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.

It was the middle of summer – monsoon season – and returning to India’s plains after time in the Himalaya’s cool foothills felt like a descent into hell. We planned to ride a train from Gorakhpur to the tea plantations of Darjeeling and to travel the short distance from there to Calcutta a few days later.

Our bus from the Nepali border, 90 kilometres away, arrived at Gorakhpur’s train station late at night. The journey had taken four hours. For a stretch of a few kilometres, there had been no road. At any sharp ascent or descent, passengers were asked to get out and walk.

Even at night, the train station seethed. In the parking lot outside, under the station’s bright lights, passengers in transit had set up camp. Blankets were laid over the tarmac and, on them, whole families slept. In places, the smoke of chula stoves rose above the mess of bodies. Women squatted beside them, cooking chapatti, an Indian flatbread.

We had slept in Gorakphur before, on our way out of India, and returned to the same hotel. Our room was cheap and dirty. Lying on the bed’s stained sheets, you felt as if you might wake up to find that the matter thriving on the floor and walls had grown in the night, to suffocate you. The hotel was redeemed by its restaurant. It stank of ghee, but served buttery khali dhal and delicate parathas. The tables were on a terrace overlooking the station. Train whistles, distant conversations and echoing announcements wove a tangible roar; like India’s heavy air, it blanketed diners, and gave a sense of the momentum of countless lives below; an inkling of the mind-boggling scale of India’s population.

The next day, we went to buy tickets. Ten minutes after the ticket office opened, lines already stretched to the back of its large hall. At most Indian train stations, there is a ticket window reserved for women, foreign tourists, journalists and members of the state legislature. We found it at the opposite end of the hall. Although the other lines were only a little longer, we went to the back and began our wait. After about half an hour, a second line started to develop at the same window. The people in the second queue – all men – waved ten rupee notes and jostled the people in the first – all women, except for me – to compete for the ticket clerk’s attention.

The clerk began to alternate her service. A man was served, his ten rupees taken before he said a word, then a woman was served. We moved forward slowly, and eventually, near the front of the much shorter first queue, drew up alongside the second. I asked the man next to me – fat, with oily hair and a thick gold chain around his thick neck – if he was a journalist. He laughed, revealing a mouth full of paan. “Are you a journalist?” I persisted. “Or part of the government?”
He pointed a stubby finger at his chest and said, “I VIP!”
Claire joined in. “A VIP? What do you mean, you’re a VIP? This isn’t a line for VIPs. It’s a line for women, tourists, journalists and members of the state legislature.” She pointed at the sign above the ticket window, “Look! Read the sign!”
The man seemed a little perturbed by Claire’s aggression – she was, after all, a woman, and nobody else in the queue had said anything – but he laughed again, turned around, and made an effort to ignore us.

The line inched along and we were, eventually, second from the front, with the man still beside us. He had, by now, slipped a ten rupee note between his index and middle fingers, ready to fight for service at the front. After many months in India, I should have been able to let him go. I should have allowed him to buy his ticket because there was, really, nothing I could do, and trying to prevent him would only make buying our own take longer. Instead, when the person in front of us finished paying and he leapt ahead of us, I pulled the money from his hand.

The man turned. He pressed his stomach against me and started to shout. Spittle tinged red by paan flew from his mouth. We traded mutually unintelligible insults, but the man had already won. I might have his money, but he had wedged his body between me and the ticket desk. Nobody was going to buy a ticket before he did. I threw his money back at him. He paid, first the bribe, then the ticket price, and walked off smugly.

The ticket clerk was middle aged. She wore glasses and had woven her grey hair into a long plait. Years spent serving an endless line had reduced her words and movements to the utmost economy. We produced a form, the name of the train we wanted, our destination and desired class, as well as our own details written on it. She pulled it through the hole between counter and window and, without acknowledging us, began to punch station codes and dates into her terminal.
“No tickets,” she said. “Tickets for Siliguri are sold out until next week.” The woman pushed the form back out, her eyes already moving past us, to the next in line.
“Are there any trains to Calcutta?” I asked.
More keys were punched. “No, not this week.”
Claire and I stood there, stunned, as the person behind us wriggled past. We had waited in the queue for over an hour and were about to leave empty handed. Worse still, we were stuck in Gorakhpur.

A travel agent near out hotel suggested an awkward route – a train, a connecting bus and another train – to Siliguri. It was hideously expensive, by Indian standards, and involved a long, looping detour as well as an uncomfortable wait. The first train would leave that evening. We’d arrive in Siliguri two and a half days later and, once there, would still have to find our way up to Darjeeling.

I suggested going instead to Varanasi, only 120 kilometres away, hoping we could more easily buy a ticket to Siliguri there. Claire wasn’t sure. Varanasi was equally hot, we were visiting it with my family anyway, and we might, once there, find ourselves in exactly the same position. Stuck. But she agreed to go back to the station, to see if tickets to Varanasi were available, while I checked us out of the hotel.

An hour later, I was sitting at the hotel’s restaurant, surrounded by bags, when Claire returned, clutching two tickets to Varanasi. Our train was leaving in an hour and a half. We had just enough time for lunch.

I ordered. Our food arrived almost an hour later. Daytime service, it seemed, was slow. We ate quickly and, now late, ran through the hotel, down one flight of stairs, then a second, then – THUD – my head connected with a low arch. I fell, landed on my backpack, and lay dazed on the floor.

Pain led to anger. Claire came back to ask if I was okay. “Yes,” I snapped, but told her to leave me alone. I stood up and vented a little by hitting the arch. At home, I am taller than the average doorframe, and duck almost instinctively at thresholds. India’s doorways are lower. Although I had adjusted quickly by ducking a little further down, no uniform height seems to exist, so an instinctive duck often meant hitting my head harder.

We carried on, running again, out of the hotel, past roadside restaurants, thick with touts, through the people encamped in the parking lot and onto platform one, where we found a blackboard and, on it, the number of our train and the platform from which it was scheduled to depart. It said platform six, so to platform six we went.

There was a train at the platform, but it was a mail train, with sleeper cars and different classes. We were expecting a local, stop service, with only third class seats. I asked a man on the platform if the train was going to Varanasi. He said yes. I asked somebody else. He waggled his head, a gesture of maddening ambiguity, and repeated Varanasi. I asked another man. He said no, we should be on platform four.

We trusted the third man and ran to platform four, but found it empty, although our train was scheduled to depart in under ten minutes and began in Gorakhpur. We asked the people on the opposite platform. Some said yes, a train to Varanasi was due to arrive soon, some said no, some waggled their heads. One man suggested platform one, another platform five.

There were station attendants at platform one, we reasoned, who could give us a definitive answer. So we ran back to the first platform, where I questioned the guards inspecting tickets at the platform entrance. They pointed to the chalkboard that had begun us on our search. We found an information desk, but nobody at it. Again, we were left asking people on the platform. More vague yes’s and no’s and maybes.

I felt as though my mind might snap. Our train, the only train we had been able to buy tickets for, was scheduled to depart in less than five minutes, but we didn’t know from where and neither, it seemed, did anybody else. Frustration had made my head hot, and I could feel angry tears welling up. After the relative placidity of Nepal, I was not happy to be back in India.

Then a man who spoke excellent English said, with absolute confidence, that our train was departing from platform one. It hadn’t arrived at the platform yet, but he was certain. We threw our bags off and, drenched in sweat, sat down.

It was then that Claire, our camera slung over her shoulder, decided to take a photo. My jaw is clenched, my forehead creased and my eyes black. I am staring straight at the camera’s lens. The people on the platform are watching me, perhaps wondering why I am making no effort to pose.

It is these details that people notice when looking at the photograph on my living room wall. And a few days later, reviewing the pictures on the camera’s screen, I probably saw the same scene, but I now notice more. I notice our yoga mat, carried in a green bag, lying on the platform, and the bag Claire used obsessively, to carry a water bottle, beside it. I notice my hair, long and sun-lightened, and the copper bracelet around my left wrist, which I lost a few months after arriving in Shanghai. I notice my clean shaven face, and think of India’s barbers. I discover people asleep in the background, Hindi written on the walls and the garish clothes worn by the man next to me. In short, I very quickly become nostalgic.

Claire had not yet packed the camera away when the loudspeaker above us crackled to life. “Train 5004 to Varanasi will be departing shortly from platform A. Passengers for this train please board now.”

“Platform A?” I shouted at Claire. We were already standing. I had thrown my backpack over one shoulder, picked up my daypack and started moving. The train was scheduled to depart in two minutes. “Platform A?” I asked one man, then another. They pointed to an area behind the station building. We started to run – fast, carrying 50 kilograms of luggage, including a laptop and a small library of books – and arrived at platform A with seconds to spare. The train was still there. We swung up onto the last carriage, found a seat and heaved a very big sigh of relief. Five minutes later, the train left the station.

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.

The man looked clean, and refreshed. He had anticipated the train’s inevitable delay, so had slept for an extra hour. With hands and faces washed with our indispensable Dettol soap, it was easier to ignore our grimy clothes, sticky after a night on linenless bunks. But could one can call the semi-hallucinatory experience of dozing with clanging tracks and noisy passengers sleep?

I had found Iain and I whispering before dawn that morning, while trying to dislodge our baggage from under the lower bunk. Shh, people are trying to sleep I heard myself think, in my mother’s voice. Despite falling asleep to the blaring voices of Indian families, who talked when they wanted, shouted when they wanted, and switched on the light when they wanted, there I was whispering, so as not to wake them up.

A man in a tatty maroon uniform walked past calling, “CoffeeeeCoffeeCoffee!” I paid five rupees, and began sipping my second cup that morning, feeling more refreshed with each sip.

A movement on the ground caught my eye. Below me, on the carriage floor, a bedraggled child crawled past on his hands and knees, wiping a filthy t-shirt along the carriage floor, in a gesture of cleaning. I averted my gaze automatically. He was the second child that morning to crawl past, t-shirt in one hand, holding the other out for coins.

My coffee-fuelled contentment was gone, and I snapped back into the reality in which I was living; this cruel reality in which I was a privileged spectator. A five rupee note lingered in my purse, and I remembered it – it was the smallest denomination in my coinless, note-stuffed wallet. The child dwelled at our feet, ineffectually wiping the floor, looking up at us with mournful eyes. I looked sideways at Iain. He shrugged. The man across from us appeared not to have noticed the boy.

Refusing children money was the one decision about begging we’d made upon arrival in India. By then we’d heard enough rumours about young children being stolen by ‘beggar masters’ who force them to beg, while profiting from the takings. Beggars whose bodies have been mutilated, often having had entire limbs removed, or those who have been blinded, earn better money for their masters. The five rupee note remained in my wallet.

But guilt soon crept up. What if this child has no parents, no food, no access to an orphanage, no other option but to beg? But perpetuating the cycle is worse. What if I give him money which goes straight to a beggar master?

“We must start volunteering,” I said in my head, then to Iain. We had intentions to do some volunteer work for a few weeks while in India, but this had not yet materialised. I sipped my coffee. The child had gone. Five minutes later I may have forgotten about him. The coffee, at least half milk, had formed a creased brown skin on top.

*

I fumbled in my wallet for money to pay a rickshaw wallah. He sat waiting in the small scrappy contraption, which belched acrid black smoke onto my damp skin. Standing beside the vehicle, my wallet and white face had already attracted plenty of attention.

“Ugh, ugh,” groaned a woman, her hand held out. Another grabbed my arm, “Ten rupees! Ten rupees!” she demanded, pointing to the baby on her hip. “Yes please, yes please,” said a man, covered almost entirely in handbags, as though we had already agreed to purchase one of the bunch being thrust in our faces.

“Let’s get out of here!” I said to Iain, once the rickshaw man had been paid. But where to go? More vendors were beginning to approach. The hounding beggar women were not reacting to the dismissive wave of my hand. We darted through the mangle of traffic; a picture of chaos and collision which moved in slow motion, the occasional optimist tearing through a gap with millimetres to spare.

The pavement was lined with more vendors, their wares set up on wooden wagons – at least they could not pursue us. But as we passed, the familiar cries followed. “Yes, have a look… You like? Nice shawls…” and with it, went my exasperating habit of feeling a duty to reply, to at least acknowledge these salesmen. “No thank you… No… Uh, no…” my head perpetually shaking, my nerves increasingly taut.

Burka-ed women shopped, holding their children by the hand. Skull-capped men stood by wagons of watermelon, sprinkling them with murky water in the fierce heat, their tunics as white as their trousers; incongruous amongst the faded filth.

This was Hyderabad’s Old Town, established by an ancient Muslim dynasty, later conquered by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. The city was once the centre of Islamic India; a focus for arts, culture and learning – a somewhat difficult reality to imagine amidst the mayhem.

The Charminar, Hyderabad’s principle landmark, stood 56 metres high, in the centre of the mess. The structure’s four columns were joined by elegant Mughal arches, facing the cardinal points. A minaret graced the top of each column.

Beyond the Charminar, we approached Mecca Masjid, one of the world’s largest mosques. It can accommodate 10 000 of Hyderabad’s large Muslim population. With my head covered by a Middle Eastern scarf, we entered its enormous courtyard, and soon noticed that I was one of the only females with her head covered – out of respect for one of Islam’s primary practices. No woman was permitted to enter a mosque without a headscarf in the Middle East.

People lay in the shade of the towering building, chatted in groups, or wandered the courtyard. Most of the women wore saris and a handful of burka-ed ladies were splattered like black ink across a vast cement courtyard. A few men wore the traditional skull cap and tunic.

Still wearing the headscarf, I attempted to enter the mosque, where I was sure it would be required. But the mosque itself was not open. Neither would it open at all that day, or on any day, according to anyone we asked. The courtyard was simply a communal Muslim space, where no worshipping was taking place. All wore shoes, though the filthy ground did not invite other options. Young boys played cricket at the mosque’s rear, haughtily insisting that we photograph them. We left, the mosques of the Middle East now just an enchanted memory.

*
It was just after 1am when we first met Robin, at a lone omelette stand outside our station hotel. Everything else in sight had shut, and the omelette stand provided the only promise of food, late that night when hunger struck.

Iain was still making his way from the hotel room when Robin swaggered up to me, hands in the pockets of his tie-dyed shorts. “Hey, how you doing?” he asked, in a self-consciously un-Indian accent. His hands dangled from pockets below a pink t-shirt with the sprawling letters ‘US ARMY’.
“Fine thanks,” I answered, while nodding to the vendor’s grubby-fingered pinch of chilli.

Just then Iain appeared, and Robin casually enquired as to our relationship. “We’re a couple,” said Iain.
“Way to go!” Robin shouted, and lurched forward to slap Iain on the back. He worked in one of Hyderabad’s many call centres; full of thousands of money hungry young Indians like Robin who could speak decent English, and in his case, master the American accent required by the American company that employed him.

A few other men surrounded the omelette man, who rubbed chilli onto sliced white bread with his fingers, and whisked onions, tomato, and more chilli swiftly into the egg mixture, taking payment between batches. After tasting the omelette, I could ignore the hotplate’s blackened grease and the man’s money-soiled hands. Trusting our taste buds, Iain and I each ordered another.

Robin usually went to the omelette stand after work. He had just finished a shift; the hours were an unsociable 6pm to 1am.
“So do you sleep all day?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I sleep in the day, but tomorrow is Sunday – a holiday – so I will not sleep. Tonight I am going out with my friends,” and he pointed to a man standing beside a motorbike.
“Where are you going?” I asked. We were yet to meet an Indian who actually went to the nightclubs that we’d found empty, during two hopeful attempts at a night out.
“One of the clubs…” he said vaguely. “There are so many in Banjara Hills.”

Hyderabad has an alter-ego: Cyberabad, which is home to a moneyed middle class who work in India’s booming IT sector. They live in upmarket parts of the city, where Western style consumerism is growing fast. Banjara Hills is one of those areas.

“You been to Imax?” Robin asked, with sudden enthusiasm. We shook our heads. “Oh, you must see this place,” he said.

The Imax Centre was Cyberabad’s newest shopping mall, although Robin was not familiar with this concept. “It is a place where you can do everything: eat, shop, go to cinema, have entertainment, all in one place! ” He looked to us for a reaction, waited, and then insisted that he take us to see for ourselves the next day. A shopping mall, held in high esteem, on a Sunday, filled with Indians; it sounded worth the outing. We agreed to let Robin “pick” us at 11am “sharp” the next morning, and said goodnight.

*

It was 11:30am, and I sat in the sun on our hotel’s steps, watching traffic approach the train station. The collective noise from the hooting was incredible, but the distance I kept was comfortable enough to avoid the usual attack from the rickshaw drivers: “Where you go? Where? Come! Yes! Where you go?”

Every morning in Hyderabad I had gritted my teeth and delved into the madness that dominates any Indian train station, and its immediate surrounds, and walked the fifty or so metres onto the platform, in the name of real coffee. Bangalore and Hyderabad’s most pleasing modern conveniences, for me, were undoubtedly the take-away espresso stalls. But that walk – clambering over piles of rubble, dodging goats, dangerous drivers, shaking your head at rickshaw drivers, shaking your head, shaking your head – was only possibly worth it; Iain considered me quite the caffeine addict to bear it.

While I sat on the steps, Iain called Robin to make sure he was on his way. But he had not even left home yet. Neither did he perceive any inconvenience, while we sat, waiting, outside our hotel. “Ten minutes, ten minutes,” he told Iain casually.

When boasting of his training in “American consumer thinking” the night before, he had mentioned, “American accent, no grammar mistakes, proper customer attention, and punctuality,” as his areas of expertise. He had obviously missed something. At 12:30pm, he arrived, by which time we’d thankfully decided to be rude enough to wait upstairs where it was cooler.

