Are You Experienced?

by William Sutcliffe

  ‘Hello, my friend,’ he said.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘What is your good name?’

  ‘David.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is your profession?’

  ‘I’m a student.’

  ‘Oh, very good.’

  Here we go, I thought. Same old crap.

  I responded with a few token questions, and before I knew it I was stuck as the audience for a Mahabharata-length discourse on the paths taken by his God-knows-how-many-hundred sons through the Indian civil service. This lasted until we arrived in Bombay. He tried to invite me to his house for supper, but I managed to shake him off, saying that I was in a hurry to meet someone.

  In Bombay, I only needed to take one sniff of the city to realize that I couldn’t face staying, and walked to the nearest travel agent to buy a ticket for the first bus to Goa (quicker than the train at a mere sixteen hours, according to The Book). The bus was due to leave in two hours, actually left in four hours, and took three more hours to reach the edge of Bombay. Once we reached the open road, it was already after midnight, so I decided to try and fall asleep just as the driver put a tape of Hindi musicals on at top volume. This tape played all night, periodically interrupted by me standing up and shouting at him to turn it down. When I did this, everyone on the bus stared at me as if I was mad. Apparently, it was common practice for bus drivers to play music to help keep themselves awake while they drove through the night. At one of our innumerable stops, I bought a box of biscuits from a road-side stall so that I could tear off strips of cardboard in order to improvize a pair of ear-plugs, which, it turned out, didn’t make any difference to the noise, kept on falling out, and gave me sore ears. I also ate all the biscuits in one go, just to try and take my mind off things, which made me feel sick. The bus broke down half-way through the following day, and I ended up hitching to Panjim (the capital of Goa) in the back of a truck, with a pile of axles for my seat. In a delirium of anger, frustration, loneliness and arse pain, I just about managed to face the one final leg of the journey, which was to take a local bus out of the city to the beach. I didn’t care where it was going, or which resort I ended up in, as long as there was a beach.

  I had clearly been wrong about the joys of travelling. Getting from one place to another was, without any doubt at all, the crap bit. The journeys, quite clearly, were not the point – particularly if you tried to do six little-finger-widths of India in one go.

  Comfortably numb

  The monsoon travels in a wide band northwards through India. As it gets started in the Himalayas, it will be tailing away down at the southern tip of India. I had caught the beginnings of it up north, but now, having travelled one thousand two hundred miles south, I found myself in the middle of the country, in the middle of the monsoon.

  I had ended up in one of the largish resorts, called Colva Beach, but at first sight it seemed deserted. There were still plenty of Indians around, but I couldn’t really make out any other travellers. And most of the hotels seemed to be closed.

  I found one place from The Book that was open and took a room. Even though it was only mid afternoon, I went instantly to bed.

  After a monolithic sleep, I woke up well into the next morning and took my first proper look at the place. There were lots of hotels and bars, but mostly with the shutters up. I wandered down a Tarmac street dusted with sand, which led me from the hotel, past a deserted town square and on to the beach.

  The beach was amazing. Miles of empty yellow sand, palm trees along the shore, and… well, the sea. The sky was overcast, and the air was a little humid, but this really didn’t seem like a good enough reason to close the whole place down. Everything looked fine to me. It was beautiful. I could have a great time here. There was nothing wrong with it at all. Apart from the fact that I was the only person there.

  I wandered up and down the beach for a while, but it wasn’t long before I got bored. Not yawn-bored, more what’s-the-point-of-being-alive bored. I sat in the sand, looked out at the ocean and had a good rummage around my emotions. Here I was, in a beautiful place, utterly calm, unwinding after a long and difficult journey, relishing a well-earned rest with no one telling me what to do, no stress, a comfortable and cheap hotel room, and no Indians hassling me. But although I felt more relaxed, satisfied and confident than I had done since landing in India, I also felt more miserable than I could ever remember. An all-embracing loneliness squatted over me and gave me a strange feeling that my whole life was a sham and I was a tosser who didn’t have any real friends. I had got what I deserved. Isolation and misery. I was thousands of miles away from anyone who cared about me, and even the people who cared about me probably didn’t, because they had no idea where on earth I was. If I died tomorrow, no one would give a toss. And who could blame people for hating me, when I was a selfish, thoughtless, ignorant human being – an arsehole, a coward and a loser.

