I rearranged my shirt and tried to get my breath back. The entire courtyard was silent, and everyone was staring at me. I tried to chuckle and say that the guy was a loony, but no sound would come out of my mouth.
I then noticed that Liz, Fee and Caz had watched the whole thing from a balcony above. Liz, I could tell, was almost wetting herself with delight, but was straining every facial muscle to keep her pleasure hidden behind the smug, disappointed, told-you-so look that was plastered over her features.
Fee and Caz, judging by appearances, just felt sorry for me.
I had barely recovered from my brush with death when Liz descended from the temple that was Fee and Caz’s room to give me ‘some news’.
‘What? What is it?’ I said, still feeling a little rattled.
‘I’ve made a decision. There’s something I have to do.’
‘What?’
‘Well – Fee and Caz have been telling me about a place, not far from here, that I’d like to visit.’
‘So?’
‘It’s not the kind of place that you can just go and look at, though. If you want to go there, you have to make a commitment to stay at least two weeks.’
‘What! Why?’
‘It’s an ashram.’
‘An ashram? What’s an ashram when it’s at home?’
‘It’s a Hindu place of retreat for meditation, reflection and spiritual furtherance.’
‘Spiritual furtherance? What are you talking about?’
‘Look – I don’t want to go over this ground with you again. You’re obviously impervious to… to what this country is trying to teach you, and I think we should just stick with the facts. I am going to go to the ashram with Fee and Caz.’
‘For two weeks?’
‘For at least two weeks.’
‘Well that’s that, then.’
‘What’s what?’
‘You’ve abandoned me. That’s it. I’m on my own.’
‘No, you’re not. I realize you don’t want to come to the ashram with us, but we can always meet up…’
‘Too sodding right I’m not coming to an ashram. I don’t want to get brainwashed by some bunch of Hare Krishna loony mental headcases. No way. I’m not going anywhere near…’
‘Stop. STOP! I don’t want to hear this. Your prejudices are…’
‘PREJUDICES! I’m not prejudiced – I just don’t want to end up running around Leicester Square with a shaved head telling everyone I love them.’
‘That, Dave, is called prejudice, in case you didn’t know what the word means. We’re talking about a whole religion here, followed by hundreds of millions of people, and all you can think of is some… some… typically twisted Western manifestation of an Eastern philosophy. You are so closed-minded, I really don’t know why you even bothered coming here.’
‘Because you persuaded me to.’
‘Don’t give me that. You wanted to come.’
‘Only so I could be with you. And now you’re deserting me.’
‘I’m following a calling. You’re welcome to join me, or to meet me afterwards, but I am not going to sacrifice this opportunity just for the sake of your petty-mindedness.’
‘And I’m not just going to hang around waiting for you. We’ve got an itinerary to keep up with. There’s a whole country out there that I came here to see. I can’t just waste all my time here, can I? I’d go mad. There’s no point in coming to India and not seeing anything. I’ve got to get moving. I have to get to Goa.’
‘Impatience is a typically Western state of mind. You don’t realize it, but you’ve become a self-parody.’
‘I’ve become a self-parody? That’s hilarious!’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘You… you… you’ve just become an arsehole. That’s the only way of putting it. And you haven’t even got enough personality to become a self-parody. You’ve become a parody of someone else. Despite the fact that Fiona is one of the biggest bullshitters ever to walk this earth, you have decided to try and turn yourself into her! It’s pathetic’
‘If you had said that to me a week ago, I would have got angry. Fortunately for you, in the last few days I have made significant progress, and have come to know myself well enough for a pathetic little shit like you to be unable to get to me. My real self is simply impervious to the likes of you. Whatever you say, you simply can’t offend me, you… you slimy little PIECE OF SHIT! YOU TURD! YOU FEEBLE MOANING CYNICAL PATHETIC PSEUDO-LAD PISS-HOLE FAKE! I HATE YOU AND I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE! YOU MAKE ME SICK!’
Cross-cultural interchange
And so it was that I ended up on my own. Ranj had been kidnapped by his family, Liz had become a Hare Krishna, and Jeremy was just a lost cause as a human being. Other than them, there was no one I knew in the entire country.
By this stage I was bored of Pushkar. After the argument with Liz I felt that I ought to get moving in order to give the impression that I wasn’t frightened of being alone, but the fact was, even the thought of travelling on my own made my already loose bowels take on the character of a deflating balloon.
I did not want to be on my own. I just didn’t. There was only one thing in the world that would have been worse than being alone, and that was being with Jeremy.
Pushkar was such a small place that it didn’t even have a railway station. The nearest one was a few hours away by bus, in Ajmer. As I walked alone to the Pushkar bus station to buy myself a ticket to Ajmer, I felt like one of those old men who amble around in parks feeding ducks, eating sandwiches out of a paper bag and trying to talk to strangers. This was bleak. Nineteen years old, and I already felt like a lonely pensioner.
I couldn’t recall ever having felt lonely before. It was a weird sensation – for the moment a bit exciting, but I could tell that once I got used to it, it would be awful.
