Massage, Medicine balls, and the Marquis d'Amritsar

I bathed an elephant. I did it. It wasn’t what I expected, but in fact transpired as one of those rare experiences that exceed all expectation. I envisioned being thrust beneath a lumbering, gentle but abjectly filthy creature, handed a brush and a bucket, and told to have fun. Bathing an elephant, though, is – it turns out – an unmissable life experience. You are taken to the to the river, accompanied by her mahout (handler), and the gorgeous creature carries you, perched upon her massive frame, into the water.

Delighted to be doing what’s her favourite thing in the world, she drops to the river floor, pulling you underwater with her. She rolls and turns like a bucking bronco as you hold on for dear life. One of her eyes peeps up in your direction and you see – as anyone who has been right up close to an elephant has seen for themselves – the depths of her character, her mischievousness, her gentleness, her (I’m reluctant to say this because elephants have more soul than many people you meet) “humanity”.

So she rolls and heaves, ecstatic to be in the water. She fills her trunk, lifts it above her head that’s the size of a large washing machine, and sprays you in the face. She throws you off her back. She lies on her side in three or four feet of water and her mahout hands you a pumice stone and gestures for you to go to work. So you rub the rock over her massive grey frame. Her skin is coarse, thick and rubbery. She makes little noises of pleasure. After spending all day standing around in the dusty heat, swatting flies or carrying irritating, middle-aged Italians through the jungle, there's unmistakable happiness in her eyes. She sprays you in the face with her trunk again and you begin washing a hind leg which has the girth of a morbidly obese man.

You then hear a gushing sound, like a fireman’s hose being emptied into a river. Which is pretty close actually, because an elephant a few metres away – also having her daily bath – is happily pissing in the river. Panicked and desperate to reach the safety of the river bank, you find yourself rapidly encircled by a foaming, iridescent slick of thirty litres of elephant urine.

Then a thud – like a medicine ball being dropped into a puddle. And another. And another. Three enormous balls of elephant dung get carried ominously toward you by the current. Like Costner in the Bodyguard, you throw yourself prostate over your own drowsy beast, in the vain hope of hiding behind her gargantuan body to use it as a dung-shield dam. God’s will prevails as her friend’s medicine balls are stopped in their path and you are saved with mere seconds to spare. Until your own adorable creature farts happily underwater for twenty or so seconds. Which sounds exactly like an outboard motor idling in the shallows. 4 Hz and about 400 decibels of elephant flatulence. “The Humanity!” you scream, as you mount her enormous body to get out of the water. She sprays you in the face with her trunk and throws you off. The process repeats.

Anyway, bathing an elephant – urine and brown medicine-balls notwithstanding – is a top five life experience and I’m privileged to have done it. All of the above took place in Chitwan National Park in southern Nepal. Which is also the site of the inevitable subcontinental food poisoning. I was so smarmy and self-satisfied – telling everyone who would listen that my gut was iron-clad and I'd be fine. Talk about counting chickens. I won’t go into the details (everyone has vomited, everyone has been bedridden, everyone has had diarrhea at some point in their lives). But for those fortunate enough to have had merely western food poisoning, let me just say I wouldn’t wish Delhi Belly on my girlfriend’s paramour. It’s like a small explosive device goes off inside you while you body is swinging around on a gyroscope. So the centrifugal force sends the toxins two ways. Up. And Down. That’s all I’m going to say on the matter – other than I’ve lost a lot of weight.

The past couple of weeks – which began with recovery from the Auschwitz train experience – have taken me through Ahmedabad (a nondescript city which nobody’s heard of, with the population of London), Udaipur, Jaipur, Agra (a bona fide contender for the world’s worst place, and which should probably be nuked aside from the gloriousness of the Taj), the colourful holy Sikh city of Amritsar in the Punjab, the holy Hindu city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, and on to Nepal – which, frankly, is already my favourite place on my trip. Gastric catastrophe notwithstanding.

During all of this, I’ve been reading a lot. Long train journeys, interminable delays and the need to block India out of one’s mind for a few snatched moments here and there all lend themselves well to a book or five (I have eight in my bag now which weigh more than all my clothes combined and lead to an almost daily jettisoning of clean underwear, the consequences of which I invariably come to regret a couple of days later).

Anyway, I’ve been reading Mark Twain. In 1895, financial difficulties forced him to accept a commission for round-the-world travel – poor soul! – and the great man found himself bewildered and ensorcelled by India. In 1897 he published Following the Equator – recounting tales of hiring the requisite ‘bearer’ (an all-needs manservant who would following the visiting traveller around doing pretty much everything) and a visit to a Parsee Tower of Silence. I commend this book to everyone, but I read a line in it (a footnote, actually) that struck me as ironic, and a convenient segué into a bit about Indian self-identity.

Twain’s first candidate as bearer was a little man named Manuel, of half Portuguese descent and half Coolin Brahman – the highest of the numerous castes. After a ludicrous exchange in which he discovers Manuel’s English is not as was claimed (something every traveller comes to terms with here – the Indian will always prefer to feign understanding than to admit his English is inadequate, often leading to disastrous results), Twain orders him to clean out the bathroom, just to get rid of him.

