Kevin and I in India Read online

  Charlie came to the rescue. He got rid of the pony-man, arranged to meet us later, and saw us onto a boat for the lake. Sculling out from the shore, we were followed for some distance by friendly Indians in other boats hollering ‘What is your name?’ and ‘Where are you coming from?’ but we soon rowed beyond them, and found a quiet spot on the far side of the wide lake, where we were not disturbed. For a very enjoyable hour, we sat back and relaxed while the cool breeze played on the calm, clear water and the warm sun played on the backs of our bald, polished skulls. Kevin said that this part of the lake reminded him of the Norfolk Broads.

  Back on land again, we went to the Liberty Cinema to see an entertaining film called Shaolin Temple. It was all about armed Buddhist monks reluctantly slaughtering half the local militia in order to save their temple. At the first break in the film, the lights came on, our caps came off to give our bald heads an airing, and the serried ranks of grinning Indians behind us gave a concerted shout of ‘Shaolin!’ – thinking we were Buddhist monks. Then they left the cinema, thinking that the break was an interval. But it wasn’t the interval at all, just the second reel being loaded. Everybody quickly piled back in the cinema again. And then, when the real interval came, nobody trusted it and everybody stayed rooted to their seats. Finally, when the film came to an end, they all got up again and made to leave the cinema, only to discover it wasn’t the end of the picture at all, so they had to wade back inside and sit down again until it had really finished.

  Having returned to the YMCA for supper, we met a young English couple called Tim and Jill. They had also recently returned from Thekkidy Wildlife Reserve. Whilst there, they had decided to avoid the recommended guided forest trek (the one where all you see is wildlife droppings) and instead opted to go exploring on their own. They were just wondering where all the animals were, when Jill had to stop and lean on a tree to get a splinter out of her foot. Only it wasn’t a tree she was leaning on, but a baby elephant. And its mother was standing right next to it, looking not all pleased. Tim and Jill fled hotfoot back to their lodge. This was the luxurious Forest Lake Hotel, and here they recovered from their shock – casually observing elephants safely watering on the other side of a deep ditch – along with all the other guests in the hotel. Then they noticed that two bull elephants had materialised on their side of the ditch. And both of them suddenly gave a crazed bellow and thundered towards the terrorised guests. Everyone scrambled back up to their huts, where they hid quaking while the maddened elephants tore up the lodge’s garden shrubbery, battered down a couple of trees, and made repeated thundering assaults on the building itself. Tiring of this, the massive beasts had contented themselves with patrolling round the lodge for the rest of the night – peering in windows and snuffling through doors – while Tim and Jill (and every other guest) lay shivering in fear beneath their bedclothes.

  February 22nd

  The V.K. Bakery in Ooty’s Commercial Road serves just about the best cakes and patisseries in India. As we arrived this morning, a batch of fresh mutton puff-pastry rolls had just emerged from the ovens. We rapidly disposed of these, then moved on to a piping-hot loaf each, followed by some appetising chocolate cake. We ate continuously for two hours. I had never seen Kevin looking so happy.

  To work off this excess of food, we bussed up to the nearby Dodabetta Height, took in the marvellous views of Ooty Town and surroundings from the summit, and then commenced a long two-hour stroll down by foot. This was a delightful walk, the cool breeze sending shimmers of sparkling light through the coppery-gold forest glades and rustling gently through the brilliant green foliage of roadside pine and evergreens. Further down, the road opened up into a dry, dusty clearing, with gangs of local workers chipping away busily at the side of the mountain, building safer highways. On the stepped farmland below them, other families of workers were tilling the soil and planting crops. As we passed, they all looked up to give us a smiling wave of welcome.

  The only blot on this calm scene was the regular succession of noisy tourist coaches blaring up the mountain passes. Air-horns on at full blast, and egged on by their loads of cheering Indian tourists, these insensitive juggernauts tore up the hill like there was no tomorrow. Kevin became so piqued with them that he lay in wait and gave one of them a sudden shrill blast on the plastic green police-whistle he’d bought earlier in the bazaar. The victim driver was so stunned by this unexpected rearguard action that he almost plunged his busload of singing Indians right off the edge of the cliff.

