For a long time I walked without even knowing where I was going. In the back of my mind, I was looking for a place where I’d be able to hide from the crowds and forget how far from home I was. The rest of my brain was filled with the thought that there was still a month to go before I was due to fly back. A whole month.
It was a shock to realize how much my happiness had depended on a couple of people I hardly knew. It wasn’t as if I wouldn’t be able to see them again, or even as if I didn’t know where they were going. They were going to Kerala, and everybody’s first stop in Kerala was Cochin. If I wanted to, I could probably even have got a place on the same train as them. But they had clearly made a point of trying to get rid of me. This meant that if I wanted to salvage any pride, I had to spend at least another couple of days in Bangalore and would have to try and ignore them when I got to Cochin. I was still going to go there – that much was certain. I wasn’t going to miss out, just because they didn’t want to see me – no way.
The gutting thing was, I really thought Sam had liked me. The other gutting thing was that Bangalore was a dump. Oh, and there was also the small matter of me being utterly pissed off with the entire continent, and wanting to eat Marmite on toast in front of Match of the Day under a frosty duvet on a sofa in a London pub.
Eventually, I stumbled across a restaurant called MacSpeed. I poked my head round the door and saw a kind of Wimpy Burger Bar à la 1982, with moulded plastic seats screwed to the floor around tiny Formica tables. I hadn’t seen anything remotely like this since… well, since 1982, and certainly hadn’t spotted any burger restaurants in India.
God was clearly looking down, and had done his best to provide comfort food for depressed, lonely, homesick little me. I ordered a lamb burger and chips (no beef, obviously), with a Campa Cola on the side, and ice-cream for afters. I couldn’t even be bothered to worry about what kind of water was in the ice-cream. I was giving myself a treat and would eat exactly what I wanted to cheer myself up.
This was my first meat for weeks, and it tasted absolutely delicious, as did the chips, the Coke (despite a hint of ammonia in the aftertaste) and the ice-cream. If I shut my eyes, I could almost imagine myself back home.
I was three-quarters of the way through my lamb burger when it occurred to me that I’d travelled more than two thousand miles all over the country and had yet to see a single sheep. The question of which animal had been mashed up to produce my burger suddenly became a rather pressing mystery. Whatever it was, it wasn’t sheep, and it almost certainly wasn’t cow. Precisely which varieties of red meat with burger potential remained, was a difficult one.
Pig? No. It definitely didn’t taste of pork.
Goat? Possibly. There were plenty of goats around.
Dog? No. Not dog. Please. Not dog.
Leaving the remaining corner of burger on the side of my plate, I finished the chips and rinsed my mouth thoroughly with the ammonia-flavoured Coke.
On the way back to the hotel, a curious thing happened. I was walking down the street, feeling a touch anxious about my meal, when I suddenly found myself puking in the gutter.
Having voided my stomach, I stood up and looked around self-consciously to see if I had provoked a reaction. A few metres down the road, an emaciated sadhu with grey dreadlocks was meditating on the pavement. On the other side of the street, a fully soaped-up man was washing himself from a bucket of water, and right in front of him a man trying to transport huge bundles of steel on the back of two donkeys was having an argument with a mango-seller who wouldn’t move his pile of fruit out of the way.
A vomiting Westerner, apparently, didn’t stand out. No one seemed to notice or care what I had done, other than a small dog who trotted over and started lapping up the puddle at my feet. I wiped my mouth with a T-shirt sleeve, and leaving my burger behind for the cannibalistic dog, continued back to the hotel, stopping on the way to buy a bottle of mineral water.
*
That evening, I was standing over the toilet doing a pre-bed piss, when I let a fart escape, only to feel an odd sensation in my boxer shorts. My underwear suddenly felt heavier. This was followed by the sensation of a warm, wet blob sliding down the back of my thigh. Realizing what had happened, I clamped shut my sphincter and dribbled out the remains of my piss. By the time my bladder was empty, the miniature turd had reached the back of my knee.