Manuel begins brushing Twain’s suit with violent enthusiasm. Twain asks why. Manuel fetches a young, bedraggled child in from the street and delegates the slop-bucket duties to him. Manuel’s refusal is indignant. He would lose caste if he did it himself; it would be pollution, by the law of his caste, and “would cost him a deal of fuss and trouble to purify himself and accomplish his rehabilitation”. That kind of work was strictly forbidden for persons of caste as is strictly restricted to the very bottom layer of Hindu society – the sudra, often called the dalit. Apparently the name is a term of contempt, ordained by the Institutes of Menu (900BC) that if a Sudra sit on a level with his superior he shall be exiled or branded – and Twain follows with a short footnote:

“Without going into particulars, I will remark that, as a rule, they wear no clothing that would conceal the brand”.

Oh, how deliciously ironic that, despite the change in meaning of the word, and the relative improvement of the Sudra’s lot – that statement has become so true for Indians as a whole. They love their brands. They live for their brands. They wear as many western brands as one can fit on a garment of clothing. Which is more than you would imagine possible. This brings me to a question which confronts all travellers to the developing world – what is Westernisation/Americanisation doing to the peoples of these places? What is left, once the sartorial, musical, traditional, linguistic aspects of the indigenous culture are subsumed by a once-size-fits-all, multinational McHomogeneity?

I defy any traveller to claim they haven't seen it for themselves. The Asian peasants’ and African militiamen’s NBA shirts; the closure of local business in the face of junk food franchises; the increasing obsession with celebrity and banality; and most of all: the pornification of the culture.

I like porn as much as the next man – if for no other reason because it is speech. And like it or not, the only permissible restriction on speech in a liberal society should be when it encourages violence against a group. Although there’s a reasonable argument to be made that porn fits this bill, in my opinion the threshold to be met ought to be high, and to those who loathe pornography, it’s the natural consequence of free speech and a free market, and the price to be paid for those things.

But the introduction of porn to a culture previously unaccustomed to it is a whole different thing. The television and billboards are replete with practically naked women dancing sluttily to sell some product or another. Which, in cultures where women have been previously marginalised, oppressed or disenfranchised, seems to me to be even a retrograde step. Empowerment of women – crucial for development and human rights in these parts of the world – will not and should not happen through their objectification. It must come through education, affirmative action and collective will. Despite the ponderings of those towering feminist ideologues the Spice Girls, girl power will never come from a liberal display of T&A on every street corner.

As well as the indirect pornification of mainstream culture, there’s the problem of porn itself. Or perhaps more accurately, the ‘into the deep end’ phenomenon, whereby a demographic stratum of young men previously ignorant of pornography suddenly finds itself with an internet café on every corner, the introduction of more and more Western female travellers, and a culture which has sharply-drawn lines between boys and girls before marriage.

I hope I’m not labouring the point, but young Indian men (and the Turks do the same, it must be said) are absolutely, frighteningly sex-obsessed. Example number one: the 17-year old boy in the internet café in Amritsar who is surreptitiously looking at ultra- hard core porn on the computer screen (amusingly minimising windows the moment anyone walks by), while at the same time reading an online sex guide to putting on a condom, and posting onto a sex education forum with the hilariously minimalist query:
“Who do I sex?”

Assuming – as I think is fair - that this translates to, “With whom can I have sex, and how do I make it happen?”, one pities the poor young girl who ends up in an arranged marriage with the aspiring Marquis d’Amritsar, and who, on her wedding night, comes face-to-face with a litany of perversions which Marquis presumably thinks the norm. It seems pretty clear to me that if you mix a culture of pre-marital abstinence and arranged marriages, with total access to western pornography, you’re going to get a lot of frightened young brides, or supremely disappointed young grooms. That’s example one.

Example two is the rickshaw driver who insisted on asking Matt every conceivable question of Western women’s sexual habits and proclivities – despite Matt’s repeated entreaties for him to just shut up and drive. Example three is another driver, who asked a perfectly lovely girl I met the most inappropriate questions about her sexual history within moments of meeting her, and gave a look of blank incomprehension when she refused to answer. As he would never ask an Indian girl the same questions, one assumes he views Western girls as completely permissive. Example four is the guy running the internet café in Ahmadebad, having concurrent and clumsy chats with a bunch of women – a complete amateur, too – trying to use the law of averages to get anything he can. As a journalist, I felt obliged to photograph his screen over his shoulder, and have reproduced the incriminating evidence here.

Example five is the guy in the hotel in Varanasi who, again, was running an internet café and streaming and distributing hard-core pornography while the rest of us put up with the resultant snail-aced Internet. I told tales on him when we left. I filed a written complaint with his superiors. I hope he got fired. I’m a moral man, after all. There’s nothing I hate more than slow Internet.

These are but a sliver of what I’ve seen, suggesting that a generation of young Indian men are growing up to see women (or at the very least Western women) as sluts. This was so evident in Turkey too: I can't count the number of Western girls I met who had to put up with aggressive sexual predation from the local men, a predation which they definitely don't force upon the Turkish girls. It can only be the effect of globalisation. The proliferation of pornified Western media – not to mention pornography itself – has led these men to believe that white girls are tramps and harlots. It’s sad and depressing.

But moving away from the sexual side to the other aspects of cultural degradation, I wish I had much original to say. But, alas, the negative effects of global westernisation are so obvious to even the most addle-minded and uninterested nincompoop, that they’ve been documented to death.