*

Robin, Iain and I sat sipping Mirinda from disposable cups in a burger joint that honoured the Hindu holiness of cows – it was beef-free. Robin began telling us about himself.

“I am from a high caste family – we are Brahmins,” he began. “My father is a priest. He also teaches Sanskrit.”
Robin grew up in a small town in Andhra Pradesh, a neighbouring state, where his parents still lived. Landing a job in an American call centre justified a move away from home, to Hyderabad, the capital of Andra Pradesh.
“So you must be quite religious,” I suggested, after he had made his caste clear.
“No, I am not really. But I live as a Brahmin: I do not eat meat.”
“Have you ever?” I asked.
“No, never. I could not do this.”
“So you don’t drink either,” I said, knowing the basics about high-caste Hindus.
“Yeh… Sometimes. When I go to the club.”

Living independently from his parents – a rarity for Indian sons, especially unmarried ones –allowed Robin to live beyond the constraints of convention. Modern Hyderabad, or Cyberbad, offered a taste of another life that was vastly different from growing up alongside an orthodox father in rural Karnataka.

At 27 he wasn’t in the process of planning a marriage yet, but was “looking”. “My father knows I will make my choice wisely,” he said, “so he is not planning for me.”
Robin knew, he explained, that in conjunction with his success in having a good job, a wife would be the second part of his assured “success” in life. He had his eye on a very attractive Brahmin girl who worked at his company, and asked for our advice on how to proceed.

“Have you spoken to her before?” I enquired. He shook his head. I began to advise that this was the essential first step of a courtship.
“I have heard that she has a boyfriend,” he interrupted. A declared “boyfriend”, especially in traditional Brahmin circles, is one step away from a fiancé, and just one more away from a husband.
“Even if she has a boyfriend,” I continued, “talking to her is the easiest way to find out.”
“No, she is traditional. I should speak to her parents first,” he insisted.
Asking a woman’s parents whether she is ‘taken’ or not, without having ever spoken to her, was obviously beyond my comprehension. I couldn’t possibly give advice on a romance which subscribed to cultural nuances that were unfathomable to me. And in any case, Robin appeared to know better.

He piled three twenty rupee notes up on the table. As he tucked his wallet back into a stone-washed pocket, he told us, “India has become such a major location for call centres these days, you know.” He wore his call centre job like a badge. “It is because of our neutral accent,” he told us, while we nodded, forcing silence upon ourselves.

He strolled back into the mall, with us behind, and began to point out its highlights. “The Imax cine-complex is up there,” he said, pointing to an escalator beside an enormous poster for the latest Bollywood hit. “And there are so many games you can play here,” he said, as we entered the arcade.

Hiding a lack of interest in a games arcade, while your reactions are being closely monitored, can be a tricky task. Robin pointed to a counter where game tokens were sold, and informed us, “First, you go to that place and pay. If you give them ten rupees, they will give you two tokens. You need this tokens to play the games. You cannot use money in the game.”
“Well,” I mumbled to Iain, “we’d better go and get our tokens.” It was obvious that opting out, or explaining that our affection for video games had faded with childhood, was not going to be well-received. I couldn’t be sure that Robin even considered that we had so much as seen a games arcade before.

I raced beside Iain on a plastic motorbike, while his knees pointed up towards his ears. Robin watched blankly, and declined to play. He didn’t appear to think the arcade was particularly exciting either, but assumed a serious stance while touring us around the mall, showing us what modern India had to offer. It was all for our benefit. And somehow, within the next hour – through a combination of polite appreciation for what Robin proudly showed us, and our six-month-long deprivation of ordinary Western commodities – we became like children on an outing, coaxed into a bizarre form of excitement. We paid to walk through a hall of mirrors, we ogled at the chocolate fountain outside a Belgian chocolate stall, and Iain kicked off his shoes and pulled himself to the top of the climbing wall. Towards the end of the afternoon, Robin was smiling.

As we walked back into India, and back into the train station turmoil, we were greeted by the country’s contrasting persona, Mother India. She nurtures a beautiful chaos where rural life merges with the railway stations – the country’s pulse. I was relieved to be away from one of India’s few Westernised enclaves, where the Mother is stripping herself of sari and sandals and basking in the glory of globalisation, soulless, imitated and superficial, though it is.

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.

*

In the relative cool of early morning, an old white Ambassador heaved itself to a halt outside our guest house, with two Brits inside, to collect us for a trip along the backwaters. Hannah and Echo were mother and daughter, and had been lured to Kerala, not by its lush landscape and watercourses, but by an ashram in Kerala’s south. They had completed the two week long ‘yoga vacation’ the day before and would spend their last few days in Cochin, sightseeing and having clothes tailored in exotic Indian fabric, for peanuts. They had decided that half a day was enough on the backwaters, and would be leaving before lunch. There were clothes to be tailored.

The heaviness of the day grew, and the Ambassador’s brown velour upholstery became itchy, sticking to my damp limbs. After an hour of driving, we arrived at the edge of a river, where small wooden boats met us and other taxi loads of tourists.

Hannah, Echo, Iain and I waited for the groups of mostly French and Israeli tourists to clamber aboard. Our patience was rewarded: we were left the last of the boats, which was empty, save for the slight Indian boatman who would punt us for the day, in a faded orange lungi, folded above the knee, and a blue collared shirt.

We slid through the silky green water, legs dangling off the narrow wooden boat, stroked by soft slimy plants. Minute insects buzzed above the glassy surface, then landed, making minute ripples. The river banks were dense with palm trees, swaying collectively in a sturdy bunch; green with yellow tips and a brown cluster of coconuts in the middle. More like a sketch chalked onto paper, their thin bendy trunks were a blur of grey-brown, with white highlights smudged for effect.

With the wide river behind us, we took a turn down a dim stream, curtained in by feathery green leaves that hung on either side. We floated in tranquil quietude, through dense jungle, following this hidden path amongst the lushness of bird territory. Brilliant blue-tipped wings shone through the green, a long black beak protruded, held in the air, and a white chest stood distinct from the brown-black of a white-breasted Kingfisher.

We stopped at a small island, where coir was made. Washing hung on a line beside the island’s only plastered house. Outside, two ladies had stopped working, to begin a demonstration for us. They wore faded saris around their waists and their cholis (the miniature blouses worn underneath) were without the usual drapes of concealing cloth. Loose skin hung over the older lady’s washboard stomach, and – the crowd now assembled – they resumed their working positions.

Coconut husks were stripped of their wiry hairs, which were nimbly twisted between the ladies’ fingers to matt them together. The tangle of coconut fibre was then attached to a rudimentary spinning wheel, and twisted further, while pulled, so that only a few of the fibres intertwined with one another. As one lady pulled, and the other fed the fibre towards the mechanism, a fine length of coir followed. Two thin lengths of coir were then twisted together, making a rope of astonishing strength.

The glittering green of the water greeted us again; an emerald carpet spread out for our boat’s crossing. White blossoms played among the floating lily pads, speckled sunspots and deep shade colouring their faces. A tangle of green wove a canopy over our heads, shading us from the sun, which peeked through leaves; luminous light. Hannah and Echo postponed their shopping trip.

Another island stop – the tourists required refreshments. A spindly man grabbed the trunk of a palm, wedged his feet into a loop of coir, and using it to grip the tree’s sharp ridges, manoeuvred his feet toward his clinging arms, worming his way up, inch by agile inch, until he’d climbed the length of it. Coconuts were thrown to the ground, the man calling out incomprehensibly as the rock hard things hit the ground beside us. A small machete was used to hack them open, we were provided with straws, and sipped the clear unripe liquid; its slightly medicinal flavour a reminder that it contains enough pro-biotic goodness to cure Delhi belly.

*

Back in Fort Cochin, the island town where we were staying, we watched the daylight depart with a teacup of beer, facing the sea. An alcohol license was a rarity on the island, and most establishments served beer in a teapot. That evening, teacups had run out and Iain was left with a milk jug.

The teapot disguise was a gesture. No police officer, after several years of service on Fort Cochin, would believe for a second that hundreds of tourists spent each evening guzzling litres of tea, into the night, becoming increasingly louder from the caffeine. But appearances, in India, must be kept up. Once an evening, a police van would drive past, a scurrying waiter would present baksheesh, and the policemen would drive on. They had seen only teapots.

Ahead of us, on the water’s edge, were a row of wooden mechanisms, enormous and spider-like. These cantilevered fishing nets are believed to have been introduced by Chinese traders in the early 14th century. They require at least four men to operate their delicate system of counterweights. The spidery silhouettes descended slowly into the ocean, to rise against the mauve striped sky. Only a few fish and crustaceans were caught in each hoist of the nets, and these were quickly sold to passing tourists, who could have the fresh catch cooked at neighbouring restaurants.

Kerala’s long coastline has encouraged maritime contact for centuries; it was through Kerala that Chinese products and ideas found their way to the West. Fort Cochin itself is steeped in reminders of the state’s colonial past.

Early the next morning we began exploring the island’s narrow streets on bicycles, while an ambitious energy still inhabited our bodies. Already, South India’s heavy heat had crept up on the morning, and we soon realised happily, as a breeze washed over us, that it was cooler to cycle than to walk.

Outside Santa Cruz Basilica, one of several Portuguese relics on the island, a swarm of schoolgirls walked down the street. They were dressed in spotless white knee-length tunics, with blue trousers, and matching blue cotton scarves pinned neatly to their shoulders: salwar kameez, a commonly worn traditional outfit. They attended one of the Christian schools established by the Portuguese. Kerala’s population remains 20% Christian.
We cycled through a traffic circle, a red hammer and sickle symbol sculpted onto a plaque in its centre, and followed a narrow road toward Mattancherry, one of Cochin’s neighbourhoods, once a town in itself. Decrepit little rooms lined either side of a long road, used as modest warehouses, or wholesaler’s premises. Rice was piled onto tables that looked onto the street, metal was welded, different tea varieties were chalked onto boards outside. Men were silent inside their premises, expressionless as we passed, until returning a smile.
Goats clambered atop piles of rubble. Trucks, their width comparable to the street’s, hooted their way though, Horn Please, painted in red letters on their rear. The crumbling concrete of the street was defied by the bright paint-peeled surrounds. A wooden green wagon, a sunshine yellow auto-rickshaw, a blue, green, red and yellow wall of a building, advertising KRM Best Quality Rice.

We were passed by numerous bicycles, ridden by men – always men. Some cycled past bare-chested, in sarongs, with turbans that soaked up sweat from their foreheads.

Mattancherry has Kerala’s only functioning synagogue, situated in an area still known as Jew Town. Pardesi Synagogue was built in 1568 to serve the Cochin Jews, or Malabar Jews, who after several rounds of immigration made up a significant population in Cochin. They were of Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Middle Eastern and North African origin.

Some sources say that the earliest Jews in India were those who settled along Kerala’s Malabar coast during the times of King Solomon of Israel, and after the Kingdom of Israel split into two. It is also said that Jews came to Kerala and settled as early as 700 BCE for trade. An old, but not particularly reliable, tradition says that the Jews of Cochin came in mass to Cranganore, an ancient port near Cochin, after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

In 1524, Muslims, backed by the ruler of Calicut, attacked the Jews of Cranganore on the pretext that they were tampering with the pepper trade. Most Jews fled to Cochin and went under the protection of the Hindu Raja there. He granted them a site for their own town that later acquired the name ‘Jew Town’.

Unfortunately, the Portuguese occupied Cochin at about the same time and persecuted the Jews, destroying Pardesi Synagogue. It was rebuilt when the Dutch took Cochin.

Jew Town’s streets were filled with tourists, who must have bypassed the go-downs by rickshaw, and now browsed the curio shops. We cycled beyond the bustle, and along a quiet stretch of small homes. The perpetual scream of children, “One photo! One photo!” caused whole families to rush out of their homes to wave at us, grinning.

*

We boarded a passenger boat, bound for Ernakulam – Cochin’s mainland, and epicentre – where there was a Hindu festival being held at a temple. The boat was the same that ferried Fort Cochin’s commuters into Ernakulam daily, and as Iain and I enjoyed the smooth hour long journey across a wide stretch of Kerala’s backwaters, we decided it would be a pleasant commute to make; heavenly compared to long hours on rush hour trains.

The Shiva Temple was only a few minutes away from the waterfront by auto-rickshaw, and outside, the beating of drums informed us the festivities had begun. We added our shoes to the rows outside the temple grounds, and beneath a stone carved archway, entered a large courtyard, which surrounded the temple itself.

We skirted the temple, heading toward a crescendo of drum beats and saw, beneath the shade of an awning, seven bejewelled elephants standing, munching on large green leaves. They wore enormous gold headpieces fringed with a rainbow of tassels, and oval pendants featuring their names in Malayalam (Kerala’s local language) which dangled from thick gold chains. Men sat atop them ceremoniously, holding circus-style umbrellas, and below, on the ground, writhed a mass of glistening bodies in white cotton lungis, pounding drums and blowing long curved horns in a frenzy that we could all but stare at.

The drummers played in sweat coated ecstasy, muscular arms raised above their heads in between beats. Gradually the entrancing rhythm slowed, and the elephants were led steadily forward a few paces, with the mass of musicians in the lead. A gentler rhythm persisted, while thirsty men gulped water, pouring it into their mouths, to prevent their lips from tainting the shared metal cups.

The first rhythm frantically started up again, on some unknown cue. The elephants stood passively, devouring the piles of leaves, while tiny men carried their fresh dung away in large woven baskets. An elephant trainer sat under the shade of an elephant, between its four legs, waiting to lead it the next few steps in the procession, killing time with a newspaper.

*

After lunch, while the festival slept through the fierce afternoon heat, we wandered drowsily through Ernakulam, cursing the intermittent hooting of cars that I was sure we’d never get used to.

Kerala’s government is communist. It 1957 it was the first freely elected communist government in the world. Unsurprisingly, communism is hardly practised. But a more equitable distribution of land and income is said to exist, and communist principles are partly responsible for Kerala’s low infant mortality and 91% literacy rate – the highest in India.

Billboard sized advertisements were nailed to the exterior of a seven storey building. A light skinned Indian woman posed, wearing a midriff and swathes of silk draped sensuously around the rest of her body. She had striking features, and the kind of attractive curvy figure that would prevent her from becoming a model in the West. Intrigued, we entered the shop and took the escalator a few storeys up.

Ladies were seated in front of long counters, upon which metres of fine silk had been spread by slender shop assistants in matching floral saris; a pale yellow that elegantly complemented their rich brown skin. A group of them approached me, with wide white-toothed smiles.
“You want sari?” one lady asked me excitedly.
“Oh, no thank you,” I said. “I’m just having a look around – such beautiful silk. I mean, I’d love a sari, but I couldn’t fit anything else in my backpack.”
She smiled, along with the four other women, their hands clasped neatly behind their backs. It was not the potential sale of the sari that excited them, I suspected, but the prospect of a foreigner like me showing interest in one.

Iain was among a minority of males in the seven storey building, which a shop assistant proudly told us was the largest sari shop in the world. The few men in the store browsed their own department: a single floor which featured long traditional tunics, embroidered to the leg, in a style which I associated with fabled Oriental emperors. This, the wedding silk department, was female domain, and the saried shop assistants ignored Iain, perhaps only because his very un-Indian height intimidated them. Encircling me, they began asking the standard Indian questions: What is your country? What is your profession? How do you feel in India? Do you like Kerala?

I told them we’d been at the festival, where we were returning shortly, after stopping for some coffee. It was true; the heat was draining, and I required a pick-me-up before the evening’s festivities, but could also not foresee an end to this charming, yet tiring exchange with the sari ladies.

To me, coffee in India simply meant caffeine – instant and powdered. The rich aromas of real coffee were only a memory. Tourist restaurants sold it, but I never considered it worth the price of a beer. But here, out of a hidden door, came a yellow sari-ed lady carrying a paper cup of the strongest espresso I’d tasted in months – complementary. I expressed my gratitude; the ladies beamed.

“I like your dress,” one of them said, assuming I didn’t know the local name of the traditional Indian outfit I wore.
“Oh, this… Thank you,” I said, feeling self conscious among all the silky exoticism, in my casual cotton salwar kameez.
“I put this?” the lady said sweetly, pointing to the black bindi stuck between her eyebrows.
“Sure… Thank you,” I said, as she stuck the black sticker onto the same position on my forehead: the location of the third eye – the chakra associated with insight.
“It matches your dress,” she said, pointing to the black embroidery on my tunic.

We watched the wedding silks being shown to some prospective customers, a mother and daughter I presumed. Heavy with gold thread, the cloth was flung into the air, and gracefully draped onto the counter before the scrutinising eyes of the two ladies. A weighty decision was required; the luxurious wedding sari alone can cost Rs 25 000 (about $600) for a garment weighing 1.5kg. This is only one of multiple expenses in the Indian marriage ceremony. The minimum cost of a middle class wedding is $34 000, according to wedding planners quoted on Sepia Mutiny. The average American wedding costs $26 327. India’s middle class are considered to be those earning between $4500 and $23 000 a year; a percentage of the population that constitutes 300 million. The upper-middle and rich classes are known to spend upward of $2 million.

Expressing happiness for your offspring’s marriage, while displaying emblematic Indian hospitality may seem reasonable. Financially, it can be devastating. Custom-made personal loans have been introduced to fund what Indians consider a vital expense, and extravagant weddings have spread like a disease.

Besides wedding costs (which are usually the responsibility of the bride’s family), the parents of the bride often face ludicrous dowry demands from the groom’s parents. The dowry remains the cause of numerous legal battles, despite being declared illegal in 1961. It is these burdens – the dowry and wedding costs – that are also responsible for India’s terrifying rate of female infanticide and sex-selective abortions. And it is the wealthy and educated alone who have access to prenatal equipment for determining a baby’s sex. Unfortunately, the ‘Keeping up with the Jones’s’ syndrome, for all its potentially horrific repercussions, remains the way of the middle class in India.