In a crouched, waddling sprint, I charged out of the toilet and upstairs to my bedroom. Having peeled my clothes off and tossed them on to the floor, I got into the shower and scrubbed my entire body. I then plucked a few of the more soiled clothes from the heap, and rinsed them in the shower. Once I had got most of the loose crap down the plug-hole, I hung my stuff up to dry, so that it would look respectable enough to give in as hotel laundry the following morning.
Later that night, I was woken from deep sleep by a man revving up a Formula One racing car inside my bowels. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening, before I sprinted to the toilet and shat like I have never shat before.
I don’t know if you have ever seen a cricket bowling-machine, but they work by having two small tyres, placed horizontally next to each other, rotating extremely fast in the same direction. A cricket ball rolls towards the two tyres, then becomes gripped between them, and is flung out at up to a hundred miles an hour. Well, imagine what would happen if you set that machine to maximum speed, then poured in a cow-pat. This is the only way I can describe my new experience of shitting.
After this sudden burst of viciously propelled turd, I felt a rancid and acidic stench rise from between my knees. Just as my nose started twitching with revulsion, I noticed that my arsehole was on fire. I couldn’t squat for much longer without my hips objecting, so I hurriedly used the Indian arse-wiping technique – dabbing water from a bucket on to the tenderized flesh of my anus.
Only when I was back in bed, having spent at least ten minutes washing my hands, did I begin to realize that my stomach was in agony. I felt as if someone had mistaken it for a soggy flannel and was trying to wring it dry. After writhing naked on the bed for a while, I felt another emergency alarm-call and ran back to the toilet. From the doorway, I noticed that it now wasn’t possible to get within striking distance of the porcelain without standing in flecks of my own widely scattered turd. There was little time for squeamishness, however, and certainly not enough time to put my shoes on, so I braved the filth, attempting to replace my feet in the footprints I had left behind.
The second I had squatted, I heard a strange sound of rushing water coming from behind me. ‘What’s that?’ I fleetingly wondered, ‘Who could be running a bath at this time of night?’ Then I realized that it was me. My numb arsehole had become a tap.
When the gush of liquid had subsided, I toppled forwards, my forehead pressing into the wall in front of me. Still in squatting position, I let out a few groans and attempted to gauge whether or not my punch-drunk sphincter was now closed. It was hard to tell definitively, but I got the impression that even if it was, it would be about as effective as a cat-flap in the Hoover Dam.
When it became too painful to squat, I hauled myself upright, rinsed my legs and feet in the shower and stumbled back to bed. I knew that it was important not to get dehydrated, and since I had just shat out more water than I could remember drinking in the last fortnight, I made myself swallow the remaining half-litre of mineral water from the bottle I had bought that evening.
I felt the liquid slosh around in my belly and knew instantly that it wasn’t welcome. After a sudden and vicious stomach cramp, I rushed back to the bathroom just in time to projectile-vomit against the wall of the shower. Even when all the water had come out, my stomach continued its contractions, making me gag on an empty throat.
After this, I didn’t have the strength to make it back to my bed. Instead, I turned the shower on, waited for the worst of the vomit to get rinsed away and curled up under the stream of water. I positioned myself so that I wouldn’t have to remain anxio
us about the feeble state of my cat-flap and could simply let any late seepage get washed down the plug-hole.
I had no real sense of time by this stage, but when I eventually felt sure that my body was fully drained, I crawled back to bed and fell asleep.
I was woken by voices in the corridor. The second my eyes were open, I felt the pain return to my throat, stomach and arsehole, but I knew that these voices represented my only chance of contact with the outside world, so I hauled myself out of bed and scrabbled through my rucksack for a clean pair of trousers. Having pulled on some clothes, I rushed into the corridor.
‘Hello! Hello!’ I croaked, just as the voices disappeared down the stairs. ‘Hello!’