I have a close friend who has, only this week, retreated to the UK, tail between legs, after an aborted attempt at the Asian travel experience. Depressed and unspeakably disappointed at having given up on her life’s dream of exploring Asia, she left a month ago for a seven month tour salivating at the prospect of a cultural smorgasbord of dialects and strange sounds and arcane traditions and mystique and history and alien peoples. Instead, she found what so many before her have in so many places: an indigenous culture being bevelled, chipped and sanded down until it’s nothing but a junkheap carcass of crass imitation and ill-conceived aspiration. There are many things which development has given the third world; many things of which the West is justly proud. It’s because of Norman Borlaug that India can feed itself, after all. But why is it that every place east of Vienna and south-west of Los Angeles manages to import the base-level awfulness of the worst we can offer? Croatian Big Brother made me want to weep with embarrassment. Serbian materialism, Bulgarian ghetto patois, and India – my god, India is a country weighed down by a collective lack of self-esteem which manifests in both adorable quirky traits, and social phenomena which suggest that theirs is a culture which is slowly dying.

There are countless anecdotes I could recount to support this argument. Some are my own; some are collected from the myriad travellers whose paths I’ve crossed. But I’ll limit myself to something particularly depressing, something that –while not unique to India (it's prevalent in South America and Africa, too) – has struck me as abhorrent. This thing is the obsession with face lightening.

The market in India is saturated with products to lighten your skin. One is called, “Fair & Easy”; my personal favourite is “Fair & Handsome: Very Sexy!” As I’ve written before, India is – to this day – a terribly stratified society. There are four main castes – at least 22 sub-castes – and there is a very clear positive correlation between skin lightness and caste level. The Brahmans and the modern entrepreneurial class have skin of almost west European lightness, while the lower castes have a black pallor. I really cannot overstate the prevalence of advertising for these products. Practically all the Indian celebrities are virtually white. Practically all the mannequins in the store windows are actually white. And the actor Shahruhk Khan – the biggest celebrity in India, who advertises every product under the sun and who until recently I concluded to be a decent and moral man – advertises Fair & Handsome. I gatecrashed an eight-year old girl’s birthday party in Jaipur, to discover that her father had bought her a large supply of this cream as a present. He was – as so many middle-class Indians are – desperately keen to give his children better opportunities than he was given. This is to be admired, of course. And perhaps I’m over-blowing this (it wouldn’t be the first time), but I find it symptomatic of a society in rapid decay that its most visible and respected celebrity advertises a product designed to make the overwhelming majority of the native population look more like the overwhelming majority of a foreign population. And a young girl – a girl young enough she shouldn’t be concerned with ethnic self-image – gets a present which will make her look like she’s from a different place and of a different race. Aside from the probable health consequences of regularly bleaching your skin, does it not smack of a macrosocial dearth of self-esteem that a people with such a rich ethnic history should be seeking to be other than who they are?

The counter-argument is a predictable one: that we in the West want to be more tanned, and use various tanning creams and solaria to darken our skin. This was an argument made to me by a professor to whom I presented my observations. She said that all people want to look more like other people – and that this is the same. And although there’s some broad truth in this, I find it specious. I don’t know a single Westerner who wishes to look Indian. Rightly or wrongly, there's an imbalance here, and if I can invoke one last example, it’s a poster I saw in Varanasi advertising English classes at a local school. It showed a chess board in oblique view. In the far ground were the black pieces, lined up in their starting positions. Only the black pawns were really visible. In the foreground stood the white king – alone, and three times the size of the black pieces. I probably don’t need to join the dots here, but when a society’s advertising distinguishes between whites being kings and blacks being pawns, something has gone seriously, seriously wrong. Maybe it’s a relic of the British Raj. I don’t know.

Perhaps I’ve been overly critical. Next time, I’ll wax lyrical about the Sikhs and their generosity, the spirituality of Varanasi and what it’s like to take a boat across the mist-drenched Ganges at dawn, watching the cremations and the Hindus washing away their sins. I’ll write about the soft pinkness of Jaipur, the overwhelming friendliness of the locals of Udaipur, the natural beauty of Nepal which makes your eyes hurt, my slowly growing respect for the system of arranged marriage.

But for now, I think it’s worth me posting – for the benefit of future travellers in the subcontinent – a warning about the famous Ayurvedic massage. I had one. This was my folly. So as designated beefeater, I feel compelled to warn you about what is involved.

The Ayurvedic massage uses some sort of weird oily concoction about which I’m not au fait – my approach to massage generally being like that to food: don’t ask questions. So while in Varanasi, curiosity gets the better, and I traipse to the local parlour. A gorgeous young girl welcomes me in. Trying to suppress my delight, I hand over my money and am led into a spartan room lit by a single fluorescent light, and with a small, hairy man inside, wearing a couple of kilos of gold jewellery. I spin around anxiously, only to see my lovely intended masseuse disappearing out the door.

Now, I’m neither a homophobe nor particularly averse to male physical contact. So when he instructs me to strip down, I think of my book and my pack-induced back pain and take it like a man. Once down to my boxers, he starts shaking his head and pointing for them to be removed too. I look up at the glare of the fluorescent light, I peer once more at his hairy chest and gold jewellery, think of my Anglo-Saxon aversion to non-sexual nudity, protest for a minute, then reluctantly acquiesce.

So there I am standing stark naked in a room with a hairy little man I’ve never met. Ominously, he takes off his shirt. He motions for me to lie down on my front. Compared with lying on my back this seems a reasonable option, so I do. He starts pouring hot oil over my body and, well, it feels wonderful. As it should.

