A Western Oriental Guy Sees the Light

By Kris Kingsland

I´m half-Indian, but not so you´d know it, and it was time to redress a lifetime of cultural neglect. I barely knew India or my family out there. And so, for £160, I flew to India, intending to stay for three months. I came back after a year of adventure.

An 8,000 km roundtrip on £20!

India assaults the senses, the heat and dust, the smells of spices, incense, sweat and dung, the blinding colours, the sound of a billion people - enchanting and terrifying - the culture shock hitting you like a sledgehammer.

Indian culture is ancient and diverse, where the extraordinary meets the mundane in the land of extreme contrasts. A caste system still exists, restricting cultural evolution. Though an out-dated concept, the untouchables - are outcasts from ´normal´ society because their ancestors committed heinous deeds. They get a very raw deal, but this is slowly improving. Hindu weddings are usually gaudy events and marriages are usually arranged. They are almost never between castes. There´s no social security, so people have big, close-knit families so their children can provide for them in their old age which is a revered state. This environment generates a strange blend of generosity and tolerance coupled with materialism and a distrust of strangers (even from the next state). Language is a problem - though everyone has some English - though not the kind you may have heard before...

A good adventurer travels light, leaving unnecessary baggage at home. This includes preconceptions and hang-ups. Do pack a decent guidebook, an open mind, fresh enthusiasm and a reservoir of gumption. With this in mind, I set off for the realm of the ancient Indo-Europeans!

I arrived in Goa - hippie hotspot and Mecca to New Age travellers. There I stayed with family and friends, who helped me to acclimatise. Until 1963 Goa belonged to the Portuguese and their passing is still greatly lamented by the Goans. Mostly catholic, the place has a Mediterranean feel about it, and is much more liberated than many other parts of India. This was a boon, as the moment you step off the plane, you march into another world.

During my stay, I tuned into the culture: learning how to survive, what to say, eat, drink, wear, and how to shop, travel, & keep clean (not easy in 40° C with water available only between 6-8am)... Experience soon taught me the do´s and don´ts - and hardest of all - when to be charitable and when to be tough-minded.

Many people that I encountered on my travels, seemed to thrive on emotion. It doesn´t matter what the issue is, or what is done about it, as long as you love or hate it and make a lot of noise. It doesn´t do to offend others - easily done when you´re naïve (NB religion is sensitive and sex taboo)! Tourists are beleaguered by genuine beggars, and often robbed blind by professional conmen who sell overpriced junk or feign illness and beg... By the time I´d worked all this out, I´d been accepted, along with the Goan team, to go to the All India Karate Championship in Darjeeling. It was an 8,000 km trip and cost me about £20!

My team-mates were all poor fishermen and we got amazing deals - fine ´cos I was broke. I crammed a bag with bare-essentials; everyone else took everything else. My team-mates knew what they were doing. The logic being that you can find the essentials almost everywhere, but rarely the luxuries (at least I had my towel)! Clocks are set to IST - Indian Stretchable Time, and thus we left 3 hrs late (bang on schedule)...

An awful 17 hours followed, in a cramped, dirty bus with no suspension, surrounded by everyone else´s luggage. We´d stop for ten minutes every four hours or so and disappear into the bushes or buy steaming glasses of sweet tea from tiny road-side shacks. People rarely risked eating - they´d brought tiffin tins and the wealthier you were the more you had to keep eating. Another bonus was the non-stop Hindi film music - same tape, twelve times... We arrived in Bombay before dawn, which was cold, dark and ghastly. In a convoy, we took auto-rickshaws (three-wheeled motorised cabs) and eventually rented two tiny rooms between twelve of us!

Shell-shocked and frazzled, I went to meet a friend who I´d first met at a Goan ´full-moon beach party´. The usual street vagabonds and weirdoes came up to talk. They like me as I’m polite (hence gullible) and don’t shout ‘go away’. A ‘priest’ came up and tied a red cord around my wrist, gave me some sweets and a rose, anointed my forehead, and finally blessed me.

He avoided my gaze and repeated himself. "Whoa there brother, I´m Indian - five rupees." I thrust the note at him. Sighing, he took it, and waved as he stalked away. I think if I´d really been a local I´d have told him to shove off earlier!