There was silence for a second or so, then I saw a head reappear around the corner of the staircase. ‘Yes, hello?’
‘Please! Come back! I’m sick!’ I said, supporting my weight on the door-frame.
He called something down the stairs, in a language that sounded like it was probably Dutch, then wandered towards me.
‘What’s up?’ he said.
‘I’m sick! I can’t walk! I need some water!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Everything. Shitting, puking…’
‘The usual, then.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You want me to buy some water, yes?’
‘Please. Thanks. I’d be so grateful. I’ll get you some money.’
I hobbled back into the room and came back with a few notes. I saw the beginnings of a smile around the edges of his mouth as he watched me try to walk.
‘Does it hurt?’ he said.
‘Yes. My arsehole’s in tatters.’
He laughed and clapped me on the back. ‘Hey! We’ve all been there.’
‘It’s fucking agony.’
‘No, it’s not. You wait. If it’s food poisoning, you have a chance to be better in a few days. If it’s dysentery, you get worse. Then you know what pain feels like. Bacillary dysentery, you have it for a week. Amoebic, and you’re fucked.’
He clapped me on the back again.
‘You’ve had dysentery?’
‘Yeah, sure. Everyone’s had it.’
‘What did it feel like?’
‘Bad, man. Pretty bad.’
‘Which did you have? Amoebic, or… the other one.’
‘I had both at once, which was a big fucker. Still, even that’s not agony. Now malaria, on the other hand. You wait till you get malaria. This is a real bitch. I got it in Nepal and I was so fucked I couldn’t get myself to a doctor, so I just had to take a bunch of my Chloroquine and hope for the best.’
‘Is that what you’re supposed to do? I mean… if I… ‘
‘I don’t know. I’m not expert, but I look on the packet and read that it has quinine in it, so I just experiment.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I took four the first day, then increased the number by one each day until I felt better.’
‘H-h-h-how long did that take?’
Suddenly, I seemed to have forgotten my own pain. I was transfixed.
‘About ten days.’
‘But isn’t that stuff supposed to make your hair fall out, and turn you psychotic?’
He suddenly leaped in the air, kicked his legs, stuck his tongue out, whooped and wobbled his hands above his head. This was a terrifying sight, and I felt myself almost wanting to vomit again.
‘Not me, I’m fine,’ he squeaked, in a manic voice.
With a gasp of relief, I realized that he was joking, and my pulse went back to normal. I forced out a feeble laugh, as a way of indicating to him that he could stop jumping on the spot.
Once he was at rest, he spoke in his normal voice again. ‘Hey – even malaria’s not the end of the world. The locals live with it.’
‘Right.’
‘And die of it!’ With this, he doubled up with laughter.
Eventually, having calmed down enough to speak, he said, ‘Lighten up, man. You’ve just got a bit of diarrhoea. It’s nothing. Drink water and you’ll be fine. At least you haven’t got this!’
He pulled up his trouser leg and showed me an angry-looking trench gouged out of his skin, just next to the shin-bone.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s from a worm that lives in bad water. It swims through a tiny cut in your skin, or even up the end of your dick, then it grows inside you to a big, big size, living inside your… what do you call this?’
‘Your veins?’
I felt dizzy.
‘Veins. Exactly this. Once the worm gets to be big, you feel the pain, but there’s not a sign of it on the surface, and no one can tell what’s wrong with you. You have to keep your eyes out, and if you see a lump near the skin which is moving, you must dig with a needle, until you see enough of the worm’s head. You can’t pull it out all at once because it will snap, and worse than having a live worm in you is having a dead one, so you must put the head around a matchstick, and then give the stick one twist a day, until the whole worm is winding round outside your leg.’
My knees went weak, and a head-rush closed in on my vision. I gripped the door-frame tighter and tried not to listen.
‘If the worm gets to your heart, that’s it. The end. Paf! I am lucky. I get it out of my leg.’