This goes on for a while, and it becomes frightfully clear that he has no compunction about letting his hands go where masseurs’ hands rarely do. So now, of course, all I can think about is how normally when hands go to such places, the circumstances – not to mention the gender of the other person – are somewhat different. So I’m stuck in the age-old battle of wills with the autonomic responses of the male body. But mental recitations of UN Conventions and times tables prevail, and we’re out of the woods. Until he commands me to roll onto my back. Which is altogether a much more compromising experience – and one which might have been easier with some Enya and scented candles to make it feel less like a doctor’s appointment. As if this weren’t enough, he pops out of the room a couple of times, opening the door to a communal corridor of passers-by who are probably about as happy to see a feet-first, pale and naked man as I am to be giving anyone who walks by a public peep show.

After the massage, the pervy little masseur suggests I shower. Happy to wash the gallons of oil from my body, I enter the shower to find the hairy little man right behind, insistent that an important part of the massage is being bathed by the masseur himself, and before I protest, he throws me – still butt-naked – onto a toilet seat and begins sponging me down. Eventually, I reach my limit. I believe in trying anything once, but I’m perfectly capable of washing my own genitals, thank you very much.

The whole experience, mortifying as it already was, was made all that much worse when I emerged to find that Matt – who had also taken the Ayurvedic plunge – was offered some sort of rudimentary underwear to wear. And his masseur was perfectly happy for Matt to wash himself. So on top of the fact that I spent the following two days smelling like I’d fallen into a vat of Madras Curry, it turns out I was molested by Vanarasi’s pre-eminent homosexual.

It was time to head to Nepal.

Video of a very typical Indian traffic intersection

Video of the Mumbai-Ahmedabad train in Auschwitz Class

Ticket touts, turds and a taddle-tale

Picture – if you will – a steel-panelled cylinder made in the 60s, seventy feet long and twelve feet wide. Picture two hundred peasants, merchants and general riff raff crammed inside. Picture it creeping through the baking hot Indian countryside. Picture this happening at dawn after a night with no sleep. And lastly, picture three unhappy western travellers – accustomed to niceties such as a couple of inches of personal space, seats which don’t crush the spine and the absence of some irritating toilet-trader excavating his feet and clearing his throat like a two-stroke tuk-tuk in front of one’s face. If you can, you are picturing General Population Class train travel from Mumbai to Ahmedabad during Diwali, when nothing else is available.

The all-emcompassing dreadfulness of the experience begins with the ticket purchase the day before. You’re directed from one non-functioning and utterly nonsensical website to another before you discover the entire process is designed to break the spirit of the wired traveller. So you give up and grudgingly trudge through the crowds to the station.

The train station you’ve been directed too is, naturally, unable to help. So you spend an hour in a four wheeled furnace driven by a guy who’s played too much rally driving on his Commodore 64, and eventually you get to the right station. This, you soon understand, is but a physical manifestation of the website, but with the additional delights of unbearable heat, sickening stench, and – in addition to the thousands of men standing around and shouting apparently at themselves – the flagship of Indian bureaucracy. They are prouder of this than anything else.

The form-filling in India deserves a moment’s digression. Everywhere you go and everything you do, there’ll be a form to be filled out – usually complete with irresistible contradictions – and a sheer litany of details required. An internet café – I kid you not – will usually demand not merely your name, age, birth date and address in India, but passport number, visa number, passport issue date, passport issue place, visa issue date and place, address outside of India, email address, contact phone number and, (in one excruciating place which offered dial-up speed and a suspiciously sticky keyboard) both parents’ full names.

“Tell them to sod off!” you might retort. This – I assure you – doesn’t work. Resistance to the form filling process is met with looks varying from manifest incomprehension to curious bewilderment to barely-veiled hostility. You can try compromising – filling in some of the details and drawing a line at “Age Of Mother’s Loss of Virginity”, or “Average Daily Bowel Movement Frequency” – but all this leads to is the aspiring bureaucrat traipsing back demanding more. Exactly the same process takes place at every hotel. Every booking in a travel agent. Forms and forms and even more forms all demanding the minutiae of your life. Time and time again.

Ultimately, you concede you’re not in a bargaining position at all. Because stone-age bandwidth and sticky keys notwithstanding, this is travel, and this is the 21st century. And you need Internet more than he needs the aggravation of someone from the Ministry of Pedantry coming round with a clipboard.

The form filling is everywhere – and most of the time it’s a time consuming but tolerable nuisance. But at the railway station – oh Lord! – the least accessible system conceived by Man is accompanied by about as much organisation and forethought as you’d get in show-and-tell for special ed kindergarteners. First you need to find your train number and fill it in. This is not easy. Once done, you queue for a reservation form. This is not easy either, because the child in front has shat itself without a nappy, and twelve barefoot urchins are eyeing your backpack. Nevertheless, you fill out the form and get to the front of the queue, open your mouth to speak, and immediately three men push in and start barking Hindi at the official behind the desk. You push and shove and shout back but they speak about as much English as you speak Hindi, and moreover, the official is ignoring you and attending to them. You then realise that this is India, and the only way to get attention at all is to push through as many people as possible, elbows flailing backpack swinging, and completely disregard the existence of the queue in the first place. This will get you served.

