It's on the Meter

by Paul Archer

The Taj Mahal, one of the most famous landmarks in the world, left us feeling a little underwhelmed. After the beauty of Iranian architecture, it just didn't seem quite as epic as we had expected. That we were all so jaded by such a technically amazing sight showed us how tiring driving through India had been already. We had only just had a break from constant driving up in Manali and now we almost immediately felt like we needed another one. Such was the stress generated by driving on the terrible roads of such a vast country in an old cab that now broke down multiple times a day. As we fought back to the car through the hordes of hawkers one at least brought a smile to my face: 'Sir! You buy fridge magnet? Twenty rupees!'

  'I don't have a fridge,' I replied.

  'It's OK, my dear, you can buy fridge here, too!'

  India is a country of great contrast and limitless fascination. Its virtues could fill pages. However, so too could the subject most often spoken about during any conversation with anybody who has visited the country. That subject is poo.

  CHAPTER 29

  UNAVOIDABLE FACTS ABOUT LIFE IN INDIA

  We spent the morning in Jaipur, where we heard the news that Amy Winehouse had died, joining the '27 Club'. This piece of information is of very little use to you, but having exhausted most topics of conversation after hundreds of hours on the road, trying to remember who else was in 'the club' (Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison…), without the use of Google, was one of those amazing new conversations which could rejuvenate us and take up much of the day.

  And it did.

  The weather was wholly British as we drove out – overcast and muggy – except that in India your brow would rapidly bead with sweat as soon as the car stopped. We headed due south on the road to Mumbai, bouncing on unpaved roads, dodging rickshaws, cows and atrocious drivers.

  We made good time at one point, actually finding a road that resembled a motorway, which meant we could gain speed. Indians are tremendously quick to capitalise on any situation. When a Western farmer sees a motorway built through his land he sees the business equivalent of a hooded character approaching, clutching a scythe that's clearly not intended for the harvest. However, when an Indian farmer sees a motorway built, he uses the newly laid, lush green grass in the central reservation to graze his cows on, oblivious to the cars zipping by at 75 mph.

  So, there we were, speeding along, when I felt a twinge in my stomach. It was a slight twinge, but it was the kind that makes one sit up and say, 'Uh-oh' aloud. My stomach was quite clearly telling me, 'Paul, prepare yourself, all is not well in the world of your insides.'

  India's fledgling motorway system consists of approximately

  550 miles of expressways spread thinly throughout a country

  14 times bigger than the UK and we were lucky enough to have a found a rare 60-mile stretch. However, smooth as it was, and central-reservation-cows notwithstanding, it massively lacked service stations or slip roads of any kind. Unable to stop the car, I held on for a bit longer, clenching every muscle in my body. The lads offered to take over driving, but I knew if I did stop to swap, I would be giving my body that little bit of permission to ease up, which would have dire consequences for the scuffed leather of our Cortina seats. A slip road eventually appeared, but it wound around for an eternity before leading us to the middle of nowhere. Things were getting pretty close to the line (or the cloth) by the time I pulled over at a farmer's shop, moving towards him in a half-clenched, half-jogging shuffle, shouting for directions to the toilet he didn't have.

  I have been fortunate enough to experience toilet facilities in countries all over the world, and from what I've seen, India has a rather lackadaisical approach to sanitation. Human beings are fantastic at developing a system for getting rid of bodily waste, no matter how poor they are. From long drops in Africa and the communal troughs we were yet to experience in China to the patented water closets that adorn bathrooms across the Western world, they all manage undesirable outputs very well. In India though – for all its beauty and spirit – it appears that only the very privileged have flush toilets. For everyone else there's the side of the busy main road and a little bucket of water – it's a part of everyday life.

  I have no idea why people think a road was more suitable than, say, the privacy offered by a bush or the semi-sanitary option of a hole, but performing one's ablutions in public is perfectly normal – old or young, male or female. Doubling the road network as a toilet network means the waste flows away, mostly, as it is trodden around into mud, sprayed up on to cars and moved onwards (presumably into roadside food stalls, vegetables and into the water network).

  Not being a fan of the verge loo, the cow shed behind the man's shop was the next best thing for me.

  We soon found the only service station on the brand new stretch of road, and pulled in for fuel. I had used the facilities three more times when I started to worry that this wasn't just the normal case of the trots. I self-medicated with a bottle of Coke; banking on its time-tested bacteria-killing abilities to eradicate the nasties from my stomach. But soon, back on the road, my stomach started to feel as though somebody had tied it in a knot and was slowly wringing it out, pushing everything either up, or down. Nausea overcame me and I informed the lads that we needed to stop. I then informed them again with more urgency, a few choice words and a very loud, 'NOW!'

  The side of the road where we pulled over this time was rather typical for India; years of rubbish piled up around small bushes and everything was covered in an oily slime that smelt of sewage.

