.  The state still holds that mantle, and the party still regularly hold office too; right now, they’re in coalition with another, centrist party.  The whole place (like a lot of India) is daubed in election posters, and the vast majority of hammer and sickles on them.  (Which takes some getting used to, when you’ve been schooled in the idea that communism is an extinct ideal, slain by the wondrous individualism of the free market.)  Kerala also has an incredibly diverse religious/cultural community, having been ruled by the Portugese, and then the Dutch, and then the British.  There are significant amounts of people from more or less every religious group on the planet.  Cochin (a major coastal city) contains both the country’s oldest Christian church and its oldest synagogue.  India itself is a melting pot, but Kerala is a melting pot within a melting pot.  The uniqueness and variety of the place is overwhelming; sometimes it’s hard to believe you’re still in India, such is the weird, eclectic mix of European architecture and elephants, ancient Dutch palaces and chai-wallahs.

Over the years, Kerala has sort of become a success story within India – it has the highest literacy rates in the country, and more than 95% of the population has access to primary school within 1 km of their home.  In India, that’s incredible.  It also has the country’s best healthcare, highest life expectancy, and all-round state infrastructure, including the closest thing India has to a well co-ordinated waste disposal program.

Anyway, so, Kerala is a pretty advanced, succesful (apologies for the platitudes, but like I said, that willpower…) place.  And it feels it too.  The people are lovely – very smart, with excellent English, and a healthy, honest interest in foreigners.  There are actually bookshops all over the place; something I hadn’t seen for five weeks.  Plus the public transport runs more or less on time, and people aren’t trying to rip you off all day every day.  Which is incredibly refreshing if you’ve been to a single other place in the country.

So.  We went from the amazing Cochin, to the deliciously cool and visually breath-taking Munnar (a hill station founded by the British back in the day), to Allepey, where we drifted along the Keralan backwaters,  to Goa’s little brother Varkala, and then Trivandrum, Kerala’s state capital, from where I flew to Mumbai this morning ( stepping off the flight to learn from the TV screens in the arrival lounge that Bin Laden has been guest of honour with the Pakistanis for five years).  Every step of the way, it was amazing.  Some of the happiest times of my life.  The coastlines were simply awesome,  the beaches utopian in their perfection, and the food constantly sublime.  As I said, I don’t have it in me to go over details right now.  It feels too much like picking at an emotional wound.  I would go back to any of those places in a heartbeat, and to talk of them in detail right now would instill me with a nostalgia all the more painful for its rawness.  Eventually, Jess’s photos will make their way onto Facebook.  Eventually, with those of you who care, I will elaborate.

This is almost goodbye then.  The final post.  It’s been pretty mind-blowing, these six weeks.  India hits you like a punch when you arrive, and it only starts to get easier a few weeks in.  People had told me it was intense/hectic here, but you can’t possibly understand them until you arrive.  Ranjit perhaps put it best, as we were watching India take the World Cup crown in Assam over two monster martinis, when he referred to his homeland as “a country of contradictions.”  Never have I been in a place where my emotions have swung from one extreme to the other so quickly, and so frequently.  In the same day I’ve felt happier and freer than I have for years, and been driven close to tears by the ridiculous impossibilty of Indian bureacracy.  I’ve wanted to flee to the airport, and apply for a residency VISA.  India has the ability to fill you with the most exasperated rage, and the purest sort of joy, often within the same hour.  It’s tiring, and draining, but – at the risk of sounding like your most cliché backpacker alive – ultimately, it will teach you something about yourself.  Making your ego run an assualt course can be a damn healthy thing.

In the end, India is everything everyone says it is.  It’s both the invorigating, spiritual land of the yogier-than-thou novels filling up airport bookstands, and the grittier, realist commentaries of V.S. Naipaul and Shashi Tharoor.  Sadly, the protaganist of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is not entirely lying when he says that India has “no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality.”  However, Gregory David Roberts is also bang on when in Shantaram he calls India “the land of the heart,” and Mark Twain spoke the truth when he said “So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.”

It’s not always the easiest of countries for a foreigner, but it’s been by far the most rewarding land I’ve ever dragged my soul across.   It has its problems, no doubt – the enduring caste system, the unsettling obsession with white culture, the mass social inequality which always follows the neoliberalization of an economy – but which country doesn’t.  Ultimately, for all that’s wrong with it, I can’t help but think that India’s people will be its salvation.  I have been continually astounded by the friendliness, compassion, generosity, and honesty displayed by each and every Indian I’ve met.  Shit, even the guy who robbed me this morning only took a third of what was there, and replaced it with some loose change!

Thanks for reading, every last one of you.  If any of you ever visit India, I’m more than happy to dispense you some advice I wish i’d been given before I left.

Love to all.  See you on the other side x

Cities and years

Alas readers, time is short.  I have lots to tell, and only an hour to tell it in.  Best log out of god-damn facebook, and crack the hell on…

My last post ended on our final day in Goa, I think I’m right in saying.  Which was only about ten days ago, but feels like an age.  So:  From Goa, on that balmy Saturday evening, we took an overnight bus due east to the historic city of Hampi.  In true Indian style, the luggage compartments on the bus were broken, so we ended up in a situation in which the entire length of the aisle was piled three-high with backpacks, wedging everyone into their seats and precluding any movement or even conversation whatsoever.  No matter; Helios’s Eingya was just the tonic to send me into a thick, perfect slumber, from which I didn’t awake until long after the next morning’s sunrise.

Hampi itself is, again, a major town within the Kingdom of Backpackistan.  The minute we stumbled bleary-eyed from the bus into the pulsing heat, we were met with a fleet of über-keen rickshaw drivers, all working commission rackets for various guesthouses, elbowing each other out of the way to inform us that in fact no, it was they who knew where the best possible place to stay in Hampi was.  We managed to escape the frenzied tourist trap and made our way into town, sucking down a couple of fresh lassis before eventually finding for ourselves a secluded, clean place that would do us a room for two pounds a night.  Which was nice.

The town of Hampi is actually pretty small; a scattered arrangement of tourist-geared shops and lodging options, weird and wonderful cuisines, and the occasional massage/treatment parlour.  No-one comes for the town itself though, but for what it is built around, and within.  At Hampi’s centre sits the incredible Virupaksha Temple, a 160-feet high Shiva-dedicated temple which dates from the 9th century,  and constitutes the town’s main pilgrimage spot.  It’s an incredible structure; an intricately carved, imposingly tall site of worship which formed the seat of the Vijayanagara Empire during the centuries in which they presided over the whole region, and oversaw a flourishing of native art and architecture.   The temple is just one of the surviving monuments of these fallen rulers, however:  The whole of the area surrounding Hampi  is home to the 15th century ruins of other temples, palaces, public baths, elephant stables, and much more.  The landscape is extraordinary, an expanse of huge sand-coloured boulders scattered in swathes like God-sized shingle (weirdly enough, bits of it actually reminded me of what I’ve seen of rural Colorado), set around the eroded yet dustily-preserved remains of hundreds of empty, ancient structures.  It’s no wonder the place is a World Heritage Site.  I would say that, in a purely visual/aesthetic sense, and taken as a whole, it is up there with the most incredible places I’ve ever seen.  It honestly felt like stepping into some sort of time-warp.  As soon as you leave the town, bar the occasional electricity pylon, the scenery is almost exactly as how you would imagine it was all those centuries ago.  Stare hard at the ruins and you can almost feel the weight of history; the resounding silence of an extinct empire and a vanished peoples, enveloped within the hard indifference of nature, which persists, as always, long after man has been and gone. In fact, bugger it, time is short and there’s that thing people say about a picture saying a thousand words, so I’m going to cheat a bit and chuck in some photos:

 

So yes, you get the idea.  We rented scooters for another 24 hours and spent our time tearing up and over the surrounding hills, pulling over to walk, crawl and clamber into the various ruins, often sitting in silence for minutes on end just to soak up the timeless majesty of it all.  It was awesome, and I really, really didn’t want to leave.  (In fact, in one way I haven’t – since seeing the 15th century monolithic Ganesh at Hampi, carved from a single boulder, I’ve thrice dreamt of the elephant-headed deity…)  I wanted to leave even less when we heard there was a festival kicking off on the day of our departure – evidenced by the hundreds of purple-painted cows charging around the town, the bells around their neck jangling incessantly, and the quite literally thousands of Indian families camped out on the top of the hill awaiting the next morning’s antics.  (In fact, that’s one thing I’ll say for the Indian people – they’re bloody hardcore.  They never seem to moan, or complain, or plead discomfort.  They just get the hell on with it.  The hill above Hampi was covered with four generations of families, just sleeping out on the rocky floor with nothing more than a blanket for cover.  Can you imagine a single British grandmother you know voluntarily sleeping outside, on a boulder, amidst hundreds of other people drunkenly racing cows and jamming on tablas, without so much as the prospect of a shower or any real shelter, for three days running?  Like I said, hardcore.  Major respect to the Indian grandmothers.)

Still, we had tickets booked, and we had to go.  On the Monday, having had not nearly enough time to absorb Hampi’s magic, we left on an overnight bus for Mangalore.  I mean it though Hampi; I’ll be back.  Ganesh my friend, we have an unfinished business.

I won’t say anything about Mangalore, other than that it was arguably the most lifeless, uninspiring city I’ve ever been to.  The highlight of our 24 hours there was a sublime masala dosa we ate for breakfast.  Aside from that, we were more than happy to board the southbound (and, amazingly, air-conditioned) train for Kochin the next morning.

Dammit dammit dammit I’ve run out of time, and the narrative has only just breached the Karnataka-Kerala border.  I have to leave you now reader.  Sorry the update is an incomplete one.   Fare thee well. x

Third stone(d) from the sun

I write this from within the shelter of an internet shack in Palolem Beach, towards the Southernmost end of the long coastal strip that is Goa, India’s smallest state.  It’s 13.00, and swelteringly hot outside.  Having recently contracted sunburn in a variety of places, I am spending today cowering from the heat of the day in shaded cafes and bars, while, some fifteen metres away, on the beach, my girlfriend Jessie and my good friend Katie stretch themselves over sun loungers in an attempt soak up the very same rays that have so mercilessly turned my shoulders a vicious red over the last 72 hours.

