Are You Experienced?

and bitching about me. I was determined not to dream about how the three of them would have endless fun while I withered away in lonely hotel rooms on my own, and I tried to make myself think about something else. The subject which kept on rushing in to fill the void, however, was even worse, with my brain insisting on doing mental calculations of how many days I’d done, and how many days I had left in India. It seemed of crucial importance to work out whether or not I was more than half-way through, but I didn’t really want to think about that either, because there was definitely still a long time left, and it seemed likely that I was going to find myself unable to enjoy any of it.

The only way to stop my mind swirling with awful thoughts was to try and empty it altogether. This proved almost impossible, with images of Liz, Fee, Caz, Jeremy, my mum and bizarre Asian sex acts in Udaipur Railway Retiring Rooms perpetually filling my brain. I thought back, straining to remember if I had eavesdropped any tips on meditation from the three girls, but nothing useful came to mind.

I ended up just repeating ‘void void void’ over and over again in my head, so obsessively that it blotted out any other word, and concentrating all my remaining powers on trying to visualize an empty box. I kept on getting distracted by the feeling that it might actually be working, but eventually deduced that I must have fallen asleep from the fact that I was waking up and it was light.

With the new day, I found myself feeling marginally happier and took breakfast in the station restaurant. There

was

something a bit cool about being on your own. If nothing else, I felt brave, and that at least was a positive feeling. Watching all the other people eating in groups, I decided that I must look slightly mysterious. That also felt good. I’d never really felt mysterious before. And, to cap it all, my omelette genuinely tasted nice. Yes – this was a good day. Yesterday had been a bad day, but this, I decided, was going to be a good day.

It wasn’t. My compartment from Udaipur to Ahmedabad was shared with a kid who screamed incessantly, a girl who ate incessantly, a boy who hit the kid who screamed incessantly, their mother who hit the kid for complaining he was being hit by his brother, and her husband, who looked as if he wanted to kill himself. They were so noisy and took up so much space that I spent the entire eleven hours feeling like an unwanted social worker in a psychotic family’s living room.

Ahmedabad station stank of shit – literally – and I had to reach new pinnacles of threatening and lying behaviour before succeeding in buying my onward ticket, eventually using the pretext that my wife was about to give birth in a Bombay hospital.

This train finally set off long after dark. I was feeling fragile, so as soon as the train had started moving, I climbed up to my top bunk and tried to forget where I was. I usually left my rucksack under the lowest bed, but with no one around I trusted, the only way to make sure that nothing could get stolen was to use it as a pillow. This made my feet stick out from the bottom of the bed, and I ended up kicking most of the people walking up and down the carriage in the head. Some of them got a bit stroppy about this and tried to get me to move my bag, but I pretended to be either stupid or asleep, or both.

As I dozed off, I vaguely remembered someone telling me that you should always sit cross-legged because it’s a dire insult to show the soles of your feet to a Hindu. I thought this might have something to do with them being reluctant to have sweaty socks wiped on their forehead, so I made a token attempt to curl up. After all, it would be pretty stupid to get lynched purely because you were trying to avoid getting robbed.

I woke at dawn and did a quick scout of the train for other travellers, but couldn’t find anyone. I was in no mood to try and talk to Indians and spent most of the morning hiding up in my bunk feeling lonely and depressed.

Around lunch-time, the train pulled to a stop in the middle of nowhere, and after a while people started getting out. I hopped down from my bed and followed the crowd out of the door. We were high on an embankment above a swamp, with one other track next to us. I had assumed that people were leaving the train to try and find out what was happening, but it turned out that everyone was contentedly stretching their legs, smoking, chatting or pissing. I wandered around for a while, and a few people smiled and waved at me. I waved back, but tried to avoid talking to them, because you always ended up going through the same old ‘Hello, what is your good name? Where are you from? Are you married?’ crap with every single person, and I just couldn’t face it any more.

Then, after a few minutes, I spotted another white guy, right up at the front of the train, near the first-class carriages. He was sitting on a rail, looking down the track towards me. Thank God! At last – someone to talk to!

I was almost jumping on the spot with delight, and gave him a huge wave. Although he must have seen my greeting, he didn’t acknowledge me, but simply turned his head and looked away, out over the swamp. As I approached him, almost at a run, he still didn’t turn towards me, even though he would have heard my feet crunching on the stones.

I sat on the rail next to him, and just his presence by my side made me feel calmer.

‘Hi,’ I said.

He waited for a while, as if he was hoping that I’d go away, then, eventually, he turned towards me and said hello. Then he looked at me. Properly looked at me. Like he was examining my face for something.

I couldn’t think of anything to do other than examine him back. He was quite old – in his mid-thirties or something – and had wiry hair forced down into a side parting, with a dense but short beard. His eyes had a slightly disturbing look in them: glazed over, but still somehow piercing. And he wasn’t wearing the usual traveller gear, but was actually dressed in trousers and a shirt.

‘Where are you from?’ I said.

‘Bangalore,’ he said, then he watched my reaction. I tried not to have one, but it didn’t really work. I wanted to know where he was really from. While I was trying to find a way of asking that wouldn’t sound racist, he said, ‘Manchester’. Then, after a while, to fill the gap, he said, ‘Reuters’. I nodded slowly, and to finally cement the hole, he said, ‘Journalist’.

‘Right.’

This was a chatty kind of guy. I wanted to tell him that he’d obviously spent too much of his life writing telegrams and should learn some social skills, but he wasn’t the kind of person you could say that to. In fact, he didn’t seem to be the kind of person you could say anything to.

It was ages since I’d spoken to a proper… you know, adult. Someone with a job. Other than the Indians – they’ve got jobs, obviously – I just mean someone from back home. A European with a job. Someone doing something real.

This fact somehow made my mind go blank, and I couldn’t think of anything to say to him.

Eventually, I said, ‘Where are you heading?’

‘To cover the strike,’ he said.

I nodded, as if this was an answer I understood.

He kept looking at me, so I carried on nodding.

‘Do you know which strike I’m talking about?’

‘The strike?’

‘Yes. The strike.’

‘Um… I haven’t read a paper for a few days, actually.’

He snorted. ‘Congress have been arguing with the B J P over Harijan quotas in higher education, and the Maharashtran Sabha has been unable to pull off a conclusive vote against the threatened general strike. It’s probably all going to blow up quite soon.’

‘Right.’ I nodded vociferously.

‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘Look. I’ll start again. Congress…’

I tried to arrange my features to say, ‘Go on…’, but they somehow still had ‘What the fuck?’ stamped across them.

‘Congress?’ he said.

‘Ummm…’

‘You don’t know what Congress is?’

‘Yes I do.’

‘What is it?’