*

The sun was setting in the sticky pink sky as we walked back to the festival, and a carnival atmosphere fluttered through the air around the Shiva Temple. Shiny silver decorations flapped in the occasional, merciful breeze beside strings of coloured light bulbs that dangled from trees and buildings. Suspended from a frame of scaffolding was the main feature: a enormous Shiva, with his wife Parvati standing beside him, his trident glowing red, all lit up in coloured lights. Stalls had been set up, selling books on Hinduism, plastic Shiva figurines, sparkly framed pictures of popular deities, and other Hindu kitsch.

We entered the main temple area, where people had begun lighting hundreds of palm oil-filled hollows in the outer temple walls. Pieces of string were soaked in the oil, and then lit, to burn as wicks. Moving clockwise, people circled the temple, lighting a few wicks as they went, leaving little orange flames in their path. Soon enough, the temple was aglow with flickering wicks, which danced in the darkness of ancient ritual.

The elephants returned, to parade around the temple – clockwise, always clockwise in Hinduism – and the hypnotic rhythm began again. Iain, too, was making his way around the temple, lighting the higher rows of lights, when a tiny man approached me and introduced himself as Shiva.
“Can I explain something about all this to you?” he asked, looking up at me with bright eyes.
“Yes… thank you. That’d be nice,” I replied.
“This elephant…” he began, pointing to the largest, “is Shiva.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused.
He repeated himself. “This elephant is Shiva. Nobody can touch him, he is so so powerful,” he said. “They would die.”
“But what about the people riding him?” I asked, truly puzzled, trying to set aside my hopelessly Western sense of logic.
“For them, it is okay,” he continued. “But for anyone else to touch him, it will be very bad,” Shiva said.
I nodded slowly.
“Inside…” said Shiva, pointing to the temple, “is the real Shiva.”
“Oh,” I said, and squeezed the scepticism from my voice.

He began explaining a vital aspect of the temple’s history to me. Years before, a fire had devastated a large part of Ernakulam, destroying hundreds of homes and more lives. Such awful devastation could have only one source, decided the Hindu population: Shiva, the Hindu deity known as ‘the destroyer’. Characterised as the lord of yoga, Shiva is typically represented sitting in the lotus position, meditating. One day while Shiva was meditating, his third eye became very hot – heat between the eyebrows is supposedly common during intense meditating. But on this occasion, he told me, the heat was so extreme that it caused an entire neighbourhood in Ernakulam to ignite, and be devoured by flames.

But now, Ernakulam was safe, Shiva assured me. The position of the lingam (a phallus that represents Shiva) inside the temple had been altered, so that Shiva now faced toward the cool sea; a sensible measure which was sure to prevent any more spontaneous combustion from between his eyebrows, the little Shiva beside me concluded.

A man walked past and handed me a small lump of sandalwood paste, which Shiva indicated I should push onto my forehead, between the eyebrows, with any finger but the inauspicious index. A crusty beige bindi was now established just above the black sticker I had been given earlier, in the vicinity of my third eye. Sandalwood is known for its cooling properties, and is used specifically by meditating Hindus to lower the temperature of the heat-prone third eye region, hence its popularity as bindi paste. Ernakulam would be in no danger of spontaneous combustion from my third eye either.

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.

The conductor is normally middle aged. He has risen to the position. He organises banknotes between the fingers of his fist. He instructs his assistant. The people outside the bus, clutching its sides, pay the conductor a negotiable fare. This money is his, a bonus. It might or might not be shared. The bus has a maximum capacity, officially set, but ten to twenty extra people are routinely squeezed into the isle. The conductor, because the crowding is so routine, can pilfer only some of these fares.

The conductor’s assistant works mostly as a tout. He shouts loud, difficult to hear destinations. He bangs metal sheets or blows a whistle. The driver understands the thud and whistle, the assistant’s sounds, and knows to stop or start the bus, or, guided by dot-dash trills, to reverse it into a narrow berth.
Our bus from Madikeri to Mysore was typical. A land of rolling hills and rice fields moved beyond the openings at its sides. Above the windshield, to the driver’s left, a sticker told us to “Smile Please.”

A bald, bespectacled Indian man nearby muttered in English to his son. “Buddy, sit down. Please buddy.” He did not sound patient. He sounded worn thin, tired. The son stood unsteadily in the aisle, sullen faced. In front of his father there was an empty bench, but the boy preferred to stand, clutching a pole, riding the potholes. The father removed a handkerchief from his shirt pocket. He wiped sweat from his bald head, turned, smiled at Claire and I, turned back. The smile, an apology, became a grimace. “Buddy, the roads here are not good. The bus does not have good brakes. If we stop suddenly or go over a big hole you will fall and smash up your spine. Or cut your head open, and bleed. Please buddy, sit down.”

“Ah Dad, I won’t fall,” said the son. His accent was Australian. It explained the odd scene: the English, the insolence and the fretting father. Fathers on the typical Indian bus do not fret, nobody does, and sons are not normally insolent. The pair were NRIs: Non Resident Indians, allowed a small identity card and a special acronym; allowed to enter India without a visa and work.

The father seemed uncomfortable, nearly hysterical, in the land still nominally his own. In Madikeri, he had skittered on and off, on and off the bus, securing luggage, seats, snacks. He wiped sweat constantly from his scalp and accorded other passengers an awkward, scraping respect. I thought, because his accent was Indian, that he might have been born and spent his childhood in India, perhaps somewhere nearby. He might then have been a part of the educated, car-owning, driver-hiring elite. The family he had left in India, the family he might now be going to meet, did not travel on typical, clattering buses; but time in the more egalitarian West had made him forget, and he now looked, and seemed to feel, out of place.

The bus stopped at a ragged, nowhere station. Passengers left to find a toilet or tea and, through the half-barred openings, bandit monkeys swung into the unoccupied seats. The animals scurried squawking through the aisle, and picked at plastic and abandoned fruit, and hissed.

The father slunk along his seat and sat rigid at the opening. The son, still standing, took half steps to the right. A monkey stopped, squatted. It inspected the boy. Eyes wide-afraid and fascinated, the boy inspected it. “Don’t touch the monkeys buddy,” said the father. And his voice cracked. “They are wild animals!” The monkey’s arms dropped to the floor. It ambled towards the boy. Another passenger, a man with a greasy black moustache, noticed. He swung an empty hand at the animal, a human hand that could, and often did, hold and throw a stone. It bared its teeth, but left.
The bus entered Mysore at night. It passed the maharaja’s palace, outlined by 97 000 bright light bulbs. The bulbs shone in lines of independent dots, and made the palace seem bare: like a hollow frame, or prop; like an image – as we looped through a traffic circle, a statue at its centre installed between carved pillars and a golden dome – from an Indian fairytale, or theme park. The image was appropriate: Henry Irwin, an English architect, designed the palace after its predecessor burnt to nothing in 1897. Mysore was, at the time, the seat of a princely state, and that gave Henry Irwin theme park, fairytale ideas.

The princely state, under Britain’s Raj, allowed a feudal lord – often a maharaja, sometimes a nawab or nizam or rana – some, mostly internal control over his chunk of India. The chunks, big, small and in between, were many: in 1947, before independence and the end of princely states, 565 had representatives in a chamber of India’s legislative assembly.

The princely state was a neat compromise. Britain avoided petty wars and had its pre-eminence acknowledged. It gained a puppet maharaja – an ally, perhaps, against his mutinous peers – and found a figure to attach to its most romantic ideas of Eastern excess. The maharaja rode elephants and hunted tigers. He kept a harem and had a thousand servants. He wore feminine clothes, even makeup, and had strange, mystical beliefs. He was carried on ornate palanquins and cooled by peacock feather fans. He was an idea, the epitome of exotic, and the man that I thought had inspired Henry Irwin.

The light bulbs, said our guidebook, shone once a week: on Sundays between seven and eight. The bus had arrived in Mysore at seven. It stopped at the central bus stand a few minutes later. I moved our luggage to an auto-rickshaw and pre-paid; the driver pulled a rectangular black bar and the engine buzzed. He drove us up a stiff straight road, past monuments and concrete shops, through the same circle, palace lights still twinkling behind it, and hurriedly to a hotel.

The hotel room had switches and plug sockets rusting above the bed. It had hot water in the early morning, grey blankets, a fluorescent light bulb and a landscape painting framed by dust. It was near the palace but was overpriced; we accepted it and went quickly out.

Food and balloons were being sold at the palace gates. Barely head-high and ornamental, like those of a suburban home, the gates opened below an enormous, grooved arch. It was theme park frivolity: a huge entrance proved gratuitous by modest gates. And the palace, this Sunday, had the theme park’s sense of collective fun. A crowd outside considered cut watermelons and candy floss hung on iron frames. Inside, families moved about happily stunned by the lights. A young woman, purple sari pulled over her crossed legs, leant over a body-sized sitar and plucked the beginnings of a raga. Men pawing cheap cameras stopped us and asked bashfully for “one snap,” then called family and friends, threw their arms around us, and took three.
97 000 light bulbs went off. A more generous, sensible light covered the palace. It had colours again: yellows, greens and earthy reds. And depth. People stopped, regarded the building; many turned towards the gate. Only the raga went on, its beat now frenzied, near disjoint and a belated conclusion.

We left, passed food vendors shouting a final price, and idled in the nearby roads. All the way around the trapezoid block, almost directly behind our hotel, I noticed a noisy basement, suggesting beer. We entered immediately, and were led by a miniature man – not a child, not a dwarf, but a man not higher than my hip sporting a perfectly formed moustache – to a table, its top a splatter of peeling plastic.

The basement shut in smoke and shut out light. It had low ceilings, embattled fans, and a big, roughly square floor, full of tables. It was busy; men – only men – shared tall bottles of extra strong beer, or mixed water and Indian whisky in grubby tumblers. At the table next to us, Tibetan monks in red robes slurped a saucy chicken chowmein.

The menu listed naan bread, ‘non-veg’ Punjabi curries and ‘Chindian’ dishes: fried rice, American chopsuey, chilli chicken. It promised that the restaurant did not intend “to take advantage over a Full tummy or fuddle headedness!” And reminded us that “to err is human, but to forgive is divine.” I was sceptical. I remembered Mike, on the ferry from Aqaba to Nuweiba. As did Claire. He had suggested we avoid eating meat in vegetarian countries. Particularly, I supposed, at smoky-dark drinking dens. I ordered two tall bottles of regular strength Kingfisher. Claire continued to scrutinise the menu.

Beers near empty, we decided to eat. Another miniature waiter – the swift, table-high second, his child’s face also belied by a thick moustache – took our order: naan, chicken kolhapuri (the spiciest curry we had so far found) and a mutton handi. Mutton, in India, meant goat.

Indian food, by now familiar, did not excite me until it arrived at the table. And then, when it did, my hands were a blur – right, grasping bread, pushed against the spoon held awkwardly in my left; right moved bread, now steeped in oily red sauce, to my mouth; left, spoon now discarded, extended to clutch a cold, cooling beer – until the meal was greedily complete.

*

On a steep green hill two kilometres south of the maharaja’s palace, the Hindu Goddess Chamundeswari is said to have battled and slain Mahishasura, a demon king. Mysore, once Mahisuru, is said to have been a part of Mahishasura’s kingdom – and it has inherited his name. The hill is called Chamundi, after the goddess, and in the 17th century a temple of unusual power and importance was built upon its top, around a 12th century shrine.

A thousand stone cut stairs lead to the temple, interrupted, about halfway up, by a tarred road. It took Claire and I by surprise after five hundred slow midday steps. Busloads of noisy, not-sweaty pilgrims rattled past, and looped along contours, away, to a parking lot on the hill’s top.

Past the road, in a clearing, men juiced sugar cane beneath a monolithic statue of Nandi, a much venerated bull. Pilgrims – the sweaty purists, out-of-puff – stopped here, made offerings, rested, and bought the cloudy green sap. Nandi, according to our guidebook, is a symbol “of power and potency, justice and moral order.” He is a vehicle, the magical animal that carries Shiva, perhaps Hinduism’s most popular god.

The vast bull-shaped rock is coated in a paste of coconut charcoal and ghee; a splash of bright-eyed white separates black body from blackened pupils, and allows Nandi to smile, and see. Long orange garlands – marigolds, already a little withered by the heat – had been fastened to the big bull’s neck, or placed in bundles at his feet. A brahmin in loose, gold-trimmed white, rang a sturdy bell – it made a solid, school sound – and positioned the garlands, coconuts or cash, offered by devotees.

Further up, boys stood above us on a saffron-painted rock that the steps bent behind, smiled, and hurled stones. I shouted a threat and passed, to emerge, at last, amongst shops on the hill’s top. A line of carts had been rolled in front of the shops. From these, proprietors sold hairclips, hairbands and bracelets; but now, because the sun hovered overhead, business was slow, and the proprietors sat underneath the carts and chatted, or slept.

Our shoes had to be surrendered at a stone paved square, far from the temple’s entrance. A roughly torn piece of cardboard was thrust, with dead flowers and a newspaper bundle, into my hands. I needed the cardboard to collect our two out-of-place pairs of shoes. The flowers and newspaper bundle, a pile of red powder inside it, were to be offered inside the temple.

The temple has a seven storied gopuram. Eyes rise easily along the slim pyramid, but stop, briefly, at all of the seven increasingly narrow stories, to consider seven large breasted goddesses, crossed legs party uncurled. The seven stories are mentioned often – our guidebook added that the gopuram is 40m high – and must be considered exceptional; but the gopuram did not seem to tower that midday, perhaps because it cast no shadow.

A queue, close-packed inside a barricade, bent about the temple’s lower floor. The male pilgrims wore a uniform: a black lungi (an ankle length piece of cotton, wrapped around the waist) and a strip of saffron above the knee: a black skirt and an orange mini-skirt, and bare chests. At the barricades open end, we let ourselves loosely into the queue, waited, and decided to eat the bananas in my bag.

Claire, standing behind me, could reach the bag; I did not have to remove it from my back. I stooped, she unzipped the bag and rummaged through it. The queue shuffled slowly forward. We did not. Two blackened bananas found, Claire zipped the bag carefully up. A space had opened in front us and, as I moved forward to occupy it, two men carrying a boy crashed past. The men looked smugly back at me. One placed the boy triumphantly on his shoulders. I said nothing.

It happened again a minute or two later. Our camera was not allowed inside the temple and had be put away. Again I stooped, again Claire unzipped and zipped up the bag. And again a small space opened in front of us. Three young men clambered over the barrier and inserted themselves into it. I muttered, stumbled angrily over “manners” and “civility,” but was ignored.

The barriers continued up to, and surrounded, the central shrine; but the queue degenerated immediately at the temple’s entrance. The pilgrims became insensible. A woman knelt, ecstatic, moaning, and rubbed small, silver footprints. A man prostrated himself, pressed his bare chest to the dusty floor. People stood on his extended limbs. The man that had pushed in still carried the boy on his shoulders. He rushed forward, and the child’s head slammed against a low arch. The child cried, but was ignored.

At the shrine, a khaki uniformed policeman tapped pilgrims into neat, seething lines. His other hand, the hand not grasping a lathi, banged a metal donation box. It made a metallic thud. Thud-two-three-four. Thud-two-three-four. After every thud, the line moved.

Thud. A pilgrim was pressed against the barrier, not too near the shrine. Two. A brahmin, back turned, swirled a yellow flame. The pilgrim cupped his hands, imagined the warmth, and moved it to his head or heart. Three. An attendant sprinkled holy water into the pilgrims cupped hands. Four. He drank the fuller drops, pressed the remaining moisture into his hair, and was done. Thud. Two. Three. Four.

I noticed a man past the barriers, an elaborate caste mark painted on his forehead. He stood beside a woman and a child. The man chatted to a brahmin, inside the shrine. He had trousers on, and a collared shirt. He possessed a combination of money and caste that enabled casual access to the divine.

The barriers forced us clockwise through the temple. The roof dissolved, and disorder continued under the hot high sky. I noticed more women now, women I had not seen in the line. Many must have lingered, to gather the blessings they could not buy. A fire burnt in a concrete bin, beside an uncrowded shrine. The women discarded incense packets into it, or lit pills that produced acrid smoke and a little flame. The pills, once lit, were placed on the shrine. Hands, again cupped, groped the acrid smoke.

A holy man, body swathed in a lurid orange, stopped us near the exit. He held out a finger dipped in ochre paste. It invited us to stop, and participate. Pressed against our foreheads, the finger would leave an ochre mark, a tilak. In his other hand, the holy man held a plate. On it, bronze deities presided over a pile of Indian coins. Accepting the tilak meant payment, a contribution to the man’s collection of coins.

I accepted, as did Claire, and placed ten rupees on the plate. A note. The only note. The holy man’s assistant – I had not, until now, noticed he had an assistant – said, “not enough for two. Ten rupees for one. Twenty rupees for two.” I don’t remember speaking. Angry, dizzy and confused, Claire and I left.

I sat down outside, unhappily, on a short brown grass. Boys stopped a game of cricket to demand pens, sweets, biscuits or South African money. The instigator, and most importunate of the three, fingered a new cricket bat. All the boys had nice, clean clothes on. I told them to leave us alone.

The man who had thrust a dead flower and newspaper bundle into my hands chose this moment to appear. “I am taking my lunch break,” he said. “You must pay me. Fifty rupees. Now.”