Our plan had been to stop in Udaipur, Ahmedabad and Bombay before we got to Goa, but I decided to ditch the original itinerary and head straight there. This meant that I would be going half-way down the entire country in one go, but I couldn’t face stopping in places where I might end up in some hotel on my own, without any other travellers. I mean, there’d be some people in each of those places, but I’d already learned that in big towns, travellers weren’t very friendly. And I didn’t even really want to see Udaipur, Ahmedabad and Bombay, anyway. I mean, a city’s a city.
If I could just grit my teeth and make it on my own to Goa, I’d be able to hang out there and meet some new people. I was bound to find someone who’d travel with me. Maybe even a female. A lot of that kind of thing went on in Goa, apparently.
I turned to the map of India at the front of The Book and worked out from the scale that the width of my little finger corresponded to roughly two hundred miles. I then measured Pushkar to Goa, and it came out at six little-finger-widths. That couldn’t be right. One thousand two hundred miles? I didn’t even know the whole country was that length.
Whatever. I closed the book. This was clearly a long journey. But it would be worth it in the end. After all, I still had precisely two hundred condoms left. (Fortunately, the condoms were in my rucksack, and whatever happened when we finally separated, I was going to make damn sure that I took all of them with me.)
With a ticket to Ajmer in my money belt, I spent the rest of the day phrasing my farewell speech to Liz, and finally settled on:
‘I realize that things have been difficult, and that whatever happens we’ll never be able to say that we parted on the friendliest of terms – but I just want you to know that I forgive you for what you’ve done to me, and I won’t hold it against you that you abandoned me. I wish you all the best on your spiritual journey, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity to travel alone in Asia.’
Unfortunately, when I woke up the following morning, she had already left. I found a note on the floor of the room which said,
D,
Bye.
Peace,
L
&
nbsp; I crumpled up the note angrily, then decided that I wanted to keep it and flattened it out on the floor, folded it up and slipped it into The Book.
With a start, I realized that I had overslept and was late for my bus. Liz had normally taken charge of the getting-up-in-time-to-catch-buses side of things. Shit. In fact, she had taken charge of everything.
I got dressed, threw the stray piles of scattered clothes into my pack, put my shoes on, checked under the bed, then paused for a second, threw my stuff out on to the bed and counted the condom boxes. Yup. Thought so. There were two missing.
Some fucking ashram she was visiting. Typical. So that’s what she meant by spiritual furtherance. Absolutely typical.
I contemplated the pile of condom boxes on the bed, all of them with the Cellophane still intact, and felt briefly paralysed. I was a failure. My life was a mess. I belonged in a monastery.
However miserable I felt, it dawned on me that missing my bus wasn’t going to improve the situation, so I forced myself to repack my bag and head for the bus station. I arrived almost a quarter of an hour late, but fortunately the bus was still there. To my horror, though, I saw that the front three seats of the bus were already occupied by Liz, Fee and Caz.
My seat was in the row directly behind them, and as I got on, Fee and Caz smiled at me in the way you’d smile at a naughty leper. Liz looked the other way.
Despite the fact that it was only a short journey, Caz managed to puke out of the window twice. Due to the speed of the bus, a significant portion of vomit flew out of her window and back in through mine, splattering me in the face.
How apt, I thought, as I wiped half-digested flakes of lentil from my face. First you steal my travelling partner, then you puke in my face. Do you have any other desires? Would you like to crap in my bed?
Ajmer isn’t the kind of place where you’d actually want to stay, and given that Fee, Liz and Caz were on the same bus as me to Ajmer, it seemed a fair bet they’d be heading on somewhere else by train. We didn’t speak on the bus, not even, for example, to apologize for vomit shrapnel, so the details of their onward journey remained a mystery.
The bus stand in Ajmer turned out to be small and almost empty of buses. This made it pretty clear that they were going to be continuing their journey by rail. The bus station was on the opposite side of town to the railway station, and having seen the three of them squeeze into a rickshaw with their rucksacks, I got a separate rickshaw on my own and followed them across town.
I lost sight of them during the journey, only to find them again at the railway station, right in front of me in the queue for trains heading south to Udaipur. None of them turned round to look at me, but I could tell that my presence had been registered by the way they all stiffened up and started exchanging fevered whispers.
After about ten minutes, Liz spun round, bright red with anger.
‘Are you following us?’
‘No.’
‘Just tell me why you’re doing this, Dave. Precisely what do you think you’re getting out of this?’
‘Nothing. I’m just travelling south, and this is the way.’
‘Is it some twisted form of revenge?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where else am I going to go? Back up to Delhi?’
‘Very funny.’
‘It wasn’t a joke.’
‘You’re not going to intimidate us, you know.’
‘I’m not trying to intimidate you, for God’s sake. I’m just making my way to… to… Udaipur and Ahmedabad.’
She eyed me suspiciously.
‘I thought you said you were going to Goa.’
‘Yeah, well I’m stopping on the way, aren’t I? I’m not just interested in travellers’ hang-outs you know. I want to see the real India.’
She eyed me even more suspiciously.
