Mrs Gardenia presented us with a motherly smile and a dusty menu as old as the taverna itself, entirely in Greek. Mr Gardenia stood at the back of the restaurant, sweating behind the coal stove on which great tarnished vessels held the day’s offerings: roast chicken, moussaka, boiled potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs, sticky creamed spinach and a large pot of mixed vegetables.
Travel and Nostalgia
“Increasingly of late, and particularly when I drink, I find my thoughts drawn into the past rather than impelled into the future. I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of my earlier student days in England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi.
What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.”
Vikram Seth, From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet
At home, in Shanghai, I have stuck 120 of my photographs to the living room wall. The pictures, now a little discoloured by the late afternoon sun, chart my overland journey, in 2006 and 2007, from London to Shanghai. The first is of the Thames on an overcast day. The next is of mountains and sea on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. The photographs move quickly on, left to right, top to bottom, through western Europe, the Middle East, India, Nepal and eventually China.
Most are of scenery, sites, and the people Claire and I encountered en route, but near the bottom I have stuck a picture of myself, sitting on a train station platform. It is often the photograph that visitors comment on first, intrigued, perhaps, by the raw anger written upon my face.
The picture was taken in Gorakhpur, a city in northern India. Its railway station is the country’s largest broad gauge junction and is as close to the Nepali border as you can travel by train. Claire and I arrived there after a month in Nepal. Although we would eventually travel into China from Kathmandu, we had come back to India to meet my family, scheduled to arrive in Calcutta, 816 kilometres away, in a little over a week. Continue reading Travel and Nostalgia>>
Hyderabad / Cyberabad
I awoke to the muffled beeping of my mobile phone’s alarm, heard through airline issue earplugs and the metal of the train clattering on its tracks. Fumbling through my handbag, I found the phone and switched the alarm off. The faded sari fabric of my bag, seen through sleepy eyes, comforted me; I had awoken at involuntary intervals during the night to confirm its presence. It’s green and gold strap was still tied to my arm.
I shot a look toward Iain, who was asleep on the upper bunk across from mine. Yes, the laptop bag was still there, chained to the caging beside his sleeping head. It was 4:30am, fifteen minutes before our train was due to arrive in Hyderabad. I woke him up, with just enough time to splash water on our faces in the grimy carriage toilet, and unchain all of our belongings from under the bottom bunk.
An hour later we had still not reached our destination. I watched the man on the lower bunk across from me fold up a sheet he’d brought with him and deflate his blow-up pillow, which was covered by a clean cotton cover. Our fat, thumbed guidebook had been a pillow for Iain, and I’d used our grubby (but softer) yoga mat; we alternated the two on overnight train journeys. Continue reading Hyderabad / Cyberabad>>
Cochin, Kerala
The train rattled along, inducing in me the sluggish fatigue of rock-rocking train travel and blanketing heat. I sat atop a wooden luggage rack in third class, legs crossed, ankles pressed into the hard wood, to prevent my mosquito bitten feet from dangling in the faces of the people below. The man beside me sat hugging his knees. He wore a mint green handkerchief, folded into a triangle, over his mouth and nose, to prevent the dark coating of fine dust in his nostrils that was ordinary after an Indian train journey.
Out of the window, in a luscious landscape of immodestly green fields, palm trees stretched their necks in the sun. Waterlogged rice paddies reflected the sunlight; a mirror of still silver water and green stalks. A lazy stream wound itself between the green, and as the train curved, we rode alongside the ocean, grey and choppy. Kerala owes its fertility to 900km of waterways. Some flow far inland, but all have mouths opening into the tide’s ebb and flow. They are Kerala’s backwaters, and are a substantial part of the state’s appeal. Continue reading Cochin, Kerala>>
Mysore
The typical Indian bus resembles scrap. It is made of metal sheets, generously dented, perhaps a metre wide. The sheets are joined one to another by rivets, and this leaves a visible seam – covered and reinforced, in places, by a strip of dull-silver steel. It has rectangular openings positioned along its sides. The openings resemble windows, but cannot be shut. Three horizontal bars, or two or one, dissect the openings, and appear to serve an only incidental purpose: the bus gets enormously full, so full that people clutch and ride its bloated sides, using the bars as convenient handles. It is also chronically overused. The steel strips spring away from bus’s sides and protrude at sharp, bent-metal angles, making the vehicle look as if it is, quite literally, bursting at the seams.
Three men are normally employed inside the typical Indian bus: the driver, the conductor and the conductor’s assistant. The driver hunches over a large steering wheel. He has brisk hands, hands that swerve, hoot, smoke, grind gears, swirl. He knows his vehicle is amongst the largest on the road. It is his advantage. The driver’s seat is crudely sprung. It bounces, because India’s roads are bad: narrow, potholed, often congested. The typical Indian bus covers about one hundred kilometres every four hours. Continue reading Mysore>>
Village Homestay, Karnataka
A cock crowed, and crowed and crowed. I straightened, flopped my legs from the end of our just-bigger-than-single bed, and stood. I picked through a pile beside my bag, found a towel, toothbrush, toothpaste and the plastic tub containing our soap. I left Claire to sleep.
A sun-blackened man had slept in the next room. He was still there, awake, folding a bobbled blue blanket. The man, I gathered, was the family’s elder, the grandfather. He had arrived here, at the family home, occupied by his son, his son’s wife and their daughter, after dark, during our supper. The room he slept in was the room where paying guests, like us, were fed. He had been quietly greeted and, after adjusting his dhoti, had fitted a stiff body between blanket and bed. He had let his head loll sideways and, with weary eyes, had watched us eat. Continue reading Village Homestay, Karnataka>>