As you may know, reader, Goa is a pretty touristy place.  It’s backpacker heartland – to India what Koh Samui is to Thailand – and a major stop-off on the gap yah trail.  Even here, in South Goa – supposedly the secluded, lesser-known end – the beach has the unedifying feel of a resort tailored towards Brits-on-tour.  It’s stunningly beautiful, with hot white sand and a gently lapping sea bordered by a long row of leaning palm trees, but the top end of the beach is essentially a long row of bars and cafes selling full English breakfasts and two-for-one cocktails, populated by gaggles of toffish teenagers.  Almost every single person here is British – I read in Goa Plus yesterday that a full 44% of all foreign visitors to Goa hail from Britain, in fact – and almost every single one of them is well on the way to being drunk by dinner time.

However, despite the slight feeling, especially after Assam, that I’ve stepped from the real India into an episode of Boozed Up Brits Abroad, Goa itself is a truly beautiful place.  We arrived early on Wednesday, after an uneventful overnight bus from Pune, and managed to find a couple of great little wooden beach huts for 100 rupees (about £1.50) a night each.  They were pretty basic – suspended precariously on big stilts, with a crap fan and a resident family of cockroaches in the bathroom – but for the price it was impossible to complain.  Quite literally a stone’s throw from the beach, where the Arabian Sea laps endlessly at the sand, just cool enough to be refreshing without being cold, and with a hypnotic hushing of the waves that is wonderful to fall asleep to, the huts could not have been better placed.  We spent the first day wandering the countless market stalls along the sand’s edge, sporadically plunging in and out of the sea, and stopping off at bars for fresh pineapple juices and mojitos.

We’d heard that Goa is the hashish capital of India from various people on our way South, and this turned out to be true.  After befriending the owner of a nearby bar, Tyson, a half-Cuban half-Nepalese man the size of a house who offered us the services of his establishment 24 hours a day, I tentatively, apologetically asked him if he knew where we could get ourselves a small lump of what the locals call charas.  “Of course,” he replied, grinning, totally unmoved by my request.  “Here.”  He wrote down the name of the bar a few hundred metres up the bay which we have since realized operates simply as South Goa’s narcotics store, in the full knowledge of everyone for miles, including the police, who – as in so much of India – turn a blind eye for a fee (or bakshish, as it’s known).

As it turned out, we didn’t even need to trek to the bar.  We stopped and asked a young Belgian guy how to get there, and he whipped a grape-sized lump of hash from his pocket and gave it to us, saying that he was getting a flight soon and couldn’t take it with him.  It was the softest, most malleable stuff I have ever come across.  Like plasticine.  We thanked him profusely, and went to sit in the surf and sample the goods.

So that evening, ultimately, for all my hand-wringing about the swathes of culturally ignorant, beer-swilling Brits lining the beach, I – with the full complicity of Katie and Jess – pulled off the perfect act of hypocrisy.  Hugely stoned – slow-motion, caked-in-cotton-wool stoned – the three of us walked the beach for hours, drinking cocktail after cocktail and shunning Goan cuisine for pizza and chips,  before eventually, sometime after 2, just like all the other Brits in our hut colony, collapsing blind drunk into bed.

That night, sometime around 4, a magnificent storm broke, awakening us from our boozy slumber.  It had been building all day – you could feel it in the crackling humidity of the air – and it arrived in an instant, the rain suddenly pouring down in vast torrents which drummed against our tarpaulin roof so loudly that we had to shout to hear one another.  Lightning tore the sky, dancing and tearing into the ocean, and thunder, the loudest, most chest-rattlingly bassy thunder I have ever heard, rolled over our heads.  It was terrifyingly beautiful.  Dogs howled their fear as floods fell from the skies.  Trees writhed.  The next morning, all the locals were saying that the monsoon had come early.

On Thursday, we rented two scooters for the next 48 hours.  They cost 200 rupees each per day, plus fuel (dirt cheap out here).  The rental was very Indian – no meeting with the guy in charge, nothing signed, no insurance policies, no driving licenses displayed, not enough helmets to go around – but it was the single best purchase I have made since coming here.  I’d never ridden a motorised bike before, and to the superbike-initiated I imagine a scooter is understandably rather a lame thing,  but I absolutely loved tearing up and down Goa on my Honda Dio.  At first it was slightly hairy, not least because of the state of Indian roads, and how unnatural and even suicidal simply leaning into the road in order to turn feels when you’ve never done it, but we soon got to grips with it.

We’d rented them with the intention of getting away from the tourist trap of Palolem and seeing a bit more of Goa’s raw side, and we did just that.  Over the next 48 hours we spent all day cutting up and down the winding roads of the coastline for hours, opening the scooters out on the long straights and letting the rush of the breeze cool our faces, and then  steering carefully around corners often blocked on the blind side with packs of cows and pigs as we came into little villages.  The road soared up into the coastline’s lush green hills, where families of monkeys watched us from the trees as we pulled over to photograph the stunning vistas of the Goan coastline stretching northward in jagged, rock-teethed outcrops and lush, empty bays.  Then it dipped suddenly downwards towards the water’s edge, where along some dirt tracks we found semi-deserted beaches with the only trace of commerce being a single man in a shack selling fresh pineapple juice.  And always, on our left or right, the huge expanse of the Arabian sea, glittering like a bed of jewels in the sun, and cooling us with its waves every hour.  It was amazing.  I really haven’t felt so happy, so happily liberated, in a long time.  We had nothing – no plans, no timescale, no schedule, no way for anyone to contact us – but those feisty little scooters, a single road, and the coast.  It was without doubt where I got my sunburn – the rush of the wind stops you from feeling the heat, but it was there alright, roasting my exposed shoulders and neck – but it was utterly worth it.  Just the open road and the ocean for a navigator.  Sublime.

Towards the end of the second day, yesterday, we found our way South, to the quiet, secluded Galgigaba beach.  Here, on Hyla’s recommendation, we made our way to a beach cafe run by an old fisherman called Surya, which is relatively famous to those seafood-inclined and in the know in South Goa. The operation is simple:   Surya catches fresh what he can every day around sunrise, and then that’s what his patrons eat in the evening.  The restaurant itself is some plastic chairs amongst a bank of trees along the top of the bay, and a few hammocks.  After another dip in the sea, Surya brought us out his freshest, plumpest, prawns, crab, rock fish and calamari, all caught that morning.  Needless to say it was absolutely delicious, and I’m not even mad on seafood.  The girls went mad for the fresh crab – that’s what I nearly called the post, actually; ‘Two girls one crab’ – and destroyed the calamari.  I finished off a prawns chilli – a traditional Goan dish – and then, in the dying light of the day, with the sun a hot red on the horizon, we rode the coastal road North for the last time, back through the winding villages and the long cooling straights, to our huts in Palolem.

Last night, we smoked some more hashish in various bars along the beach (à la San Francisco, de facto legal to the point where tables provide king size rizlas), wandered through the surf, and discussed love and friendship.  Then, with another storm breaking over our heads, we fell asleep under out mosquito nets in Goa for the last night.

Tonight, in some 6 hours time, we head for Hampi, a stunning-looking place intermingled with ancient temples and ruins which was once the seat of the Vijayanagara Empire (worth a gander, for any of my historically-inclined friends).  It’s a 12-hour overnight straight-up bus into a place which at this time of year reaches 40 degrees in the day, which could be an experience.  We shall see.

That’s all for now, reader.  I realize this was a short one by my standards, but, with Goa being tourist-ville, and this being India, they royally rip you off for using the internet.  Thanks for reading, as ever.

Oh, one final thing – I just finished The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga.  I realize I’m a bit late on this (it won the Booker three years back), but it was hands down the best book I’ve read this year, and I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone who likes their literature.

Thanks again all.  Namaste. 

x

Due south

This post will be exceedingly small, as I have been neglecting my blogging duties, and spent the last three hours learning to juggle.

I write this from Pune, Maharasthra’s second biggest city after Mumbai.  We arrived two days ago, having spent one night in Delhi and our last four or five days in Assam.  Assam ended as brilliantly as it began.  I gained another uncle, Sanjiv – an exuberantly friendly, full-of-life guy who works as an assistant manager on a tea estate in upper Assam – and stared a rhino in the eye from about ten paces in Kaziranga National Park.  We smoked, drank, and ate some of the most incredible fish I’ve ever tasted.  We watched freshwater dolphins roll and splash across the surface of the Brahmaputra from aboard an ancient canoe.  We smoked and drank some more.  We dodged mosquitos.  And then, far too soon, we left behind my newly discovered family, and along another trail of tears made our way back to Guwahati, to fly West.

Delhi was every bit as noisy, grumpy, busy and sweltering as Mumbai.  Truth be told, neither Jess nor I were particularly fond of the place.  Perhaps it was just coming from the spacious, laid-back atmosphere of small-town Assam into the crushing business of the Indian city, but we found it to be a hard, draining place.  Dodging the ranks of tourist-trap merchants trying to sell you crap, we managed to find our way to a continental restaurant, scoffed some pasta in front of an IPL game, and then headed back to the hostel (one of India’s few genuine, actual hostels) fairly early to hit the hay, suffering from what I will today coin as post-Assamese blues.

Pune is a cool place.  (Not a cool place, but a cool place.  It’s anything but cool; it’s brutally hot.)  We’ve met up with my good friend Hyla, who I lived across the hall from during my year on exchange in Canada, and who’s just finished university here, and my equally good friend Katie Nicholls, who has been working at a school up in Jaipur.  Tonight, in approximately three hours, the four of us will board a twelve-hour overnight bus to Goa, kicking off our Southbound travels.