I was late, and ran to make up some time. Sixty seconds later, a minute boy accosted me, keeping pace easily.
"Please sir, my little brother is hungry - he needs milk. Please buy some (pricey!) powdered milk for us."
<Oh hell - another beggar...>
"We need milk, sir."
My policy is to give only to the very needy old, stooped, crippled, and limbless. Not Lilliputian athletes... Despite this, I was being persuaded, when a pigeon crapped on my wrist - just above the cord!

<Great - British luck to match the Hindu...>

My sympathetic streak was off-lined as I quickly rinsed my arm. I had trouble doing this; the people in the cinema outside which this happened didn´t want to let me use their bathroom. I had to reason with them considerably, whilst making sure the kid´s hands stayed away from my cash. Then the moli bled red dye, staining my wrist. When I returned the urchin was still pleading when an old man turned to me.

I saw my friend and escaped ASAP. My face said it all and she hurriedly led us through the crush to a rooftop bar.
"My God! Your wrist!"
It looked like I’d slashed it. I explained all and we had a lot of catching up to do. The bar was a cool-scene - a rooftop five floors up from the chaos of the street. We sat under the stars, sipping cool beers by candlelight, with the whole of Bombay spread out below us. Bombay nightlife is very colourful - prostitutes, drug-dealers, and street-hawkers - all trying to eke out a living. Looking down you can get very philosophical, amongst it you can feel very stressed.

Pressed for time, I taxied back (luxury!) and asked if they were using the meter for the fare. They weren’t.
"Rs.35. Meter is more expensive."

<Here we go again...>

"If it’s more expensive then I’ll pay more." We arrived at the station.
"Rs.35 plus Rs.5 for luggage." I had one smallish bag, which I’d held on my lap. I also had a list of the local taxi rates.
"Well guys, according to my information, you just earned Rs.12."
"Luggage! Rs.5!"
I laughed. "For one small bag? You didn’t even get out of the taxi, let alone open the boot!" I gave him Rs.15 and left - he should be happy with the tip, but I’m sure that he felt a little hard done by, because he’d not screwed me enough... Funny world!

Forget Dante’s vision of hell, see a Bombay train station! I boarded the train and then leapt off - ´ladies only!´ Women need a separate carriage because of excessive eve-teasing (sexual harassment). The train quickly filled to a bursting point. My stop came and passed... I was struggling through the on-rush of people in the carriage. Pandemonium! People leapt onto trains in such blind panic (before it stopped) knocking passengers back inside!

I finally met the rest of the squad and eventually boarded the night train to Calcutta. I had a travel strategy: get the tiny top bunk and fast the next four days. The loo was a hole in the floor and you could see the track rush by. Being India loo roll is rare and there was soon no water to wash. The khazi soon became a quagmire and I avoided it as much as possible. Because the train was so packed, I stayed in my bunk and read most of the time - we only stopped for a few minutes at each station, and you dare not stray far in bandit country! I later learned that the carriages were known as bogies presumably because they´re dark, dank, dirty, and cramped.
Claustrophobia set in, and we took to hanging off the train, leaning out of the end of carriage doors, kicking trees (the inspiration for Under Siege 2 I feel sure)... This was a championship and we were gonna win! A slightly insalubrious air of aggression was nurtured by the cramped, stressful confines, smoke, and everyone else´s pheromones. I´d had to break-up several fights and by the time we arrived, I too, felt murderous.

Calcutta is a huge, sprawling, steaming, hive of humanity. Stories about the ´black hole´ take on a whole new meaning, as strolling through the misty morning streets, I saw more people pooing on roadsides than I care to remember... What an amazing place!

Despite being fighting fit, the bus to Shilliguri was the most gruelling experience of my life to date - like being continuously thumped for twelve hours! I nearly cried with relief when we changed buses. Then we nearly froze as the temperature plummeted below zero! We entered a region of unearthly beauty - driving up windy roads and passing lost little villages and tea gardens. Mist was abundant and you felt like you where flying up through clouds to the gods. Once I saw a woman washing under a waterfall, so beautiful that she could have put a supermodel to shame. Chances are that she´ll live and die in absolute poverty and be totally unknown to the outside world. It all seemed quite weird, surreal, and not a little sad. Before I could get truly forlorn, a rainstorm broke, lightening dazzled us, and water seeping in through the rusted roof drenched us to the bone.