The amount was ridiculous, intended to insult. The man had refused to payment, and refused to take the items back. I had discarded them inside the temple, just before stamping out. I told him he could have two rupees, to return the insult. “Twenty rupees,” he said, and I laughed. It had become a bargain. The man was young. Perhaps my age. He wore tacky sunglasses, too big for smirking his face. I shouted. He shouted. Claire shouted. The man, outnumbered, stomped away.

The ochre tilak, still wet, itched between my eyes. I rubbed it off.

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.

I plodded past him, to the back of the house, out of the back door, to the bathroom. The bathroom door – unequal, sharp-pointed planks nailed to short, lateral struts – had a neatly uncoiled coat-hanger latch. Dim morning light bubbled through the room, lighting smoke in horizontal stacks. I had brought a torch: the bathroom, like the house, had no electricity, or running water, and below a vast clay urn – the geyser – a slow fire burned.

I lifted the urn’s metal cover, a disused plate, and washed. The house sat amongst south India’s stubby mountains. Winter – now, before the rise of a heavy sun – was just perceptible: jugfuls of lukewarm, smoky water, slooshed from the urn across my body, became quickly cold, and left a trail of rising hairs. The water’s smoke stuck to me, despite my soap, and the smell – a vaguely familiar farm mustiness – returned later that day, to remind me of a less sterile age.

At the front of the house, steps led to the family’s fields: a long basin of tanned stalks, dammed by hills and crowding trees. Dawn had felt her rosy fingers past the trees, the thick trunks and thicker leaves, to touch the fields and illuminate grains of rice, bobbing on the stalks, bent by a morning breeze.

The basin was crisscrossed by tiny watersheds: grassy banks that neatly divided the rectangular fields. In the rectangles to the north, the stalks had been cut to stubble; to the south, they had been bundled into sheaves. It was harvest time: silhouettes moved amongst the bent but standing stalks near to me, then stooped, swung archaic sickles, made and tied the sheaves.

It was not land I’d imagined supporting rice. The ground was sodden, but not soaked – although water did collect at the edges of some rectangles, in channels beside the grassy banks. The fields looked like fields, not like the terraced paddies I thought would resemble swamps. And they were fields: well irrigated, well landscaped fields. A stream ran from south to north through the basin – it was full of tiny fish and tadpoles, and was where our dirty plates were washed – and could be tapped, if necessary, to feed water to the crops.

Two-toned, course haired dogs, not far removed from jackals, moved amongst the stooping people; cows picked at the banks and cropped the stubbly fields. Other landowners from Galibeedu, a village of thirty families, helped our hosts harvest their rice. Tomorrow – maybe, because the work was hard, the day after – the silhouettes would move, to swing sickles and tie sheaves in the next family’s fields.

*

It was because of the harvest – steadily progressing: the rice, still attached to its stalks, had been brought in from the fields – that, at lunch, I found a chicken’s boiled ribs floating in my thin curry sauce. Our hosts had so far fed us only vegetarian food, but were, today, responsible for feeding the neighbours, because they had spent the morning helping harvest our hosts’ crops. The harvest was to be celebrated, and a celebration called for meat. A chicken had been slaughtered, cooked, and sent to swim in my sauce. I hoped it was the rooster.

Claire and I had returned for lunch from a hike to a nearby high point – we had seen the ten or so houses at Galibeedu’s centre through a hot, rising haze – led by Kieran, our guide.

Kieran did not live in Galibeedu. He had brought us to the farm house the day before, left, and – on a bus from Madikeri, the district’s major town – arrived again this morning. The family seemed used to him – he was, at present, happily inspecting their bee hives – and it seemed safe to assume that he accompanied tourists here often.

Kieran had told us, while we walked, that the family planned to have electricity brought to their home. It would cost 30 000 rupees (£375) and require the construction of five pylons. It would quickly alter the landscape I had been so enchanted by that morning.

I couldn’t begrudge rural India’s acquisition of modern amenities. It would, I knew, be a foolish, very Western hypocrisy. Instead, I allowed myself a kind of reluctant sentimentality: the scene I had thought so close to primeval that morning would now be interrupted by power lines; the urn would be displaced; activity in the kitchen would not make smoke drift through the house, and nobody would read by candlelight, as I had done before bed the previous evening. The distinction between day and night would become less important and the connection with the land would, in some ways, be lost.

The family, Kieran said, was one of Galibeedu’s wealthiest. It owned the village’s only hotel – the grandfather, content to sleep in a dining room, had returned from this hotel the previous evening – and a home large and comfortable enough to accommodate foreign tourists.

The granddaughter, a six year old I let scrawl in my notebook, had been sent to an English medium primary school. The school – private, probably expensive – was in Madikeri; this village girl, her hair cut short and completely straight, trimmed, perhaps, by placing on her head one of her mother’s shiny metal bowls, made the hour long journey to and from the town on a crowded local bus.

No other member of the family could speak English – guides translated our and other tourists’ requests – and the granddaughter filled a few pages of my notebook with Kannada, her mother tongue, repeating the words “Kannada writing” as she did.

The girl saw her grandfather – old and male, the patriarch in a patriarchal society – moved from his bed by tourists, speaking English. At a big school in a big town, teachers made her complete English exercises in English workbooks; taught her an unfamiliar language alongside an unfamiliar respect. Her eyes were large and enquiring; innocent, but not entirely the eyes of a child. I thought her “Kannada writing” a request: the girl wanted me to acknowledge Kannada, to acknowledge the only language her family spoke, and to acknowledge, perhaps, that she might also have something to teach.

India has 18 official languages; most are older than English. Kannada is the language of Karnataka, a south Indian state. The state has a population of 52 million – larger than South Africa’s 45, near the United Kingdom’s 60 – and its language is whole: Kannada has a unique script and a unique literature. The same can be said about most of India’s other 17 official languages, although a few share the Perso-Arabic script.

Parents barely able to afford private education send their children to English medium schools; schools that might, if the parents do not speak English, isolate fathers and, more often, mothers from what the child learns. Every class but one – swift instruction on the mother tongue – is taught in English. The students are bewildered, made to understand new concepts at the same time as a new vocabulary, and are always catching up, always left behind.

Kieran had a bachelor’s degree. He had studied English and History, but, near the shade of a wood that morning, said “look this, look this plant,” knelt, and cleared soil from the stem of a touch-me-not. It was a small plant, almost a grass, but had the comb-like leaves of a fern. Kieran had touched one of these leaves; it closed like a trap, comb tooth between comb tooth. “It does like this to protect itself from cows, deers and this kind of animals,” Kieran had said.

I looked through the granddaughter’s Year One Environmental Studies workbook and found a poem:

Wait for your turn,
Follow the queue and enter the bus.
Do no run or push and rush.
Obey the rules and wait in a line,
This is the way to be happy and fine.

The language, the queues and the electricity: all were imported; brought to India by the British, only arriving in Galibeedu now. It seemed difficult for people to pick the package apart, to separate a man’s language from his technology, discard one and adopt the other. In Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital city, at the headquarters of Infosys – a vast Indian owned IT company, a company that does the jobs outsourced by the West – English is mandatory: spoken, because no other language is permitted, by chairman, techie and driver.

*

The harvest continued. Ready sheaves were thrashed two or three at a time against hard-packed earth. The rustle, thump, rustle, thump separated rice from its stalks; the grains fell in a widening circle, until rice covered the area of a large room. The stalks were stacked beside a cowshed, and the stack grew; it was, eventually, taller than the men thrashing sheaves in front of it, and longer than the cowshed beside it.

At seven that evening, the sun set. A gas lamp was carried outside. An hour later, the rice was swept carefully swept into baskets the size of car tyres. The baskets, once full, were balanced on the perfectly still heads of the three people still working – three people I had seen working at dawn and all through the day – and moved through the house to a pantry. Basket after basket moved through the house. I imagined the procession to be a kind of relay race, and wanted to participate; but I was too wary of dropping a basket and, with it, perhaps a weeks worth of rice. An enormous pile accumulated in the scullery – enough, I assumed, to feed the family and their many guests for another year – and the harvest was complete.

Supper was served immediately afterwards: two curries, one thick, the other watery, both vegetarian; poppadums; an omelette; coconut chutney; and rice. The rice was short-grained and stuck together in clumps. Near the centre of every grain was a pink stripe, a vein. It was unpolished rice, from the fields outside, and it had been served with every meal: with the chicken curry at lunch, and with near identical curries and sides at supper the previous evening. At breakfast, it had been ground into flour and steamed, to make a sort-of rice bun, called an idli.

A Belgian family had arrived, escorted by a different guide, and we shared the meal. Our hosts stood a few step away, hands clasped, watching. The Belgians, a mother, father and three very blonde children, were near the end of three months in India. The father was a civil servant. He got six weeks of leave each year and took two years allowance at once, dividing it neatly over New Year. He did this every second year. The mother was self-employed. Their children were young: nine, seven and five; two girls and a boy.

“It’s going to be difficult to convince them that knives and forks are important,” I said, because the children were eating the Indian meal – with their hands, the Indian way – more easily than me.
“We say that we will have to start again,” said the mother. The adults had Flemish accents; they ‘brayed’, a soft unrolling of the ‘r’ familiar to me because it is done in some Afrikaans speaking parts of South Africa. The children did not speak English.

The family travelled on a budget. It had only been a problem once, on an overnight train. No sleeper class tickets were available. The classes above sleeper were too expensive, so the parents had spent an entire night standing on a second class – the lowest – carriage. The children had slept on luggage racks, almost as precious as the hard wooden benches below, but only because other passengers had moved.

I thought the parents very brave, and said so. Getting myself across a road in India was difficult; escorting three young children would be near impossible. And there was the spicy food, and it’s reputation for making people sick. But the children, the mother said, liked the food, and loved India; they didn’t want to leave. The only real annoyance was Indian children, because they had never seen blonde hair before and liked to pull it.

The couple had travelled through India twelve years ago, before having the children. “It must have been easier then,” I said. It came out like a question. I didn’t really expect an answer.
“In some ways,” said the mother.
The father continued. “But people are much more helpful now,” he said, “because they see us as a family. And the family is so important in India.”

They seemed like responsible parents. The mother was rubbing mosquito repellent onto her son’s thighs, muttering that she didn’t do it often enough. The children had missed almost two months of school, but had spent some of the afternoon – after their own long hike – doing work that the parents would take back to teachers in Belgium.

I was absorbed. It was polite to eat with only one hand (the right hand). I could turn to face the couple, across the table to my left. The scooping of each handful pushed my plate closer and closer to the table’s edge; I didn’t notice it move until, mid-sentence, the plate dropped, flipped, distributed its contents unevenly, and clanged against the concrete floor. I had been saving my omelette; it was lost. A puddle of rice, chopped vegetables and oily sauce collected near my bare feet.

Our hosts – still clasping hands, still watching – looked appalled. I battled to meet so many eyes. I was embarrassed, heating up, talking fast, frantically. I stood up, asked for a cloth. Rice was squelching below my toes and I thought I might be hopping. Our hosts hadn’t eaten. Did they wait to see what was left? The father had worked from dawn that day. He would be ravenous, maybe angry.

The grandfather’s wrinkled face folded. He started to laugh. The mother came forward with a cloth. I wasn’t allowed to use it. She bent, scraped the food from the floor, and, smiling, brought me another plate. I served myself another portion and, more carefully this time, ate.

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.

I devoured prawn vindaloo, authentically Goan enough to make my sinuses march in protest. After lunch, we attempted to explore the small town, but soon retreated to our guesthouse. Besides endless rows of desperate stall owners, empty restaurants and small shops stocked with imported Western comforts, there was nothing to see. In fact there was nothing particularly Indian about the town at all, apart from the locals who manned the superfluous shops and stalls. Mumbai’s exoticism had provided hours of exploratory entertainment, and now, having gone through a kind of acclimatisation to India’s manic, colourful world, we felt disappointed with Vagator, and longed to be dumped back into the middle of the sub-continental madness.

At Vagator’s Main Beach, we found a small morsel of it. A hundred sari clad women ran into the sea shrieking, and stopped waist deep before hauling themselves out, saris weighed down by the water. Tour buses waited until the rainbow coloured ladies dried out in the sun, and drove them away with their husbands, outlines of soggy wet underpants visible on their trouser seats.

Further along the coast, Little Vagator Beach was a palm-fringed picture of foreigners sun-tanning, swimming, or playing with beach bats. Restaurants had been set up at intervals, just beyond a long row of deck chairs where people tanned, and ordered seafood lunches. Ladies with heavy baskets on their heads called out “Papayaaa! Pineapple! Mango!” and plonked themselves at the end of deck chairs to deliver dripping pieces of fruit, sliced with a shiny knife.

Intrepid cows casually sauntered up to the row of tourists, following their noses; one buried its snout in my bag of pineapple slices while my back was turned. Wandering cows were ubiquitous in India, and Little Vagator Beach was a glossy-brochure illusion that their arbitrariness defied.

“Sarong! Sarong!” a young woman called, carrying a pile of vivid cloth on her head. A tourist called out to her, began rummaging through the pile and asked the price, an eyebrow raised.
“One hundred,” said the sarong lady softly.
The tourist dropped the sarong she’d been holding and looked away.
“Okay, how much you give,” said the sarong lady said suddenly. Her eyes pleaded.
“Thees is stoopid price,” said the tourist. “I not stoopid tourist! Thees Fifty Rupees!”
The sarong lady lowered her head. “Fifty I no can do,” she said, disappointed.
“Fifty!” said the tourist.
The sarong lady looked at her for another price: a compromise. The tourist began reading her book, the sarong lady still perched at the end of her deck chair.
“Seventy okay,” the sarong lady said.
“Fifty!” shouted the tourist.
Slowly wobbling her head from side to side, the sarong lady released her grip from the sarong. The tourist handed her fifty Rupees – less than 60p.

I met the sarong lady a few days later, when she sat down beside my deck chair – just to rest she said; I had no need for a second sarong. I asked her about her husband: the short line of crimson powder she wore at the start of her middle parting classified her as a married woman.
“He is in Tamil Nadu,” she told me. “I am Tamil. I come to Goa to work, and go home during monsoon.” Thousands of Indians, Goan or otherwise, relied on the seasonal tourist trade – and it was the slowest season in years.

The beach, as far as we were concerned, was Vagator’s only attraction, and so we began daily pursuing its simple pleasures: sun, sea and sand. But after a few days of sun-worshipping, I began to feel the guilt of doing nothing. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to relax on the beach all day – it felt mundane. I kept wandering, bored, through the town’s clothes stalls, which other – I fancied – even more mundane tourists visited; not to browse, but to reinvent their wardrobes, becoming almost identically dressed hippy look-alikes, decked out in Indian cotton. In the evenings we ate dinner after a sunset beer.

Goa had a reputation for weeks of outdoor trance parties during its December-January season: 72 hour gatherings of international ravers who stomped the nights away among hippies, druggies and people like Iain and I, who just appreciated an interesting party.

Summertime in Cape Town for us had always meant driving a few kilometres out of the city to spend two or three days at some of the world’s most renowned outdoor trance parties, set amongst gorgeous orchards, below lush mountains. We had high expectations for the Goa trance scene – but, so far, there was not even a rumour of a party.

*

I clasped a cold Kingfisher, trying to ignore the ceaseless buzz of mosquitoes at my ankles; they seemed immune to the potent smelling coils that had been lit to deter them. My barstool faced Vagator’s main road, darkened and quiet, save for the steady vroom of scooters driving past. Most of Vagator’s male residents rode a scooter and for tourists, a motorbike or scooter was the crucial accessory to tattoos or dreadlocks. All the foreigners driving past took a right turn down a narrow road we hadn’t explored, so, beers finished, we decided to see where it led.

We walked for about fifteen minutes; thick shrubbery grew around the few houses on either side of the road. It was unlit, so we wouldn’t see a snake until we had practically stepped on it, Iain joked, playing on my fear. The scooters continued to drive past us. “There might just be a few guest houses down here,” I said to Iain. “Let’s just turn back.” But we went a bit further, and heard a faint bass beat in the distance.

Around the next bend was a swarm of people, bouncing gently in time to the raging bass of trance tunes; strolling between bars, restaurants and crowds that spilled into the street. Beers in hand, people chatted animatedly. Some sat at restaurant tables passing chillums that propelled marijuana smoke into the air, creating a herby haze that wafted from group to group.

We took the last two outdoor seats at a tiny bar looking onto the bustling street, and began excitedly gulping beers, astonished by our find. Chapora, the town, was more of a village: Vagator’s modest neighbour. It originally housed little more than a small fishing community, and is almost adjoined to Vagator, only a twenty minute walk away. The older brother of the two, and still a functioning harbour, Chapora’s quaintness had somehow won the crowds. Vagator – previously the guidebook’s favourite – had been rejected and was left empty; it seemed a cruel spate of sibling rivalry.

A short, stocky Brit in his fifties strode up to a battered black hifi and changed the CD: The Doors blared through the bar, and he pulled up a chair beside us. He wore ordinary Western clothes: jeans and a t-shirt; not the faded hippy garb of the Chapora crowd.

His name was Dave, and he’d visited Chapora every year for the last 32. “That’s longer than any of these people,” he said, in a sharp accent from London’s East End, motioning toward the other bars. “The Old Man of Chapora they calls me.” But there was no one around who might have called him that, at least that night; he was without company.
“I was the bus driver on the original Magic Bus,” he said brashly. “It stopped in India on the way to Kathmandu. Let me tell you, this place wasn’t always like this. There were no foreigners, no shops, no hotels. Lived on bananas, bread and peanut brittle for a month we did.” His tone was almost aggressive.
“You must have witnessed a lot of change here,” I said, and tried not to sound patronising.
He ranted on, telling us angrily, “If I see something… a problem… I fix it! You take my meaning? I fix it!” He showed us a tube of mange treatment he carried around with him, and insisted that it was only Goa’s animals that needed help. “All these women begging on the street, with the babies in their arms – it’s all a scam I’m telling you,” he announced, irritated.
“They asks you for money for milk, you buy them the milk at the tourist price, and they goes back to the shop and gets the money back.”
“What do they use the money for then?” I asked tentatively.
“Oh, they don’t feed the baby. They rents those babies from mothers coz they earn more that way!” He was shouting now.