  A small shop was open; I asked them if they had a toilet. Or, more accurately, I jumped around from foot to foot – my face distorted with pain – gesticulating and occasionally shouting words that sounded similar to 'toilet', 'loo' and 'owwwwww!'. They looked at me blankly and started to call for other people to come over and see what was going on. I'd been through this process numerous times – it's part of the fantastic Indian desire to be helpful, something that seems almost wonderfully innate to every citizen. Three or four family members, old and young, would try to communicate with me, coming to the eventual conclusion that none of them could speak my language, I couldn't speak theirs and they didn't understand what I wanted. Then would come apologetic smiles and often a generous offer of some sort of hospitality, and certainly some kind of tea. However, on this occasion I just did not have the time to play.

  I ran around the corner to a bush and threw up.

  Flat Coke and stomach acid burnt the inside of my nostrils as I dry-wretched the last of my 'time-tested cure'. Out of the corner of my eye I could see four rickshaw drivers, nonchalantly sitting on their machines, observing the scene. As soon as I had finished, the wringing sensation started pressing downward, so down too came my shorts.

  My audience just sat and stared. I caught one of their eyes from my squatting position and received a masculine nod, the kind that a man might give to acknowledge another man's pain as he struggles with something in the DIY shop, or follows his wife around yet another clothes shop.

  'I feel your pain,' the nod said. 'It's something we've all gone through.'

  This was one of my all-time low points. But it got worse: I soon saw that what was being wrung out of me was not normal poo or even normal liquid poo for that matter (if there is such a thing). It was green slime, marbled with a considerable amount of blood.

  We needed a hotel – or at least I did – and quickly. After we eventually found one, we discovered that they didn't accept foreigners. Exasperated, I used their facilities and we found another. The same thing happened again and we moved on.

  There are hordes of tourists in India, but as it's such a vast place there are some areas with few attractions and fewer public transport links that can only be seen if you're driving your own vehicle, meaning they're not used to accommodating foreigners. This started to get irritating after I shuffled off to another hotel's toilet for the sixth time. It dawned on me that the toilet paper I had acquired from the first hotel had run out at what
can only decently be described as 'the wrong moment'. I shouted for Johno and Leigh, but what came out sounded more like a pathetic squeak. Apparently this was all I could muster. I squeaked a few times, but soon gave up. I leant against the white tiles that surrounded the hole-in-the-floor toilet, and, slowly slipping to the floor and feeling very sorry for myself, I cried for the first time in many years.

  I decided that it was categorically the lads' fault that I had no paper.

  It was their fault I was ill.

  It was their fault nobody would accept us.

  It was even their fault I was in fucking India.

  Eventually, I plucked myself out of self-pity, used some initiative and made my way back to the cab, minus a pair of Marks & Spencer boxers. It was dark by now and the smooth road had turned very Indian again, each pothole and bump became agony, and it appeared that I had developed a fever and was now shivering violently. We found one more hotel but it was 50 times more expensive than anywhere else. They agreed to accept us, but it was way out of our budget. We decided to move on, but only after I had taken a trip to the men's. I soon remembered the paper problem had yet to be resolved.

  But I only remembered when it was too late. By this point I was not in a state to care any more.

  Things were bad. I lay in the back of the cab, shivering, cramping and covered in my own shit, wishing I had a bed, my mum, a shower, toilet paper and a hug; I was willing to pay any amount of money to get out of this bloody car, so we headed back to the hotel.

  Leaving the boys to crack open our emergency cash supply and sort out registering I had to run to the room. I had nothing left in me, so I had a shower and curled up in the foetal position on the bed, forgetting that normal people clothe themselves after a shower. I felt like with one more whimpering trip to the loo, I might be a goner. Leigh and Johno must have come in and covered me up at some point, and I recall snippets of their conversation as they discussed what to do as I lay there 'moaning like a little bitch'.

  When I was a kid my parents never took us to the doctor unless something was seriously wrong, like the loss of a limb. Once I was sure I had broken my wrist after falling out of a tree and it took a whole day of crying and begging until they finally took me to hospital for an X-ray. Of course, I was fine; they were right and I was wrong and since then I had learned to grin and bear it through gritted teeth.

  By contrast Leigh's mum is a nurse and his dad is a paramedic and as such he had brought along a whole separate bag jammed with various bandages, tablets and needles. At the slightest sign of anything wrong he would be cracking out the antibiotics and rehydration salts while I rolled my eyes and reached for another cup of tea.

  So when Paul started to complain he was feeling ill I told him to clench up and drink more water, but by the time we got him to a hotel he wasn't looking too great. Still, I was sure he'd be just fine in the morning…

  Luckily, Leigh thought I was going to die. Ever the cautious one, I was glad that he ignored Johno's verdict and tracked down my phone from my shorts pocket – although I can only imagine what condition they (and it!) were in.

  He called Ellie up in Manali, to get her advice. She asked to speak to me, but when she was told that I wasn't talking she came to the immediate conclusion that I must be ill. She diagnosed it as a nasty case of dysentery and said I needed rehydrating quickly and to get to a hospital. But seeing as there were no hospitals around, she prescribed some specific antibiotics that Leigh searched high and low for, eventually tracking them down in a street pharmacy after an hour of looking, and said that if I didn't improve during the night, we should find a hospital urgently; if I did, then keep taking the pills and I'd be fine.