  We returned to the V.K. Bakery to meet Charlie. He came bouncing down the road just as we were seeing off another helping of chocolate cake. We took him to a nearby Chinese restaurant, and treated him to a feast of scrambled egg on toast.

  Charlie was an eighteen-year-old Brahmin youth, whose neat and smart appearance, coupled with his academic, inquiring mind, testified to his high-caste status. Not only was he a talented amateur artist, but he also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Indian history and mythology. Having heard in Mahabilapuram that I was an eminent English professor (someone’s idea of a joke), he felt bound to share the entire fruits of his knowledge with me. It was indeed fortunate that I was interested to hear about Hindu gods and goddesses, because Charlie was of a very determined disposition. He was going to tell me all about them, whether I cared to hear or not.

  I was particularly taken with the parable he quoted from one of India’s foremost poets. This parable, Charlie told us, explained the fundamental reason for India’s continuing poverty.

  ‘In this poem there is a frog,’ he recounted, ‘and the frog lives and dies in a beautiful lotus blossom – never seeing, never knowing, that there is rich honey in it. He lives instead by eating mud and insects. And he dies never knowing of the rich bed of honey he has been sitting on his whole life.’

  ‘This parable,’ Charlie went on to explain, ‘is meaning that we people in India do not understand or see the good things around us, or the wealth of our heritage and culture. Instead, we are always looking and searching for bad things only. Thus, India is eating the same meal of bad things for thousands of years. She is still squatting in the mud and dirt of her ignorance. And, worst of all, because her people are not seeing the wealth of their own knowledge and culture, they are still allowing foreigners to steal the fruit of it!’

  We eventually steered Charlie off the subject of philosophy, and got him talking about his plans for the future. He told us he was presently doing correspondence course studies, in preparation for a ‘restaurant’ he was going to establish by Ooty Lake. We asked him how he expected to set up a restaurant on wages of just Rs500 (about £40) a month. He bent forward and told us in a surreptitious whisper how he was making Rs400 ‘extra’ a month by overcharging people for Christ Eucalyptus Oil.

  Charlie’s single-minded preoccupation with his restaurant plan rendered him quite deaf to any suggestions we might have concerning it. Kevin tried to advise him on the best way to cook fast-food chips, but Charlie wasn’t listening. He was quite impervious to any new ideas. He was going to do it his way. The only thing that worried me about his plans was his constant talk of the ‘cart’ he would be bringing up from the plains for his new restaurant. Kevin and I spent much of the evening trying to work out what this ‘cart’ involved. We eventually discovered that it wasn’t a cart at all, but a mobile van. Charlie was planning to set up India’s very first five-star mobile snack bar. And with his kind of total dedication, who was going to stop him?

  February 23rd

  Today we moved northward to the ‘incense’ city of Mysore. Here, we found lodgings at the popular Durbar Lodge. Charging just twenty rupees (£1.50) each, this place was a real find. Not only did our room have a balcony giving a fine view of the streets and bazaars below, but the lodge had two attached restaurants. Visiting the downstairs one, we came across another deliciously mis-spelt menu – offering SLICED CHI (chips) WITH VEGTABEWES, CHINEES CHOPSY CHICKEN, and (our favourite) EGG-N-BRAIN. The beverages on o
ffer were equally strange: they included BORN VITA and PAIN APPLE JUICE.

  The other restaurant was on the roof. We had our evening meal here, listening to tinny western music playing in the background. We were just looking down and commenting on how bright and busy the street-life below was, when we caught sight of the beggar woman. She was lying in the middle of the road, inviting death under the wheels of all the traffic roaring past, and she held a small baby in her arms. If this was not disturbing enough, local people were dodging speeding buses and lorries to drop a few coins into her outstretched hand, and then simply wandering off again.

  It was the child which finally moved Kevin to action. From the start, we had both agreed never to intervene in the customs or disputes of this country, not only because we may well be misinterpreting the situation but also because we had heard of Indians turning violent when foreigners attempted to interfere in their private business. But with the life of a helpless child at stake, all such considerations were abandoned.

  ‘I’ve got to do something about this!’ declared Kevin. And, rising suddenly from his seat, he stormed off down into the street.