  As I thought about this, I began to detect that a weirdly pleasurable edge had crept into my unhappiness. A faint masochistic thrill had appeared in my self-hatred, tinging the whole thing with a kind of bitter-sweet melancholia.

  And when I saw a vision of myself, as if through a movie camera, sitting on this tropical beach, all on my own, with bitter-sweet melancholia etched on my features, I suddenly felt a surge of joy rush through my body. I was fucking cool. The whole scene could have been part of an aftershave advert. This was exactly what you were meant to do on your year off. This was it – this was the moment. I was finding myself.

  I suddenly felt so elated that I almost started to cry, which seemed like a strange reaction, because they weren’t happy tears, they were what’s-the-point-of-being-alive tears. I instantly felt pissed off with myself for having spoilt the big moment by thinking about crying. From being pissed off, it was just a short hop back to being depressed, miserable, and hating myself again.

  I decided that emotional rummaging was a bad idea. It didn’t really get me anywhere. But at least I’d found myself, which was a bonus.

  I spent a week in Goa, since I couldn’t face taking on another journey, and gradually discovered that there were a few other travellers around. I never really got very far with any of them, though. None of them were English, and they were all from that slightly older generation who, for some reason, look down on students. I spoke to them all, and on the surface they were friendly enough, but I couldn’t help feeling patronized by them.

  There was a little gang of Aussie blokes who were quite a good laugh, but they were all well into their twenties, and had an annoyingly macho way of being friendly that I found a bit intimidating. They also immediately assumed that anyone who was my age must be immature, and I kept on spotting them smirking when I spoke, which really got on my nerves. I felt I couldn’t really talk about what I’d done, because they’d all been on the road for months and had amazing stories I couldn’t possibly compete with – about how they’d got lost in the Thai jungle with heroin smugglers, had fought off kitten-sized cockroaches in an Indonesian prison, or had done the entire Everest trek dressed in flip-flops and a Bondai Beach T-shirt.

  They hadn’t swallowed any of the hippie Mother India crap, but had just gone all over Asia acting like Australians and generally drinking lots of beer and having a laugh. Even though I didn’t like them, I had to admit that they were pretty cool.

  For the first time, I kind of wished that I’d done more travelling. I’d never been jealous of the older travellers before, because most of them were such transparent social failures. The people in their thirties who were still trudging around India had so obviously cocked up their entire lives that there wasn’t much to be jealous of. And most travellers seemed to be either my age or of the sad, beardy basket-case generation. It was when you occasionally bumped into the mid-to-late-twenties crowd that things got a bit scary. There was something about them that always
made me envious. When they were around, I always felt like a bit of a child. I couldn’t relax when I was talking to them, because I was always worried that something naive would slip out.

  There was only one evening in Goa when I really enjoyed myself, and that was when one of the Aussies almost got into a fight with a Swiss hippie. It was quite late, and everyone had been drinking for several hours in the resort’s only hang-out: The Jimmy Hendrix Bar Experiance. The Swiss guy was talking at the top of his voice, trying to impress some girl with a story about how he’d risked his life trying to get into Tibet, but how in the end it had proved impossible.

  Garth, one of the larger Australians, interrupted him by tapping him on the shoulder. ‘Hey – Pinktrousers,’ he said, ‘could you turn it down a bit. We’re trying to play riotous drinking-games over here.’

  This made all the Aussies (and me) laugh.

  ‘What is this?’ replied the Swiss guy.

  ‘It’s just a small thing, but (a) you’re talking far too loudly, and (b) you’re talking shit.’