We drank up and moved on, eager to find gentler company. A few metres down the road tables and chairs overflowed into the street outside a tiny shop, which was doing a brisk trade in Kings beers for only Rs25 – less than 30p. Sanjeev, the owner, wore a white vest and a sarong, and served purified ice with his gin and tonics, all out of this shoebox of a shop. It was little more than a corner shop, with a meagre stock of biscuits and crisps, two large stainless steel fridges, and the chairs and tables outside, brimming mostly with Germans. Next door, also brimming, was apparently full of Italians.

We met Achie, a slender effeminate man with a waist-length ponytail, who pursed his lips when we mentioned the aggressive Old Man of Chapora. “The one who zinks he know everything? I know zis man. Nobody likes zis man,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “We are coming here every season and are happy to see all the people again, but not zis man.”

Achie had spent every season in Goa for the past 26 years, and now lived in Chapora in an air conditioned house down the road. “I have been very lucky,” he said, when we asked what he did for a living. “I go back to Germany in June every year, for summer, because it is terrible here at that time –so so hot! Your clothes grow mould, there is never any wind, your skin is wet all the time – it is terrible.” His tanned face wrinkled.

We asked him about Vagator’s empty restaurants, the owners and staff standing forlornly outside. I thought that a fear of terrorism may have deterred people: only a few weeks before, a group of Pakistanis were arrested carrying bomb-making equipment on an Indian train – they were on their way to Goa.

Achie had his own explanation. “There are no parties,” he told us, despondent. Apparently the Goan police had begun enforcing a late night music ban. The nature of Indian law enforcement meant that late night parties could still happen, but ever more baksheesh was required to keep them from being shut down. Many new age hippies considered paying an entrance fee to an outdoor trance party – which went towards baksheesh for the police – unthinkable. Paying heartless currency to bask in the moonlight on the beach in an act of peace-loving unity under Mother Earth’s sky is very un-hippy-like, I supposed.

“This year I am leaving for Thailand on January 15th. The parties there…” Achie smiled. “They know: full moon party, new moon party, quarter moon party… All the time. It is very sad – this will be the first time I leave Chapora before the season ends.”

But not everyone had dismissed the threat of terrorism entirely: there were virtually no Israelis in Goa. There is a huge trance scene in Israel and many of the world’s best trance DJ’s are from there. December usually brought them to Goa by the thousands – but Israeli masses at an outdoor party would be an easy target for Pakistani fanatics.

The straggly haired man beside him – German Swiss – had remained silent throughout the conversation. Now, his artistry complete, he soundlessly lit and passed us a beautiful tulip-shaped joint – the petals delicately formed by the rolling paper which now kindled the slowly burning orange tip.

*

Despite the good company we’d met in Chapora (Dave, the Old Man of Chapora, excluded), the hippy-wannabes that zoomed around Vagator on their very un-eco-friendly scooters had begun to annoy, “lingering like a bad smell,” as Iain put it. We walked to Anjuna, a town four kilometres away, where there was a market every Wednesday. A few of the hippies had set up stalls there, alongside the Indians: not all were economic refugees, there to escape the necessity of work, in a warm climate, where the law could be bought.

Goa’s bohemian tribe, obsessed by looking different – yet wearing matching badges of belonging – were impossible to escape. And Iain and I could not help but be condescending of this cult that seemed to have no substance other than desperate non-conformity, superficiality and arrogance.

Our objections stemmed, in part, from an intolerance of attention-seeking show-offs, but mostly from our dismay at being treated like we were in some competition of cool. This crowd boasted about what drugs they took, turned their noses up at our European travels, and scorned our conventional appearances. We were made to feel, in some ridiculous way, inferior.

*

I clutched the bus roof’s sticky, swinging handle while the driver bumped along the road, flinging me around as he screeched on the breaks to pick up ever more passengers. My arms were shining with sweat, which left nowhere to wipe my trickling forehead – besides my shirt. I released the handle and wiped my brow, trying to prevent the salty sting in my eyes, and instantly fell into the man beside me who, luckily, stood only a few centimetres away. The rusted local bus was on it’s way to Panaji, Goa’s capital, in this skin soaking heat.

At Panaji’s bus station, it hooted the high-pitched tune of Indian buses: a combination of grating notes that forces you to seriously contemplate the bus driver’s murder. An artificial marigold garland dangled from the top of the windshield, above a framed picture of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god, who always ensured a safe journey. And it was the picture, I suspected, that was supposed to protect our driver against his own refusal to stick to the left hand side of the road, obey speed limits, fear blind corners, and dodge oncoming traffic.

The bus station was a muddle of vendors selling sliced coconut, samoosas, fruit and vegetables and crispy fried dal (lentils). Men mixed the dal with onion, tomato, chilli and lemon juice on a tray balanced on a wicker stool, which they carried around on their heads. It was served in a soggy bit of newspaper, with a torn off piece of cardboard, used to scoop the tasty snack into your mouth.

Buses were parked in seemingly random places, and people shuffled slowly out of the way when one drove in; they seemed oblivious to the piercing hoots.

We walked toward the exit and passed a tiny structure that housed a painted statue of Jesus, his arms raised. In front of the statue stood an enormous red heart and a crucifix, marigold garlands – traditionally hung as offerings to the gods in Hindu temples – dangling from it. The building was lit up on the outside with an electric blue crucifix, and the fluorescent words Holy Cross.

The Church of the Lady of the Immaculate Conception stood, brilliant white, at the end of two roads, a neat park in between them. It was a majestic European presence in the midst of a dirty, litter-filled Indian city. Consecrated in 1541, it was in pristine condition, a silver bell gleaming from below the steeple, and had been decorated with star shaped lanterns, made from crisp white paper.

I noticed the unusual existence of pavements adjoining the wide, Portuguese planned streets, and the occasional white-washed building, incongruous, took me back to Lisbon, if only until a car hooted by, or the smell of urine reached my nose.

Panaji was the first port of call for voyages from Lisbon, so it was at this cathedral that the sailors gave thanks for a safe journey before travelling to Old Goa, the original Portuguese capital.

Old Goa, a short bus ride away, was once said to rival Lisbon in magnificence, but this was difficult to imagine wandering around the ex-capital, abandoned in 1843 after devastating malaria and cholera epidemics struck. A bronze statue of Ghandi, with his distinctive cotton khadi and stave, had replaced a statue of Camoens, a proselytising Portuguese poet, in the centre of a traffic circle, once a 16th century square.

The Basilica of Bom Jesus, famous throughout the Roman Catholic world, is Old Goa’s major tourist attraction, frequented by foreigners and middle class Indian tourists alike. It contains the tomb and mortal remains of St Francis Xavier, who travelled extensively throughout Asia spreading Christianity among the subjects of Portuguese colonies; today he is Goa’s patron saint.

Xavier’s three tiered marble tomb dominates the simple cathedral. It is claimed that Xavier’s body – which has supposedly been doused with quicklime – is incapable of rotting. Needless to say, the incorruptible body has generated a variety of interest over the centuries. His right arm, parts of a shoulder blade, and all his internal organs now lie scattered throughout South East Asia.

We wandered past enormous Roman Catholic cathedrals, many built almost five hundred years ago. The Portuguese buildings appeared to have been randomly planted in the tropical surroundings and little more of the town remained. The absence of houses was unsurprising; the population was sparse enough to give Old Goa the feel of a ghost town. This piece of Europe had been so carefully built, by people more than six months at sea from Portugal, and now it lay eerily empty, the buildings and churches steadily decaying.

*

Sanjeev’s shoebox bar was humming; we sat down at the last empty table. Achie floated from group to group, resting his chin on his hand as he spoke. A well-built man and his nondescript friend – both German Swiss – asked if they could join our table, as these were the last two seats at Sanjeev’s. They had just returned from a trance party at a large outdoor venue known as Hill Top: an Indian-organised affair that charged Rs1000 entrance fee for foreigners (about twelve pounds), but none for Indians. Close to the opposite had apparently happened an Israeli-organised party: they displayed ‘No Indians’ signs outside the entrance and the party was broken up by police. Many of the hippies had boycotted the Hill Top party that night; some had imitated the entrance stamp on their wrists with ink.

The well-built man began dextrously rolling a joint, while he smoked another. “I smoke joints like cigarettes,” he said, offering us one. “I smoke 110 grams a week. That’s nearly 6000 in a year.”
“Oh,” I said impassively. The Germanic efficiency that characterised his habit was quite extraordinary.
The man’s skin was tightly drawn over a sharp jaw. He said he was full of chemicals. He had been going to Goa for 17 years, every December, and had brought his friend along this time.
Iain shrugged at the figures. “Grams don’t mean anything to us. In South Africa, weed is sold in bank bags, and grown outdoors.”
The man converted the weight into ounces, eager for us to fathom the amount – it did not help.
“The charas here is not as good as what we get at home,” he said, with confidence. “I have to smoke much more here.”
His friend remained silent, nodding at what the well-built man said, passively accepting the joints that he was perpetually passed.
“Every year, after I am in Goa,” he continued, “I detox for a week. Nothing. No charas, no hard drugs, no alcohol. This way I keep my body strong.” I had to wonder how exactly it was that he went about maintaining his muscular physique.

“So, what do you do in Switzerland?” I asked him, eager to change the subject.
“Office work… It is a crappy job,” he said, just as eager to talk about something else.
He began telling of tales of India, mentioning several of its highlights. Now we listened intently.
“There is a temple where you can smoke charas… in the North. And Hampi is a great place.”
“Where else would you recommend?” asked Iain. “You must have seen a lot of the country in seventeen visits.”
The man looked down, and paused for a second before regaining his air of certainty. “Oh, I have plenty of time,” he said. “I am going to retire here in a few years.”
But he had never ventured beyond Goa. He flew in each year, and was driven to his guest house by taxi. Still, he felt confident telling us that he would retire there, at 45, and that our nine days in Mumbai had definitely been too long.

Simon, sitting at the next table, was English, in his early forties, and from somewhere supposedly green and beautiful between Nottingham and Manchester. A stone mason for half the year, he spent the other half living off his pounds in Chapora. His hair was shoulder length and scraggly, and his one-tooth-short smile was warm.

We told him about our journey, and although he had mentioned travelling a lot, he seemed disinterested. “Yuh know, you’ll see…” he spoke with a lagging lilt. “When yuh get home after a year or two… or however long its been… people will listen to yuh talking about the world, and what yuh’ve seen… They’ll listen for a while… Boot fifteen minutes later they’ll be talking about what was on telly last night… and that’ll be it.”
He was another escapee of the West, trying to break away from his mundane life in England, but had nothing to fall back on: finances, talent, ambition.
“How old are yuh now anyway?” he asked.
“Twenty four,” I replied.
“Well, there yuh go… When you’re older you’ll understand… Yuh’re all optimistic now, but yuh’ll see… The best thing you could do now is buy yuhself a big piece of gold – yer from Souf Africa, right, it’s cheap there – and in a few years yuh’ll have a nice chunk a’ cash for yuhselves.”

It was beyond amusing. After all, Simon did have about twenty years on my twenty four: and during those twenty years, he’d come to the realisation that he didn’t want to work anymore, and had managed to deposit a few illegitimate kids over the planet. He may have even had a stash of gold hidden in the bottom of his sock drawer.

Fireworks sounded, and everyone turned to face a roof across from Sanjeev’s. Two tiny Indian men ran around on top of it, dodging sparks that spurted from the cheap, hastily lit Indian fireworks, which flew recklessly out of flimsy holders. The crowd that had assembled below the roof began backing away from the flying sparks, laughing nervously at this alarmingly dangerous display. “Happy New Year!” people shouted.

The sound of trance music and Westerners that surrounded me were familiar, and I found myself wondering what kind of fireworks displays were happening thousands of kilometres away: where Vasco da Gama stopped en route to India, where the Indian ocean meets a peninsula on Africa’s tip.

We sat opposite two Indian women: a mother in her mid-forties, wearing a pale pink sweatshirt and Capri pants, and her daughter-in-law, in jeans and a t-shirt. Iain’s backpack stood in the aisle, leaning against his legs, which poked awkwardly into the tiny train’s aisle. He had positioned the bag near the train’s door, where there was an area of unused space, but a woman in a green sari with a bright red bindi on her forehead had scowled at him and rattled off complaints in Hindi.

The lady in pink noticed the length of Iain’s uncomfortable looking legs, summoned her son, and watched as he moved Iain’s backpack to the end of carriage, in that same space beside the door. The sari wearer muttered, shaking her head.

“Just ignore these people!” the woman in pink said loudly, smiling at us. “Now you will be slightly more comfortable.” She was visiting Matheran for the weekend, with her son, his new wife, and her other daughter-in-law, who sat beside her. “We are Christians from Bombay,” she said proudly, in only faintly accented English. “And where are you from?”

We chatted to them sporadically, gazing out of the window as the train chugged above a dry reddish landscape, where dark green grew in thick clumps. “Isn’t this just wonderful?” the woman exclaimed. It would be her first visit to Matheran, she said, but her son went there often, as did many of her friends. Only a few hours from Mumbai, the hill station is many a Mumbaiker’s weekend paradise.

The train halted at a small platform, where a man squeezed lemons into glasses of water from behind a wagon. “I wouldn’t trust the water thosedrinks are made with,” said the mother-in-law and, turning to her son, who sat at the window where a drinks vendor had appeared, asked “Do they have Appy?”

Mountains receded into the distance; we had begun moving again. I watched the daughter-in-law opposite us clutch her empty juice box awkwardly, and say, “What are we going to do with these?” to no one in particular. The mother-in-law loudly declared that she had a plastic bag that they could be kept in. But the bag never appeared, and, a few minutes later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the boxes being tossed out of the window, to lie amidst the unspoilt beauty that everyone had travelled to see.

We reached Matheran, a hill top town with a population of 5000, where motor vehicles and even bicycles are banned; a shady haven to rest the ears and lungs after the chaos of Mumbai. A huge portion of the town’s residents are dogs who sleep the day away, bundles of mongrel pups, sacred cows with calves, goats and bleeting kids, hens hiding chicks under maternal wings, horses, ponies and cats; it is a kind of giant petting zoo. And high up in the trees, are hundreds of mischievous monkeys, picking through the fur behind their babies’ outsized pink ears, bounding through the town, or sauntering into an unguarded home, to steal food which they greedily stuff into their cheeks for later.

A young man in a shirt and brown high-waisted trousers greeted us outside the small train station.
“Where are you going?” he enquired politely.
“To Pramod Lodge,” I told him. I had spoken to Santosh, Pramod Lodge’s owner, on the telephone the day before.
“Aah, yes, Pramod. I am Santosh’s brother,” he said smiling.
“Oh,” I said, surprised, but somewhat glad that he was there to direct us to the guest house, described as difficult to find in our guidebook.
We walked with him, making polite small talk: he asked where we were from; I enquired about the guest house. Halfway down a narrow dirt road, he pointed to the door of a small semi-detached room, with peeling blue paint and a porch. “I am very sorry,” he said. “But we are full at Pramod. Santosh asked me to give you this place.”

I was surprised by our naivety. In India, as in Egypt, the likelihood of the polite, helpful man that appears outside the train station being honest – and not seeking a commission from the hotel he escorts you to – is slim.

We found our own way to Pramod Lodge, where Santosh confirmed that he did not have a brother in Matheran, and that our room was waiting for us.

That evening, Main Bazaar, the town’s central red dirt road, was alit with fairy lights. Indian tourists wandered past stalls selling plastic toys that spun up into the sky, glasses of rainbow coloured sugary cordial, and the most beautiful handmade leather sandals I had ever seen. It was a carnivalesque scene: people wandered by, wearing luminous rubber necklaces that glowed in the dark; groups of girls strolled arm in arm, enjoying their new found freedom from hooting cars and zipping auto-rickshaws. The road was clean and litter free, thanks to the eco-minded town council, who have imposed a complete ban on plastic bags. ‘This place is pretty much Mumbai’s antithesis…’ I wrote in my journal that evening.

*

At five thirty the next morning, Ganesh, the man with whom we’d organised an early morning horse ride, knocked on our door. “Best time early morning, empty stomach,” he had said. The air was crisp and cool, and the only people we saw along Main Bazaar were other riders, mostly Indian tourists being led by their horse’s reins.

Matheran’s horses are in excellent condition – several also work as racehorses. Underneath their saddles, they all wear red cotton cloth draped over their middles, with their names hand-sewn in coloured letters: Amit and Abishek, our horses, were named after two of India’s most worshipped Bollywood stars.

Following Ganesh, who rode a small well-trained horse, we trotted until Little Chouk Point. A man in a small kiosk offered us chai or coffee, but we hadn’t brought any money. We joined the other riders on the edge of the cliff, to see the view. A fine mist obscured much of the valley ahead, but a few metres below the cliff’s edge, we could see clearly the piles of multi-coloured litter that lay on the ground, almost out of sight. Indian tourists took “snaps” with black film-fed cameras and mobile phones, posing in tracksuits.

We left the groups of riders lingering at the view point, and began a gentle canter along a path through dense woodland, a thick canopy of trees above us. The forest was a deep emerald green, shadowy with glimpses of yellow sunlight streaming through dark leaves. Ganesh released my horse’s reins and we cantered back to town.