But of course it won’t – because you get instructed by the bored official that you forgot to enter “Father’s Sperm Count” and “Girlfriend’s Fellatio Technique” in the box at the bottom. Once the form is complete, the really awful truth dawns. This is Diwali week – the festival of lights in which everyone in India travels and the consequences of which you were too stupid to anticipate – and every train for the next eight days is not merely full, but has a three-figure waiting list.

Until this point, you’ve not noticed the eighty or ninety sly and ridiculously-moustached men loitering furtively in the shadows. Like the cheetah in the grass waiting for the limping gazelle, they wait for the moment your travel plans collapse around you and your face reveals your desperation – and they strike.

These men are the touts, and they call themselves – again, I kid you not – “corruption agents”. I suppose you have to commend their candour. They explain to you – and you manage to corroborate this – that paying under-the-table to the train officials is not only the done thing, but in fact the only way to get a train ticket at all. At, of course, a criminal mark-up.

“But”, you protest, “All the trains are full!” You point to a 10x8 seat availability matrix on the board showing trains down the side and classes across the top – and it’s filled exclusively with zeroes. The shady-looking one with rodentish eyes who's pushed to the front sniggers. And clears his throat and spits – sending a shimmering oyster of beef-coloured phlem flying past your head. You fantasise about cutting his eyeballs out with the pocket knife you’re fingering in your pocket, but the idea of a week trapped in Mumbai helps to quell this urge.

The long and the short of it is that you (and by this I mean everyone, not just gullible rich tourists) pay these guys to buy tickets for you. All the train network employees are corrupt too, of course, so they claim the trains are full when they’re anything but. So the phlemmy rodent-man pays the corrupt douchebag of an official, and sure enough you get your ticket at an exorbitant rate.

But no! He returns, touching and placating you with mock sincerity, and hands you a document with the ominous initials WL. Waiting List. You get into a heated argument (helped by having a gargantuan travel companion who can trample them under his clown feet) and you get some of your money back with the understanding you show up at the station an hour before the train leaves the next day, and some more money will get you assigned seats – presumably at the expense of a family of poor chumps going home to visit their relatives for the holidays.

5am the next morning, you arrive ticketless expecting a relatively deserted station only to find 50,000 people engaged in what can only be a faithful recreation of the First Zulu War. You track down the thieving pustule of an imp-man who shafted you the night before, you find out that the waiting list – unsurprisingly – has gotten longer rather than shorter, and you end up paying way, way too much for General Population Class. Also known as the way the Germans took the Jews on holiday to Auschwitz.

So, we’re back to the sweltering, steel cylinder creeping across India at the speed of a motorised wheelchair running low on batteries. After waiting on a platform which looks over an enchanting view of piles of human effluent dropping straight down from the toilets, you take your seats – benches, actually – which provide roughly half the width and a third the legroom of an economy class airline seat. Through the sleepless morning fog and the atrocious smell and the overwhelming noise of people yelling and pushing in the Indian way, your heart sinks at the prospect of ten hours huddled like battery hens in this oven (the accompanying photo, by the way, was before anyone really got on board and doesn’t begin to tell the story). You find you’re sitting next to a bunch of people carrying a stench that could outlast religion. So you and your travel companions move to some seats five metres away in order to sit together. A sudden hush - the din stops as people struggle to comprehend anyone sitting in other than assigned seats. And then you encounter a complete and utter pubic louse of a man who’s having his shoes shined by a miserable and malnourished child and telling everyone his opinion on everything. Although obviously due to patriarchal pride and overcompensation for the shame of having to travel Auschwitz Class, he’s a person you want to disembowel and force feed his innards. You wouldn’t wish him on your worst enemy.

He starts lecturing us on why we need to be in our proper seats. Irate, we retort that if his compatriots had only learned about Imperial Leather instead of just imperial mistreatment of everyone else, we wouldn’t need to move in the first place. The ticket inspector arrives and the pubic louse sees his moment. Standing up to impose his full five feet of height, he excitedly recounts the story of how the three westerners left their assigned seats!! – something apparently unprecedented in Indian transport history. Eventually, our use of logic and reason is considered cheating, and we’re forced back to our assigned places. We huff and sulk. We check our watches to find there's almost the entire journey to go.

Five men clear their throats, spray snot out of a nostril in no particular direction, and spit.

But it’s about to get much worse. Much, much worse.

Because although all the seats are full as you pull out of Mumbai Central Station, this doesn’t mean the carriage – which the Germans must’ve sold to the Indians during Partition – is full. Not at all. The two hundred people sitting down are a mere third of the carriage’s capacity.

So you pull into Borivali in the outskirts of Mumbai, to be greeted by a platform of people one hundred deep. The moment the train stops, they engage in an orgiastic display of violent pushing and screaming. The doors are immediately crammed with three people who are now of course, wedged stuck and being pushed by three dozen people behind them. In the crowd, women and children are pushed over, elderly men thrown aside, punches thrown (well, this is India, so girly slaps really), and eventually bones give, the dam breaks and the three guys in the doorway tumble forward and everyone charges on board.

The two hundred in the carriage becomes five hundred within seconds. With absolutely no comprehension of personal space or the acceptability of leaning over a complete stranger and dangling sweat-sodden armpits in his face, the newcomers fill every square inch of floor space. Including the small gap between your seated legs. For Londoners, imagine the Northern Line, southbound at 8am. Double the people, double the heat, quadruple the smell, increase the cacophony by five orders of magnitude, and halve the ventilation. Oh yes, and it’s ten hours.

