Two men with identical moustaches – obviously the doctor’s companions – bobbed past, chanting “Bush! Bush! We love George Bush!” and fumbling a silver camera. Their fuzzy, self-conscious pronunciation – Boosh! Boosh! We luf Jhoj Boosh! – gave the words an awful quality: the men seemed insincere, even coached. They started to giggle.
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>>
Goa
Vagator, one of Goa’s coastal tourist towns, was said by our guidebook to have “long been the hot location for the outdoor rave parties that made the Goa party scene famous.” But on the day that we arrived, with only a week till Christmas, and accommodation supposedly jam-packed, it was deserted.
The restaurants were all empty, and shiny Christmas decorations hung feebly from the rafters. Rows of clothes and souvenir stalls stood redundant, their proprietors calling out from shaded straw mats, “Hey, how you doing? Just have a look…” in feigned American twangs, or “Yes yes, have a look… please madam!”
The guesthouses and hotels were only half full, but still charged exorbitant “high high season” rates – the locals believed that the regular horde was still on its way. We settled into a spacious tiled room, bright and clean; a delight compared to Mumbai’s Samrat hotel and its midnight vermin visitors.
