by Justin Brown
‘I had it washed.’
‘You smell like a chemical plant,’ I said.
‘Rubbish,’ Reece said, putting old faithful on the back of his chair.
‘Not there,’ Stew said. ‘Put it away properly. It stinks to high heaven.’
Reece opened a door to the antique cupboard behind our table and put his cape next to some sparkling, meticulously ordered cutlery.
If there was a God, I thought, he would forget he had put it there.
The time after breakfast was spent avoiding the inevitable: planning two days in Delhi before flying to Jaipur. There was India Gate, a war memorial commemorating the members of the Indian Army who lost their lives fighting in World War I and the Afghan Wars. And a visit to New Delhi’s wonderfully clean and well-organised parliamentary sector. But nothing could beat a phone call I received while on the toilet at day’s end.
Earlier, Brendon and I, utterly knackered from being tourists for the day, had watched the entire bath scene from Pretty Woman before one of us had the energy to reach for the remote. And then came the phone call that made me want to hang up my backpacking boots forever.
‘Good afternoon,’ I said, my voice echoing around the bathroom.
‘Hello, Mr Bougen?’
It was a lot easier to say yes than explain the real situation. ‘This is him,’ I said.
‘I’m Kavita Aneja,’ said the sweet-sounding voice on the end of the line. ‘Guest Relations Manager of the Taj Palace.’
‘Hello, Kavita. What’s up?’
‘I was wondering whether you would care to join us for cocktails in Room 105?’
‘Cocktails?’
‘Yes. We are also having other guests, but would love to see you there.’
‘Why, yes,’ I said with a plum in my mouth. ‘That would be lovely.’
‘Excellent,’ said Kavita. ‘See you at 7 pm.’
I put the phone back on the wall above the toilet roll, washed my hands and found Brendon lying on his bed, channel-surfing. ‘Who was that?’ he asked, eyes not leaving the screen.
‘Kavita,’ I replied. ‘Put your tails on, we’re going to a party.’
I located my ‘going out’ jandals and had an Aussie shower (splashed on some deodorant). Indeed, because this party was something special, I even sponged the front of my trousers. We made our way to Room 105, replying to half a dozen ‘Good evening, sirs’ on the way. We felt like frauds. ‘Now, no silly stuff,’ I said ringing the doorbell of Room 105.
‘Yeah right,’ scoffed Stew.
A very attractive woman, spick and span in black and white, stood before four homeless hacks. This was Kavita. The room was like any other in the hotel, the only difference being the free champagne poured by four equally well-dressed men who stood to attention in each corner.
Collectively the Black Craps possessed many handicaps, but bullshitting was not one of them. We could do it anywhere, anytime. In this case, the more right answers we provided — more to the point, the more answers our Guest Relations Manager wanted to hear — the more free booze we were given. And the less we had to spend on dinner. Which was something I made a little too clear when the salmon and caviar came around for the third time: ‘Saves us buying food from the restaurant tonight.’
‘Sshh!’ said Blanket Boy, almost spluttering his bacon-wrapped green beans across the table.
A family from Newcastle soon joined us: mum, dad and two sons. The eldest son had been studying in India, one of the reasons his parents had made the trip. Small talk resumed and then jealousy, Dad clearly wanting to join us the next morning in preference to visiting tourist spots with his family.
‘Now,’ said Kavita, finding a minuscule gap in a conversation about cricket, champagne and Jackson Pollock-esque toilet adventures, ‘if there were a way we could improve the Taj Palace, what would it be?’
She clicked her pen and readied herself for answers, of which there were none. The main problem with the question was the small matter of there being not one thing wrong with the hotel. Another problem was that no answer would bring no more food and no more grog. I poked Reece in the ribs. ‘Come on,’ I said, with the desperation of a drunk, ‘think of something.’
Stew, seeing the end was nigh, sculled the contents of his champagne glass and had a waiter refill it. Brendon ate a sweet-and-sour meatball. Kavita’s pen hovered over the clipboard. For the first time in the past hour, we were silent.
We were back in school.
‘Ooh,’ said Reece, probably a little too enthusiastically, ‘I know.’
