My Retiring Room, I discovered, was clean and well-ordered, which somehow depressed me just as much as if it had been dirty. The precision of the room and the emptiness of the bed next to me, the pattern on the floor, the hole in the mesh over the window, the shape of my rucksack – suddenly everything I looked at seemed to contribute to making me feel worse.
I decided to try and cheer myself up by writing a postcard home. I found a crumpled picture of Manali at the bottom of my pack and sat myself at a rickety writing-table in the corner of the room.
Dear Mum & Dad,
Udaipur is a fascinating and colourful city in the southern part of Rajasthan. I’ve just arrived here, and am hoping to visit the Lake Palace Hotel tomorrow, where a bit from one of the James Bond films was filmed. Liz has ditched me and run off with two Sloanes, so I’m now all on my own and am feeling severely depressed. My stomach also feels a bit weird, so I think I’m probably about to get ill, which isn’t very good timing, because there’s no one to look after me now. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure things will be fine soon.
love,
Dave
PS How are things at home?
I perched the card on top of my backpack, put the light out and went to bed. The sheets seemed relatively clean, but I was in the kind of mood where it’s impossible to forget how many people have slept in the same bed, and the variety of acts that have been enjoyed on the same absorbent mattress. I began to feel itchy and needed something to take my mind off things.
Having switched the light back on, I opened my book and managed to take some comfort from the fact that the main character was obviously having a worse time than me (puking his guts out in the Mexican desert and running around naked thinking he was a dog). I couldn’t concentrate for more than one sentence at a time, though, and ended up just listening to the trains outside my window.
I switched off the light and tried to fall asleep, but was distracted by visions of Liz which kept on popping into my head. I couldn’t stop myself from seeing her sitting around with Fee and Caz, having a laugh, meditating, and bitching about me. I was determined not to dream about how the three of them would have endless fun while I withered away in lonely hotel rooms on my own, and I tried to make myself think about something else. The subject which kept on rushing in to fill the void, however, was even worse, with my brain insisting on doing mental calculations of how many days I’d done, and how many days I had left in India. It seemed of crucial importance to work out whether or not I was more than half-way through, but I didn’t really want to think about that either, because there was definitely still a long time left, and it seemed likely that I was going to find myself unable to enjoy any of it.
The only way to stop my mind swirling with awful thoughts was to try and empty it altogether. This proved almost impossible, with images of Liz, Fee, Caz, Jeremy, my mum and bizarre Asian sex acts in Udaipur Railway Retiring Rooms perpetually filling my brain. I thought back, straining to remember if I had eavesdropped any tips on meditation from the three girls, but nothing useful came to mind.
I ended up just repeating ‘void void void’ over and over again in my head, so obsessively that it blotted out any other word, and concentrating all my remaining powers on trying to visualize an empty box. I kept on getting distracted by the feeling that it might actually be working, but eventually deduced that I must have fallen asleep from the fact that I was waking up and it was light.
With the new day, I found myself feeling marginally happier and took breakfast in the station restaurant. There was something a bit cool about being on your own. If nothing else, I felt brave, and that at least was a positive feeling. Watching all the other people eating in groups, I decided that I must look slightly mysterious. That also felt good. I’d never really felt mysterious before. And, to cap it all, my omelette genuinely tasted nice. Yes – this was a good day. Yesterday had been a bad day, but this, I decided, was going to be a good day.
It wasn’t. My compartment from Udaipur to Ahmedabad was shared with a kid who screamed incessantly, a girl who ate incessantly, a boy who hit the kid who screamed incessantly, their mother who hit the kid for complaining he was being hit by his brother, and her husband, who looked as if he wanted to kill himself. They were so noisy and took up so much space that I spent the entire eleven hours feeling like an unwanted social worker in a psychotic family’s living room.
Ahmedabad station stank of shit – literally – and I had to reach new pinnacles of threatening and lying behaviour before succeeding in buying my onward ticket, eventually using the pretext that my wife was about to give birth in a Bombay hospital.
This train finally set off long after dark. I was feeling fragile, so as soon as the train had started moving, I climbed up to my top bunk and tried to forget where I was. I usually left my rucksack under the lowest bed, but with no one around I trusted, the only way to make sure that nothing could get stolen was to use it as a pillow. This made my feet stick out from the bottom of the bed, and I ended up kicking most of the people walking up and down the carriage in the head. Some of them got a bit stroppy about this and tried to get me to move my bag, but I pretended to be either stupid or asleep, or both.
As I dozed off, I vaguely remembered someone telling me that you should always sit cross-legged because it’s a dire insult to show the soles of your feet to a Hindu. I thought this might have something to do with them being reluctant to have sweaty socks wiped on their forehead, so I made a token attempt to curl up. After all, it would be pretty stupid to get lynched purely because you were trying to avoid getting robbed.
I woke at dawn and did a quick scout of the train for other travellers, but couldn’t find anyone. I was in no mood to try and talk to Indians and spent most of the morning hiding up in my bunk feeling lonely and depressed.