Unlike Goa, which is coastal and never drops below 20° C, Darjeeling is the gateway to the Himalayas and the thin air is -10° C on winter mornings. The ´hotel´ was only half built, cold, wet and draughty. Everyone hated it - all bare concrete and rusted iron bars. We had no heat source at all - not even hot water! I was first to the bathroom and last to sleep; ten in the room, and four in my bed. I suffered a slight humour failure, though I probably had preferential treatment.

Rallying well, I visited almost every shack, shop, bar, barn, hotel and hovel I could find. Wow! What an amazing bazaar - situated so close to Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sikkim, China, and old Tibet - Darjeeling is the hodgepodge treasure-trove of an eclectic cultural magpie! I also met the most interesting foreigners - aspiring monks, artists, writers, and the wanderlust few who spontaneously congregated and recognised fellow madmen. That evening I gambled my few remaining funds and moved into a traditional guesthouse with a local Sherpa family. I had a kerosene heater, mouth-wateringly wholesome grub, and a bedroom view of Kanchenjunga - 3rd highest peak on the planet. Awesome! They even came to support me in the contest...

The next few days were filled with barefoot runs at 5 A.M. and endurance training up mountainsides. Even the frozen donkey-dung felt like sharp pebbles! The joint chief instructors were both 5th dans - one a Nepali with hero status and the other a revered Japanese expert - pushed us hard. Kata and combat filled the days, followed by technical demonstrations. Unusually, we were shown how to incorporate furniture into our fights - a sort of graceful brawling, and the local speciality - the deadly kukhri dagger, beloved by Gurkhas everywhere became an extension of the hitherto empty fist. I got carbon monoxide poisoning from the kerosene heater and was unwillingly excluded from the finals. After days of what felt like ´barefoot gravel dancing´ it seemed incredibly unfair!

Then with the spare time, I jogged up Tiger Hill for the sunrise, and promptly got myself lost in the pea-soup fog. A kilometre away crowds were bustling around, packed into markets, shops, and temples - but the cold mountain air seemed host only to the mist and myself. It was very quiet and eerie. Perhaps it was the thin oxygen, but I experienced a chill that had little to do with to do with the ambient temperature. On the whole, it felt like something out of a Doc Savage adventure! Only the night before I´d heard the strangled begging as a gang visited bloody vengence on a food thief. After some serious thought I decided to intervene but thankfully they chose that moment to stop. It is doubtful that it was because they heard my approach. A few years before, Darjeeling had seen some very nasty partizan fighting, complete with grisly murders. Locals used to wake to an offering of dismembered heads left impaled upon the spiked railings in Chowrasta. Suddenly looming out of the fog was the fearsome face of a temple guardian! It had been there spooking folks for a thousand years yet still managed to find a new victim - me!

Coming down I literally froze and was only saved by hot tea and fried sweets. It took me 10 minutes to unclench my frozen fists! I visited Buddhist temples and saw the image of the Maitrya (coming) Buddha - he´s got black hair, green eyes and a glowing, golden tan. Mind you, at that time under an inch of muck, so did I... Also I was able to explore the museums, zoo, & mountaineering institute where I met Tenzing Norgay´s nephew. In the land of the incredible, Darjeeling is on another plane.

On parting, my thoughtful host presented me with a packet of Goldentip Orange Pekoe tea (the best!) and I was both very touched and wistful. The return journey to Goa was even tougher going, but we were all too battle-weary to care. The high point was being crapped on by another pigeon in Bombay - never before or since has this happened! I finally made it back with Rs.5 (10p) to spare. I scrubbed off four layers of dirt and wore the first clean clothes for ten days. By coincidence, my Indian cousin was visiting and floated in - at home anywhere and always seeming at ease. I was slightly envious that she could travel the globe so easily. She smiled, "Hi brother." I felt I´d come home at last...

India is both heaven and hell on Earth - and even its ugliness can be wholly beautiful. Life in India is at times so otherworldly that you wonder what part you play in it, if any. You will see much and then later question what you saw. Be wary and chilled and you will leave stirred but not shaken.

© Kris Kingsland 1995

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