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.