I have no time to write anything more.  A pre-travel dosa is calling me.

Love to all.  Donations towards air-conditioned facilities much appreciated.

x

The earth is not a cold dead place

(Disclaimer:  The author of this post is suffering from a severe hangover, brought on by a combination of Assamese marijuana and imported Polish lager.  WordPress.com accepts no responsibility for the quality nor content of the words contained herein, and any views or opinions expressed belong to the author, and not WordPress.com or any of its affiliates.)

In the past week I have gained (in a manner of speaking) two uncles and a grandmother.  But before I get to that, I must, as ever, rewind a number of days, to that point in the tale where I last left my faithful readership – ten or eleven days into the past, with Jess and I arriving into Guwahati, Assam.

So.  We arrived exactly on time, late on the afternoon of the 27th March.  I gather – and can totally believe – that this in itself was something of a minor miracle.  All around us, people were excitedly phoning relatives, their voices heavy with the relief that only the termination of a 2700km train journey can bring, presumably informing them that yes, honestly, we were arriving on schedule, and lifts home were needed right about now.  Sangita – Vikram’s mother, who had adopted us some 24 hours before, informed us that 6 hours late was the best the train had previously managed with her aboard.  So in this we were extremely lucky.

A few miles outside Guwahati, we rolled over the rail bridge which spans the breathtakingly huge Brahmaputra, one of the great rivers of Asia.  Most of the carriage fell into an awe-ridden silence as we floated across the couple of miles of slow-rippling water, glistening silver in the afternoon sun.  Many of the locals tapped our shoulders and pointed down at the giant serpent of water, dotted with fisherman like bugs in a flood, and, grinning proudly, repeated that word; Brahmaputra.  (‘Son of Putra’, it means, Putra being the Hindu god of creation, and one of the faith’s major deities.)

As we got closer to Guwahati, the slums sprang up on either side of the train.  These were nothing new to us, having spent two days in Mumbai (half of whose population live in various legal and illegal slums), but it was the first time we’d cut through the heart of them, and the first time we’d been presented with such tableaus of heart-wrenching poverty metres from where we sat, comfortable and amply-fed, in our air-conditioned carriage.  I won’t dwell on what life for the poorest in India is like, only to say that it is every bit as wretched and difficult as you’d imagine.  The slums are quite literally villages built from rubbish (India has a major, major litter problem, not least because the entire concept of ‘littering’ simply doesn’t exist), and large families of bone-thin adults and pot-bellied kids live – again quite literally – on top of one another, alongside small rivers of raw sewage, in conditions so awful that they are simply incomprehensible to someone who has grown up in the West.  I find myself filling with a helpless sort of sadness, not to mention anger and stomach-churning guilt, at the sight of so many millions of people struggling simply to survive, when I hail from a land where people think their government isn’t looking after them if they fail to empty their bins twice a week.  I know it’s hardly news to any of you that the world is a place of spirit-crushing inequality, and injustice, but it drives it home when you see it.  And what can I do about it, really?  What can I do?  Nothing, over than, against the better advice of other white tourists (“You can’t help everyone,” “They’ll only spend it on drugs,” “Some of them don’t even try and work,”) stuff twenty rupee notes into the palm of every crippled amputee, every blind old man, every mother with an armful of crying, starving children who drags herself down the train aisle, wordlessly begging me for money because I am white and in their world that renders me unimaginably rich.

Sorry reader, I know this isn’t edifying stuff for you.  But it hits you like an existential punch, the poverty out here.  At least it does me.  And the guilt, the unavoidable sense of my complicity, nearly pushes me to tears.  I sit before you now promising to never again complain that my life back in England is anything less than endlessly, flukishly charmed.  You can all, every one of you, hold me to that.

Anyway, like every train station we’ve encountered in India, Guwahati was hectic as hell.  As soon as we stepped down onto the platform we were absorbed into the press of bodies.  We found time for some group photos with Vikram’s family, and then headed for the exit.

The stares are amplified here in Assam.  Mumbai, being a bustling, metropolitan city – India’s ‘melting pot’, or so they say – is at least accustomed in some small way to the presence of white foreigners.  But Assam is truly the far-off reaches of the country, the closest thing India has to a still-untamed wilderness.  As my mother said, flying into Mumbai and heading out to Assam is a bit like flying into Heathrow and then trekking to the Outer Hebrides.  So yes, the stares were intense.  As I’ve said before, they’re not hostile, or aggressive, and actually a smile or an Indian sideways-nod will almost always be happily reciprocated, but a few hundred people staring blank-faced at you is still enough to seriously sketch you out (especially when long years of marijuana smoking have somewhat lowered your paranoia threshold), and, truth be told, sometimes really quite annoy you.  I know, I know, that it’s a curiosity thing, a societal quirk, but an (occasionally rather large) part of me still feels like staring each of them hard in the face and saying What?  What?  I’m white, yes.  But I’m not a fucking alien.  What do you want? I’m trying hard – not least after interesting and honest conversations with various locals on the subject – to treat the stares for what they are, which is a collective expression of simple interest and even fascination, and accept that a few thousand years of social evolution in India has simply rendered staring not the rude practice that it is in England, but it’s difficult.  I come from a place where a man staring at you and not looking away when you meet his eye is usually intended as an incitement to physical violence.  Having a hundred of them do this is really quite seriously unsettling.  Having a few hundred more stare at your girlfriend (some of them with brazen, uncontained lust) is something more than unsettling, and can even trigger feelings of anger in a guy who generally approaches life with something of a make love not war attitude.  But like I said, I am working on my emotional response to it, and making good progress.

So yes, the winding wall of eyes followed us out of the station and into the back of an auto-rickshaw.  As has often been the case here, the driver assured us happily that he knew of the address I had scrawled in my journal, only to come over utterly lost almost as soon as we set off.  Still, after some phone-calls and barked exchanges with other drivers, we found the place.

I won’t bore people with the complicated network that is my family/family-friend tree, but essentially, a man called Ranjit Barthakur who grew up with my mother and remains close to her, as well as more recently myself, arranged more-or-less everything for us here in Assam.  As well as being one of the most lively and big-hearted men I’ve ever met, Ranjit is an extremely successful businessman, with many projects/properties all over the world.  One of the more minor of these properties is a guesthouse in southern Guwahati, where he let us stay, free of charge, for as long as we wanted, during our time in the city.

Now, Jess and I weren’t sure exactly what to expect at the guesthouse – we knew it was hardly going to be a dive, but we didn’t realize it would be quite as magisterial as it was.  As we pulled up outside the painted red walls of the compound, and were immediately ushered inside by first a rifle-wielding security guard and then a soft-smiling bearer (essentially a nicer word for a servant), we were feeling pretty blown away.  The two of us are deeply unaccustomed to luxury accommodation – we are almost always traveling on a shoestring, and the primary place we skimp is with where we sleep.  So after 56 hours on a train, badly in need of a shower and with my stomach slightly sideways, walking inside a huge, impeccably maintained Raj-era mansion to a bedroom that was the absolute balls was really rather nice.  When I say the balls, I mean the balls – a giant double bed, air conditioning (anywhere with A/C in India during these months is sort of like the promised land), a private shower, a bookshelf, a goddamn button to call our bearer; the works.  So yes, pretty nuts.  Giddy as children in a new bedroom, we took long showers, and relaxed with hot sweet tea on the bed, before taking a doze through the worst of the afternoon heat.

Not a lot happened on that first evening.  We ate a huge dinner, delighted to be able to tuck into something other than the pre-packaged identi-meal of the train.  We met a couple of British guys who were working on a conversation project with Ranjit – one of whom bore an uncanny resemblance, in looks, demeanor and personality, to Christopher Hitchens – and talking to them about Indian idiosyncrasies was amusing for a while.  Then, early on, with dusk just dying into night, we retreated to bed.

Actually, one thing of note did occur that night.  Now, readers, I am a great lover of animals.  I have an (admittedly inconsistent) Buddhist streak which makes me balk at the idea of causing any creature any harm.  But that night, it deeply shames me to tell you that I killed.  As our heads were sinking into the pillows and slumber was rushing through our tired minds to greet us, there was an almighty, shrill crying sound from the wall near the curtains.  A sort of ka-ka-kaar, ka-ka-kaar noise, in a parrot-esque tone.  Shocked and startled, we investigated.  A gecko lizard.  I know, I know, gorgeous, very cool little animals.  At first we tried to leave the thing to its own devices, but I tell you reader, the racket it made, the shrill, ear-splitting racket it made, without pause, was keeping us from sleep, and stirring a primal, this-room-ain’t-big-enough-for-the-both-of-us sort of anger in me.  Plus, I didn’t know then – until the next morning, appalled at my sin, the conservationists informed me of the fact – that they are perfectly harmless.  For all I knew the thing was as deadly as nerve gas. So, after chasing the slippery little bugger around the room for about two hours, wanting desperately to just remove, rather than kill it, I did it.  Lighting up the killing zone with my headtorch, I took the Assam Tribune I had been pawing through earlier, spread it across my palm like a flat glove, stalked into range, and then, with the flat-palmed punch common to bad kung-fu films, ended a life.  Wrapping the splattered little torso in the paper and placing it in the bin, I retreated to bed, the room finally silent now, and my chest heavy with guilt.

The next morning, with just one day in the city, Jess and I made our way up to Guwahati’s primary must-see place:  Kamakhya Temple.  The bus ride was an experience – in India, buses are basically run by teams of two guys; a driver, and then a ticket man.  The buses don’t actually stop at stops, they just slow down to walking pace, and the ticket man (literally) hangs out of the door and yells off a list of destinations, giving the waiting public a few seconds to jog along and hop onboard if they so desire.  There is then a complicated hierarchy of who is allowed seats on the bus, and system determining what fare you pay.  Anyway, eventually we made it, and took an auto-rickshaw up the steep, winding road to the top of the hill, where you could look down on the whole mist-shrouded valley enveloping Guwahati, and where, beyond a network of small shops and chai stalls, lay the huge temple.