  ‘This isn’t shit, my friend. I spent a month almost starving in a prison in Golmud after trying to hitch down into Tibet. This is not shit.’

  ‘Listen mate, I don’t mean to brag, but any arsehole with two brain cells to rub together knows that the Golmud route has been closed for years. I managed to get into Tibet only a few months ago, using the southern route from Kashgar.’

  ‘That’s bullshit. I researched this route, and it has even more police road-blocks than from Golmud.’

  ‘Golmud’s got a whole economy running off travellers who want to look as if they’ve tried to get into Tibet, but can’t actually be arsed to try anything dangerous. Anyone who’s serious about it goes from Kashgar.’

  ‘Bullshit. I’m perfectly serious about Tibet, but you can’t get past the police.’

  ‘Not if you sit around in cosy Golmud and act like you’re on some package holiday, doing whatever the police tell you.’

  ‘Golmud is not cosy!’

  ‘If you’re a real traveller, you’ll use a bit of initiative and take a few educated risks. I hitched a ride with a trucker who knew the location of the road-blocks, and he dropped me off before each one. I trekked round behind the police, and he picked me up on the other side.’

  ‘That’s not possible. This takes weeks, and there are no towns to buy food.’

  ‘Damn right it takes weeks, and I lived off porridge which I shared with the driver, but it’s possible. If you really want to, you can get to Tibet.’

  ‘You are a lying, stupid Australian. Everyone knows that Tibet is closed to travellers.’

  ‘Sure it is – officially.’

  ‘You’re lying. No one would let you stay there.’

  ‘I didn’t say I stayed there. I just said I got there.’

  ‘To Lhasa?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’re a bullshitter.’

  ‘It’s fucking true, mate, so I suggest you shut up and sit down.’

  ‘You… you… and I suppose you’ve been to Burma as well, have you?’

  ‘As it happens, yes. I trekked over the border from Thailand. Stayed a couple of weeks with the mountain rebels.’

  ‘That’s easy. I know hundreds of people who’ve done that. I trekked into Afghanistan and spent a month with the mujahedin.’

  ‘Well, bully for you Mr Pinktrousers. You’re a real hero.’

  ‘Don’t be sarcastic with me, Australian idiot.’

  ‘Who are you calling an idiot? I’m not the one who couldn’t even get into Tibet.’

  ‘If you think I believe this story, then you are an idiot.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘No – fuck you.’

  ‘No – fuck you.’

  The two of them traded insults for a while longer, with Pinktrousers eventually switching into Swiss German, which is a damn good language for insulting people. They were moments away from a punch-up when one of the Aussies dragged Garth away, thrust a fresh beer bottle into his hand, and told him that he should take a bit more acid.

  *

  After almost a week of semi-loneliness and mild boredom, I bumped into two English girls on the beach, who were on their summer holiday from Newcastle university. One of them, called Claire, was a bit ugly, but her friend Sam was a genuine bollock-tighteningly sexy woman – and not in an aloof way, either. She honestly didn’t seem to realize how staggeringly fit she was. With her cropped black hair, spindly arms, kissable mouth and twinkling green eyes, she must have been either blind or stupid not to fall in love with herself every time she looked in a mirror. After the aloof Australians, it was a relief to find someone of roughly my own age who I could actually talk to – someone willing to sit down and have a proper conversation which didn’t revolve around the exchange of life-threatening-situation anecdotes.

  It turned out that they were staying at the next resort down, but had already been there for almost a fortnight, and were preparing to make the journey south to Kerala. I immediately chipped in with a prudent half-lie and told them that I was about to go to exactly the same place myself. I didn’t want to look like too much of a sad git and give the impression I was desperate to cling on to them, but the truth was that I simply couldn’t face doing another big journey on my own. Looking only mildly enthusiastic about the whole idea, they agreed to meet up the following day to go off in search of train tickets. I couldn’t tell what they really thought, because I hadn’t given them much of an option to turn me down, but I felt reasonably sure that I could make them like me, given enough time.