We looked at him as if he were Jesus. Could this man, without the aid of his putrid safety blanket, pave the way towards an extended good life of caviar and bubbles? Or had we, as expected, been ousted for the true con artists we really were?
He spoke at last. ‘We only have one reading lamp on the wall above our bed.’
Reece shuffled. Kavita looked up from her notes. At first she looked as if she was going to scold, as if Blanket Boy had just admitted he was going to marry her only sister. Then she squinted, cocked her head, and just stared.
This we took to be very good, or very bad.
‘That’s true!’ Kavita smiled. ‘The rooms do only have one lamp.’
Reece sat up. He really was Jesus. And all without the blanket. ‘I mean, what if a couple want their own light?’
‘Exactly!’ Kavita enthused, scribbling every word down.
‘More champagne?’ asked a white-gloved man with a full bottle.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Reece. ‘Our work here is done.’
Twenty-four hours later Delhi’s fog once more brought us to our knees. What was supposed to be a forty-five-minute flight to Jaipur was now a conundrum: should we drive six hours north, arriving at midnight, or fly to Rajasthan the following morning if the weather allowed. The worst part of this news was our complacent assumption that the van ride to Agra was our last on India’s roads. The second-worst part was the way Sunil grinned as he told us. The Indian technique of selling bad news with a smile is sweet, but a little disconcerting. An unhappy tourist is a dangerous being; one who thinks he’s leaving Delhi only to discover that his plane hates the place as much as he does, is another beast altogether.
Thankfully the Black Craps were all fans of waking up to a new city. And so it was that we boarded the Goldfish Bowl, battled Delhi’s rush hour and headed towards the final piece of the golden triangle. Although it is hard to admit, the only thing able to lift our spirits at 10.47 pm on a dusty, pothole-ridden highway was the Golden Arches. Even Brendon, once again at war with his arse, agreed that the best cure was a spicy McMaharaga Burger. We stood at the counter like ten-year-olds at a birthday party. Brendon was Dad, and we were the annoying little shits who wanted two of everything. Apart from signs written in Hindi, and Bollywood songs on the radio, we might as well have been in New York, New Lynn or Newfoundland.
Despite ordering double for everyone, the feed barely touched the sides, each of us scouring paper bags in vain for leftovers. We did, however, make sure we ate in the van to ensure that we reached Jaipur this side of midnight. A text message welcomed us into a new mobile network, then beeped again minutes later.
FROM JOHN BOUGEN:
FINISHED MY BOOK — HAVE YOU?
The constant reminder of Shantaram, the brick disguised as a book, continued to gnaw away every time I repacked it. Here was a story of an escaped Australian convict who became a doctor in the slums of Mumbai, and wrote about it with rare lucidity. Leopold’s, the expat bar where he carried out dodgy dealings in the 1980s with similarly dodgy characters, was so well described you wanted to go there right away. But then the author loses the plot, the hero goes to fight a war in Afghanistan, finds the girl of his dreams, sleeps around on her, finds her again, sleeps around on her. At nine hundred pages, it was seven hundred pages too long.
But the first two hundred and twenty were unbeatable.
Upon reaching Jaipur, we were greeted at the hotel b
y a walking moustache. The doorman was wearing something like sherwani, the long royal robes which are still often worn by Indian grooms and in times past were the court clothes of Rajput warriors. But we were more intrigued by this man’s perfectly trimmed face fuzz. Moustaches prove the virility of a Rajput man, so the longer the better, although various castes and tribes have different ways of growing and tying them. The man before us, however, had little to worry about in that department, possessing chops that would put Thomas Magnum to shame.
We were shown to our rooms. The draw of shut-eye after six hours on the highway was like a magnet. We slept the sleep of kings, but for one minor incident. At 3 am I woke to find Brendon in the single bed next to mine, laughing like a hyena.
‘What?’ I managed, still trying to work out where I was.
‘You don’t know?’
He was still sniggering.
‘No, what?’