  I've known Ellie for many years, but, I must admit, I've always found it a little terrifying that as a doctor she is in charge of people's health. That day I must have gone to the toilet over 25 times, but after taking the drugs she prescribed within a few hours my fever had gone down, I stopped going to the toilet so much and I was actually able to sleep. The antibiotics had worked and Ellie's telephone diagnosis was bang on the money. I think I probably perpetually owe her a drink or two.

  I woke up the next morning, naked, wrapped in a towel.

  Where I had been sleeping, a large green patch had soaked into the bed sheets and the stench was unbearable. I felt like utter crap, I was sweating, I hurt all over… and I had clearly shit the bed during the night. Admittedly, I've had better mornings.

  But, it was worse for Leigh who was just waking up. He had lost the rock-paper-scissors game with Johno the night before and had been sharing the bed with me.

  CHAPTER 30

  MISSING PERSONS

  My convalescence was short lived, for, as always with the expedition, we had to move on. With the only hotel that would accept us unlikely to let us stay again once they had seen the room, we mounted up. Relieved of driving duties, I curled up in a ball in the back of the cab underneath my hajji scarf-blanket, sipped some foul-tasting World Health Organization rehydration solution and slept the entire way to Mumbai.

  The sprawling capital's quirks and irks, beauty and dirt are far more mind-boggling than I could ever describe. It's vast and filled to bursting with people (60 per cent of whom live in slums) and then filled some more. Our destination was the touristy Colaba District where we knew we could grab a cheap bed in what turned out to be a surprisingly expensive city. The plan was to do some interviews with the Indian media, get Hannah in a Bollywood film and sample all the delights the city had to offer.

  We arrived in the huge, bustling city with a terrible atmosphere in the car. Driving in India had been extremely challenging and tiring for all of us, and that day Leigh, still not feeling great from his illness in Manali, had hit a particularly large pothole at high speed causing one of our headlights to ping out of its mountings and smash on the side of the road. My less-than-diplomatic request for him to be more vigilant had led to an intense shouting match that had culminated in Leigh refusing to drive any further and me taking over for the gridlocked streets of the inner city.

  As soon as we found a cheap hotel we checked into separate rooms. I dumped my bags in my two-metre-square box, splattered with the crimson stains of dead mosquitoes, and headed out to try to catch some of the tourist sites and walk off my bad mood.

  The place where we were staying really was horrendous. Stocking up on toilet roll (I had learned the hard way…) and sleeping pills, I settled down to a night of toing and froing between my celllike room and the toilet we shared with 30 Nigerian labourers, two families and a crusty hippy.

  The next day, I carried on with the previous night's monotonous toilet activities, utterly drained (pardon the pun) by this point; Johno had gone out to see the sights of the town while Leigh sat and watched action films on his laptop, still annoyed from the earlier argument.

  Eventually Leigh rose from his ancient, stained mattress and poked his head round my door. 'I'm going to get some lunch,' he said in a defeated tone.

  'Cool, do you need some cash?' Leigh's card had been blocked so Johno and I had been subbing him until he had access to more funds.

  'Nope, I found a hundred rupees in my pocket, should be enough for a samosa.'

  An hour passed. Then two, three, four…

  Johno returned.

  'Seen Leigh at all?' I asked.

  'Nope.'

  'He popped out for lunch five hours ago.'

  'Bothered.'

  'He only had a hundred rupees.'

  'Sucks to be him.'

  His laptop lay on the bed of his unlocked room, paused where he had left it halfway through an episode of Battlestar Galactica. I was slightly concerned for his wellbeing, but figured he was a big boy and would turn up soon enough. I watched Apocalypse Now (the extended director's cut) with the odd essential toilet break built in. This had become the standard entertainment for the trip for when we were too exhausted to leave our rooms and explore. It seems that films and TV series are traded between travelle
rs' hard-drives in hostels everywhere, so you can spend fortunes travelling to the other side of the planet just to sit in a hostel common room watching different movies on a tiny screen. The film was excellent, however the bit when Martin Sheen emerges from the water covered in browny-green slime was a little bit close to home for me at the time.

  Midnight came around and there was still no sign of Leigh. I was starting to get really concerned – it was unlike him to do this, there was a monsoon blowing outside and he only had enough money for a cup of tea (hardly enough to nurture ten hours' worth of exploration). I left our hovel and paddled my way through the flooded streets to the local police station to give them my number in case a skint Brummie turned up.

  When morning came around and there still was no sign of him, even Johno started to be a little concerned. We had no idea where to look; where do you start to find a missing person in a city with a population the same as Holland? We usually carried our passports at all times, and a quick search of his stuff confirmed he had his, so if anything had happened the British consulate was likely to be contacted. I called them up and asked if they had heard anything. They hadn't, but said I should call the local hospitals instead and emailed me their details. It was about 10.30 a.m. by this point and he had been out for 19 hours.