through a difficult phase, with her mother possibly having an affair. I nodded and grunted the occasional approval, too dizzy with lust to offer any sensible comments. I mean, if her
After a while, dusk started falling and the view from the train became incredibly beautiful. Endless paddy- fields stretched to the horizon, dotted with children, water buffalo and rice farmers. The scene was bathed in soft light, and there was a wonderfully peaceful atmosphere of people finishing off their day’s work and heading home. As the train clattered slowly through village after village, paddy-fields drifted by in an endlessly varied and beautiful jigsaw, with many children waving at us as we passed.
Sam had a dual-headphone Walkman, and she put on Pink Floyd’s
If you had seen what I saw, you would know that the Indian countryside was designed with a Pink Floyd soundtrack in mind. It really was. When God put together those paddy-fields, he was definitely listening to ‘Comfortably Numb.’
On our first morning in Bangalore, I got up for an early breakfast, which I planned to eat as slowly as I could in order to make sure that I would be in the dining room when Sam and Claire came down. This would allow me to ask casually what they were up to, then with any luck to spend the day with them, all without coming across as over-keen.
Streams of other travellers came and went, while I sat there over my omelette and tea, waiting for the two girls.
It was almost lunch-time when I finally gave up. Everyone had disappeared from the hotel, so I prepared myself for a boring day on my own in Bangalore. Then, on my way out, I bumped into them.
‘Where’ve you been?’ I said, sounding more eager than I intended.
‘Oh, we got up early to go to the railway station,’ said Claire.
‘Right,’ I replied, my heart suddenly sinking. ‘You bought tickets?’
‘Yeah,’ said Sam, ‘we don’t really want to spend any time here.’
I waited for them to tell me where they were off to, but neither of them said anything. A long and sickly silence opened up.
Sam, blinking with embarrassment and even a hint of pity, eventually spoke. ‘What are you up to today, then?’
‘Just… looking round town.’
I pointed to the bag over my shoulder, as if this explained my point further.
‘Right.’
There was another silence.
‘Bye,’ I said, and wandered off. I didn’t even wait for them to answer. As I walked away, I could feel them standing still and guiltily watching me go. I didn’t know whether to head right or left when I hit the street, but I just wanted to get out of sight, so I turned on instinct and walked blindly into the crowds.
Suddenly, I didn’t want to be in India, I didn’t want to be in Bangalore, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near Sam or Claire. I had no interest in seeing anything, buying anything, or eating anything. I wanted to be at home. I wanted to watch telly. I wanted Marmite on toast, friends, a sofa,
For a long time I walked without even knowing where I was going. In the back of my mind, I was looking for a place where I’d be able to hide from the crowds and forget how far from home I was. The rest of my brain was filled with the thought that there was still a month to go before I was due to fly back. A whole month.
It was a shock to realize how much my happiness had depended on a couple of people I hardly knew. It wasn’t as if I wouldn’t be able to see them again, or even as if I didn’t know where they were going. They were going to Kerala, and everybody’s first stop in Kerala was Cochin. If I wanted to, I could probably even have got a place on the same train as them. But they had clearly made a point of trying to get rid of me. This meant that if I wanted to salvage any pride, I had to spend at least another couple of days in Bangalore and would have to try and ignore them when I got to Cochin. I was still going to go there – that much was certain. I wasn’t going to miss out, just because
The gutting thing was, I really thought Sam had liked me. The other gutting thing was that Bangalore was a dump. Oh, and there was also the small matter of me being utterly pissed off with the entire continent, and wanting to eat Marmite on toast in front of
Eventually, I stumbled across a restaurant called MacSpeed. I poked my head round the door and saw a kind of Wimpy Burger Bar
God was clearly looking down, and had done his best to provide comfort food for depressed, lonely, homesick little me. I ordered a lamb burger and chips (no beef, obviously), with a Campa Cola on the side, and ice-cream for afters. I couldn’t even be bothered to worry about what kind of water was in the ice-cream. I was giving myself a treat and would eat exactly what I wanted to cheer myself up.
This was my first meat for weeks, and it tasted absolutely delicious, as did the chips, the Coke (despite a hint of ammonia in the aftertaste) and the ice-cream. If I shut my eyes, I could almost imagine myself back home.
I was three-quarters of the way through my lamb burger when it occurred to me that I’d travelled more than two thousand miles all over the country and had yet to see a single sheep. The question of which animal had been mashed up to produce my burger suddenly became a rather pressing mystery. Whatever it was, it wasn’t sheep, and it almost certainly wasn’t cow. Precisely which varieties of red meat with burger potential remained, was a difficult one.
Pig? No. It definitely didn’t taste of pork.
Goat? Possibly. There were plenty of goats around.
Dog? No. Not dog. Please. Not dog.
Leaving the remaining corner of burger on the side of my plate, I finished the chips and rinsed my mouth thoroughly with the ammonia-flavoured Coke.
On the way back to the hotel, a curious thing happened. I was walking down the street, feeling a touch anxious about my meal, when I suddenly found myself puking in the gutter.
Having voided my stomach, I stood up and looked around self-consciously to see if I had provoked a reaction. A few metres down the road, an emaciated sadhu with grey dreadlocks was meditating on the pavement. On the other side of the street, a fully soaped-up man was washing himself from a bucket of water, and right in front of him a man trying to transport huge bundles of steel on the back of two donkeys was having an argument with a mango-seller who wouldn’t move his pile of fruit out of the way.
A vomiting Westerner, apparently, didn’t stand out. No one seemed to notice or care what I had done, other than a small dog who trotted over and started lapping up the puddle at my feet. I wiped my mouth with a T-shirt sleeve, and leaving my burger behind for the cannibalistic dog, continued back to the hotel, stopping on the way to buy a bottle of mineral water.
That evening, I was standing over the toilet doing a pre-bed piss, when I let a fart escape, only to feel an odd sensation in my boxer shorts. My underwear suddenly felt heavier. This was followed by the sensation of a warm, wet blob sliding down the back of my thigh. Realizing what had happened, I clamped shut my sphincter and