Flocks of tiny school children were on their way to school, wearing boxy oversized satchels, white shirts, and navy shorts, or skirts. The girls had red ribbons in their plaits, and silver-belled anklets tinkled on their flip-flopped feet. They giggled and screeched when they saw us. “Hello! How are you? What is your name? What is your country?” and burst into laughter as we turned to answer.

At Main Bazaar, more Indian tourists were arriving; we were yet to see a foreign tourist in Matheran. Large ladies and their husbands were carted in by hand-pulled rickshaws, pulled by young swaggering men. Some arrived on horseback, followed by male and female porters, camouflage suitcases balanced on their heads. A group of ponies ambled along the dusty main road with gas canisters strapped to either side of their bodies and a hungry black cow poked its head into a dustbin that was mounted onto a pole; the bin was only fastened on one side, so it swung back and forth as the cow’s head searched deeper in the bin for breakfast.

After our own breakfast, we took a random route into the village that lay behind Pramod Lodge; it soon seemed like a route that few foreigners take. The villagers stared at us as we wandered slowly past their quaint homes; some retreated shyly inside.

A woman in a bright red sari stood in front of a tall tree, its big, gnarled roots exposed, cutting a bundle of wood into small pieces with a long dirty knife. Behind her, perched higher up, was a tiny sky blue temple, with a square base and a dome in the middle of its flat roof. We peeked through the bars that blocked the temple’s entrance, and saw a shrine of sorts: a poster of a bald man wearing glasses, his one arm raised, palm forward, adorned with marigold garlands and surrounded by small brass containers with lit candle wicks burning in oil, and incense sticks.

The homes on that narrow lane were mostly small, tin constructions – often rusted in parts – but were brightly painted, and had been built carefully, producing a pretty, homely-looking result. Burnt metal drums stood outside, surrounded by metal crockery sets, ready to be washed at the outdoor water pump by housewives on their haunches.

We passed a man painting his wooden rickshaw bright red and orange. He smiled and greeted us as we passed, asked for his picture to be taken, and posed, grinning, proudly holding his paintbrush.

Hay bales were stacked in golden bundles onto the roof of one of the village’s stables. It was the stable where one of the horse riding guides we’d met slept for eight months of the year; he went home to his family in Bangalore during the monsoon.

An old woman lay outside in the shade, on a charpoi: a wooden bed frame strung with criss-crossing pieces of leather or rope. Beyond the tiled entrance pillars to her home – Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, was featured on a central tile – were potted plants and a brightly painted fence. The house next door was creamy beige. Artificial marigold garlands hung over the doorframe, bordered by brown painted swastikas. The swastika is an ancient Hindu symbol, with multiple positive meanings, including ‘Good Luck’ – also painted, in large brown letters, beside the door.

A few houses down, a balding man of about sixty, with a thick white beard, sat on a chair outside his front door. “Good morning!” he called, as we walked past. “Would you like to come inside?”
We entered a small room with a beige patterned linoleum floor, peach walls, a bookshelf, and a single bed, which the man gestured for us to sit on. Slowly, he brought his chair from outside and sat down.
“My name is Karim Sheikh,” he said from his chair. “Where are you both from, England?”
“South Africa,” I told him. “But we have lived in England.”
“I am very famous in London and Sydney,” he began. “At BA and Quantas.”

He told us proudly that Matheran’s toy train had been featured on British television. “I have many important people coming to visit me here,” he said. “From London and Sydney. They all know me at BA and Quantas.”

Apparently an enormous annual horserace attracted Mumbaikers and Brits alike to Matheran, when the town’s grand horseracing track, left over from the Raj, was put to use again during a week long carnival.

Karim lived with his wife and grandson, who had been sent to Matheran by his parents to attend an excellent English-medium missionary school. The child was about five, and had already made his presence known to us by throwing an unusually heavy toy truck at my legs. His catapult lay on the floor of Karim’s bedroom, where the boy slept on a mattress on the floor at night.

Matheran’s population had recently declined, Karim told us sadly. “Now there are not enough Muslims to eat a whole cow. We cannot keep it more than one day, so we have no beef.”

His grandson announced his presence again by throwing the truck at me with all his might. Karim laughed, and did nothing. We decided it was time to leave.

*

Muscles aching from a week of horse riding, we dismounted after a sunset ride, and prepared to leave Matheran for Goa. We had tickets for the Konkan Kanya Express, which departed Mumbai at 11pm, and planned to catch the last train to Mumbai from Neral Junction at 7pm. As Matheran is a vehicle-free town, the taxi stand, from where we would be driven down to Neral Junction, is located three kilometres away from the town’s Main Bazaar. Horses and porters plied the route, but cost money, and were no faster than walking.

We reckoned we had an hour to spare before leaving; enough time for a beer. I fetched two green 660ml bottles of Kingfisher from Santosh’s restaurant-cum-bar, wrapped in brown paper bags, and we drank them on Pramod Lodge’s balcony, looking out onto the dusky plains below.

Beers finished, we strapped our packs on and started walking to the taxi stand. We’d walked a few minutes through the town when I realised I’d left my flip flops in the guest house room. I went back for them, but the room was locked and I could not find any staff to open it for me. I ran to Santosh’s restaurant, and he followed me back to the room, bringing its key. Ten minutes had been wasted when I arrived back at the spot where Iain had been waiting with our bags.

It took five minutes and the start of complete darkness for us to realise what exactly we were walking through: a deserted forest where our horse riding guide assured us he had seen several cobras, one tiger, and a few panthers in his five years in Matheran. We began to make a noise: stomping our feet and raising our voices, hoping to scare off anything that we might bump into en route.

The path forked unexpectedly. I could see the lights of a nearby guesthouse, and ran up to it, ignoring shoulder muscles that groaned: my backpack’s twelve kilograms had begun to weigh me down. “Go straight,” a man on the guest house patio said. “Twenty minutes more.” Twenty minutes more and we might miss our train.

We began to walk fast – as fast as we could – each swinging our water bottles upwards by the handles to land on our moving legs with a loud thump. Predators didn’t like noise, we reasoned, neither did snakes. Nothing was going to come looking for what sounded like a crowd of people. So, a crowd we became: shouting and singing as we tore through the forest in a paranoid frenzy, our torch waving from side to side before us, surveying the bushes.

The path continued, with no sign of light. I thought of the long sweaty hour we had spent in a Mumbai train station, queuing for our tickets to Goa, and of the hefty waiting list that every train for the next few weeks had. Another fork appeared. We argued over a route, chose one, and a few dark metres down, realised that it led to nothing. Cursing, we ran back to the fork, by now soaked with sweat from this never-ending journey, and took the other branch, at the end of which shone the yellow lights of the share taxis to the train station – all empty.

“Neral Junction!” I called to the nearest driver, gasping for breath. We would have to pay for the full vehicle; there was no one to share the taxi with.
“Two hundred and fifty Rupees,” he said solemnly.
“Yes, yes!” I panted, trying to open a door.
“Two hundred fifty,” he repeated, his eyes wide.
“Yes, yes, lets go! Very fast to Neral Junction!”

We reached the first of a series of hairpin bends on the dirt track that wound sharply down toward Neral. Headlights flickering wildly, the vehicle tore round the unbarricaded corner into complete darkness, its horn honking loudly at any oncoming traffic we might meet. And thus, the journey continued, for twenty teeth-clenching minutes (our guidebook estimated forty), until we reached the train station.

There were four minutes until the train to Mumbai departed; it was the last train that would get us there in time. We were at the ticket counter when I realised I would not last the two hour journey without a toilet. I left my bags with Iain and sprinted down the platform, searching for any sign of a toilet. A middle-aged woman noticed my panic, and approached me, miming an enquiry. “Toilet, toilet!” I said, and followed her as she darted across the tracks and pointed to a small concrete building. Two perpendicular walls, each about two metres square, formed a corner in front of a locked door. Whether or not the woman had realised that the door – presumably to a toilet – was locked or not, I did not know, or care. I was concealed behind the concrete, which, I imagined, was a better place than the toilet itself, sure to be vile. When the woman reappeared, poking her head round the concrete corner, neither of us flinched.

I dashed back across the tracks, and onto the train with Iain. We slumped onto a hard seat in one of the third class carriages, and noticed the fine layer of Matheran’s pink dust that coated our bodies; our shoes took on a dusky hue. Streaks of dark red had formed where dust met sweat on our legs. Adrenalin still surged through my blood, but my body had begun to give way to complete exhaustion.

Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus – still known as ‘V.T’ (Victoria Terminus) by many abbreviation-loving Indians – was heaving with people. We dumped our bags at a pillar in the station and I sat on my backpack, guarding our belongings. Iain went to ascertain our train’s departure platform.

Entire families were sprawled out on the station floor, lying on large squares of cloth, or asleep, barefoot, with their head on their sandals. Some were surrounded by bulky canvas-wrapped packages, others appeared possession-less. Ladies spooned curry into chapatis spread out in their palms. A man clasped a small mirror, and shaved his white foamy face.

Tiny beggars in rags trudged through the station aimlessly. Men wearing only strips of grubby white cotton wrapped around their miniature builds plodded through the station, carrying small bundles. I knew nothing about Indian dress codes: they all might have been beggars, as might none of them. I sat, concentrating on the ground before me, hoping to deter the aggressive beggars I had already encountered in this city, intermittently flicking my head left, then right, to check that our four pieces of luggage still surrounded me.

Iain returned, saying a porter had informed him that platform number four was our departure point. A uniformed man escorted us to sleeper car one. Sleeper class is the fourth of five descending classes, and less than half the price of the next class up, which is air conditioned. More than this, we did not know.

Our overnight travels had thus far been on buses in the Middle East, which had been clean and comfortable. We’d taken one overnight train in Turkey, and one in Egypt, both in carriages with plush reclining seats. Journeys within Western Europe had been short; our only other overnight train experience had been on a Swiss-run express from Barcelona to Geneva, complete with white sheets, hospital corners, a basin in each single sex four bed compartment, complementary earplugs, mineral water, and a reading lamp. It had been one of the best night’s sleep we’d had in Europe.

I stepped onto the carriage, and strode past noisy passengers who overflowed into the passageway, from beside padded blue shelves, triple tiered, where they were arranging their luggage. Searched for a compartment, I noticed our berth numbers, 54 and 55, nailed beside two of the padded shelves, one above the other, in the middle of the unpartitioned carriage, where about eighty others would sleep that night.
“Oh my god… This is it?” I said to Iain. “It can’t be… I thought we were in compartments.”

We shoved our bags under the bottom bunk, onto the filthy floor, and sat down, caked with our coating of pink dust. I ran my hand over the bunk; it hadn’t seen a wipe in a while, and was left with a hand as dusty as the floor. Iain chained our bags together, while I retrieved a bar of soap and washed my hands and face in the toilet’s basin, careful not to let the soap touch the unidentifiable slop on the basin’s edges. The train began to move, past what smelled like a sewage farm, but could not have been: the smell remained potent – toe-curling, Iain called it – for some time, and when I peeked through the shutters to identify its source, I saw that we were travelling along the banks of a river.

Iain took the bottom bunk to keep me further from reach of any potential misdemeanours: a friend we’d made in Luxor had woken on an Indian train to his girlfriend screaming as a man climbed into her bed.

The berths were about five foot long, which left over a foot and a half of Iain to be contorted into some form of repose. The sound of chai wallahs, selling tea, traipsing up and down the carriage, howling, “Chai chaaai-ya! Chai chaaai-ya!” sent us into agitated, intermittent slumber. The same sound woke us at four the next morning, as the wallahs leaned over, toward our ears, offering chai in wails that resonated through the sleeping carriage.

I stepped, not looking, and slid; swayed backwards, snapped forward, and stopped. A smear of yellow brown behind me led to a large, fresh, now trampled, cowpat. It had been spread thickly over my sandal, and, despite thinning at the heel, continued up to reach my calf. A nearby woman – wrinkled, squatting, bony arms wrapped around her bony knees – noticed me: tall, white, with a soiled foot raised gingerly for inspection; she grimaced, then spat.

Khar Road had surprised us. The area, ten stops north of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s epicentre, is ugly: a sprawl held messily together by a busy suburban rail station. A few mildewed hotels have assembled near the station – including Hotel Samrat, our hotel, at the long end of the motley strip. It offered a service so identical to its neighbour that the two hotels shared one reception area. Inside, different men staffed different desks.

Mumbai, Claire and I had thought, was an easy way to enter India. It was said by Paul, the wild haired Kiwi, to not be properly an Indian city, because there were no cows to obstruct its traffic. Proper or not, it was India’s largest, most cosmopolitan city, and this appealed to us; it eased our fear of an anticipated shock: of a vast unknown, of abject poverty and assured stomach infections. Mumbai, after all, had not long ago been Bombay, an entirely British invention.

But Paul was wrong: herds of cattle roamed Khar’s streets. The animals were large, horns long and haphazardly twisted, or small, with the stubby, pointed horns of imps. Owners milked and presumably fed the cows each morning. Then, allowed to wander, the animals, to feed four stomachs, snuffled amongst Mumbai’s festering waste and watched shopkeepers; shopkeepers – particularly the men who spent long days standing in the street, behind carts laden with fruit – watched the cows, because the cows, able to spot an unmanned stall, might lumber over, and, tongues flapping spittle, gleefully help themselves.

The cows are sacred – to extract a blessing, Hindus occasionally offered a treat, touched the animal’s forehead and then their own – and have equal right to pavements and roads.

Outside Khar’s station was a small traffic circle, serving three roads. Auto-rickshaws – modified scooters with two rear wheels and a black canvas top – lined up at this circle, to wait for fares. Disembarked train passengers flooded its boundary, the pavement, demarcated by informal shops. Stray dogs – and once, heartbreakingly, a loping pup – crossed here, and demonstrated by limps or the progression of mange their varying states of neglect. It was not a terrifically busy intersection: traffic was restricted, mostly, to auto-rickshaws and motorbikes. Cars were infrequent, trucks and busses rare. But this encouraged people to swarm across it, and cows, some of them humped and impossibly white amongst so much grime and grit, to lie down, impassive amidst the tonk and squeal of obstructed drivers.

It was past this circle that I now walked, unhappily, squelching faeces at the heel of my shoe. I considered the old woman’s grimace: I had anticipated laughter straight after I slipped. People slept tightly packed on Khar’s pavements; thin, dirty sheets between gaunt bodies and the cracked cement. Perhaps I had ground the cowpat into this women’s small piece of earth, the piece she claimed as her own each night. Now, because of me, she would have to clean it. Perhaps, because Indians use dried cow dung as fuel, to cook, and because people also lived on these pavements, boiled tea and rice for their naked children, I had destroyed something she planned to collect. My inconvenience might, for very different reasons, have also been hers.

I scraped clean my shoe near the entrance to Hotel Samrat. Paul had suggested we stay in Mumbai for two or three days: rest, and maybe see it’s most important sites – but then quickly leave. We stayed for ten, and made plans to return.

*

I clutched close a bottle of Kingfisher, Indian lager, and attempted to step out of Hotel Samrat, to stand and smoke. The security guard, a young, wide smiling Sikh, opened the door; Toadman, the receptionist, stopped me. “It is illegal to drink publicly in India sir,” he croaked, and waved a chubby finger.

Neither Claire, who had christened Toadman, nor I learnt his real name. He had drooping jowls and a just discernable chin. He sat marathons behind his desk, on a stool, completely hunched – and rested his arms, at the elbow, on trousered thighs. To compensate for his bent back, when eye contact with a standing customer was required, Toadman would lift his head, stretch his neck and raise his bulging eyes – then talk through flapping jowls.

I accepted Toadman’s superior knowledge and positioned myself instead behind the only table in reception. The Times of India – on the table, in sections – had two women, separately photographed, in headscarves and lycra cat suits, on its front. Out of focus, behind the obviously Muslim athletes, were other women, also athletes, in ski-pants and crop-tops. The pun-heavy caption, “The Gulf between Hot Couture and Cool Couture,” led my eyes down further, to an article of obvious lament: India’s female to male ratio had declined. India now has 927 women for every thousand men. The imbalance is no longer a product of rural ignorance: the disparity is greatest in urban areas, where access to prenatal technology is easier. Only China is more awkwardly male: there are 832 women for every thousand men. China and India: one third of the world’s population; it meant more than 500 million men might never find brides.

The Times of India is sold in stupendous bulk: more than two and a half million copies are distributed daily. It the world’s most circulated English language broadsheet, and its editor has, because he believes its use inflates egos, abandoned the capital ‘I’.

Further into the paper, amongst the business pages, was “Biz Next: Talk soft, laugh light, dress right.” Etiquette institutes had begun to appear in Mumbai, said the article, because “if a senior manager gingerly balances a pea on a knife and tries to push it down his throat, he clearly needs a crash course in etiquette. (A 43 year-old top executive was recently watched doing precisely that. A tip: he could have done his country proud by elegantly eating straight out of his hands).”

India’s development, its unfamiliar strength, meant sending uninitiated executives to do business in the West. “The Indian executive increasingly travels on business, does stints abroad and entertains foreign clients at home. Now, if only he spoke a little softly, laughed a little less loudly and asked fellow diners if he could smoke before lighting up, the executive would have that personal edge too.”

It reminded me of an advert we’d seen pasted to a crumbling wall. Dr Rajesh D. Bhujle, “a miracle, the ninth wonder in English,” could, the advert suggested, teach us to “speak English like James Bond (007)… According to him [Dr Bhujle] there are two class (sic), first and no class. We have to develop the first.”

The Times article, and the etiquette institutes, suggested that “the big Indian failing… is absence of regard for others. The way executives behave in the boardroom, at airports or with clients is an offshoot of this callous attitude.” And many Indians, I had quickly discovered, are callous – particularly the professional elite, the “first” class.