Around lunch-time, the train pulled to a stop in the middle of nowhere, and after a while people started getting out. I hopped down from my bed and followed the crowd out of the door. We were high on an embankment above a swamp, with one other track next to us. I had assumed that people were leaving the train to try and find out what was happening, but it turned out that everyone was contentedly stretching their legs, smoking, chatting or pissing. I wandered around for a while, and a few people smiled and waved at me. I waved back, but tried to avoid talking to them, because you always ended up going through the same old ‘Hello, what is your good name? Where are you from? Are you married?’ crap with every single person, and I just couldn’t face it any more.
Then, after a few minutes, I spotted another white guy, right up at the front of the train, near the first-class carriages. He was sitting on a rail, looking down the track towards me. Thank God! At last – someone to talk to!
I was almost jumping on the spot with delight, and gave him a huge wave. Although he must have seen my greeting, he didn’t acknowledge me, but simply turned his head and looked away, out over the swamp. As I approached him, almost at a run, he still didn’t turn towards me, even though he would have heard my feet crunching on the stones.
I sat on the rail next to him, and just his presence by my side made me feel calmer.
‘Hi,’ I said.
He waited for a while, as if he was hoping that I’d go away, then, eventually, he turned towards me and said hello. Then he looked at me. Properly looked at me. Like he was examining my face for something.
I couldn’t think of anything to do other than examine him back. He was quite old – in his mid-thirties or something – and had wiry hair forced down into a side parting, with a dense but short beard. His eyes had a slightly disturbing look in them: glazed over, but still somehow piercing. And he wasn’t wearing the usual traveller gear, but was actually dressed in trousers and a shirt.
‘Where are you from?’ I said.
‘Bangalore,’ he said, then he watched my reaction. I tried not to have one, but it didn’t really work. I wanted to know where he was really from. While I was trying to find a way of asking that wouldn’t
sound racist, he said, ‘Manchester’. Then, after a while, to fill the gap, he said, ‘Reuters’. I nodded slowly, and to finally cement the hole, he said, ‘Journalist’.
‘Right.’
This was a chatty kind of guy. I wanted to tell him that he’d obviously spent too much of his life writing telegrams and should learn some social skills, but he wasn’t the kind of person you could say that to. In fact, he didn’t seem to be the kind of person you could say anything to.
It was ages since I’d spoken to a proper… you know, adult. Someone with a job. Other than the Indians – they’ve got jobs, obviously – I just mean someone from back home. A European with a job. Someone doing something real.
This fact somehow made my mind go blank, and I couldn’t think of anything to say to him.
Eventually, I said, ‘Where are you heading?’
‘To cover the strike,’ he said.
I nodded, as if this was an answer I understood.
He kept looking at me, so I carried on nodding.
‘Do you know which strike I’m talking about?’
‘The strike?’
‘Yes. The strike.’
‘Um… I haven’t read a paper for a few days, actually.’
He snorted. ‘Congress have been arguing with the B J P over Harijan quotas in higher education, and the Maharashtran Sabha has been unable to pull off a conclusive vote against the threatened general strike. It’s probably all going to blow up quite soon.’
‘Right.’ I nodded vociferously.
‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Look. I’ll start again. Congress…’
I tried to arrange my features to say, ‘Go on…’, but they somehow still had ‘What the fuck?’ stamped across them.
‘Congress?’ he said.
‘Ummm…’
‘You don’t know what Congress is?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘What is it?’
“It’s… the… parliament. The Indian parliament.’
‘It’s not the parliament. Parliament is the Lok Sabha and the Rahja Sabha. Congress is the ruling party.’
‘Oh, yeah. Right. Of course. I knew that.’
‘So you know about the argument over Harijan quotas?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘You know who the Harijans are?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who?’
‘They’re… um… the opposition party.’
‘Oh my God, this is unbelievable. “Harijan” is the name for the underclass of Indian society. The Untouchables. The people who’ve probably swept every floor that you have stood on and cleaned every toilet you’ve shat in since you’ve been here. They are the Harijans – as renamed by a certain Mahatma Gandhi. You’ve heard of him, perhaps?’
‘Yes, thanks,’ I said, with attempted sarcasm.
‘Probably just seen the film,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Just forget it. Forget it.’
Then, shaking his head, he gave every impression of forgetting that I was there, and turned his head away. With a vague smile on his lips and a frown playing across his forehead, he stared out at the swamp.
This was a very rude man. I decided that I wasn’t going to let myself be humiliated.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘you’re a professional journalist. It’s your job to know these things. I’m just travelling here. It’s only a holiday. I don’t have to revise for my holidays. I get enough of that the rest of the year.’
He turned towards me slowly, and muttered, still apparently to himself, ‘You don’t have to revise for your holidays.’
Was this his idea of a conversation? He was, without a doubt, the most impolite man I had ever met.
After a while, he said it again, slightly louder, with strange emphasis.
‘You don’t have to revise for your holidays.’
‘That’s right. I don’t have to revise for my holidays. Do you have a problem with that?’
‘No,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘I think it’s very accurate.’
‘Accurate. What do you mean, accurate?’
‘University of Life. Year One – Advanced Adventure Playgrounds. Part One Exam – go to the Third World and survive. No revision, interest, intellect or sensitivity required.’