He laughed some more. And couldn’t stop. I started to get tetchy. Clearly I had done something I promised wouldn’t happen again on the trip. Brendon composed himself, and managed to talk without hooting. ‘You sat up, and said, “Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello!”’ He said, ‘Hello!’ as if he was Gollum in Lord of the Rings.
‘Crap,’ I said.
‘You did! How could I make that up?’
‘No word of this at breakfast.’
‘Oh yeah, okay.’
Breakfast was a nightmare. Three Gollums and a defenceless sleepwalker going at it hammer and tong. Brendon held court, delighting and savouring every detail of my misfortune. I admired everybody’s ability to annoy.
‘Only sleep walks once every couple of months.’
‘Yeah right.’
‘At least he didn’t leave his room this time.’
‘Hello! Hello! Hello!’
Rebuttal is impossible when you don’t know what it was you actually did. The best thing to do was promise that such an occurrence wouldn’t happen again before departure. Brendon’s response wasn’t encouraging: he laughed harder than when he had found me screaming at 3 am.
An obese American woman sat one table over with her teenage daughter. When a waiter, more refined and respectful than she could ever be, placed a can of Pepsi in front of her she barked, ‘I said Diet! And where’s the ice?’
Having disposed of the restaurant’s supply of toast, we moved outside to be greeted by the ever-faithful Goldfish Bowl. It was easily our warmest morning yet. We celebrated by leaving sweatshirts behind and exposing knees and shins.
‘You’re really making no attempt to blend in, are you,’ said Reece.
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘It’s a beautiful day,’ said Brendon.
‘You look like labourers and schoolboys,’ said Reece. ‘Look at Stew, he’s not wearing half-pants.’
‘I haven’t worn them since the start of the trip,’ said Stew.
‘There’s a respectful tourist for you,’ said Reece.
‘Thank you, Blanket Boy,’ nodded the farmer.
I looked at Stew’s perfect attire and the smug look on his face. ‘Teacher’s pet,’ I said.
Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, is built from pink stucco (a material made of an aggregate, binder and water), made to resemble sandstone. For this reason, the showcase of Rajasthani architecture is known as the Pink City. It’s almost as if its founders scored a summer special on pink paint, started on a Saturday morning and never stopped. The result, however, is far from dull. But why pink? The city was painted that colour in 1853 to welcome the Prince of Wales, pink being the traditional Rajput colour of welcome.
Jaipur is less hectic than other major Indian cities. And it shows in its inhabitants, many of whom just hang out, meet, or pass the time. On the hilltops, forts and palaces remind the traveller of a more regal era. Elephants and camels clog roads, creating traffic jams the photographer in the back seat couldn’t pass up on. Soon we passed Jal Mahal (literally, Water Palace), a pleasure fortress built in 1799. Five storeys high, with its first floors underwater in Mansagar Lake, it was built for royal duck-shooting parties. A giant iceberg of a building that now lay abandoned, it was a birdwatcher’s paradise, but visibly not one immune to leaky building syndrome.
Our plan was to find cricket with a view. Our driver, as usual, had other ideas. ‘Elephant ride?’ he asked as the van wound its way up the hillside.
‘Here we go again,’ said Reece. ‘No thanks, gee!’
‘Jantar Mantar?’
‘No thanks.’
‘City Palace Museum?
‘No.’
‘Jawahar Circle?’
‘Nope.’
‘Birla Temple?’
‘Fuggoff,’ said Stew. ‘Just find us a spot where we can play cricket, gee.’
Something Jaipur doesn’t have, but clearly needs, is a plural for the word ‘palace’. They are everywhere. Forts, too, like Nahagarh, which, while a remarkable structure with grand views and individual rooms for each of the king’s nine wives, was a terrible venue for a quick ten-over game. That’s because the only player we could find was a ‘guide’ who had attached himself to us like a limpet. The only option was to head back down the hill. Our driver hit the outskirts of town and parked the Goldfish Bowl next to half a dozen tourist jeeps, a renovated palace as its backdrop.
The building was Amber Fort, military headquarters of the Kacchwa dynasty of Jaipur rulers. From the speed at which a teenage snake-charmer joined us, we figured this was a regular tourist spot. He opened a basket more suited to picnics. A cobra woke from a slumber and lethargically projected itself upwards. The boy regularly tapped him. The snake appeared irritated, but performed when the boy played his flute. At the end of his number, the snake-charmer held his hand out, but we were more interested in the possibility of playing cricket on a dry lake bed.