Earlier that week, Claire and I had found Dominos selling pizzas for 500 rupees (£6) – meals in Mumbai could be had for as little as ten rupees, perhaps 15 – past a line of homeless, fly plagued people, and a child defecating in the street. Boards outside announced Domino’s delivery service, named the “Hunger Helpline.”

Claire had boarded the ladies only carriage of a metropolitan train past a woman lying, seemingly asleep, on the carriage floor. The woman, Claire said, was old, tiny: a bundle of rags. A guard appeared. He poked the woman with his lathi, a heavy, medium length stick. She didn’t stir. The guard felt her pulse, then her side. He called another man. The men picked the woman up and deposited her on the dirty platform. Still, she didn’t stir. Claire heard two passengers conversing. One, just boarding, asked another about the commotion. “Oh, there was a lady, she was sleeping here,” replied the other, then kicked the woman’s sandals and water bottle off the train.

Even so, I felt sympathy for the uninitiated executives. Protocol required a professional face in a world as – and perhaps more – uncomfortable and unfamiliar as the one in which I found myself now.

My beer was by now finished. Toadman, mouth pursed, eyes bulging, looked, I thought, as if he had captured a large fly. I approached his desk to ask if there were any cinemas nearby. Mumbai is Bollywood’s home – the ‘Bo’ came from Bombay – and it seemed important that we watch a local film.
Toadman, head waggling (an affirmative side-to-side), said “You’ll need to take an auto-rickshaw sir. Tell them you want to go to the Gaity-Glaxy.”
“The Gaity-Glaxy,” I repeated. “How much should it cost?”
“The driver will use a meter sir. It is only ten minutes.”
Claire had appeared in reception a few minutes before. I thanked Toadman and we left.

The cinema, a tall, square building, its walls painted cream and peach, had seven screens. The screens – and I now understood Toadman’s “Gaity Glaxy” – had been named: the Grace, the Gemini, the Gossip, the Glamour, the Gem, the Gaiety and the Galaxy. These names were declared across the building’s front, near the appropriate door, in sturdy blue letters. Above the names were posters, advertising the films being screened.

I had bought Mumbai’s Time Out, a franchise of the London based magazine, and read an interview with Baabul’s director. The film, I gathered, was to be taken seriously – so it was Baabul, being screened at the Gaiety, that we decided to see.

Every screen had two ticket windows: one for advance purchases, another for that night. It had taken us a while, confusedly wandering in the direction ticket clerks pointed, to establish this. Another queue had to be joined before entering the cinema. A man just behind us in this queue – neatly dressed, standing beside his equally neat wife – addressed us.
“Are you able to understand a Hindi film?” The man’s thin grey hair and neat but informal clothes suggested a pensioner – as did the evening: a Monday night.
“No,” I said. “Are there no subtitles?” I had thought there may be, because the cinema screened films in three languages: Hindi, India’s most widely spoken language and the language of government, Marathi, the local language, and English. None of the three, the man explained, had subtitles. I though it appropriate, then, because of Dr Bhujle, the “ninth wonder in English,” that the Hollywood film being advertised was Casino Royale, James Bond’s latest instalment.
“A baabul,” the man said – he seemed concerned now that we would not understand and appreciate the film – “is the father of a married daughter.”
“Like a father in law?” I asked, underestimating his English.
“No. It is a man whose daughter has been married. I do not think there is an English word.”

Inside, a uniformed porter led us to our seats. He was needed; the tickets were printed in Hindi. The theatre was as large as any I’ve been into. Adverts were already playing on the curved screen: a family, out for the day, happily scattered rubbish and spat, then returned, incredulous, to a foul smelling, litter filled home; a woman, a mother, cried for the camera and asked us to “make Mumbai unbreakable,” because her son had died in the city’s most recent terrorist attack. The national anthem was played, the Indian flag was projected, and people stood.

Baabul began. I had encountered Bollywood at university, where I dabbled in film; I remember long, excruciating dance sequences and little else. Initially, Baabul surprised me. It presented an unrecognisable Mumbai: clean, wealthy, sanitised. A father and son raced through organised streets. The father drove a silver sedan, the son a bright red, just presented sports car; neither wore seatbelts. It then feigned cool: pale skinned Indians and posturing, bikinied white girls danced to music influenced by rap.

The plot seemed simple: son returns home from studying abroad and is groomed to replace father at father’s successful business; son meets, courts and marries a beautiful, artistic woman; woman goes to live in son’s family home (with son’s parents – the Indian norm) and immediately abandons fashionable Western clothes – instead she wears the sari of a good Indian wife; son and wife have child; son assumes greater responsibility at father’s business and travels, for business, to London; son is killed, upon his return, in a road accident; wife mourns, becomes irrational; father travels, to London again, and finds wife’s former good male friend, now a pop icon; pop icon returns to India, courts wife, is liked by child; father suggests pop icon marry wife and, controversially, he does.

The film, spread over three hours, was broken by a short intermission. We considered leaving then, because we were only there to experience a Hindi film and an Indian cinema – and we had done that: the audience laughed loudly (informing us of the humour, in Hindi, we missed) and cheered and clapped, answered mobile phones, swapped places and ignored the film, to chat. But the son had just been hit, unexpectedly, by a car, and it was not yet clear if he had lived.

Afterwards, outside the cinema, the neatly dressed pensioner found us. “Did you enjoy the movie?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Claire. “More than we expected to.”
“It’s very controversial in India you know,” he said, and told us that the lives of orthodox Hindu widows, are, even today, considered over. The unfortunate women keep short hair and wear only white (and I now understood the film’s inexplicably solemn figure, a beautiful woman dressed in white). Neither able to remarry or work, the women live silent lives, anticipating nothing but death.
The pensioner, his wife still elegant and silent beside him, became excited. “The father is a brave man, a reformer!” The father, I realised, was the film’s baabul – and the term was heavy with patriarchal respect – because he had arranged the marriage of his son’s widow: he had treated his daughter-in-law like his own daughter. “He is quite right!” said the pensioner. “She has to have her own life, you know. And she must be happy and have lots of joy!”

*

Our train, a line of brown carriages and barred windows, approached the platform. It slowed – men ran at it, grabbed hold – and stopped. The carriage entrances, wide, divided by a single, much clutched pole, were a mess of brown skin and hard packed, wiry limbs. Men shouted. Forced between bodies, the individual shouts echoed and merged. Men pushed and came out: narrow, ragged, luggage swaying above their bent heads.

I wavered, but Claire moved, past one, two, then three carriages. All, she said, were impassably full. The shouts stopped, the echoes faded, and, behind us, new cries were assumed. Again, men pushed. I was caught in their momentum and, at the gap between carriage and platform, was forced to leap into a squash of bodies, a somehow penetrable space.

Claire, on the platform, carefully aside, immobile, said I should get off. I couldn’t, I had immediately been pushed back – and still people continued to board. The train screeched, then limped: a slow unsteady pace, but forward, imposing decision. Hands, the hands of the five people hanging at the entrance’s three person width, extended out. Claire grasped two, the hands of different men, and was pulled up, a sixth person in the three person width – then pushed through the carriage to stand beside me.

“Where you going?” a man asked. I could not, anywhere on the carriage, see women.
The man’s head was immediately beneath my chin, I could not look at him to respond. “To Victoria Terminus,” I said, “V.T.”
“Go in, go in,” said the man.
V.T. was the final stop. The man was suggesting we somehow move further into the carriage, because we would be amongst the last to get off. The train turned a soft, swinging arc. Handles, unheld, clattered against the rusting roof. A grip, I discovered, was unnecessary: we were supported by the press of flesh about us. I thanked the man, but ignored him.

I could see nothing but bodies; they obscured the scenery at windows and doors. The men wore short, oiled hair and singlets – perhaps their shirts were stuck away, protected, because of the inevitable rub against a neighbour’s sweat. White eyes, bright so near to black moustaches, studied us: we had enlivened the unpleasant commute.

I could smell our progress – a sulphurous, enveloping pong, burning plastic, manure, its slow final mingle with spicy food – and later, happy reading a book on the same route, above Indian heads, measured the journey by these smells.

Officially, Victoria Terminus is Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the epicentre of Mumbai. Above the platforms, hands tic-tocked slowly through the face of a large, Roman numbered clock. The clock, inconclusive evidence of our arrival at – according our guidebook – “the city’s most exuberant Gothic building,” had been superseded: at every platform, digital displays choreographed the arrival and departure of Mumbai’s throngs. Old, white bearded Muslims, in white robes and white skullcaps, stumbled toward trains, leaning on sticks. Chubby women shuffled, and made bright saris swish. Young men swaggered in tight trousers, swinging skinny hips. People appeared, boarded, and disappeared, obeying the bright yellow numbers displayed against black. Victoria Terminus was, quite obviously, Mumbai’s many-ventricled heart, and the digital displays dictated its pulse.

Two girls, hip-high, possibly sisters, pursued us through the station, insisting we distribute rupees. The eldest fingered soft hair, opened a mouth of gleaming white teeth – her dress, by immediate contrast, was extravagantly dirty – and stuck out a confident hand. We gave a few meaningless coins.

Outside, our guidebook’s description was justified. A four metre high toga-ed figure called “Progress,” resembling Manhattan’s “Liberty,” stood above the station’s brown-bricked, broadly Gothic building. I say broadly Gothic because its mishmash of Roman, Hindu, Gothic, Venetian and Damascene arches, all of them time-blackened and industrial, were also frantic and uncomfortable.

A three pronged radio antenna extended beyond Progress’s crown. It was a small sign, besides the soot, that this was not 1887, and Victoria Terminus had not just been built. The station became Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in 1998, two years after Bombay became Mumbai; but it is still referred to as V.T., just as Mumbai is still referred to as Bombay.

We walked south through a subway, below an impassable road of red, double-decker busses, yellow-black taxis and shrill, incessant hoots. At a distance, the Victoria Terminus was symmetrical and perfectly confident, a statement of Victorian certainty. Near Mahatma Ghandi Road we forked right, and slowly passed the Oval Maidan where cricket was being played in perfect whites. We entered the confusion and stacked paper of the city’s High Court. Barristers dressed in British robes, but forgot the silly wigs. Next door was Mumbai University, a palm fringed transplant from Oxford, built to imitate “14th century Gothic.” We lingered at the journalism department’s newspapered wall; front pages remembered men on the moon and the assassination of two Ghandis.

At last, through Colaba, we arrived at the Gateway of India and could walk no further: a harbour full of fishing boats began. Beggars, fishermen and balloon sellers swarmed at the Gateway’s base. Next to it stood the Taj, a luxury hotel in a Mogul influenced concrete tower block. It made the Gateway look small. J.N. Tata, an industrialist, had the Taj built because European owned hotels denied him entrance: he was a ‘native’.

The Gateway had no walls. It was a notion, a magical portal – and it might transfer people into a magical world. But the magical world had limits, and the limits, like the Gateway’s narrow arch, were British made. It was the beginning and end of British India. British troops arrived here, after long months of sea, and it was through the Gateway, on 28 February 1948, that the remnants of British government ceremonially left.

A man unrolled his patterned carpet beside a metal detector. Neatly dressed, in a wool suit, he would, like us, soon leave Amman from the city’s international airport. He raised his open hands to shoulder level, looked up through simply framed spectacles, and bent from the knee, down, until his head and hands touched the floor. I recorded him in my journal, amongst other, final impressions of the Middle East: of people praying publicly, next to taxis and behind shop counters, oblivious to customers waiting to be served, outside full mosques on Friday and on the edge of a felucca, divining Mecca through a long relationship with the Nile. Three months before, I might have panicked. Airport, metal detector, Muslim. But I recorded no fear; what I wrote, instead, was a conclusion.

Claire and I had intended a journey with only one conclusion: Shanghai; but Shanghai was not our destination. We were to fly from Amman to Muscat and from Muscat to Mumbai, bypassing Iran and Pakistan to enter India over the Arabian Sea. The aeroplane tickets were old. We had bought them in Cape Town, before the journey began, to satisfy visa requirements, fretting family, and a few friends.

By travelling over land and making only slow transitions, we had hoped to witness the connection between cultures, and gain some understanding of the whole. The local bus, dispensing and collecting en route, makes its own slow transition – as does the overnight train. Languages change at the border; memories of the place just visited can be carried with you. Flights move too far too fast. It is as if your memories cannot keep up and are lost, amongst too swift impressions of the utterly new.

We boarded our first plane, to Muscat. I slept slack jawed on the in-flight table; the two hour journey passed unremarkably.

Already, we regretted not going to Iran; less so Pakistan. It was our journey’s largest flaw. It has become our flaw, because the journey, for this period of our lives, has become us.

Iran conquered far past its modern borders. It reached Egypt to the south, Greece to the west and controlled long swathes of north India. Much later, when Islam spread from the Middle East to India (and modern day Pakistan), it came, in part, through already converted Iran.

There were consolations. Iran and Pakistan would have drawn us quickly through Turkey: we could not have travelled south, past the Aegean, to discover the Middle East. Egypt and India have close historical links: they first traded in about 2500 BCE. Commerce continued, through the Suez Canal and its ancient predecessor, built as early as 1500 BCE: a thin line on maps, snaking east from the heart of the Nile.

More tangibly, Iranian visas are notoriously difficult for independent travellers to obtain. We would require an invitation, but did not know any Iranians. Had we applied, we might have been disappointed by an unconquerable bureaucracy.

We had feared Iran; it was unknown. Syria, also unknown, Muslim and a pariah, cured us of this fear. In Damascus, we met Kathryn, who had travelled our route in reverse, from
China to the Middle East, alone. Iran had been her favourite country. She told us of tremendous hospitality; restaurant meals had been paid for by anonymous benefactors, to reward her faith in the unfamiliar.

At Muscat’s airport, people waited. Dark skinned men extended stringy muscles and slept, somehow oblivious to hard ridged, uncomfortable seats, duty free trade and incessant, chimed-in announcements. Gulf Air flew cheaply through this airport, encouraging awkward, often long connections.

I smoked a cigarette in an overflowing room. Condensation turned yellow as it trickled down the window, staining the white frames. Smoke escaped from the open door, to be smelt long before it was seen. The people around me were unmistakably Indian, returning from hard work with hard currency, from countries made indolent by oil. They smoked their cigarettes – short, with stub filters – exuberantly, pulling them quickly from their faces before opening their mouths wide, to inhale deeply.

Our flight started to seem appropriate. In Damascus, a barber had told me, while his razor skirted my throat, “you been India you understand life. You no been India, you no understand life.” Long tufts of ginger hair protruded from his sunburnt scalp. The few teeth left in his gabbing mouth were rotting, and extended out, towards the mirror. I could see him move, flick foam and hair from the blade. He seemed a man who knew life like I might never. In Luxor, Paul, a wild haired Kiwi, described defecating in Delhi’s streets. “I couldn’t help it, I had the shits real bad. But I didn’t feel outta place.” He said Mumbai was not an Indian city, because there were no cows to obstruct its traffic.

Other travellers had told me that India required “at least a month” of acclimatisation; but they had arrived from places like London and Sydney. I felt prepared, as did Claire. She had sat beside me at Amman’s airport, writing her own conclusion.

The second flight left at 1:10am. We had lost two hours between Amman and Muscat. We would lose another one and a half before arriving in Mumbai at 5:05am. The plane was familiar: medium sized, modern – but not new, without televisions; the kind used for short hops. I had travelled from Johannesburg to Cape Town in these planes, to see my father during school holidays.

Hostesses handed out blindfolds, earplugs and blankets, then offered coffee. I made no effort to sleep, but packed away the blindfold and earplugs, for later use.

It was dark when we landed; seemed darker still when we emerged from the bright airport building. Taxi drivers pressed against a barrier at the exit, an incomprehensible mass of shouts and waving arms. One held a scrap of cardboard close to his chest, “Manley” written in hasty strokes of black ink upon it. He was there to collect us; apprehension had led us to book an over priced airport transfer.

I pushed the luggage trolley after him, to a small white hatchback. A diagonal crack stretched to opposite ends of its windscreen. Grey uniformed men had followed us, offering to push the trolley. We declined; they followed us still. Our driver opened the boot. Quickly, the men grasped our bags and threw them in, then turned, and demanded baksheesh. I said we had no rupees. “English pounds, okay,” said one. I said we had no pounds; we weren’t English. “Okay dollars,” said the other. I ignored them, and climbed quickly into the car. The men seemed unsurprised; they collected the empty trolley and left.

It was 6am. We drove through the last of the night, through the disorientation of a new city. A woman, unkempt, obviously just awake, emerged from her pavement shack to empty a chamber pot into the road. Her home, and others like it, lit by yellow street lights, were unlike South Africa’s ‘tin shacks’: most were made of wood and pilfered plastic, some stood two short stories high; they did not sprawl on the city’s outskirts, but appeared for short bursts inside it, arranged in an uncomfortable single file.

Hotel Samrat was dark. A man was asleep on the reception area’s single couch. He rose slowly, lit and waved incense before a shrine, turned on the lights. He hawked. Phlegm moved from the base of his lungs to his puckered mouth. He walked outside and spat, returned and retrieved an enormous ledger. “Good Morning!” he said. “Welcome to India. Could I have your passports please?”

A notice board in reception was covered by still bright photographs of white skinned foreigners. Beds at Hotel Samrat could be reserved on Hostel World. Later, on the same website, they could be reviewed. The results were proudly displayed below the photographs: “Better than I had expected, ” said Gillian Muir from Canada. “Fairly clean, and I feel rather safe,” said Ying Tan, of unknown origin.

