Are You Experienced?

‘I haven’t got any money yet, have I? It doesn’t exactly look like he takes traveller’s cheques.’

‘Just give him anything.’

‘Like what? A roll of loo paper? Yesterday’s

Guardian?’

She ignored me and got on the bus.

‘Munee. Munee.’

‘I haven’t got any.’

‘Munee.’

He was beginning to tug at my clothes now, and the crowd of onlookers was closing in.

‘Look, mate – I haven’t got any money yet. I have to go to a bank.’

‘MUNEE!’

I turned out my pockets to show him that I didn’t have any money, and out fell a whole load of English coins. He gave me an evil stare, then bent over to pick up the coins. There was a mini riot while several people scrabbled for the cash, so I sneaked away and got into the bus, hoping that I’d be out of sight before they realized that it was only English money.

During the bag episode all the seats had gone, and Liz was standing somewhere near the back. I went and joined her.

‘Just in time,’ I said.

Half an hour later, with the bus jammed full of people, the driver started revving the engine.

Half an hour after that, with the bus containing twice as many people as it had when I’d thought it was full, and with the man in the red turban still shouting at me through the window, we crawled out of the airport.

‘This is awful,’ I said.

‘What’s awful?’ said Liz.

‘This. Everything.’

‘What did you expect?’ she said, with an unforgiving glare.

‘Is this what it’s meant to be like?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘This is what we’ve come for?’

‘Yes. It’s India.’

‘Jesus. I don’t believe this.’

I suddenly felt as if my stomach had been filled with pebbles. This was all wrong. I’d come to the wrong place. I hadn’t even eaten anything yet, and I felt sick already – from the heat, the crowds, the claustrophobia – and pure blind fear.

What the hell had I done? Why had I come to this awful country? I was going to hate it. I already knew. There was no way I could possibly get used to any of this. And now I was stuck here.

This was bad. This was very bad.

J

After the bus dropped us off, we went to the Ringo Guest-House, which sounded cool, and was the first place mentioned in the Lonely Planet. It was a short walk from the bus-stop, down a side-street.

Not that our route bore much resemblance to what I’d call a street. There was no Tarmac for a start – just compacted mud which was thick with dust and dotted with green puddles, piles of rubbish and the odd cow-pat. Amazingly, most people were walking around in flip-flops.

I took a good look at the people, and they didn’t look anything like the Indians in England. It wasn’t that they looked

physically

different, or even that they were wearing weird clothes. There was something else I couldn’t put my finger on that looked completely alien. Something in the way they moved, and in their facial expressions. Whatever it was, it scared the shit out of me. And wherever I looked there were hundreds of them – shouting at each other, or shouting at me to ‘Take taxi’, ‘Eat best food’ or ‘Make international best rate telephone call’ – all of them jostling past, laughing, chatting, arguing, and generally swaggering around as if they owned the place.

*

The hotel was up a dark staircase, and consisted of a few double rooms positioned off a cramped roof courtyard. A man with a fleshy golf ball growing out of the side of his neck told us that there were no double rooms available, so we’d have to take beds in the dorm. He then led the way up a ladder to a higher corner of the roof, on which a corrugated-iron hut had been built.

The metal walls and roof turned the dorm into even more of an oven than the rest of the country was anyway. The room was crammed with beds, and as my eyes adjusted from the outside glare to the murky dormitory, I could pick out a few depressed-looking travellers lying around on their beds. They all looked so thin and miserable that you could almost have mistaken the place for a prison. A few of them were reading, one was asleep, and a couple were simply lying on their beds staring into space.

This did not look like a bunch of people having fun. Having escaped the insanely frantic streets, we had somehow stumbled on something worse: a kind of morgue like gloom. Although we stood there for what must have been several minutes, no one so much as turned to look at us. Whatever was going to happen to me, I did not want to end up like those people. I wanted to go home.

Attempting to gauge how long I was stuck in India – to sense what three months really felt like, I suddenly felt dizzy with despair.

‘What d’ you reckon?’ said Liz.

‘Grim.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Do you think we’ll get anywhere better?’

‘Maybe.’

‘We could always ask someone,’ I said.

‘The people here are bound to think this is the best place, or they wouldn’t be here, would they?’

‘I suppose so.’

The thought that this could be anyone’s idea of the best place in Delhi was depressing beyond belief. Due to the heat, however, wandering around with our backpacks until we found somewhere we liked simply wasn’t an option.

Liz fished the guidebook out of her pack, and we saw that there was one other recommended hotel in the area, called Mrs Colaço’s. The book described it as ‘basic, crowded and rather hard on the nerves,’ which didn’t sound particularly inviting, but it was the only one nearby that was mentioned, so we hauled ourselves through the hot, soupy air towards Mrs Colaço’s.

This had a marginally less spirit-crushing atmosphere than Ringo’s, and wasn’t quite so full of catatonic hippies. Again, there were no actual rooms available, but we gratefully took dormitory beds, relieved to have at last found somewhere to flop.

We flopped.

Lying on my hard bed, staring at the ceiling fan, which was rotating just slowly enough to have absolutely no effect on the surrounding air whatsoever, I realized that I had never really

been

hot before. I mean, I’d had hot skin, in the sun, and I’d got hot from running around, but I’d never had this strange sensation of feeling like a slab of meat cooking from the inside. I genuinely felt full of heat – as if my limbs and internal organs were huge, half-cooked lumps that I had to carry around with me. And the breath coming out of my nose felt like a miniature hot-air dryer blowing on the skin of my top lip.

How could people live like this? How could a country function in these conditions? How could so much air possibly reach such a temperature without heating up the entire planet?

We couldn’t unpack, since there was nowhere to put anything, so once we’d had a good flop, we didn’t really know what to do. I had always wondered what travellers did all day – and now I was sitting on a bed in Delhi,