  Goa to Kerala is a long way, and we decided to take a night train to Bangalore, spend a while there, then head onwards when we were ready.

  Our train pulled out of Margao station late in the afternoon and was due to arrive in Bangalore around the following lunch-time. I was so relieved to be on a train with the protection of other people that I had to fight with myself to stop the happiness showing through. If I came across as too pleased to be with them, I thought I’d seem a bit of a loser.

  I sat on one side of the compartment with Sam, while Claire faced us from the opposite window-seat, slowly dozing off over her book. Sam and I started chatting the instant the train pulled out, and after an hour or so it turned into one of those talk-about-your-family conversations in which you always end up inventing traumas to try and make yourself sound interesting. I described how the person I loved most in the world was my Down’s syndrome brother, and how he was far more sensitive to human emotion than anyone else I knew. She talked about her boyfriend (boring), then about her parents and how she couldn’t help feeling that their marriage was going through a difficult phase, with her mother possibly having an affair. I nodded and grunted the occasional approval, too dizzy with lust to offer any sensible comments. I mean, if her mother was into that kind of thing…

  After a while, dusk started falling and the view from the train became incredibly beautiful. Endless paddy-fields stretched to the horizon, dotted with children, water buffalo and rice farmers. The scene was bathed in soft light, and there was a wonderfully peaceful atmosphere of people finishing off their day’s work and heading home. As the train clattered slowly through village after village, paddy-fields drifted by in an endlessly varied and beautiful jigsaw, with many children waving at us as we passed.

  Sam had a dual-headphone Walkman, and she put on Pink Floyd’s Delicate Sound of Thunder, which we listened to as the sun set. I hadn’t heard any music since leaving England, and the whole experience, with that view, and that album, was genuinely uplifting. While the batteries lasted, I felt that I was bathing in the essence of life.

  If you had seen what I saw, you would know that the Indian countryside was designed with a Pink Floyd soundtrack in mind. It really was. When God put together those paddy-fields, he was definitely listening to ‘Comfortably Numb.’

  Everyone’s had it

  On our first morning in Bangalore, I got up for an early breakfast, which I pla
nned to eat as slowly as I could in order to make sure that I would be in the dining room when Sam and Claire came down. This would allow me to ask casually what they were up to, then with any luck to spend the day with them, all without coming across as over-keen.

  Streams of other travellers came and went, while I sat there over my omelette and tea, waiting for the two girls.

  It was almost lunch-time when I finally gave up. Everyone had disappeared from the hotel, so I prepared myself for a boring day on my own in Bangalore. Then, on my way out, I bumped into them.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ I said, sounding more eager than I intended.

  ‘Oh, we got up early to go to the railway station,’ said Claire.

  ‘Right,’ I replied, my heart suddenly sinking. ‘You bought tickets?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sam, ‘we don’t really want to spend any time here.’

  I waited for them to tell me where they were off to, but neither of them said anything. A long and sickly silence opened up.

  Sam, blinking with embarrassment and even a hint of pity, eventually spoke. ‘What are you up to today, then?’

  ‘Just… looking round town.’

  I pointed to the bag over my shoulder, as if this explained my point further.

  ‘Right.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘Bye,’ I said, and wandered off. I didn’t even wait for them to answer. As I walked away, I could feel them standing still and guiltily watching me go. I didn’t know whether to head right or left when I hit the street, but I just wanted to get out of sight, so I turned on instinct and walked blindly into the crowds.

  Suddenly, I didn’t want to be in India, I didn’t want to be in Bangalore, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near Sam or Claire. I had no interest in seeing anything, buying anything, or eating anything. I wanted to be at home. I wanted to watch telly. I wanted Marmite on toast, friends, a sofa, Match of the Day, green grass, pubs, frost, and a bed with a duvet.