Now, I could dedicate a whole 5000 words to our day at the temple – as some of you may have noticed, I have a tendency to go on.  But I’ll be as brief as I can.  It was pretty amazing.  The temple was a buzzing place, surrounded by worshipers and priests, dotted with cows, goats and monkeys.  The sun beat down through yellow-blossomed trees and gleamed off the hundreds of small, garlanded shrines arranged in a vague ring around the vast dome of the temple.  In little gatherings, songs were sung in the sad wailing tones of Hindi.  Incense burned.  Beggars and holy men sunbathed together.  Amazingly, we ran into the family who’d adopted us on the train, which was lovely, not least because they helped us figure out how the hell to buy tickets and get inside.  Before we knew it, we were descending the dark passage, cut into ancient black rock, which leads to the central chamber of the subterranean temple.  Amazing, ten-foot sculptures of Shiva and Ganesh were cut into the walls.  The floor was carpeted with red and white petals, and the air was thick and humid with people muttering prayers and pressing together to give offerings at shrines.  A young priest took it upon himself to guide us round the temple and, eventually, down into the inner sanctum – a small cave, embedded even deeper underground and built over a natural spring.  Sweating buckets, we reached the little pool of water.  It was intense down there.  Hot enough to impair your breathing, dark as night, loud with the cries of the devoted.  A priest grabbed me and yelled words at me that I was to recite, in Assamese.  I did my best to repeat this mystery incantation, and then I was taken by the arms and lowered into the water forehead-first, before being sprinkled with petals.  The priest – an ancient man, with skin thick as leather and powerfully sad eyes – told me to ask for something.  “What?’ I asked him, not totally understanding.  “Anything,” chimed in our guide, “luck, a divine gift, help, forgiveness – in mind, just ask for something.”  And so ask I did, reader.  As the priest pressed a red bindi spot into my forehead, I closed my eyes for a short second, and for lack of a better idea, appealed to Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma to forgive me for slaying that innocent gecko some twelve hours earlier.

After leaving the temple, glad to be back in the cool air, we wandered the shrines for a while, learning and quickly forgetting about the vast pantheon of Hindu deities from our guide.  At each shrine, we were implored to donate some rupees (always a way to dilute any sense of the divine, I think.  But then the money for these places has to come from somewhere, so swings, roundabouts…).  Afterwards, with our guide gone back into the bowels of the great temple, and feeling sweaty, grimy, and mentally drained by the intense blessing, we collected our shoes, dodged the advances of a cantankerous monkey, and made our slow way back home.

(An aside:  When we first arrived at the temple, I was rather shocked to see lots of babies with swastikas painted on their foreheads.  It turns out that the swastika is actually an ancient Hindu symbol, symbolizing Vishnu and the sun’s life-giving rays, which was around for many, many years before Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party adopted it.)

That night was another quiet one, primarily because we had to get up brutally early (or so we thought) the next morning in order to catch our train-bus-rickshaw-jeep out to Manas National Park.  Remember my last blog post, with the debacle about tickets and waiting lists?  Well 5am the following morning was where, in this tangled web of chronologies, I sat down to write that.  As it turned out, there were no early trains, and our ticket on the 11 o’clock was legit, although the train was an hour late, despite Indian Railways emailing me telling me it would be an hour early.  In any case, there we were, on the road once more, dragging our two-tonne packs through the heat of the midday sun towards yet another mystery bedroom.

After a typically convoluted and at times utterly confused journey, we made it out to our jungle cottage on the outskirts of Manas National Park.  Again, I could spend hours telling you about our three nights there, but I’ll condense it as best I can.  For starters, it was simply awesome to escape the city and be out in the great outdoors.  There’s no getting away from the fact that Indian cities are loud, dusty, and smelly places.  This is not to say the smells are always bad – on the contrary, usually, they’re a heady mix of incense and cooking spices.  Sometimes though, particularly in Mumbai, the smells can be bad, even as bad as raw sewage, and on the whole, fresh air is tough to come by.  Being in Manas on that first night, amongst those miles of untouched grassland and towering old trees, just standing chest-out and breathing in the sweet, clean air was energizing.  And the sounds were wonderful.  It’s something you forget, until you go entwine yourself with the outdoors once more – the sound.  Nature is a loud beast, and louder still in a jungle climate.  As we crashed out that night, the cacophony of insect and lizard sounds, the sheer wall of rattle and squawks outside, was just awesome.  A tapestry of organic energy sounds to guide one down into the sink and swill of sleep.

Elephants are huge.  I learnt this the next morning.  As we stumbled bleary-eyed into the dawn just after 5 and began to wander down to the safari point, five or six of them loomed out of the mist like icebergs in the ocean, massive-boned with heads half the size of cars.  As we rode one of the giant beasts through the park during the next hour, and watched peacocks and buffalo emerge from the tall grass into the dazzling sunrise, I became veritably over-awed by him.  As I said, up close they are huge, but they are so languid in their motions, with their wise, slow-blinking eyes and a permanent half-smile creased beneath their trunks, that they end up looking at once very happy and very sad.  Hair fuzzes across their great knuckled heads.  As they plod along, their trunks wind gracefully into the tall grass to encircle and rip from the earth great wads of greenery and stuff them into their giant mouths.  Their skin is like grey leather, warm and mud-caked.  Anyway, I’m rambling again.  As I said, amazing animals.

So, over the next three days we went on a series of awesome jeep safaris with our very knowledgeable guide, Suk. Jess and I both found it to be a sublimely happy existence, standing on the back of the jeep, bouncing along the roughshod track with just our binoculars and a bottle of water all day every day.  There’s certainly something to be said for rising with the sunrise, and sleeping with the sundown, and then spending all day roaming through the grasslands and the jungle, sucking in the clean air and letting yourself be constantly humbled by the sheer power and grace of nature.  It’s a pure, vibrant sort of existence.  Over those three days we watched the sun set over the foothills of Bhutan in the North of the park, paddled in the Beki river with fish as big as people, and saw a parade of wonderful animals – including  capped langur, bison, water buffalo, rhinos, wild elephants, sambur, wild boars, mongoose and giant squirrels – as well as some equally marvelous birds, including the Great Indian hornbill, the florican bird, the crested serpent eagle, kingfishers (gorgeous birds), jungle fowl, scarlet minivets and Indian buzzards.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and while I frequently believe that to be rubbish, in this instance it might well be true.  Jess took a bunch of amazing photos, so I shall stop rattling away here and let you see it for yourself, whenever she manages to upload them to everyone’s favourite social networking site.

After three nights at Manas (which also included watching the India v. Pakistan cricket match with an assortment of incredibly excited locals while the power for the whole building periodically cut out; a quintessentially Indian experience, in many ways), we left by bus for Tezpur, a large town in Central Assam.

As some of you know, one of the main reasons I am here is to uncover some family history.  History is not the right word, in fact, because while some of it belongs to the past, a lot of it, the bigger part of it, exists right now, more alive than ever, in the present.  The short version is thus:  After fighting in the Gurkhas in what was then called Burma during the Second World War, my grandfather went into the tea trade, and spent the next four decades of his life working on tea gardens throughout the Tezpur region of Assam.  While here, he married an Indian lady called Bina, had two children – my half-uncles, Robin and Sanjiv – and then, somewhat inexplicably, left India in the late eighties, never to return.  Part of my trip then, most of it even, was aimed at seeing where my Grandfather – a man I only ever knew as an old, relatively solitary, whisky-drinking cricket fan – spent so much of his life, and meeting long-lost family.

I’d been in contact with Robin, and he was picking us up from Tezpur bus station on that Friday, six days back, April Fool’s Day 2011.  It’s an odd feeling, waiting for a blood relative who you won’t recognize as such until he picks you out from the crowd as the lone white guy; awaiting a first meeting with an uncle who, for first time in the almost quarter-century of your life, you are in the same country as.  I had to keep reminding myself also that although both Robin and Sanjiv are my uncles – a title which usually renders the man in question around the same age as your parents – they are actually only a few years my senior.  This fact was brought home when, looking up in response to a “Hey, Matt,” from my left, I was met not with the sight of a dad gone over into middle age, but of a young man in stylish Western clothes strolling towards me with an easy, confident smile and an outstretched hand.  The reunion was a relaxed one.  We chatted for a few minutes, before heading off to where me and Jess were to stay for four nights.  Almost a week on, I can say that my first impressions – of a laid-back, deeply warm and friendly guy who, like all the world’s best men, doesn’t take life and its various trials too seriously – were absolutely on the money.  As it turns out, I have gained not just an uncle, but a friend for life.

Robin dropped us at Wild Mahseer, an old-planter’s-bungalow-cum-top-end-tourist-guest-house where my Grandfather spent some of the later years of his life and where we were to be staying for four nights.  Wild Mahseer is another one of Ranjit’s ventures, and so we weren’t paying a dime for the privilege of staying there. Which is lucky, because I’ve since discovered that it costs in the region of 19,000 rupees (280 quid, approx) per night.  And it was easy to see why.  We thought the guesthouse in Guwahati was luxurious, but this place made it look like a Travelodge. It was (is) an absolutely breathtakingly stunning bungalow which, in its grandeur and design, almost defies description; a palace of the Raj in every way you would imagine, with sky high windows, cavernous ceilings, artwork splashed across the walls, marble floors, tea-on-demand – all in the midst of a wonderful, lush garden planted with various weird and wonderful species of crop and fauna.  Again, wait for the photos.  It was hands down the nicest place I’ve ever stayed, and it was absolutely free.  Perhaps a truer word was ne’er spoken than It’s not what you know, it’s who. The place was incredible. I truly felt like a king there, despite that being a crappy cliché.  Jessie was in heaven in our crater-sized bathtub.  For all its terrible faults, you can say this about colonialism: It was one hell of an architect.