  Following on, I found him a minute later standing in the middle of a large crowd. He was soundly berating the beggar woman for exposing her baby to certain death in the traffic. But she just smiled back sweetly at him, and remained laid out in the middle of the road. Fortunately, just as the crowd were starting to turn nasty against Kevin, a local Indian doctor chanced along. He calmly lifted the child off the dusty tarmac and deposited it safely on a nearby kerb. Satisfied, Kevin returned back to the restaurant.

  February 25th

  Early this afternoon, we caught the train from Mysore up to Londa. The journey, at least in the early stages, was very pleasant. We were sharing a compartment with a young Indian commerce student, his sister, and her two-year-old child. The sister was nicknamed ‘Mogadon’ by Kevin because the train journey lasted twenty-six hours, and she managed to sleep through twenty-four of them. Also in our compartment was a young Portuguese couple who wanted us to visit Francis Xavier’s remains (or rather, what remains of his remains, since many of his bones have been swiped by ‘holy relic’ hunters!) in Old Goa.

  As we headed north, mile upon mile of rich, arable farmland came into view from the train window. Hours passed with us seeing a bare handful of Indian people working the land. In this deserted hinterland, at least, there was evidently no risk of overpopulation for some considerable time.

  At 6.30pm we stopped at Mandargere. And stayed stopped. A train ahead had been derailed, and we were told to expect a long delay. The delay was to last nine hours, but I had no foreknowledge of that and began conversing with a couple of curious schoolchildren staring in my window. What a terrible mistake! Before I knew what had happened, my audience had increased to twenty-eight people. They had all collected to ask me what my name was, and would I play them some disco music on my Walkman. For a time, all this attention was marvellous stuff for the ego, but I soon came to feel like a zoo exhibit. Being stared at from behind the bars of the compartment window for hours on end made me feel like some rare caged animal newly brought to captivity. My persistent fan club simply wouldn’t go away. I went to look at my reflection in the train toilet’s cracked mirror, sure that somehow I had acquired Kevin’s likeness to Sean Connery. But no, I hadn’t. I was at a complete loss to explain my sudden unwelcome popularity.

  I returned to the compartment and found that my vast audience, far from going away, had actually increased. Now there were thirty-two grinning faces staring in at me. I pulled the window blind down to indicate that the show was over. But when I pulled it up again ten minutes later, they were still all there, patiently waiting for the curtain to rise on another performance. Kevin smirked that he could have made a fortune selling tickets outside on the platform. But he wasn’t smirking for long. He soon had problems of his own.

  Kevin’s problems came in one small package – a loud, precocious seven-year-old boy who had just finished driving his father to distraction in the adjoining compartment, and who now came over to inflict the same fate on the hapless Kevin. We nicknamed him ‘Mowgli’ – he had just the right kind of irksome, wide-eyed, jug-eared, clean-cut and generally over-curious enthusiasm that immediately endears itself to hungry jungle animals and immediately sends adult human beings flying for cover.

  Mowgli took an instant shine to Kevin. He started off on a pleasantly low key, bringing over all his pictures of racing cars, his calendar with racing cars all over it, and his toy racing car for Kevin to admire. But then, without any warning at all, he swung into top gear and accused Kevin of being a wealthy Iranian.

  ‘You are Iranian!’ declared the obnoxious youngster. ‘And you have lots of money!’

  Kevin gaped at him open-mouthed. ‘I am not Iranian!’ he replied hotly. ‘And I am not rich! I live in England and I own just one bicycle and two Beatles records. These are my only possessions.’

  ‘No! No! You are rich!’ shouted Mowgli, jumping up and down on his seat in his thrill of the hunt. ‘You are rich, and you are Iranian man pretending to be coming from England! I know!’

  It was now 9pm, and I took a peek through the window blind, but my fan club was still there, silently waiting. What with this, and the arrival of Mowgli, I wondered what else could happen? No sooner had I made room for this idle speculation, then something else did. An unwholesome individual with a greasy smile slid into our compartment, and sat down next to me. Grinning all the while, he began playfully fingering the combination lock on my rucksack and expertly ran his hands over my belongings to assess their possible worth. I was just beginning to lose my cool when he came to the end of his inventory, flashed me a last brilliant smile, complimented me on having such a strong lock on my bags, and went off in search of some easier prey.