Our room was large. White, blue monogrammed linen covered the double bed. Irregular, rust coloured stains marked the coffee and other spillages of previous patrons. Beside the bed was a couch, above the bed a hook, and precariously swinging from it, a fan. At the room’s far end was a small, barred window and, adjacent to that, the bathroom door. There would be hot water only until 9am. After that, we would have to wait until 6am the next day.

We showered. Claire slept. I stood at the window and watched pink light thread itself gently between deep green leaves. A large tree pressed against the hotel’s wall; it stretched up, past our room on the third floor, and out, to shade a strip of narrow shacks below. Parallel lines of rail ran close to the shack doors; we were near a station. I could hear announcements – a woman’s hollow, recorded voice – and the screech of braking trains.

On the tree’s branches, drooping in the damp air, house crows bounced and cawed. Hard black beaks, parted, took the shape of a katar: Indian daggers capable of a disembowelling scissor action. Black continued past the birds’ black eyes, then stopped, and gave way to a soft, pigeon grey, which covered their breasts. The birds’ wings, again black, beat an oily purple in the morning’s first light. There were ten or fifteen in the tree: the collective noun for crows is murder, ‘a murder of crows’.

Discernable in the shadowy thick of the tree were two parakeets. A shade lighter than the surrounding foliage, I imagined the pair cowering, afraid, too scared to sing.

I decided to go downstairs. I would have a last cigarette and then, hopefully, fall asleep. A man in the hotel’s maroon and grey uniform joined me in the corridor. “Massaj sir? You like massaj?” I said no, thank you. The man followed me into the elevator. “Very good massaj! Very cheap!” Again, I declined. “Head massaj, shoulder massaj, whole body massaj.” The man’s fingers contracted as he spoke. He reached out, grabbed my shoulder, squeezed it hard. At the ground floor, I left the elevator. The man followed me through reception, outside. “Massaj very relaxing! Very cheap!” I said no firmly, lit my cigarette and turned away. The man lingered, but eventually left.

About thirty men loitered opposite me, squatting and standing across the single lane road. The men – all of them – studied me. I paced outside the hotel’s doors, perturbed by their oscillating heads. A passing cow might interrupt their gaze, but never their attention. The men conversed; I was afraid. Not of these men, but of their unfamiliar, crowded world. I finished my cigarette and went to bed, glad I did not have to confront it yet.

The immigration office was small, with gleaming white tiles on the floor and large cardboard posters dangling on strings from the ceiling. Grinning people were pasted onto the almost life-size cut outs – comically posing: hands on their hips – with their names below in colourful bubble letters.

We came face to face with one of the poster pinups: a large, stern-faced woman in a khaki uniform. She bore no resemblance to the cheerful photo that hung above her scowling face. “Passports,” she growled, holding her hand out impatiently. She flicked through the pages. “What you have been doing in Syria?”
“Travelling,” I answered, matter of factly.
She glared at me. “What you have been doing there? Where you have been there?” Her voice demanded an answer. It was louder now.
“Petra…” I began.
“Where in Syria!” she bellowed. I had slipped up: Petra was the famous archaeological site we’d visited in Jordan, not Syria. Her voice, the speed of her questions, her scowl: they were all designed to make me nervous, to make me slip up. I had nothing to hide, but felt guilty.
“Palmyra, I mean…” I stammered. “We visited Palmyra. And Aleppo, Damascus, Crac de Chevaliers…” She cut me short.
“But why you have been there?” She spat the words out; her disgust with Syria, her nation’s enemy neighbour, was clear.
“We went to Syria to travel, to visit these places…” I offered, wondering what it was she wanted to hear, when all I could provide was the truth. She did not respond.
“And where in Israel you want to go?”
“To Jerusalem,” I answered confidently. “Just Jerusalem. We have very little time unfortunately… we fly to India on Friday.”
She cocked her head toward Iain. “Does he speak?” There was repulsion in her voice.
“I do indeed,” he answered brusquely, offended.
“Why you want to go to Jerusalem?” she continued, suspiciously.
“It is a very historical place,” I said flatly. Surely this was obvious.
“But what is there for you?” She was emotional now; she shouted the question. Beyond knowing what to say, I mumbled, shrugged, and gave up. We were admitted to the baggage scanning area.

Our backpacks passed through the x-ray machine. Three junior immigration officials – a young man and two women – began slowly unpacking them, one item at a time, scrutinizing everything that they retrieved. One of the women ran a pencil sized detector of some sort over certain items, which appeared to be randomly chosen. They worked silently, solemnly; this act of searching was important to them: we were a potential threat to their country, and they played a vital role in Israel’s national security. They could not have been older than twenty one.

One of the young women had removed our laptop from the smaller of Iain’s backpacks, and now retrieved an old, sweat stained newspaper which he had used to protect the computer. She walked over to her superior, the large woman who had interrogated us, and handed it to her. It was a copy of the Jordanian Times; on it’s front page was an article about an Israeli attack on Palestine.
“Why you keep this?” the woman demanded, angry.
Iain explained that it was to protect the laptop, which travelled with us everywhere. He had not kept the newspaper for any particular reason: it had been bought in Jordan, read, and then used to replace the tired paper that had protected the laptop before. But the woman’s suspicion was real now. I mentally scanned the contents of our bags. If a newspaper was dubious, what else could we be carrying that would be deemed the same? My mind jumped to one of the books that Iain was carrying: a gift from Oughzan, a friend we’d made in Istanbul. ‘Learn to Love Him’, it was called: a devotional Muslim book about Mohammed, which Iain had hesitated to leave behind, only because it had been a gift. Our bags continued to be searched. The book was not found. Silently, I thanked Oughzan’s God.

But then, the woman began grilling us with the same questions all over again. Why you go Syria? What you were doing there? Why you want to go to Jerusalem?

I was beginning to wonder what we were doing there, at the Israeli border, trying to enter a country that clearly didn’t want us. We had come from the Arab world, which had mesmerised and enchanted us, shown us hospitality we could never imagine. And now we were entering the land of their enemy; a country which doubted us because we had so much as visited its Muslim neighbour.

Finally, we were allowed to approach the counter where the dreaded visa would be issued. The presence of an Israeli entry stamp in your passport is enough to bar you from visiting several of the world’s Muslim countries. A more polite woman manned the counter, and asked us the same questions, with a little less vigour. We requested that she stamp a piece of paper, rather than our passports, as we may like to visit Pakistan.
“We don’t do that anymore,” she replied, sounding slightly unsure, perhaps expecting an argument. She took our passports away and we were asked us to sit down while someone decided whether or not to let us into the Promised Land.

*

An hour’s wait, and a four hour bus ride later, we reached Jerusalem – Jeru Salem: City of Peace – where we alighted in the basement of a shopping mall. We passed through metal detectors, queued to have my handbag searched, and entered. Inside, exclusive designer stores were lined up beside shops with familiar European brand names, fast food outlets, and escalators: the things we’d left behind in the West months before. Wealthy Jews were dripping in designer chic, strutting through the mall, parcels in hand. Teenage mall rats spent their parents’ money.

We were passed on the escalator by an adolescent girl in military uniform, balancing a very cool, very expensive looking pair of shades on her head. She wore a small backpack and juggled at least half a dozen shopping bags. One of the bags slipped, and as she bent to pick it up, so did the rifle that was casually slung over her shoulder.

Another bus dropped us off on the outskirts of Jerusalem’s ancient walls, at Damascus Gate. Beyond the gates, in the city’s Muslim quarter, we were swallowed up by a quintessential Middle Eastern souq – a labyrinthine arrangement of bustling stalls and shops organised by trade: jewellery, sticky sweets, spices, hardware, meat – which we weaved our way through with familiarity. The map to our hostel led us through the butchers’ lane with its strange damp smells, slippery with blood, until we came to a small delivery truck that blocked our narrow path. The truck’s back doors were open, and from inside, furry sheep’s heads were being tossed into a crate on the ground; the pointed jaws of skulls knocked together, bone on bone. We squeezed through the narrow gap between the truck and the wall, the sheep’s bulging eyes staring at me. A soft groan came from Iain: one of the flying furry heads had squirted blood onto his trousers. We pushed on, imitating indifference, eager to reach the shelter of that night’s home.

We checked into Citadel Hostel – a friendly Palestinian run place with a cosy sitting area where we could access free wireless internet – and waited eagerly for their geyser to heat up the water. Our overnight bus from Cairo had been preceded by an overnight train from Luxor: it had been more than two days since we’d had the privilege of a shower. Iain climbed the hostel’s four storeys to the rooftop, and quickly skipped back down, imploring me to join him. Below the hostel’s flat topped roof was a vision that, in a glimpse, epitomised the loaded complexity and enchantment of Jerusalem; the world’s most revered, most contentious city.

Flat roofed homes sprawled into the distance; tiny square windows were sprinkled onto their dusty, desert coloured walls. The sunlight greyed the green of the fir trees, and clumps of dry bush grew in pleasing patterns on the pale parched earth. A trio of golden onion-shaped domes shone up towards heaven; gleaming gold crosses clung to each dome’s elegant tip. Mosques’ towering minarets – steely blue or white – swept through the cloudless cobalt sky, speckling the cityscape, pointing their way to paradise. I sensed a buzz of energy in the city, a flurry of movement that was contained within the crenulated stone walls that framed imagined scenes below, built by Sűleyman the Magnificent; the centuries old walls of ancient Jerusalem. And, dominating our view, in the centre of it all, was the Dome of the Rock: Islam’s third holiest place. The enormous nugget of a dome blazed in the sun’s rays, reflecting a gleaming gold so dazzling I wanted to avert my gaze, but could not. Intricate designs in blues and greens adorned the base of the mosque; it was absolutely beautiful.

*

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is believed by the Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Coptic and Ethiopian churches to be the site where Jesus was crucified. We wandered through its dark interior, under grey gothic arches and over stone slabs, smoothed and cracked; aesthetic authentication that centuries of pious feet had trod their surface. Low ceilings and long narrow passages led us through the cavernous structure, until we reached a stone memorial marking the exact spot where Jesus’ crucifixion is said to have happened. The devout knelt and touched the stone, then their foreheads and chest: the shape of a crucifix; the father, the son and the holy spirit.

The church’s central area was full of bearded orthodox priests hurriedly swishing containers of incense in unfathomable ceremony. Tourists took photos. Several got in the priests’ unpredictable path while doing so, and were shoed away in shame. The church had an evocative sense of history. It conjured up memories of bible stories, which seemed less like fiction inside the ancient edifice. Snippets from ‘religious instruction’ at school came back to me; the teachers’ words once as good as the words of God Himself; but the familiar ill at ease ambience of church soon returned, and brought me back to my more complicated, sceptical present.

*
We came across the Wailing Wall (or Western Wall) by chance, while wandering through the Old City’s Jewish quarter, where Hassidic Jews strode through the streets, their plaits swinging beneath black hats. This part of the city was completely rebuilt after being flattened during the siege of Jerusalem: the Arab reaction to the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arabs states, between 1946 and 1949.
Metal detectors and bag searchers guarded the entrance to the Wall. I passed through, worrying that despite the stringent security measures, the site was an obvious target for terrorism. The city had already enchanted me with its wonderfully surreal quality, but a sense of fear – paranoia even – would not leave me. I stared at the Wall’s designated female area, and wanted to enter; to immerse myself in the unfathomable ritual before me, but was hesitant: proximity to a cluster of hundreds of Jews would put me in their potential danger zone. I stood there, struggling to separate rational from irrational thought, and eventually walked through the gate, into the sacred area, but silently prayed – to whom I did not know – that I would not die in this place.
I watched women work themselves into a righteous state of despair. Sobbing and swaying, a woman not far from me held herself tightly, mourning the destruction of Judaism’s holiest shrine, of which the only remnant is this retaining wall of the Second Temple – built in 515 BCE, destroyed by the Romans in 70CE.

Slowly, women walked backwards, not wanting to turn their back on the Wall. I did the same, purely out of respect, and wondered whether a devout, nationalistic upbringing would make me bewail my own fate, and revere a pile of bricks. This holy Jewish wall still serves to retain the nearby Temple Mount – a site that is holy for Muslims, Jews and Christians.

We wound our way through a maze of streets and reached The Temple Mount, or Haram ash-Sharif: the icon of the Middle East. The mount is essentially an enormous stone platform which was built over the biblical Mt Moriah, the site of Solomon’s first and Herod’s second temples: the place where Abraham was instructed by God to sacrifice his son Isaac in a test of his faith.

The Dome of the Rock mosque stands majestically atop the mount. It was the most awe-inspiring structure visible from our hostel’s rooftop, and even more beautiful up close. It’s ceramic blue-green designs are magnificent, geometrically framing one another with unsurpassable intricacy. Delicate silvery Arabic script is curved in a row above the entrance, to which, sadly, despite wearing a headscarf, we were not permitted access.

The smaller, Al-Aqsa mosque stands beside the Dome (which serves more as a figurehead) and is the mount’s functioning house of worship, but it did not permit non-Muslims either. A well dressed man stood at the entrance, and politely prevented us from entering.
“Can I ask why?” Iain said.
“You can,” he began. A faint frown crinkled onto his brow. “In 2000 Sharon came up here with 6000 troupes. Since then no tourists are allowed. It is our third most holy place.” Because of the fragility of Palestine’s government, the site is administered by the Kingdom of Jordan, he told us. Jordan’s King Hussein had sold a property in London to buy the gold now plastered over the dome behind us. It had been plated before, but the gold was now thick, making it shine in the light from all angles of the city.
“It’s beautiful,” Iain remarked.
He shook his head. “There are so many people with no food, no homes. This money could have been used on them.” He apologised sincerely for us not being allowed inside the mosques and, as we turned to leave, shook his head again.
“This world makes me very sad.” He said it as though he believed in another, better world to follow.

As Arabs and Jews attempt to stake their sovereignty on the Temple Mount, Jewish plans to destroy the mosques and build a third temple in their place persist.

*

Iain and I sat in our hostel’s kitchen, eating kebabs from the souq, beside a French girl who tossed a salad, and Josh, an American, who worked his way through a dinner of sealed army rations. Avi, a young Jew who lived in Jerusalem, sat drinking the hostel’s free supply of instant coffee. He had wanted a “break”, he told us, so had come to spend a few nights in the hostel dormitory, where we would all sleep that night.

Josh was the most devout Christian I had ever met. His father was a missionary who found God after he kicked a serious cocaine problem, and now lectured at a Christian college on the non-existence of evolution. Josh was a sweet young man who was thrilled to be in Jerusalem, and equally thrilled to be joining Avi, Iain and I for a drink at a nearby pub that night: he was under 21, and couldn’t drink in the States.

As the subject of religion had already been broached, Avi saw no harm in casually asking the French girl if she believed in God. She munched at her salad, hastily jabbing her fork into fresh leaves, talking and eating simultaneously, with the finesse that only a beautiful young French woman could achieve. “No,” she said bluntly, still crunching away.
“Avi persisted: “But how can you not believe in God?” he asked.
“Religion ees stoopid,” she snapped. Her fork had been laid down; her arms waved around. “Look at what religion has caused in thees place!” The French girl’s eyes flashed with an intensity I could not identify. “My grandparents were killed!” she shouted. “Their homes in Palestine were bulldozed. My mother is French, my father is Arab: they are Christians; I am half Palestinian.” She shot Avi a look of revulsion; her big dark eyes were glossy.

*

That night, Avi took Iain, Josh and I to a very stylish ‘Irish pub’ in Jerusalem’s modern, trendy district. He insisted on paying the hefty entrance fee; we consented. Josh ogled at the beer menu: an impressive four page array of international brands. Iain and I scanned it, debating our favourite brews aloud. Josh had had no idea that there were so many varieties of beer, he admitted, and looked to us for advice.
“Well,” I said, “My favourite of all these is the Leffe Blonde, which is a wheat beer. It’s very crisp, but quite strong. Eight percent, I think.”
“Okay,” said Josh, smiling. “That one sounds nice… but I’ll just have a small one. It’s okay for me to drink, but I’m not allowed to get drunk,” he explained. He mentioned some of the volunteer work he’d been doing for the police force: ordering alcohol at bars and reporting the bartenders who didn’t request identification before serving him. “Man’s law is God’s law,” he said, chirpily.

The ‘small’ beers turned out to be pint sized, and the ‘large’ ones that Avi, Iain and I had ordered, double the size. Josh had neared the end of his glass, and now sucked on a thin cherry cigar, his face rosy. Avi leaned heavily on an elbow, his black rimmed glasses obscured his eyes. Iain and I told him and Josh about our website, and our intentions to write about our time in Jerusalem. Avi had recently had a book published, he divulged. It was a kind of philosophy – his thoughts – he said, but did not seem keen to elaborate. He looked tired, worn.
“If you want to write about Jerusalem… you must understand it,” he said, sighing. “You must understand that everybody, everybody is so fucking tired of fighting. We want peace.” He exhaled a long, slow breath.

Military service is compulsory for Israelis once they finish school: three years for men, and 20 months for women. We had seen the hoards of adolescent soldiers in the Jewish quarters of the city, in poorly ironed uniforms, the girls’ hair tied into messy ponytails.

Iain asked him about the number of very large guns we had seen, casually slung over the shoulders of civilians.
“They must carry these because of the suicide bombers… the terrorists,” he replied, without expression.

The only way for able-bodied youths to avoid conscription is to claim mental fragility. The potential trauma of participating in a struggle for the right of what Jews deem their Promised Land is obvious. Avi’s brother had completed his three years, we were told, after which he had taken his own life.

Avi said goodnight, and we agreed to meet the next day. We had borrowed money the night before, when a hefty bill arrived, and wanted to pay him back. But, the next morning, when we woke in our dormitory, his bed was empty. He did not return.