So, the four days we spent there were awesome. On our first night they’d cooked us a platter of English food – cauliflower cheese, stew, boiled vegetables, baked beans – for us, which went down a treat.  As much as I love Indian food, suddenly eating it three meals a day is a bit of a shift, so a brief return to the dull familiarity of British cuisine was most welcome.  I also had my first cold beer of the trip; a tall bottle of Kingfisher lager, which I sipped in front of the BBC world service on the bungalow’s gargantuan plasma TV, by way of reconnecting myself with the events of the world.  Which hadn’t changed all that much, truth be told.  Bombing, earthquakes, uprisings.  The usual human distresses.  That night we slept soundly in our suite of a bedroom, listening again to the cry and craw of the insect kingdom outside.

The day after (the 2^nd), unfortunately, there was a bandh in place across the whole of Assam.  An aside about the politics of Assam, which I will keep brief for the benefit of those who couldn’t care less about such matters:

As in certain other Indian states, such as Kashmir and Punjab, there is a strong separatist movement here.  Much like in Northern Ireland, to pick a parallel, there are a range of different groups/organizations, some of which engage politically with the state machinery (a là Sinn Féin), others of which are full-blown terrorist groups (a là the IRA), such as ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam), who regularly carry out bombings and other such acts of terrorism against civilian populations.  While the perpetrators of such violence deserve every ounce of God’s wrath, it’s easy to see why a separatist movement exists here.  Assam does have a unique, independent flavor – the language is unique, as is the cuisine and the culture, and even the physical look of many Assamese people is closer to Nepali, or Burmese, than Indian.  On a practical level, the tension is based on a perceived exploitation of the Assamese state for its rich oil reserves by the central government in Delhi.  Anyway, people interested can find out more online.

So, a bandh is when these various militant seperatist groups contact the local press outlets to essentially declare a violently enforced state-wide strike.  Anyone who opens their shop, or goes to work, or even drives their car down a main road, risks being attacked – and insurance policies won’t cover you if you’ve violated a bandh.  Essentially, the whole state grinds to a halt.  On the day we arrived at Wild Mahseer, the unbelievably luxurious bungalow, the Prime Minister of India was paying a state visit to Assam, so in protest, a bandh was put in place, meaning we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything.

This was pretty annoying, but we managed to pass the time.  My beard had become seriously overgrown, and I asked Ranjit to borrow his razor.  “Forget that, I’ll get you my favourite barber,” he replied, in typical Ranjit fashion.  And he did.  Twenty minutes later I was sat on a chair underneath a bamboo tree in the garden, receiving a full-monty razor shave and – I didn’t ask for it, but once the chunks of hair began floating past my face to the floor, it was too late – an old-fashioned short-back-and-sides haircut.  When I was finished, I was only a palmful of Dapper Dan’s hair pomade away from looking like the freshest man in the East.  On my way back in, Ranjit declared that I needed an Indian massage. “To really relax you,” he said.  So, twenty minutes later, there I was, under the bamboo tree again, shirtless and oiled to the max, undergoing what I can only describe as therapeutic torture.  The masseuse slapped and drummed at my head, stretched my ears and fingers, and clicked my joints using elaborate armlocks which I’m pretty sure, with a slightly greater application of force, would have broken bones.

That afternoon, the Cricket World Cup Final started at 14.30.  Everyone in the place, from millionaire Ranjit down to the pot-washers, crowded around a giant screen to watch the match.  Just before the first ball was bowled, Ranjit strolled in having just had a long phone conversation with Shane Warne.  (Yeah, Ranjit is also on the management board of the IPL team Rajastan Royals, for whom Warne plays).  “Warney has a new girlfriend,” he grinned.  “The rascal.”

Watching India win the World Cup with my long lost Indian connections, in India, was a synchronicity of delightfully epic proportions.  There was singing and dancing as the win became a near-certainty, and as Dhoni smashed the last ball of the tournament out of the ground to seal it, fireworks erupted with such power and frequency from all the local villages nearby that it sounded like we had suddenly entered a warzone.  Everyone ate a giant meal around one, and then, having drank martinis for eight hours straight, Jess and I went to bed blind drunk for the first time since coming to India.

The next day, Robin arrived to pick us up with his wife, Swati.  Jess and I have since spent a lot of time with the two of them, and Swati, like Robin, is a lovely person.  She is one of the few people I’ve ever met who I would call genuinely selfless, and she’s deeply friendly to everyone around her for the simple reason that that’s what comes naturally to her.  She’s also highly intelligent, although modest with it, and astonishingly well-read.  On the whole the two of them are a great, great couple, who despite being wonderful individuals in their own right, manage to be even bigger people in each other’s presence.  Goethe once said “Love does not dominate; it cultivates.”  Never have I seen this better epitomised than in the their relationship.

Anyway, enough gushing at the power of true love.  That day, we visited Monabarie, the tea estate where my Grandfather spent a lot of his life as a manager.  It’s the second largest estate in all of Asia, exporting more than 3million kgs. of tea a year.  Driving past and through it, the tea trees – pruned from their natural height of around 20 feet like a bonsai tree, so that they sit at a perfect waist-height for picking – spread outwards in vast, perfectly flat fields, like the surface of an ocean, if the ocean were filled with swathes of light green leaves instead of salt water.  It’s an incredible sight, just miles and miles of miniature tea trees, glistening in the hot Indian sun, ready to be picked and withered and cut and fermented and dried and sent off to warm mugs from Asia to Europe to America.

In what was a deeply humbling experience, the staff at Monabarie were awaiting me, the grandson of the near-legendary Roy Eastment, as we arrived at the central office.  They stood in a line outside, and shook my hand one by one as I passed.  The manager, and an old guy who worked with my Grandfather for almost twenty years, escorted me inside, where they gently laid a Gamosha – a thin, white and red woven cotton scarf, and one of the chief cultural symbols of Assam – over mine and Jessie’s necks.  It’s an honour, being presented with one of these; they are used in Assam to denote a guest of great honour.  As I said, humbling.  They had arranged all the old photos of my Grandfather for me, including some of him singing karaoke at staff parties which were simply priceless, and we looked over these for a while in bittersweet silence.  Then they took me into the main office, where his name is still listed on the wall as a past manager.  It was surreal, and deeply moving.  Such kindness, such respect, just because of who my Grandfather was.  Amazing.

We had a tour of the tea factory – itself an amazing experience, seeing how those little green leaves are converted into dried, ground tea, ready for brewing – and then lunch at the assistant manager’s bungalow.  Afterwards, it was time to go and meet Bina – Robin and Sanjiv’s mother; my Grandfather’s second wife; my de facto grandmother.

I was nervous, actually, and meeting people is not usually something that I get nervous about.  As we approached her house, we were told to wait outside.  After a minute, Bina appeared, wearing long flowing robes, and carrying a small tray of incense, flower petals, and the red paste used to mark bindi spots.  She blessed us both as, in the background, an array of cousins and family members looked on.  After this, we embraced.  She’s an amazing woman, partly for reasons that are too private to explain here, but partly simply for how incredibly, incredibly loving she is.  We hugged, and she kissed me on both cheeks.  Then she held my face in both hands, and stared hard into my eyes, her face creased with an emotion suspended somewhere between pure joy and desperate sadness.  “Roy,” she said, her voice cracking.  I’ve been told I look like him when he was young, in the horizontal band of my eyes and nose, and I guess this proved it to be true.  “Roy,” she said again, gently shaking my face, her eyes damp now.  We embraced again.  I felt hot tears spring behind my own eyes.  “Roy.”

We ate dinner, and despite her lack of English, we communicated in smiles and gestures and mimes, and it was perfect.  Words weren’t needed, not really, just as they aren’t really needed now, and just as I’ll never get them right no matter how many times I rewrite them.  In the corner of the room, a picture of my Grandfather sat amongst an arrangement of flower and incense.  Young and dashing in his army uniform, he sat frozen, his grin slightly curled at the sides with some unknown mischief.  Six years after his passing, and there I was, in his old land, hugging the woman he once loved,  trying somehow to put back together a jigsaw with no hard edges, and failing even as I succeeded.

Before I knew it, we were leaving.  There were photos taken in the garden, various poses struck in the dying light of the day.  As Bina and I embraced for the last time, she began to sob.  I held her, and kissed her forehead.  Everything was very quiet.  Eventually, her face damp, she held mine and Jessie’s hands, and began to walk us over to the car.

A lot of people, when they’re giving you travel advice for India, will say something like go with the flow, or relax into it, or something similar.  It sounds like a useless platitude, but actually, it’s good advice.  My British sensibilities were telling me to react to Bina’s display of raw emotion with a sort of understated, awkward friendliness.  It was intense, having a long-lost grandmother that you’ve just met cry in your arms.  At first I wasn’t sure how to react, and I could barely find any words.  But I did relax into it, and I hugged her, and kissed her on both cheeks, and pointed into my chest and said “Grandson,” and pointed into her chest and said “Grandmother,” which lit her face up with a huge smile, and I even cried with her, and it was right.  It was raw, and it was improvised, and in many ways it was a mess.  But it was right.

Forgive me reader, I’ve let you down again, and we haven’t caught up with where I am now.  The tale is three days in lieu still.  I haven’t even got onto my reunion with my equally awesome uncle Sanjiv.  But I am more than 6000 words deep, and that last passage took it out of me.  Tomorrow is our last day in Assam, and for now I need to go and take a long drag on what some pe0ple term a jazz cigarette, and let my fingers relax.  (By the way, for those of my friends who are interested, an ounce of weed here – good weed, I might add – costs – wait for it – 60p.  That’s right.  That’s not a typo.  That ‘p’ shouldn’t be a pound sign.  An ounce of Mary Jane for sixty pence.)

I gave this post the title I did not just because it’s a great album, but because it’s true, and because it’s never been truer to me than in this past week, in the face of the sublime power and grace of both the natural world and the human spirit.  The world is a wonderful place people, and worth the fighting for.