But it gets worse. Because then the beggars, the Eunuchs and the vendors arrive and the carriage is transformed into a heaving and chaotic bazaar. The Eunuchs – dressed in saris and make-up and with male voices – push through, forcefully begging. You have to feel for them – many were boys castrated by their beggar parents in order to earn more money. The women start cooking food on the floor, and the noise of everything is just deafening. People start singing, which is only mildly better than the constant yelling and pushing. And all you want to do is stretch your leg, take a moment’s respite from the heat, go to the toilet (bad, bad idea – best to soil yourself, really) or kill people en masse.

And anyone who’s ever tried to sleep in church knows how hard it is on hard, straight-backed benches. Your head lolls, your back cramps, and your buttocks go numb – and this is with the salubrious tedium of a sermon to help your reverie, not the chariot scene from Ben Hur going on around you while all the men hack and cough, stare, take off their sandals and begin picking their feet with toothpicks which then go back in their mouths.

I’m not saying don’t take the train in India. On the contrary, I’m writing this moment on the express from Jaipur to Agra and then Amritsar. The scenery is stunning (see photo). I have a seat to myself, and the smell is really no worse than you’d get bathing in a septic tank after Glastonbury. I’m just saying: don’t do it during Diwali. Don’t take Auschwitz Class. Don’t under any circumstances venture into the toilets. Don’t queue – always push. And if some silver-haired, shoe-shined, diminutive taddle-tale is sitting around like Lord Muck and opining on everything under the sun, don’t be unnerved by your inclination to disembowel him or carry him into the toilet and shove his face down the squat hole. Nurse that inclination, embrace it! Let it grow! In India, sometimes it’s the only way of knowing you’re still human.

Largess, Love Stories & Life on the Eighteenth

Nehru once described India as “a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads”. It’d be hard work finding an apter description. The myriad reinventions of this majestic country over thousands of years tell a fascinating tale, from which a vibrant, modern yet troubled nation has emerged to confuse, scare and entice the intrepid voyager who dares – to the raised eyebrows of his acquaintances – to “do India”.

Mark Twain mused similarly: "So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked." And a close friend of mine solemnly informed me that India stands for “I’ll Never Do It Again”. After a mere week, I think I can profess this tongue-in-cheek witticism to be utter rot. I will, without a doubt, do it again.

It’s hard to put one’s finger on why. Without any condescension at all – because these are fabulously generous and warm-hearted people – it might be the childlikeness of the Indians. The film industry – centred here in Mumbai – produces, in this city alone, 900 films per year, or almost three a day. There can’t be many people in the West unaware at least superficially of the reach and reputation of Bollywood. But flipping channels on the telly – as everywhere – offers revealing insight into the nature and values of a people. Producers and programmers and advertisers understand their audience – it’s their job, after all – and India television is replete with a bizarre mix of singing, slapstick, and the obligatory bout of sobbing every few minutes. My host and friend here – a remarkable and articulate man named Russel, about whom I’ll say more later – puts it thus:

“You must understand that emotion is a very important thing for Indians. We cry together, we laugh together. Most of the time we sleep in the same room all together. And expressing ourselves is who we are”.

This is evident everywhere you look. In the human cauldron that is India's urban street, everybody shouts to everybody else about every possible thing. Hands gesticulate wildly as people barter and push and sell their wares. On the telly and in the innumerable Bollywood offerings which litter the hundreds of channels, the stories are easy to follow for the non-Hindi speaker, such are the exaggerated gestures, the cringeworthy crying scenes over the latest my-life-is-over tragedy such as Boy not desiring Girl as Wife, or the tiresome need to break into poorly-synched song every six or seven minutes. When they’re not singing or crying, the actors (and I use that term generously) gaze wistfully off-camera like a Days of Our Lives parody, without any discernible parody. Otherwise, they seem to slap each other in the face a great deal and run around at high speed. The Indians admire all things British – that much is clear (Jade Goody excepted of course). It’s a shame they’re under the misapprehension that Benny Hill and the Carry On films represent the pinnacle of comedic sophistication. Just like the prevailing wisdom here that the best solution to any administrative problem is to add another couple of layers of bureaucracy. Because that’s what the British would’ve done, of course.

All of this is ‘childlike’, but I honestly mean it in the best possible way and I trust no offence is caused. The films that studiously avoid any bad language or risqué scenes; the belief that even in a movie concerning profound and serious issues it’s permissible to break into song at the drop of a hat. The way not only the children on the street but the adults, too, greet a stranger with a Cheshire grin and are desperate to know from where he comes, what he thinks of India and what it’s like to travel so far. This is an innocence you don’t see in Europe or the States or even in South East Asia. It's a really nice feeling.

I’ve been joined for my five weeks in India by a splendid Englishman named Matt, whom I met in Istanbul and whose itinerary converged nicely with my own. Matt – as well as being black, a feature that elicits curiosity and astonishment everywhere we’ve gone in Turkey and here – is also 204cm tall. Which means that although I talk to his navel when we speak, the Indians are practically rubbing noses with his kneecaps. In Turkey, shouts of “Big man!! Black man!! Basketball!” would ring out in every street we passed through. And the exact same is true here. But the Indians are warmer, more affectionate, more tactile than the Turks and we’ve drawn a crowd everywhere we’ve been. A walk through the markets in Chembur saw us mobbed by textile traders, all of whom entered into sudden and noisy competition to see who could produce a pair of jeans long enough to accommodate his stupendously long legs.