‘Could turn a bit,’ said a musing Stew.
‘Not exactly a green top,’ I replied.
Before we knew it, we had enough Amber jeep drivers for a game. In a genius move, one which Brijesh the cheat would be proud of, the Black Craps secured the services of the snake-charmer.
‘Now, let’s not do what we did in Agra,’ I said, tossing the ball to Stew. ‘Remember, these guys have unwritten laws.’
‘Any no-ball or wide is a free hit,’ he replied.
‘No runs for legs byes or byes.’
‘Can’t be bowled on a full toss.’
‘It’s a no-ball if it bounces more than once.’
‘Are you getting all this, Blanket Boy?’ Brendon asked.
‘Nope,’ said Reece.
‘Any full toss is a no-ball,’ I continued.
‘If you don’t tell the umpire what you’re bowling, it’s a no-ball.’
‘Same with change of wicket keeper.’
‘Jesus, you lot,’ said Reece. ‘I thought cricket was a simple game.’
‘Not in India,’ said Stew.
The main issue with playing against jeep drivers was keeping them on the field. Understandably, whenever a tourist arrived or they received a radio call from their vehicle, they abandoned the game at pace. Even the umpire was a driver; he leapt away to a waiting customer before the end of the first over. Another, Sonu, did the same thing, retiring on 0. The outfield wasn’t much. We spent most of the match dodging camel shit and boulders the size of soccer balls.
Then, with just one over to go in India’s innings, Vicky packed a sad. She split in two, obviously tiring of the constant beltings she received. Thankfully, our drivers had a plan. ‘One hundred rupees, sir,’ said Rarman, the driver. ‘We buy two more balls.’
Reece temporarily stopped scoring and handed over two fifties. Rarman sped off in his jeep, leaving dust, rocks and customers in its wake. Within five minutes, he returned with two cherry-red Vickys.
The jeep drivers set us thirty-three to win. They were supremely confident but really, how can you lose with a snake-charmer on your side?
SCORECARD
Amber Fort, Jaipur
INDIA
Sonu retired (had a customer to attend to) - 0
Ali stumped Stew - 14
Kanaya stumped Stew - 0
Apsarkhan run out - 14
Extras - 5
Total - 33
Bowling: Aitram 0-7, Brown 0-10, Stew 1-7, SK 2-11
BLACK CRAPS
Aitram bowled Raju - 4
Brown not out - 25
SK not out - 7
Extras - 1
Total - 37
Bowling: Sonu 0-2, Kanaya 0-12, Apsarkhan 0-6, Raju 1-15
New Zealand wins and levels series at 5-all.
Apsarkhan, the nineteen-year-old who loved (you guessed it) Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar, was awarded Man of the Match. We also gave a cap to snake-charmer Aitram. The boys took us for a joy ride in their jeep afterwards, and Aitram celebrated by re-opening his picnic basket. The cobra didn’t look happy. Later, I would discover that the trick to snake charming is to defang the poor buggers. A snake’s venom is its saliva. Without saliva, like humans it dies. The animal we had watched uncoil and struggle awkwardly would be dead in the next sixty to seventy days.
As the Goldfish Bowl departed, a phone beeped.
FROM JOHN BOUGEN:
JUST SPENT 3 HOURS BEING INTERROGATED BY EGYPTIAN JUDGE IN A ROOM THE SIZE OF A TOILET. EVERYONE WAS SMOKING — I WAS IN HEAVEN.
A SECURITY RISK?
Our final dinner in Jaipur was, for the most part, attended by three Black Craps. True to form, Brendon spent most of his meal visiting his favourite small room, barely able to finish a single sentence before having to leave again. Reece, ever the opportunist, asked on each occasion whether the patient would require the rest of his chips upon return. Proving he really did have a story for every occasion, Blanket Boy then proceeded to tell us of the dorm he stayed in, once upon a time in Pakistan.