East Berliners flocked to the wall in their thousands. Confused border guards let them through, paying little or no attention to their identity documents. West Berliners met them on the other side and gave those who needed it money for taxis or a phone call. Brian was, by now, openly crying. He moved his hand to his ear, imitating a phone call. “Mom, it’s me, Heinrich. I’ve crossed the wall, I’m in the West. Where are you? I’m coming home.”
Goa
Vagator, one of Goa’s coastal tourist towns, was said by our guidebook to have “long been the hot location for the outdoor rave parties that made the Goa party scene famous.” But on the day that we arrived, with only a week till Christmas, and accommodation supposedly jam-packed, it was deserted.
The restaurants were all empty, and shiny Christmas decorations hung feebly from the rafters. Rows of clothes and souvenir stalls stood redundant, their proprietors calling out from shaded straw mats, “Hey, how you doing? Just have a look…” in feigned American twangs, or “Yes yes, have a look… please madam!”
The guesthouses and hotels were only half full, but still charged exorbitant “high high season” rates – the locals believed that the regular horde was still on its way. We settled into a spacious tiled room, bright and clean; a delight compared to Mumbai’s Samrat hotel and its midnight vermin visitors.
Matheran
The miniature train, royal blue with shiny red trimmings, known fondly as the ‘toy train’, waited patiently on its narrow tracks at Neral Junction. We boarded, and began the slow, winding 800 metre ascent to Matheran, a small town set amidst mountains and forest – its name means ‘jungle topped’.
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. Continue reading Matheran>>
Mumbai
“An individual-to-individual callousness… is still so strong in the country that it is the greatest danger for a foreigner living in India, for it is a frighteningly easy thing to find it creeping into one’s soul.”
A. M. Rosenthal, The Future in Retrospective
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. Continue reading Mumbai>>
A Passage to India
(with apologies to E.M. Forster)
“The brown skins, the bare feet, the nose-rings, the humped bullocks – all these things were foreseeable, seemed obvious and familiar from the moment of landing. The really odd, unexpected thing about Bombay was its birds. There are more birds in the streets of this million-peopled city than in an English woodland.”
Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: An Intellectual Holiday
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. Continue reading A Passage to India
(with apologies to E.M. Forster)>>
Jerusalem
A predawn haze lit the kilometre of road before us. We trudged along it, still groggy from the half hearted slumber of our bus ride from Cairo. Through a small strip ‘of no man’s land’ we entered Israel, and left Egypt behind us.
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. Continue reading Jerusalem>>