The thing is, they weren’t particularly trying to sell us anything. I’ve travelled enough to recognise it when I see it. But these ten or so men were so delighted to see a man of such unusual proportions in the flesh, we found ourselves in a frenzied scrum of tape measures, reels of cloth and a barrage of gleeful questions. That is, until one particularly forward young chap saw fit to push to the front of the crowd, point to Matt’s groin, and with a preceding reputation of black men evidently in mind, asked him about the size of his equipment. Which would’ve been fine until he reached out (well, reached up, actually) to grab a handful – presumably for the purpose of comparison with his his countrymen (for those wanting further research on this subject, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6161691.stm). We bade a hasty farewell.

I tell this story just to illustrate my point – that there is something very childlike about the people here, as if in Eden before Eve listened to the counsel of the snake. As I said before, I spent a couple of days staying with a man called Russel and his family, an experience which a thousand guidebooks and tens of interviews with academics or journalists could never replicate. Russel is 34, and lives with his wife Usha, his mother and formidable matriarch Elsa and his sons Kenford and Danny – eight and two respectively. Their house is like so many in India, two rooms with toilet facilities shared with a bunch of neighbours, and slim mattresses which get thrown on the kitchen floor at bedtime. The family all sleep together, they always eat together. To conserve water (heavily rationed by the city of Mumbai which cannot cope with a population that has doubled to 16 million in the past quarter century) they sometimes bathe together. Living with a family like this is the definitive travel experience – you can learn more about people in a couple of days like this than you would in a year of hotels, restaurants and taxis.

You see first hand the shortcomings of the nuclear family – the importance of having uncles and aunts and particularly grandparents around as you grow up. You appreciate the importance of meal times as a communal experience, an opportunity to bond and laugh and share news. You come to understand the pride that comes with being aspirational and driven, in being able to provide well for your children, to give them opportunities in life which your parents and their parents and theirs before them were unable to do so. Russel, who works as a systems integrator for a company – whatever that means – never completed university. He hated his father since an early age because his father married at 43 and inadequately prepared for the consequences of that. So by the time Russel and his brothers needed support to take on further education commensurate with their obvious intelligence, his father had retired with nothing. And India is not a place where you can just support yourself if you wish to study past high school. And so Russel has paid for his brother to study in the US, and paid for his father’s considerable medical bills in the final years of his life. But watching him work incredibly long hours, return home and find the energy to play with his children, love his wife and talk to his mother, I was struck, once more, by the fact that some people in this world really are to be admired. Although he earns a pittance by Western standards, he is determined to make sure that his boys – both smart as buttons themselves – will have the chance to keep the social climb going. He has pulled a middle-class life out of the scattered detritus of misfortune and inopportunity, helped his brother to do the same, and still welcomes travellers from around the world into his home and refuses to accept anything in return.

Russel is Christian, and met Usha – Hindu - when he was sixteen and she twelve. They fell in love and – in his words – ‘courted’ for seven years, which consisted of five minutes per day at the bus stop together. In a move which I find utterly bewildering (as I do all things connected with religion), she began the complicated process of converting to Christianity, and they married. He went to Muscat in Oman for a while to make a better living, but they couldn’t bear being apart and he returned back, and they had Ken and Danny. What I find moving about this story is the honour and simpleness of their courtship and the profundity of a love that waits seven years of a few snatched minutes per day in order to have a loving family full of generosity and ambition for their children.

This is not a uniquely Indian thing, naturally. I wouldn’t claim that all Indian families are supportive, caring and welcoming any more than I would argue all French, Australian, German or Welsh families were loveless, detached and unhappy. But the fact remains that – religious and cultural reasons notwithstanding – the divorce rate is very, very low here and most people remain close to their elderly parents. There’s a lot we could learn. The disconnect of the western nuclear family model which produces maladaptive and angry teens, brattish kids, pre-nupped marriages and torturous yearly gatherings contrasts starkly with my time here so far. Russel, Usha et al live in something between a slum and a housing estate – former stables and barracks for the pre-independence British cavalry which has morphed into a heaving, cramped community of thousands of families living on top of each other. Children sleep regularly at one another’s houses every night. Food and various provisions are shared and swapped. Tuk-tuks and motorbikes speed through potholed and dusty alleys four feet wide. And all of this backs onto the eighteenth hole of the President’s Golf Club, where the greens and fairways are irrigated around the clock while the shantytown has its drinking water rationed, and India’s growing number of millionaires and billionaires are meekly followed around the fairways by caddies waiting to be thrown a few rupees.

There’s only so much you can say about social inequality in any place. You can describe the abstract juxtaposition of obscene wealth and obscener poverty – but it only says so much. It can’t really paint the picture. You can take photos – which do paint a picture – but the image is always subjectively filtered through the mind and the lens of the observer. There’ll always be a contrary tale to tell.

Or you can give some raw numbers - like the fact that it’s possible to pay four days’ worth of a rickshaw driver’s average salary on a cup of coffee in a swanky hotel – which would be like a £300 cappuccino in London. Numbers are cold and detached and they don’t tell which is the greater injustice – the criminal expense of the coffee or the criminal salary of the driver. So, permit me a few statistics instead.