  By this point, my nerves were beginning to crack. I felt surrounded. I didn’t even dare go out onto the platform to buy a banana, for fear of being mobbed by the crowd of devoted acolytes outside. I sent Kevin to make the purchase instead, and immediately regretted it. Now I was stuck with Mowgli.

  ‘Where is your friend?’ enquired the awesomely tedious brat, referring to Kevin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied thinly.

  ‘Where is your friend?’ came the same demand.

  I replied that I didn’t know, and so he asked me again. He seemed to think I was stowing Kevin away in hiding somewhere. For what reason, I couldn’t guess. What was so special about Kevin anyway? He didn’t really like racing cars, and if there was anyone who looked less like a rich Iranian than Kevin, I had yet to meet him.

  When Kevin reappeared, the frustrated youngster gave a shrill yelp of joy and pounced on him, sending my banana flying out of the window and into the hands of the waiting throng outside. They were so pleased at this unexpected token of my esteem that they rattled and knocked away on the blinded window for a further hour or two, in hope of more bananas, before finally going off to their beds.

  Before I at last drifted off to sleep myself, I listened to Kevin giving a lecture on economics to the eternally curious Mowgli. The little monster’s gurgles of delight as he absorbed this fresh store of knowledge sent my fragile nerves to the brink of total collapse. Mowgli seemed to know everything there was to know about everything. He did, however, have one vital gap in his encyclopaedic knowledge which he was determined to plug. He wanted to know the price of trousers in Iran.

  ‘How much cost your trousers in Iran?’ pressed the gruesome brat.

  Poor Kevin, by now worn down to a frazzle, eyed him wearily. He had long since given up denying he came from Iran (it simply wasn’t worth the trouble), but he felt he must make one last plea to the child’s better nature.

  ‘What does it matter how much trousers cost in Iran?’ he pleaded. ‘And why do you always want to know how much everything costs? After all, there’s a lot more to life than money!’

  Mowgli thought deeply for a moment
, and then brightly enquired ‘What?’

  Kevin groaned in despair, and rolled over to sleep.

  February 26th

  Kevin was still asleep when the insufferable Mowgli skipped back into our compartment this morning. He didn’t stay asleep much longer. Mowgli bent close to his ear and bellowed down it: ‘Wake UP! Wake UP! Train is not working! Train is not working because there is no engine attached!’

  I complimented Mowgli on his brilliant powers of deduction – the train had been stuck at Arsikere with no engine attached for the past two hours. Kevin, having started suddenly awake at Mowgli’s announcement and having banged his head on the top of his bunk, was not pleased at all. He met the child’s repeated requests for a letter from Iran with a low growl of displeasure. Only momentarily shaken, the incredible infant bounced back to plan our whole route home to England for us, using a beaten-up old atlas with racing cars all over it. It was only when we came to Hubli some hours later that Kevin managed to tear himself away, leaning out of the carriage window to load up a hatful of roasted peanuts handed over by the platform vendor. But even this caused problems.

  ‘Have you change for ten rupees?’ enquired Kevin of the vendor.

  ‘No change,’ came the brief reply.

  ‘No change! He has no change!’ echoed Mowgli dutifully, clapping his little hands in excitement. Kevin’s peanuts began quivering in his grasp, as he fought down his compulsion to do murder.

  It was shortly after Mogadon made her single, fleeting excursion into the world of wakefulness that her young baby’s green underpants dropped unexpectedly on Kevin’s head from the bunk above, reminding him that he was due a trip to the mirror. ‘Lend me your comb, will you?’ he said. I stared at him, disbelieving. ‘What hair?’ I enquired. ‘The hair on my head!’ he replied. ‘What hair on your head? I persisted. ‘You haven’t got any hair on your head! You’re bald, man! You’re just like me – as bald as the proverbial coot!’ But he wouldn’t believe me. He would have the comb, and go off to the mirror to see for himself. And when he returned (still bald), all he had to say for himself was: ‘I told you! I’ve got a really nice head of hair now! Yes, not at all bad for nine days...’