Thanks all for reading.  Sorry it was a marathon.  Till next time.

x

Voyage of the dawn treader

Indian bureaucracy is a beast unto itself.  It really has to be experienced to be believed. I came here in the full knowledge that standards of organisation, punctuality etc. would not be what I have grown used to in fair old England, and generally speaking I’m a fairly laid-back sort of a soul, but humble reader, recent trials have tested my patience.

I am sitting here typing this, at 6am Indian time, with the rest of Guwahati mostly asleep and the sun only just cresting the horizon, due to the sheer complexity and absurdity of the Indian train booking system.  Jess and I are off to Manas National Park today, and train was the simplest way to get there.  However, when we went to book ourselves a seat last night, we discovered that a) no-one quite knew exactly what time the trains were running, or whether specific routes operated on Tuesdays; various Indian transport websites provided conflicting information b) the trains that we could find were mostly fully booked, or slapped us with the message ‘availably information is not forthcoming’.

Anyway, we signed ourselves up to the ‘waiting list’ (there are three different types of waiting lists, arranged in order of priority, which differ in size depending on the day, station, and route) for the 11:50 train, having been told that we had a good chance of being bumped from the list onto the train.  However, after booking, we were told by a different administrator that in fact there was very little chance of us making the cut, due to specific changes in the carriage arrangements for that day.  No big deal – the money would be refunded, and we could just show up and get on an earlier one, we were told.

Unable to discover exactly what time the earlier trains left – again, the various websites displayed wildly contradictory information – we endeavored to get to the station early – sixish – and simply figure it out.  This, our native hosts assured us, was a good plan – many trains would be leaving around the half six mark.  They promised to wake us up at five, and we accepted that promise.  To bed we went.

I awoke sometime later, seeing that it was already light.  Half five. No wake up call.  Bollocks.  We leapt up, packed our final bits and pieces in a frenzy, and tracked down one of the slumbering members of staff.  After much miming, and some basic, mispronounced Assamese from myself, a taxi was ordered. (I say taxi – what I mean is an auto-rickhsaw, one of these.) “Now,” I tried to tell him, “we need it now. Ab,” I said, using the Hindi, or maybe Urdu, for now. He nodded blankly and then, grinning, held up six fingers. Further negotiations were seemingly not an option, so I left it.  Having forty minutes to kill, I went online.  Without much hope, I checked the Indian Railway website – there we were, still sixth and seventh on the waiting list, unmoved since yesterday.  Forlorn, and losing faith, I checked my email on a whim.  And there, in my inbox, was an email from the Indian Railway server.  A confirmed ticket on the 11:50 from Guwahati to Barpeti Road.  Result.

I printed it, ran inside, and tried to tell our man that we didn’t need the taxi any more.  I think perhaps there was never a taxi, as it was nearing six and he was preparing us tea and biscuits to be enjoyed at a leisurely pace in bed.  Grinning some more, he nodded at my doubly animated miming, and set off for the bedroom with the tea, where Jess had returned to the land of slumber.  The sun was rising.  It still is, as I type.  We have a ticked for the 11:50, or so I think, although the website still has us on the waiting list, so in essence we have half a ticket.  If there were any 6:30 trains, they have all gone now.  And there was no wake-up call anyway, meaning we probably wouldn’t have made it, and perhaps even no auto-rickshaw to take us to the station, meaning we definitely wouldn’t have made it.

So there it is.  A veritable bureaucratic nightmare.  It’s an absolute mammoth of a company, the state-owned Indian Railways – one of the largest employers on the planet, it covers something insane like 40,000 miles of track – and they really do try for an air of professionalism and orderliness.  Like so many administrative bodies in this country though, what they end up producing is a web of complexity and confusion.  I had been warned by my family here to expect a somewhat slapdash style to everything here – my uncle Ranjit actually said that “India embodies the concept of confusion- but I didn’t really know what they mean till this past week.  Indeed, I think if I had to give one piece of advice to a prospective traveler here, it would be to not expect anything to work out as planned, and to approach everything – everything – with something of a que sera sera attitude.

(Two more brief examples:

Sending a package back to England from Mumbai involved tracking down two boxes from a bin, buying tape to seal them, unsealing them at the post office to show what was in them, filling out a contents form for both boxes down to exact numbers of underwear, finding a booth on the street to xerox said form four times, then having to go to a stationery shop to buy the paper for the xerox booth to use, then finding a woman on the street who makes a living by sewing packages in thin cloth (a requirement for posting anything larger than a letter in India), waiting two hours for this sewing to be completed, making up an Indian address for the ‘sender’ part of the bureacratic process, and then finally, minutes before the entire post office prompty closed at two so everyone could watch the cricket, sending the damn thing.  A total task time of between four and five hours.

Buying a SIM card in Mumbai involved figuring out what type of card I actually needed via the internet, finding an Airtel booth, finding another booth on the street to xerox my passport and VISA, then again having to go to a stationery shop to buy the paper for the xerox booth to use, then being sent to a local photo studio to produce passport photos, which involved sitting in a full-on studio room complete with backlights and tripods and a guy who looked like he’d walked off a Bollywood set delicately changing the angle of my head and the fall of my hair, all the while saying “nice, yeah, that’s the one, yeah, looks great!”, then going back to the booth with the photos to be told I needed a letter from the hotel confirming I was staying there, then going back to the booth to be told I needed an electricity bill from the hotel to confirm the hotel actually existed, then, finally, getting the SIM card and returning to the hotel room triumphant to read, in small print in the back of the manual “This SIM card will work in all areas of India apart from Assam.”)

Wow; 1205 words ranting about how hard it is to get things done in this crazy land.  This wasn’t my intention, and I should stress that the rant didn’t come from a place of anger – more an exasperated sort of amusement, and helpless acceptance.  Please don’t anyone let this put you off coming here; believe it or not, somehow, the absurd complexity of it all manages to become, on the whole, rather endearing.

Now for what I actually came to write.  And that is an account bringing my billions of global readers up to speed with my adventures.  Let us rewind to that first night in Mumbai, a week – a week which feels like half a lifetime – ago.

During the early evening, I wandered.  This in itself is a form of entertainment in India.  There is simply so much to see, so many incredible, unique, bizarre sights, that you don’t really need a plan, or a Lonely Planet, or a guide – you can just walk around.  Jess was arriving later that night; or the next morning, to be exact, around 1:30.  I watched a local Hindu ceremony, basking in the lovely scent of the incense peeling off the congregation, bought a cheap wallet and some other trinkets, finished Shantaram in a local cafe while sucking back on an ice cold coke, and then strolled through Chembur’s fruit market, which was like a city-within-a-city of alleys piled high with every fruit under the sun.  I drank a beer (30p for a pint of Kingfisher), ate a paneer curry, and then, soon, the hour was nigh.

The man in the hotel worked a deal whereby his brother would drive me to and from the airport for 600 rupees.  I sat around in the hotel foyer, reading the papers, drinking chai, and soon we were off.

The streets of Mumbai, like those of most big cities which are not exactly crime-free, rapidly empty at what seems like half ten on the dot.  Literally, the whole place goes from impossibly busy, seething with people, to tumble-weed quiet in the space of half an hour.  It’s a strange sight.  The city itself doesn’t go quiet, and the aura of a few million lives being lived doesn’t vanish – I’m not sure this ever happens; in fact, if NY is the city that never sleeps, I think Mumbai is the city that suffers from chronic insomnia, what with the dogs wailing through the night in one long, demented prayer call, and the city-wide swarm artificial lights refusing to let the sky ever go darker than a light blue – but the roads are suddenly almost utterly empty of vehicles or wanderers.  Which is nice, after the crushing traffic of the daytime hours.  My driver and I cruised down to Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport with a most welcome breeze coursing through our car, and a most welcome (relative) calm hanging over the streets.

I won’t bore you with any self-indulgently soppy romance, but I will say that waiting for Jess outside the arrivals terminal for what felt like for ever is one of the most nervously, restlessly, childishly excited I’ve been for a long, long time.  We hadn’t seen each other in nigh on two months, or really even spoken much in that time, and somehow it was only as I stood in the marbled bazaar of the airport’s exit surrounded by hundreds of utter strangers that it hit me how profoundly I’d been missing her.  When she appeared – dwarfed by her huge backpack, her skin a soft bronze from the Australian sun, and the most gorgeous smile lighting up her face – I actually ran, reader, ran, to her, and although I was utterly exhausted, jet-lag-whipped and drained by the day’s humidity, in our embrace I suddenly felt powerfully energized again.

We strolled back to where the taxi had dropped us.  The guy had assured me he’d wait for us there for the return leg to the hotel, and although it had been almost an hour since we’d first parted ways, meaning he would have been well within his rights to hit the road again, and although there were taxis we could have hopped in with far greater ease, I wanted to keep my word, and I wanted to trust that I’d he’d wait for us.  It’s something I’ve been trying to do more on this trip, not to mention something which, in India, at times, you simply have to do – have faith in people, trust that they’ll come through for you, that despite all the warnings about the third world and crime and white victims and all the other terrified crap, people are basically good, and aren’t out to screw you.  Call me naïve, reader, but I think I’d rather be the guy that generally trusts people and maybe gets burned one time out of a hundred than the guy who lives his life in a state of perpetual semi-paranoia, seeing a thief or a con-man in every pair of eyes.

On the drive back to the hotel we witnessed something semi-extraordinary.  About a hundred metres ahead of us, on an open stretch of road, an auto-rickshaw turned out of a side-alley too hard and too sharp and – unsurprisingly, as the things are almost built to crash, with their single front wheel meaning they are constantly tottering along, off-balance – essentially capsized in the middle of the road.  It slammed onto its side, skidded across the concrete and hit a wall with a long screech of metal-on-concrete.  My heart dropped; it looked like a pretty bad crash, and with the little vehicles being door-less, my head was filling with images of limbs and faces crushed and mangled under the side of the vehicle.  As we slowed down at the site of the crash, I realized with dismay that despite my mother’s best advice, I had no idea what the phone number for the Indian emergency services was.  I was scared, reader.  Scared.