This guy was unbelievable.
‘Look. You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know why I’m here. You don’t know what I think. You don’t have any interest in why I’ve decided to come and what it means to me, so you… you… you’ve got no right to make pronouncements about my… my journey… and my… character. Right?’
He nodded, still smiling. ‘You’re absolutely right. I don’t know anything about you. Nothing at all. And yet I turn up here and make judgements about your character right out of the blue. It’s terrible.’
He eyed me with an inquisitive look, but I didn’t know what he was on about, so I just tried to stare him out.
‘You’reabsolutely right. I’m completely ignorant, and yet I come here, sit next to you, spend a few fleeting moments in your company, then go away feeling that I’ve learned something about you. It’s appalling. I shouldn’t even have come here. If I’m not interested, I shouldn’t have taken up your time.’
‘Oh, right, I see. Very clever.’ I looked away and tried to ignore him.
Down the track, crowds of people were still chatting and smoking, with no apparent sign of the train moving on. Even though I hadn’t exactly hit it off with the journalist, I decided to stay put. I wasn’t ready to be on my own again.
‘I might do an article on you,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I might write about you.’
‘About me? What have you got to say about me?’
‘I’m not sure. Tell me – what do you do all day?’
‘What do I do?’
‘Yes. What does your average day consist of?’
‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘No. I’m just curious.’
I gave him a suspicious look. ‘You know – I’m travelling. I’m a backpacker.’
‘But what do you do all day? How come you don’t get bored?’
‘Bored? You could never get bored here.’
‘What do you do, though? In each place.’
He looked genuinely interested.
‘Well, you get there. Look for a hotel. Hang out there for a bit. Look around town for a few days. Eat. Read. Sleep. Talk to the other travellers. Think about where to go next, then – you know – it’s a big hassle to get the tickets for your next journey, so you prepare yourself for that, then bite the bullet, spend a morning queuing for tickets, and the next day you move on.’
‘Right. So the most significant and challenging thing you do in each place is to buy the tickets for getting to the next place.’
‘No. I didn’t say that.’
‘Yes you did.’
‘Look – forget it. You’re obviously only interested in taking the piss, so I don’t see why I should help you write your crappy little feature. You’ll have to talk to someone a bit more gullible.’
‘It’s fine. I’ve got more than enough material already.’
‘Like what? What are you going to write about me, then?’
‘I think… something about how it’s not hippies on a spiritual mission who come here any more, just morons on a poverty-tourism adventure holiday. The real point would have to be about how going to India isn’t an act of rebellion these days, it’s actually a form of conformity for ambitious middle-class kids who want to be able to put something on their CV that shows a bit of initiative. All the top companies want robots with initiative these days, and coming to the Third World is the ideal hoop for you to leap through. You come here and cling to each other as if you’re on some kind of extended management-bonding exercise in Epping Forest. Then, having got the nasty business of travel out of the way, you can go home and prove to employers that you’re more than ready to settle
down for a life of drudgery. I suppose you could call it a modern form of ritual circumcision – it’s a badge of suffering you have to wear to be welcomed into the tribe of Britain’s future élite. Your kind of travel is all about low horizons dressed up as open-mindedness. You have no interest in India, and no sensitivity for the problems this country is trying to face up to. You also treat Indians with a mixture of contempt and suspicion which is reminiscent of the Victorian colonials. Your presence here, in my opinion, is offensive. The whole lot of you should fuck off back to Surrey.’
‘That’s… that’s bollocks. I respect the Indians.’
‘Why did you run the whole length of the train to come and talk to me, then? Do you think I’m the only person here who speaks English?’
‘No… I just wanted a bit of… Look – it’s easy for you to come out with this kind of PC crap when you stay in cosy expense-account hotels. If you spent a bit of time with real travellers, you’d see that there are a lot of people who try and rip us off. You have to be a bit suspicious. It’s basic self-defence.’
‘Real travellers. You’re priceless. I’m going to have to put that in.’
‘Forget it. You’re not even listening to me. I just think that your kind of… of… cynicism is really sad. There’s a lot more to what I’m doing than you think.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘At least I’m trying. Most people are happy to… to stay totally ignorant about the Third World. At least I’ve come here.’
‘And no one could call you ignorant.’
‘That’s it. I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.’
I stood up and stomped back towards my compartment. After a reasonable distance had opened up between us, I turned round for one last look at him. ‘AND I’M NOT FROM SURREY,’ I yelled.
He gave me a huge grin and an enormous wave. ‘ENJOY THE REST OF YOUR HOLIDAY!’ he shouted. ‘DON’T FORGET TO PUT YOUR BIG TRIP DOWN ON THE CV!’
I gave him the finger.
The locomotive soon gave a hoot, and everyone scrambled back on board with the train already crawling into motion. I looked around the compartment for someone to talk to. Determined to prove the journalist wrong, I decided to make an effort with one of the locals. A guy diagonally opposite me had a couple of pens sticking out of his top pocket and looked reasonably educated, so it seemed like a fair assumption that he would speak English. I smiled at him.
Are You Experienced? Page 11