‘And no one could call you ignorant.’
‘That’s it. I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.’
I stood up and stomped back towards my compartment. After a reasonable distance had opened up between us, I turned round for one last look at him. ‘AND I’M NOT FROM SURREY,’ I yelled.
He gave me a huge grin and an enormous wave. ‘ENJOY THE REST OF YOUR HOLIDAY!’ he shouted. ‘DON’T FORGET TO PUT YOUR BIG TRIP DOWN ON THE CV!’
I gave him the finger.
The locomotive soon gave a hoot, and everyone scrambled back on board with the train already crawling into motion. I looked around the compartment for someone to talk to. Determined to prove the journalist wrong, I decided to make an effort with one of the locals. A guy diagonally opposite me had a couple of pens sticking out of his top pocket and looked reasonably educated, so it seemed like a fair assumption that he would speak English. I smiled at him.
‘Hello, my friend,’ he said.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘What is your good name?’
‘David.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘England.’
‘Are you married?’
‘No.’
‘What is your profession?’
‘I’m a student.’
‘Oh, very good.’
Here we go, I thought. Same old crap.
I responded with a few token questions, and before I knew it I was stuck as the audience for a
In Bombay, I only needed to take one sniff of the city to realize that I couldn’t face staying, and walked to the nearest travel agent to buy a ticket for the first bus to Goa (quicker than the train at a mere sixteen hours, according to The Book). The bus was due to leave in two hours, actually left in four hours, and took three more hours to reach the edge of Bombay. Once we reached the open road, it was already after midnight, so I decided to try and fall asleep just as the driver put a tape of Hindi musicals on at top volume. This tape played all night, periodically interrupted by me standing up and shouting at him to turn it down. When I did this, everyone on the bus stared at me as if I was mad. Apparently, it was common practice for bus drivers to play music to help keep themselves awake while they drove through the night. At one of our innumerable stops, I bought a box of biscuits from a road-side stall so that I could tear off strips of cardboard in order to improvize a pair of ear-plugs, which, it turned out, didn’t make any difference to the noise, kept on falling out, and gave me sore ears. I also ate all the biscuits in one go, just to try and take my mind off things, which made me feel sick. The bus broke down half-way through the following day, and I ended up hitching to Panjim (the capital of Goa) in the back of a truck, with a pile of axles for my seat. In a delirium of anger, frustration, loneliness and arse pain, I just about managed to face the one final leg of the journey, which was to take a local bus out of the city to the beach. I didn’t care where it was going, or which resort I ended up in, as long as there was a beach.
I had clearly been wrong about the joys of travelling. Getting from one place to another was, without any doubt at all, the crap bit. The journeys, quite clearly, were not the point – particularly if you tried to do six little- finger-widths of India in one go.
The monsoon travels in a wide band northwards through India. As it gets started in the Himalayas, it will be tailing away down at the southern tip of India. I had caught the beginnings of it up north, but now, having travelled one thousand two hundred miles south, I found myself in the middle of the country, in the middle of the monsoon.
I had ended up in one of the largish resorts, called Colva Beach, but at first sight it seemed deserted. There were still plenty of Indians around, but I couldn’t really make out any other travellers. And most of the hotels seemed to be closed.
I found one place from The Book that was open and took a room. Even though it was only mid afternoon, I went instantly to bed.
After a monolithic sleep, I woke up well into the next morning and took my first proper look at the place. There were lots of hotels and bars, but mostly with the shutters up. I wandered down a Tarmac street dusted with sand, which led me from the hotel, past a deserted town square and on to the beach.
The beach was amazing. Miles of empty yellow sand, palm trees along the shore, and… well, the sea. The sky was overcast, and the air was a little humid, but this really didn’t seem like a good enough reason to close the whole place down. Everything looked fine to me. It was beautiful. I could have a great time here. There was nothing wrong with it at all. Apart from the fact that I was the only person there.
I wandered up and down the beach for a while, but it wasn’t long before I got bored. Not yawn-bored, more what’s-the-point-of-being-alive bored. I sat in the sand, looked out at the ocean and had a good rummage around my emotions. Here I was, in a beautiful place, utterly calm, unwinding after a long and difficult journey, relishing a well-earned rest with no one telling me what to do, no stress, a comfortable and cheap hotel room, and no Indians hassling me. But although I felt more relaxed, satisfied and confident than I had done since landing in India, I also felt more miserable than I could ever remember. An all-embracing loneliness squatted over me and gave me a strange feeling that my whole life was a sham and I was a tosser who didn’t have any real friends. I had got what I deserved. Isolation and misery. I was thousands of miles away from anyone who cared about me, and even the people who cared about me probably didn’t, because they had no idea where on earth I was. If I died tomorrow, no one would give a toss. And who could blame people for hating me, when I was a selfish, thoughtless, ignorant human being – an arsehole, a coward and a loser.
As I thought about this, I began to detect that a weirdly pleasurable edge had crept into my unhappiness. A faint masochistic thrill had appeared in my self-hatred, tinging the whole thing with a kind of bitter-sweet melancholia.
And when I saw a vision of myself, as if through a movie camera, sitting on this tropical beach, all on my own, with bitter-sweet melancholia etched on my features, I suddenly felt a surge of joy rush through my body. I was fucking cool. The whole scene could have been part of an aftershave advert. This was exactly what you were meant to do on your year off. This was it – this was the moment. I was finding myself.
I suddenly felt so elated that I almost started to cry, which seemed like a strange reaction, because they weren’t happy tears, they were what’s-the-point-of-being-alive tears. I instantly felt pissed off with myself for having spoilt the big moment by thinking about crying. From being pissed off, it was just a short hop back to being depressed, miserable, and hating myself again.
I decided that emotional rummaging was a bad idea. It didn’t really get me anywhere. But at least I’d found myself, which was a bonus.
I spent a week in Goa, since I couldn’t face taking on another journey, and gradually discovered that there were a few other travellers around. I never really got very far with any of them, though. None of them were English, and they were all from that slightly older generation who, for some reason, look down on students. I spoke to them all, and on the surface they were friendly enough, but I couldn’t help feeling patronized by them.
There was a little gang of Aussie blokes who were quite a good laugh, but they were all well into their twenties, and had an annoyingly macho way of being friendly that I found a bit intimidating. They also immediately