In 2007, there are 41 million registered cases of diabetes, expected to double in the next two decades. India has surpassed South Africa as the country with the highest number of HIV cases (5.7 million) – a figure probably grossly conservative, and in large part due to Indian men’s unwillingness to wear condoms and women’s (particularly prostitutes’) inability to enforce their use. I posted the BBC story about Indian men and condoms above rather facetiously, but it may hide a broader problem to be addressed. Moreover, human rights groups estimate there are 60 million child labourers. 350 millions Indians live below the poverty line. The population growth rate exceeds the economic growth rate, and although the middle class is swelling, the average annual wage is US$710 per year and up to 400 million Indians live on a dollar a day or less. And despite the massive urbanisation with characterises all parts of the developing world, three quarters of Indians still live in rural areas, where income is a quarter that of city dwellers.

This last point is a question I have posed to a variety of people here – to students, to a kindly Hindu priest I met who was recovering from typhoid at the hospital where I stayed on my second night, to the traders and to Russel and Usha: As people flock to the megacities from rural areas, does their standard of living actually increase? Or perhaps more accurately – because this is closer to the subject of my book – what happens to their quality of life? Because observing the wretchedness of life for the urban poor, it’s difficult to conceive of a life with significantly less. Thousands upon thousands of people sleep on the pavement – some of whom have presumably come to the big city with grand dreams which have fallen tragically flat. And this is in the richest, most cosmopolitan and dynamic city in the country – the financial and commercial capital of a nation that’ll one day be a superpower.

Perhaps I’m being hopelessly naïve. Perhaps my scepticism at why anyone would leave a rural village only to struggle for a shanty life in a polluted, overcrowded, disgustingly congested city like Mumbai comes from being yet to see what rural Indian life is like. Russel – originally from a small town in Gujarat – assures me this is the case. Life in a rural area, he says, is beset with enormous financial costs compared with urban life, and the idealised peaceful village life I imagine isn’t a reality at all. The Indian rail system – the biggest employer in the world, by the way – is so advanced, so widespread (thanks in large part, it has to be said, to the colonial British) that there’s no village in India truly untouched by urbanisation. Cable TV and mobile phones are everywhere but salaries are lower and costs are higher. According to Russel and at least one economics undergraduate I interviewed, it’s the trappings of relatively affordable western luxuries which draws people to the cities.

It’s disingenuous to think that cheap mobile contracts and MTV account for this enormous migration. But their point was that India is not – as I’d suggested – like China, where people leave behind a rudimentary agrarian life to make their fortune in one of the twenty or so cities with over ten million inhabitants. Rather, village life in India has become a prohibitively expensive, poor, smaller version of urban life – and both standard of living and quality of life are relative concepts. The shantytowns which line the fence of the golf club – and which are periodically torn down by the local government only to pop right back up again – may be poor and dirty, but they’re a step up from life on the street and village life too. This is something I find hard to accept, and the coming weeks will reveal much, much more.

Beyond the poverty and the unfairness, beyond the simple and uncomplicated stories of love and family bonds in the movies, you can absorb so much more here. You sense the pride that accompanies having a job and making a living – the truth that so often, when you try to tip a merchant or vendor a few extra rupees as gratitude for his courtesy and goodwill, that tip is refused with a look of embarrassment. Or the fact that when I brought gifts to Russel and his family as thanks for showing me the city, feeding me and generally making me feel at home, the response was one of sheepish discomfort rather than unfettered gratitude. Or the taxi driver who, when seeing that Matt and I were sweating in his sweltering cab like cows being led to an abattoir, stopped to buy us bottles of cold water and would not accept a penny. These people, these open, friendly, generous and, yes, childlike people are the most wonderful part so far of this wonderful country. They have curious cultural affectations such as a side-to-side, up-and-down, figure-eight head-wobble (which I’ve coined the “Stevie Wonder”) that can mean ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ with no obvious way of discerning which. The children gather round demanding that you play cricket with them. And despite most Indians tolerating hardship that we should never and will never know, they smile and engage you with their eyes, knowing full well that you carry in your wallet a month’s worth of their salary and worked much less hard for it.

The weeks to come will tell me how much of this is specific to Mumbai. All the guidebooks and everyone you speak to will tell you that Mumbai is to India as New York is to the US or London is to the UK: big, cosmopolitan, and completely unrepresentative of the country as a whole.

There’s too much more to say. The perplexing choice of the Indians to, when selecting a car on which to model their taxis, choose an Italian model which rusts faster than it drives and breaks down on average every 75 metres. Or the Hindu festival earlier this week during which married women fast for the day to give thanks to and for their husbands (it goes without saying that there’s no corresponding festival in which the men fast; it was men, after all, who invented the festival in the first place). Or the endemic corruption. Or the artificially low unemployment rate brought about by having men in uniform standing around everywhere with nothing at all to do. Or the fact that recent and rapid economic development means that everyone owns a mobile, but nobody has ever had a landline.

There’ll be time for all of this – but for now, I’ll sign off by recounting that on my second day, while travelling to the hospital where I was put up by a physician I met, I saw a deaf man and a blind man crossing the road together. It reminded me, naturally, of Gene Wilder and Richard Prior in “See no evil, Hear no evil” – the blind man listening for sounds and signing to the deaf man, and the latter guiding the former through the traffic. And it occurred to me, for perhaps the hundredth time that day – as it has every day of this journey – that if everyone showed that sort of solidarity with one another, the world would be an even more extraordinary place than it already is.

“I’ll Never Do It Again”?

What crap.