‘We’re getting off before Udaipur – I’m not telling you where – but if you get off at the same station as us, I’m calling the police.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘I’m not joking.’
‘And what are they going to do?’
‘That depends on what I tell them you’ve done.’
‘Oh, Liz. Give me a break.’
‘No – you give me a break.’
‘Look – I don’t know what we’re arguing about, because I haven’t got the slightest interest in following you off the train and going to your sordid little brainwashing centre. I am going, like I said, to Udaipur.’
‘I’m not interested in your lies any more, David. Just remember, I’m calling the police if this carries on any longer.’
When I got to the front of the queue, I tried to explain to the ticket-seller that I wanted to be in a different compartment to the three English girls. It took ages for him to get what I was on about, but eventually he sighed, nodded and told me that he understood.
I paid for the ticket, and he passed it under the glass with a huge wink, saying that he’d put me as close as possible.
On the train, I was greeted with more frosty glances and rigid turned backs. I felt as if I’d already finished with the lonely-pensioner phase and was now a dirty old man in a mac.
After a while, the man sitting next to me smiled and said, ‘These girls your friend?’
He was wearing a green polyester shirt, blotched with sweat, and looked as if he had recently washed his hair in lard. We were wedged up against one another on the seat, but whenever I tried to create a little space between us, his fat oozed outwards to fill the gap.
‘No. Not my friends,’ I replied.
‘You go talk with girls, yes?’
‘No. No talk with girls.’
‘Why?’
‘They no my friend.’
The man looked at me as if I was certifiably insane, partly because I had slipped into a pidgin English even worse than his, but mainly, I suppose, because I showed no interest in talking to the girls.
‘They no good girls,’ I said, hoping to explain myself.
‘They beautiful girls,’ he replied with a huge, goggle-eyed leer.
‘Believe me, they are pains in the arse beyond belief.’
‘Hello, what?’
‘Bad girls. Bad girls.’
‘Bad girls fun.’
‘No. Not these ones. No bloody fun whatsoever.’
He wobbled his head in sympathy, obviously still thinking that I was insane.
‘What is your good name?’ he said.
‘Dave.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘England.’
‘Ahh. England very good. Are you married?’
‘No.’
‘What is your job?’
‘Student.’
‘Ah, very good.’
At this point, we ran out of steam. There was a long silence. I realized I ought to have asked the same questions back, but I somehow didn’t have the energy. The silence was broken when the man sitting opposite me, who looked so ill I didn’t want to touch him, leaned forward and tried to shake my hand.
‘Hello,’ I said, with a little wave.
‘Good day, sir,’ he replied, shaking my leg. ‘What is your good name?’
‘Dave.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘England.’
‘Ahh. England very good. What is your job?’ ‘Student.’
‘Are you married?’
‘No.’
‘Ah, very good.’
I was really meeting the locals now. Talk about cross-cultural interchange – this was fascinating.
A few hours later, when Liz, Fee and Caz left the train, I pretended not to notice. They tried to do it slowly and unobtrusively, but I saw that the second they hit the platform, they sprinted off through the station, then out of sight.
Now I really was alone.
The lard-hair man clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, nodded upwards, flicked the fingers of his right hand outwards and said, ‘Beautiful girls.’
Somehow, I understood what he meant. In the international language of greasy sex-starved men, those gestures said, ‘Unlucky, mate – they were out of our league anyway.’
I clicked my tongue, nodded upwards and shrugged.
He laughed and patted me on the knee.
It was slightly depressing to realize that I spoke Greasy Sex-Starved Man so fluently.
And I’m not from Surrey
The train terminated in Udaipur, and I was one of the last people to leave the compartment. Stepping out on to the dark platform, I saw that the station was almost deserted. Almost deserted by Indian standards, that is – which means that there are so few people around, you can occasionally discern the odd inch of floor visible beneath the swirling heaps of humanity.
From the station forecourt, I took a look at the cabs and rickshaws. Despite the hour of the day, the city looked busy. Because of my final conversation with Liz, I felt as if I ought to visit slightly more than just the railway station.
A driver came up to me and tried to drag me to his rickshaw, but I reacted so angrily he retreated. This made me realize, fleetingly, that Jeremy had been right about how you learn to be so brutal with people that they leave you alone. And you don’t even notice yourself changing – it just suddenly dawns on you that you’re getting hassled much less.
This thought provided me with a few tenths of a second of happiness, before I began to feel depressed again. I knew it was important not to let myself get into a downward spiral, so I decided to allow myself a little indulgence. I wasn’t going to bother with Udaipur. I was going to take a ‘Retiring Room’ in the station (there are hotel-type rooms in most big Indian stations), and would get a train the next morning, further south to Ahmedabad.
I turned back inside and joined the queue at a ticket kiosk.
All the second-class seats were taken for the train to Ahmedabad, so as part of my emotional-welfare campaign I decided to splash out on a first-class ticket. This cost four entire days’ worth of budget, but at least it made me feel better.
This time the sensation of well-being lasted several whole seconds, before depression rushed in again.
Are You Experienced? Page 10