Driving home from Heathrow, I felt almost as if I was seeing London for the first time. I was amazed by how clean it all was, how there were proper roads with pavements everywhere, how all the shops had enormous glass windows at the front, how the only animals were plump little dogs on leads, and how all the cars moved around as if they were in a road-safety film. No one seemed to be just hanging out – people were all marching around, purposefully going somewhere. Everyone was in their own little bubble, hidden behind glass, or a raincoat, or even just a fast walk.
And for some reason English number-plates all looked really silly. The whole place seemed more like a kind of Toy town than a city. There was something unrealistic about everything – as if it was all a parody of silly little England.
The first thing I did when I walked through the front door was to gulp down a glass of water straight from the tap. What a luxury! Mum offered to cook me whatever I wanted, and I asked for a steak with green beans and new potatoes. She instantly produced it all from the fridge and started cooking, saying that she’d known exactly what I’d want and had bought it all in advance.
While I ate, she asked me so many questions about the trip that I somehow failed to tell her anything. The minute I embarked on a story, she’d interrupt me after a couple of sentences to ask what I’d eaten, where I’d slept, how I’d washed my clothes, and all sorts of tedious crap which somehow stopped me from ever explaining what the trip had actually felt like. The more I talked, the less I seemed to explain anything. She just couldn’t understand what I was talking about. There was simply no point of contact between her world and mine. It was like trying to explain the rules of basketball to a jellyfish.
Before long, she lost interest and started telling me about everything that had happened at home since I left, none of which seemed to amount to anything. As far as I could tell, everything was exactly the same as before, and yet her version of the last three months took up almost as much time as mine. Watching her jabber away, I was amazed that she could talk at such length without it dawning on her how boring she was.
The steak, which was stunningly delicious, gave me stomach cramps. I hadn’t tried to digest anything that solid for months – in fact, my dog-burger was probably the only meal I’d eaten in India that had required any chewing.
I put a thumb in my mouth and did a quick check to see if my teeth were all still properly attached, then went for a stroll to try and walk off the stomach pain. The weather was simply gorgeous – a grey sky, with scudding clouds blotting out the sun, and a deliciously chilly wind that gave me goose-bumps on my arms. It was such a joy to be cold – to feel the crisp air in my throat and chest, with the wind stinging my cheeks, and my nose turning red. I stood still and took my first proper lungful of English air. Aahhh!
Trudging through the soggy grass of my local park, I was struck by the incredible greenness of everything. I’d become used to lurid food and brown landscapes, but suddenly everything was the other way round. Again, it all looked slightly unconvincing. Nothing felt quite real. I started touching and squeezing things for extra confirmation of their existence – plucking strands of grass, stroking a wet bench and twanging leaves from their branches.
On the way home from the park, I popped into my local corner shop for a bar of proper, real, English Dairy Milk chocolate. (You can get a version of the same thing in India, with the same wrapper, but it has the texture of pastry.) I had the usual ‘All right, mate, how’s things, Arsenal aren’t looking too good’ conversation with the guy behind the counter, then found myself asking him where he was from.
He gave me a weird look.
‘I’ve just been in India,’ I explained. ‘That’s why you haven’t seen me for a while.’
‘Oh, right!’ he said, smiling broadly. In fifteen years of using his shop I realized that I’d never particularly seen him smile before. ‘Gujarat,’ he said. ‘Originally my family’s from Gujarat.’
‘Cool. I only passed through Gujarat. What’s it like?’
‘Ah – very beautiful. The most beautiful place in the world. You shouldn’t ask me, though, I’m biased.’
‘When d’you come here, then?’
‘I was fourteen.’
‘Fourteen!’
‘Yeah. I go back once each year. To see my family.’
‘Right.’
‘Where did you visit, then?’
‘Oh, I flew to Delhi, then I went up to Himachal Pradesh…’
‘Aah – Himachal Pradesh is beautiful.’
‘Amazing. That bit was incredible. Then I went across to Rajasthan, down to Goa…’
‘By plane?’
‘Train and bus, mainly.’
‘You went from Rajasthan to Goa without flying? Are you crazy?’
‘I didn’t really know how far it was. I kind of regretted it, actually. Then I went down to Bangalore and on to Kerala.’
‘I’ve never visited the south. One day, maybe – but with work and children…’
‘It’s tough.’
‘Mmm.’
‘You should go. It’s beautiful.’
‘So I’ve been told.’
‘It really is amazing.’
‘Will you ever go back?’ he said.
‘Me?’
‘Yes.’
‘God – I haven’t really thought about it. You know – it’s hard work travelling there. It’s not exactly relaxing. But… maybe in a few years… if I get another chance. Yeah, I wouldn’t mind going back.’
Our conversation tailed away, and I wandered outside feeling oddly perturbed that I was already saying I wanted to go back to India. After only a few hours in England, all the unpleasant parts of my trip were tumbling from my memory. Rationally, I could still just about weigh things up and remember that for the majority of the time I’d been miserable, but I felt so happy that I’d done it, and had survived, that my positive emotions were already beginning to swamp everything else. In my mind, the trip was turning itself into an amorphous
All my contradictory feelings were passing through a filter which was picking out anything unpleasant or painful. I could already sense that I was going to end up with clear, uncomplicated, positive memories. My journey round India was already reducing itself into just another person’s ‘amazing experience’.
I’d been home for a couple of days when I got a phone call from James. There was such a lot to say and, more importantly, such a lot to avoid saying, that I kept our phone conversation short and arranged to meet up in a pub later. I didn’t mention Liz, and hoped she wouldn’t come, but I noticed him using the word ‘we’ where he ought