However, things quickly relaxed when I noticed that our driver was smiling, and wistfully shaking his head.  This confused me for a moment, until, just ahead of us, I was presented with an incredible sight.  From the tired, ramshackle, tragic slums that lined the side of the road, streamed a bunch of about fifteen people.  They were of all ages; I spotted amongst them an old guy with a perfectly white beard, and a young, totally naked boy.  Without a word, but with a dedicated urgency about them, they gathered around the overturned rickshaw, and with a carefully controlled group motion, righted it.  The reckless driver, meanwhile, had emerged totally unscathed, and was busy brushing the dust from his shirt in the middle of the road.   There is no way this group of impromptu helpers from the slum knew the him – they barely spoke throughout the whole event – and there was no real reason for them to help him, other than that it was simply a good thing to do.  But help him they did.  In a matter of seconds, the rickshaw was upright again, and after some silent handshakes and smiles, it was on the move once more, its hunt for some late-night passengers re-ignited, and the group of people were dissolving back into the midnight maze of the slum.  It was pretty amazing really, and epitomized a spirit of community and joint effort which I’ve rarely seen back home, but which appears, increasingly, to be the absolute norm here in India.

Relieved and cheered by this event, Jess and I ended up back at the hotel sometime around four, lying under the rapidly whirring fan, reunited at last.  It was getting light, but we talked for hours, well into the morning, earned ourselves one of those damp sheens I previously mentioned, and eventually passed out. It was beautiful, actually, and I don’t use that word lightly. Serene and contented and what I’d been waiting for for weeks.

Over the next two days we explored Mumbai proper.  This meant catching taxis in the bleeding heat for hours at a time in standstill traffic, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.  South Mumbai – Coloba, Fort etc. – was pretty cool, although notably much more touristy.  The Gateway to India is impressive, and it was nice to catch the breeze coming off the ocean.  We wandered past the slums, decided against tea in the Raj, and generally soaked up the city.  I got roped into buying a bag of rice for a woman after she tied some flowers to my wrist, but other than that things went well.  There were goats all over the place and I briefly joined in a game of slum cricket, fetching a nicely driven ball at around mid-on and returning it to the bowler amidst great cheers.   We also had lunch in Leopold’s Cafe, which will ring major bells for anyone who’s read Shantaram (and anyone who hasn’t really, really should).  The security to get in was pretty tight though because – and I didn’t know this till then – Leopold’s was actually the site of one of the awful, disgusting November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.  Still, the curry was good and it was nice to picture the novel’s assorted characters on the upper floor, sipping whiskey and philosophising (oh, the good life).

That evening we watched India beat Australia in the World Cup.  As the last ball of the game was slapped for four and India reached their target total, there were a flurry of deafening bangs outside.  Momentarily terrified at what sounded like gunfire, Jess and I skulked over to the window for a better look.  There were no bullet casings though; just a sky streaked by cheap fireworks.  As we watched, more appeared from all over the city in sprinkled splashes of white and green.  Whatever else might be confusing about India, this I can say with certainty:  This country loves its cricket.

The next morning, we got up at 6am, showered, packed, and made our way down to the train station, having mentally steeled ourselves for what was to come:  A 56 hour train ride – leaving at 8am on the Friday, and arriving at 4pm on the Sunday – across 2700km of rural India, to Guwahati in the state of Assam.  We found the train, and strolled down the platform, riding the tide of half-bemused, half-astonised stares which trail you everywhere in this country if you’re a white person, and can get pretty wearing, truth be told.  We reached our carriage, and there, in typewritten paper taped beside the door, amidst a pack of extremely Indian-sounding names, were our extremely English-sounding ones.  Seats 38 and 40.  With a relieved dumping of our packs, the purchasing of five liters of water and a shitload of cheap snacks, we were onboard, and we were away, and Mumbai was behind us.

The train ride, as a whole, was pretty intense, and pretty amazing.  Our berths (we were in the 2AC class, the equivalent of overnight first class in the UK) looked like this.  Jess and I had a top bunk each, and then there were two other people below us.  These berths run in a long row along  either side of the carriage (there are fifteen or twenty of them), and they are divided from the corridor by just a curtain.  What it means is that there is no escaping the constant company of others – during the day, the bottom bunks essentially become free-for-all seats, and people sleep sporadically the whole time, so that there is always, somewhere in the carriage, music being played, salesman plying passengers with their wares, and people talking and eating.

As I said, intense.  No showers, pretty grimy squat-over-a-whole-in-the-floor-while-fighting-back-the-urge-to-retch toilets, food which came with a slight dash of ‘Delhi Belly’, and an unceasing hubbub of activity.  But, it was one hell of an experience.  Watching the countryside slip by, you get a real sense of the sheer, unbelievable, size of India.  As you leave Mumbai behind, and the view unfolds into great flat fields stretching on to the horizon, you see that most of the country isn’t the press of the city, but this older, rural, more sparse, more ancient, and in so many ways, more pure existence.  For hours and hours, the only sights were small villages of huts, and women in beautifully coloured saris bent to the earth, hacking and plucking at the ground.  Kids played cricket on the train tracks, or swam in reeded marshlands.  Men on battered old motorbikes kept pace with us along dirt tracks, the hot wind whipping their hair and clothes  around their necks.  Girls carried great loads on their heads, loads half the size of cars, balanced perfectly atop their walk, the fruits of hundreds of labours perched on a hundred skulls. For miles, there would just be nothing, but the land, and a single wandering figure, and the beating sun.  The fields went on for acres under the cloudless sky, plump with crops and bordered by flowering trees.  A lady we met pointed out the plants as they sped by:  Wheat, grapes, bananas, wheat, papayas, onions, grapes… At each station we’d stop and people would get out and just wander the platform, smoking cigarettes, gazing at the sky.  Slowly, over hundreds of miles, as we carved our way up through Orissa and West Bengal, you saw the land begin to change, slowly, with a gradual, imperceptible shifting of nature, from the hot dry climate of the West towards the wet, tropical one of the North East.  As we neared Assam, the jungle began to emerge out of the earth, with its fat wet leaves and damp ground.  It was incredible, covering that distance, and watching the country and the climate shift.  And at every little station, and tiny village, and gaggle of natives, that mind-bending sense of just how big, just how impossibly big, and unknowable, and brilliant in its perfect mystery, the wide world really is.

Everyone on the train expressed that same communal spirit that saw the rickshaw righted in Mumbai – food, music, chai, all of it was shared between everyone, and people would simply sit and sleep on one another’s beds  and swap berths on a whim.  In essence, it was the polar opposite of your average tube ride.  Instead of a carriage full of people rocking from side to side in total silence, avoiding each others eyes, and thinking of the closed door and closed curtains at the end of their journey, you had a train-load of total strangers instantly, and unquestioningly, companions in their long journey, willing to share everything and help one another in every way.  Not once did I see an ounce of bad will from anyone.  It may sound like I am romanticizing the thing, but I’m merely calling it as I saw it.  The journey should have been gruelling, and in some ways, and at times, it was, but it was made wonderfully bearable by a show of communal goodwill and group harmony like none I have ever witnessed.

And that is to say nothing for the people we met.  For one, we were adopted into a family from Nassing, a grape-growing village outside Mumbai.  They insisted that we call the elders Aunty and Uncle, and visit them before we leave.  The son of the family, Vikram, was a lovely guy; friendly, interested, big-hearted and honest.  He worked in a call center for £30 a month, and told us how upset he gets when Americans shout at him for his accent.  He hoped to one day visit New York but didn’t think it would ever happen.  It was sad, actually – there’s no other word for it – listening to him wonder and dream at things that are so easy to do in the Western World, but nigh on impossible for your average Indian.

Vikram also expressed something I’ve been coming across repeatedly, from many Indians, and which is as unnerving as it is deeply sad – an automatic fascination, awe and almost reverence for us, simply for our white skin, and a concurrent belief that  their own brown skin is somehow deficient..  “You’re so fair, and beautiful,” he said, at one point.  “My grandmother wants to know what moisturizer you use to stay so fair.”  Always that word; fair. Everyone wanted a picture with us, and so many people commented on our lovely skin.  Maybe i’m reading it wrong – perhaps some of my Indian friends could correct me – but it really feels like this strange, national inferiority complex related to skin colour.  You see it in the adverts; everyone is white, or at least pale-skinned. In the shops there are moisturizers specifically sold as encouraging a lightening of the skin.  People have said we look like we’re out of the movies, that we look rich.  Is it just the encroaching cultural hegemony of the West taking effect, self-constructing its pedestal for others to gaze up at? What is it?  Weren’t we your colonial oppressors? I can’t help but think, every time i see the wide-eyed admiration at the sight of our skin, and the mention that we are British.  Didn’t people march and die to get rid us, to achieve independence?  And now a lot of you welcome us as if we are demi-Gods? Like i say, maybe I’m reading something all wrong with it – Anjuly, if you’re reading this, I’d love your take on it – but it’s certainly a strange phenomenon that both Jess and I are having trouble getting to grips with.

Anyway reader, I have been writing for two hours, and produced 4000 words.  The sun is beating down now.  Day hath well and truly arrived.  The train for Manas – if it, and our ticket, exist – leaves in a couple of hours, and I could use an hour’s sleep.  I shall have to step up and out of the writing zone.

I shall leave you with a short poem by Rabindranath Tagore  which I came across a few days back.  (Yes, that’s right, I’m the white Westerner in Birkenstocks sitting in a Mumbai cafe reading Tagore; I am, as my North American friends would say, that guy.)  Its simple, mercurial beauty made me pause for breath, as all good poetry should.  Perhaps it will do the same for you:

The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.

I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light,
and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds
leaving my track on many a star and planet.

It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself,
and that training is the most intricate
which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.

The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own,
and one has to wander through all the outer worlds
to reach the innermost shrine at the end.