We both admired the hole in his shin for a second. I felt some strength come back to my thighs and my peripheral vision returning.
‘And that’s lucky, is it?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘Is it ever going to heal?’
‘One day, I hope. There’ll be a scar, though.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Eh?’
‘Something to show for your efforts, and all that.’
‘Oh, no. I kept the worm. I can always use this if I need proof.’
‘You carry the worm around with you?’
‘No, don’t be silly. I post it back to my parents’ house.’
‘And they’re keeping it for you?’
‘I ask my mother to pickle it, but I think she’s not so keen.’
‘Strange, that.’
‘Yeah. Look – my friends are waiting. You want me to get you some water?’
‘Please. That would be great.’
‘You want some food?’
‘No. Can’t eat.’
‘You should.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I’ll get you bananas. When you feel stronger, you should eat boiled rice.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘I’ll be back soon. Go to bed.’
‘Thank you. You’re really kind. You’ve saved my life.’
‘I don’t think it’s quite this bad.’
‘No, really. Thank you. I’m so grateful.’ I felt my eyes moistening, and my chest filled with a pressure that wanted to turn itself into a sob.
The guy put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Hey – what’s your name?’
I took a deep breath and spoke in a high-pitched, wobbly voice. ‘Dave, from England. You?’
‘Igor Boog, from Delft in Holland.’ He smiled at me and gave my shoulder a squeeze. ‘You’ll be fine, Dave. I come back soon.’
‘Thanks. Really – thanks.’
‘It’s OK.’
As he wandered away, his sandals clacking against his heels, I called after him, ‘Thanks, Igor.’
He laughed and raised a hand to me without turning round. ‘Be brave, Dave,’ he said and disappeared down the stairs, chuckling.
*
For the next week, I barely left my room. Igor popped in every morning and brought me water, bananas, and after a couple of days, boiled rice. He sat with me while I ate and cheered me up with tales of crippling and life-threatening diseases.
Near the end of the week, just as I polished off my first boiled egg, Igor told me that he’d already extended his stay in Bangalore by a couple of days, and now that I was on the mend, he really had to get going.
&
nbsp; I felt myself wanting to cry again.
‘OK’, I said.
‘I have to go, Dave. There’s nothing left for me to do in Bangalore.’
‘OK. Thanks for everything, anyway. I wouldn’t have survived without you.’
‘I think you might have done.’
‘You saved my life.’
‘It wasn’t even dysentery, you know.’
‘I know, but I’d just had enough of everything, and… I mean, I’ve still had enough of everything, but at least I’ve got the strength to walk now.’
For some reason this made him laugh.
‘You have to be more positive, man. India’s a great country.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘It’s the best place in the world.’
‘After England.’
‘You should try travelling in Africa. In Africa they’ve this fly which lays its eggs in wet clothes. When the eggs feel the warmth of a body, they hatch into tiny maggots which wriggle through your skin and start to grow inside you. You can only get them out by rubbing Vaseline…’
‘Please, Igor. I’m not in the mood today.’
‘I’m just trying to cheer you up.’
‘I know, I just… feel a bit weak. I really am on my own once you’ve gone. I’ve got some friends in Cochin, but I’ll never catch up with them now, and it’s all just a bit shit at the moment.’
‘Dave – you were ill, now you’re better. So be happy.’
‘You’re right.’
‘I’m not going to be here to tell you funny stories any more, so you have to take a positive attitude.’
‘You’re right.’
‘You have to do it on your own now.’
‘OK. And thanks for everything. I mean – for staying behind to help me. Most people aren’t kind enough to… I mean, they wouldn’t… and you… you…’ I had to stop, or I would have burst into tears.
Igor squeezed my arm, and I started to sob.
‘Come on, tough guy,’ he said.
‘Sorry. I don’t mean it. I’m just grateful, that’s all.’
Are You Experienced? Page 13