My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said ‘Here art thou!’

The question and the cry ‘Oh, where?’ melt into tears of a thousand streams
and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance ‘I am!

(Tagore, Gitanjali, #12)

 

(Humble thanks to anyone who read this post. x)

 

Ramble On

There’s nothing like a 56-hour train ride to make you appreciate  a shower and some decent food.  This dispatch comes to you from Guwahati, the biggest city in Assam – a North-Eastern state of India which shares borders with Bhutan and Bangladesh, and is famous for its strong-tasting black tea.

Jess and I arrived here yesterday.  I have a lot, a lot to tell, about the  incredible, brutal, awe-inspiring train journey across 2700km of Indian countryside, not to mention our final two nights in Mumbai. But time and the Gods won’t allow it. My internet connection – old-fashioned dial-up, and wired elaborately through a wall and then two seperate computers via flea-bitten cables – is temperamental to say the least.  Plus, I am being eaten alive by mosquitos, which helps none with maintaining a train of thought.

So.  I will give a proper update as soon as I can, but I have no idea when that will be.  However, yesterday Jess and I were adopted into an Indian family, today we were blessed by holy men at Kamakhya, one of Hinduism’s most sacred temples, and tomorrow we’re off to Manas National Park – so suffice to say things are good.

Till next time.

 

36 hours in

Well.  Where to begin.  At the beginning, I suppose.

The heat hit me like a city-sized hot flannel as I stepped out of Mumbai airport’s arrivals terminal.  It’s hot here.  Very hot.  Sitting perfectly still underneath a fan – or, better still, an air-con unit – is about the only way to avoid a perpetual sweat.   The sun’s scorching rays beat down from a perfectly still sky from dawn till dusk. This was my very first impression of India’s biggest city.  Pressing, sticky heat and a bright, cloudless sky.

My ‘entertainment unit’ (tiny crappy screen built into the back of the headrest in front of me) on the plane had been broken, and although this annoyed me initially, primarily because I’d wanted to watch True Grit, it was a blessing in disguise, as it meant I got a couple of hours’ sleep.  Indeed, I passed out almost straight after sitting down, only waking up as we passed over the knuckled grey mountains and then perfect shoreline of Al Hadd, on the easternmost edge of Oman.   For the next hour I watched the spotless blue of the Arabian Sea slide by, and then, out of nothing, sprang the white, towering, slapdash roofs of outer Mumbai. 

The landing was smooth, and my bag was one of the first to find its way onto the rubbered carousel.  I grabbed it, slapped on my Birkenstocks, and then made for the exit.  For reasons that aren’t quite known to me, I was waved through customs without so much as a look at my passport.  Which was nice, as I had a thousand rupees or so stashed inside my copy of Shantaram, and with rupees being a controlled currency, bringing any in (or out) of India is technically a crime.  Small amounts such as mine constitute merely a slap-on-the-wrist crime, but still, feeling brutally jet-lagged, I was glad to avoid an awkward conversation with any Indian figures of authority.

I got a pre-paid taxi, managing to haggle the lady down from 900 to 800 rupees, which I’m still pretty sure is a royal rip-off.  Then an old guy – who insisted on carrying my bag, even though he was tiny and desperately skinny, and it looked as though my bag might snap his back at any moment – escorted me out of the airport and over to a multi-storey car park.  It was here, as we left the terminal, that the heat hit me for the first time.  It was also here that I got my first introduction to the curiously blank-faced stares that foreigners receive in India.  As we made our way across the slightly odd plaza outside the airport – sort of like a marble-floored bazaar, selling everything from hotel rooms and cars to chai and incense – a few hundred faces turned to watch me go with a plain, benign curiosity.   

Inside the darkened car park, a couple of young girls with faces far too wrinkled and sun-leathered for their age scampered over to me, asking for pounds, or, failing this, chocolate.  My guy, stumbling onwards under the weight of my pack, shooed them away with gusto.  We reached my taxi, and found the driver fast asleep across both seats.  After some heated consultation between the two of them over where the hell my hotel was – the address I had given to them had caused some confusion – I was waved into the vehicle with two massive smiles, and we pulled out of the car park, with my driver still blinking his slumber away.

I’d never really understood what was meant by ‘culture shock’, until we came into Mumbai proper.  This city is the single loudest, busiest, most hectic and most intense place I have ever, ever been.  The roads are unbelievable; just one huge stream of cars, auto-rickshaws, bicycles, cows, and walkers, all weaving and dodging between one another in a constant criss-cross; a muddled, seething mess of city-goers pressed together in a cacophony of car horns and shouts.  As we came into Chembur, the suburb where Jess and I are saying, the driver asked me whether I liked cricket.  At my “Yes,” he veritably jumped with joy, waggled his head excitedly, and took to telling me, in order, where each member of the Indian national side lives.  But I could barely listen to him.  We were moving through a deafening, impossibly busy carnival of engines, legs, dust and noise.  The rush of the place, the sheer crush of the bodies and the endless patchwork of shop-fronts and life tableaus was impossible to take in.  “Sehwag, Sehwag I think Delhi, and Gambhir too, just North of Delhi,” my driver was saying, but I was too drawn by the sight of a cow wandering past the car with four small children on its back to pay much attention.  The driving itself also has to be seen to be believed.  It’s the most fearless, aggressive vehicle-handling I’ve ever seen.  Traffic-slicing maneuvers which, in England, would be considered worthy of police intervention, are performed with a blasé confidence every few moments.  I was actually laughing out loud and shaking my head at times.  As I said, culture shock.  It’s a million miles from West Sussex, in almost every single way.  A whole other world.   

Anyway, I reached the hotel, tipped the taxi driver handsomely for getting me there alive, and was met at the front desk with yet another beaming smile.  The little man introduced himself as Raj, and he was supremely friendly, telling me not to worry about paying the bill, but to try some of his chai.  And so I did.  Exhausted, but wired on the energy of the place, I sat down under the air-con, which was heavenly, and accepted Raj’s homemade chai, which was also heavenly. Flicking through the Times of India, I came across an article detailing how road deaths in Maharashtra (the Indian state of which Mumbai is a part) had risen in 2010 to 36 every single day.  Which didn’t surprised me in the slightest. 

The room was – is – a godsend.  Barely a tenner a night, with a double bed, an ancient but hardy air-con unit, a bucket shower, and other conveniences.  Arriving in it for the first time, I stripped to nothing and lay on the mattress for a while, listening to the whir of the fans and, far louder, the yell and scraw of the street outside at the height of afternoon.  After sorting out my bag, by now light-headed with hunger, I headed downstairs, where Raj insisted I go to his brother’s vegetarian curry place round the corner. 

As I said, being white-skinned here means you attract serious stares.  They’re not in the slightest bit hostile, or rude, the stares, more just genuinely curious.  But this doesn’t mean they don’t take some getting used to.  Coming into the restaurant, the whole place fell silent and watched me as I clumsily mimed out that I wanted a table, and then repeated the single word of Hindi I knew – Shukriyah; thank-you – as I was taken upstairs.  Sitting down with the huge menu, I quickly realised that I had no idea what to order, and so when the waiter – who like the vast majority of people I’ve met here, was incredibly gentle and friendly, and made every effort to explain himself in English – came across, I just pointed at the table next to me and said I wanted what they had.  At this, lots of the other patrons laughed, and one shook my hand.  It was a good gamble, as when the food came – a mixture of vegetable, lentil and paneer dishes I’d never tasted before – it was the single best curry I’ve ever tasted.  And I’ve tasted a few curries, dear readers.  I tucked in with my single right hand, as is the Indian way, and when I gave a contented thumbs up to the group of waiters who were watching me, their faces lit up with delight.  The bill came to just over two pounds for the whole curried medley, and water, and extra naan, and chai.  I gave another handsome tip and went for a wander in the pressing heat.

I’m getting with it, the heat.  It sends you into a sweat straight away but somehow it’s a nice sort of a sweat, a fitting, comfortable sort of sweat, like the damp sheen that follows good sex.  I’m getting with the craziness of the place too.  Just walking the streets, the sights and sounds and even the smells are so incredibly vibrant, so colourful and varied, that you feel drunk with it.  The fruit market is like a jungle.  Crossing the road is like dodging bullets.  There are animals, everywhere.  And huge displays of Hindu gods and goddesses which light up and spray fireworks at random moments.  It’s intense, but if you can relax into it, there’s an energy to the place unlike any I’ve ever encountered anywhere in the world.    

Anyway, I’m not nearly up to speed, and nowhere near 36 hours in, as the title suggests.  In fact, I’m not even 12 hours in.  I haven’t even reached the moment of being reunited with Jessie after a six-week absence.  But I’ve been writing for nearly an hour and there are things to do.  Not least shower this film of suncream and mosquito repellent from my skin and drink more chai.

India play Australia in the cricket tomorrow, and there is a serious buzz about it here.  Somewhere around watching that I will endeavour to bring my millions of readers up to speed, but I can’t make any promises, as this city – nay, this country – doesn’t seem to be one that lends itself to either carrying out plans, or sitting in front of a computer screen for hours at a time.

Still, I’m alive and well.  And happy.  Life is good. 

Love to all.

Preface

This, kind readers, will be my attempt at keeping a blog during my time in India.  I say “attempt,” because I have no idea how regularly I will have access to this strange beast we call the internet.  Not very regularly at all, in certain places, I would guess.  But I will do my very best I can to inform all who are interested of what is going on within and without my sphere of being during my time in the the world’s most populous democracy.  Humble thanks in advance to anyone and everyone who takes the time to read my ramblings.

(p.s. Apologies if the name of the blog is a confusing one.  It seems that first-choice WordPress domain names are something of a rare treasure, and after being informed for the fiftieth time that the name I had chosen was already taken, and not fancying one full of numbers or enforced spelling errors, I went for the title of a song by Bob Dylan that I am rather fond of.  Incidentally, if you’ve never heard the song, I would recommend that you track it down, right this instant.)