Hanging Around

In the morning, I order coffee from the same waiter that served my Kingfisher last night; I consider asking whether it is still Temptation, or whether I am back in the Gold Regency Bar And Restaurant – Mr. Jekyll, or Mr. Hyde? The tables are littered with empty bottles, glasses, half-eaten plates of food and overflowing ashtrays, the waiters’ eyes red rimmed with fatigue; it’s like stumbling into the aftermath of some all-night party and pretending that you feel quite natural in drinking your morning coffee while watching the hung-over hosts slowly clear up the wreckage around you. It as dingy and airless as the night before, and with no natural light, no reference to the world outside, it could be any hour of the day or night. It has a disorientating effect; it’s like taking breakfast in a sensory deprivation tank, so I smoke a Wills Classic, drop the butt into my empty cup and walk down the Main Bazar to the Sonu Chat House. Here, at least, I can see the squalor – there is no artificial darkness for it to hide in. The houseboy who takes my order for coffee wears a dirty tracksuit top and a pair of trainers that have split across the soles in such a way that they flap up and down like clown’s shoes when he walks. I slide two Wills Classics across the table and tell him to take them; my coffee arrives a minute later, long before the hippies in the corner see their bowls of muesli and honey. Should I tell them to throw away their beads and kaftans and start smoking if they really want to enjoy India? The unending circus of life in Pahar Ganj plays out in the lane outside the bhavan, complete with tourists in silly tropical shorts, bicycles with wobbly wheels, slapstick rickshaw wallahs, the comedy act of newly arrived backpackers stunned by the heat and hassle, and even two passing elephants; are those real, or pantomime cows? A QRF patrol saunters past, the crowd parting like a bow wave before them; a stray shaft of sunlight glances off the dull metal of the point man’s AK-47, highlighting it with such clarity that I can see the slight sheen of oil where the plastic clip meets the weapon’s body. With all this lethal hardware, suspicion and paranoia loose on the streets, it wouldn’t take much to turn Pahar Ganj into a bloodbath: a bomb, or a grenade tossed at the QRF patrol, perhaps a lone gunman chancing a quick potshot, and it would be a massacre. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but behind it is the even more frightening realization that the QRF aren’t here to defend themselves, they’re here to deter the very real threat of a terrorist strike. Like the crowded markets and Bazars of Kabul and Baghdad, Pahar Ganj is a perfect target; and the narrow streets and alleys are packed with European, American and Australian tourists.
I buy the Times Of Indian from a street hawker, order another coffee, light another Wills Classic and try to divert my imagination. ‘Australian National Dead’: a short piece in the sidebar on page five. As I read the story, something stirs at the back of my mind, something remembered from the bar on Sudder Street in Kolkata. Michael Someone-Or-Other, the story goes, found dead in a seedy hotel room in Pahar Ganj; aged 49, single, overdose suspected. Could it be ‘Mike’, the middle-aged Australian who latched onto me in that bar, boring me with his stories of drug abuse and vodka; the one who would look out for me in Delhi, as we’d both be here waiting for our flights around the same time, his to Bangkok, mine back to sanity and normality? He’d been traveling since his divorce five years before he told me “You don’t mind if I share your table, do you?” in the Beer Bar on Sudder Street; the place was almost empty, but I couldn’t very well say “Yes, actually, I do mind.” I listened politely to his stories of excess and indulgence across three continents, making the sort of neutral, non-committal comments that confound even the most ardent bore, and being deliberately evasive about which hotel I was in. I eventually escaped to a dinner appointment with some fictitious friends I invented – the same ones who’ve rescued me from countless other situations like this - and avoided his end of Sudder Street for the rest of my stay. A sad, lonely, and empty man; whatever he was running away from, high on dope and vodka, maybe it final caught up with him in a cheap, dirty room in Pahar Ganj.
The Russian woman at the table in front is being fawned over by a creepy looking Indian man young enough to be her son; she is overweight, her hair dyed bluish-black, her makeup cracking around the corners of her mouth like parched mud. The Indian man constantly asks her how much money she has, how much she earns, if she has a credit card, a cheque book? He searches through her handbag, removing a passport, wallet, mobile phone, examining each of them before carefully putting them back; she says nothing, reaches for a cigarette and lights it. Almost immediately, she starts coughing, doubling over and wracking her lungs; she drops her cigarette on the table, turns, and vomits down the side of her seat. She crashes blindly through the bhavan, knocking over chairs and dislodging tables, and stumbles for the narrow stairs that lead up to the first floor kitchen, oblivious to the shouts of protest from the staff. The creepy Indian man’s eyes slide slowly away from her handbag, and then, almost as an afterthought, he rises to help her, guiding her to the hand wash behind me, where she coughs up more sickness. With no apology, she barges past me, rakes her bag off the table and cartwheels out into the Main Bazar, coughing, retching and spitting, the Indian creep sycophantically rubbing her back and murmuring his deep concern, his eyes fixed inside her open bag. A group of Japanese tourists in white, anti-pollution face masks turn their cameras on her: another shot for the Wong family album, to be filed between the crippled beggar with flayed skin at Connaught Place, and the cow defecating on the doorstep of Gupta’s Hardware And Packing House just across the street. The cigarette is still smoldering on the table where she dropped it, blackening the Formica beneath its glowing tip, threatening to ignite the unpaid check they left behind.
I pay my bill and catch an auto-rickshaw to Connaught Place; it takes me twenty minutes to find the beggar, collapsed in the gutter on Radial Road 2, a few coins in an old paper cup held in his outstretched hand. I fold a 20 Rupee note into a small square, drop it into his cup, and bury it out of sight under a handful of small coins from the zip-up pocket of my bag; his skin may be blistered and peeling, as burnt and glistening as piece of irradiated meat, and he may be blind and more dead than alive, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be robbed.
I mooch around the bookshops and department stores, killing time, and then reluctantly fork out for the astronomical cost of a Kingfisher in The Standard Coffee House. I walk back to Pahar Ganj in the sweltering heat of late afternoon, and arrive at the doors of The Metropolis Hotel slicked with perspiration, overheated and dehydrated; I climb the stairs to the rooftop terrace, find a table under the shade of a sun umbrella and order a drink. The Metropolis is the only decent hotel in this part of town, and whilst I can’t afford a room here, the bar is at least affordable. The pricey menu assures me I won’t be eating here tonight, but it does tell me – in a hideously gushing paragraph of self promotion inside the front cover – of the luminaries who have stayed here over the years: Richard Gere; Kate Winslett; Sir John McCarthy; David Quarry of the British High Commission; and finally, ‘Silva (Actress From Slovakia)’. The name leaps off the page, quickly followed by all its connotations. I’m sure ‘Silvia’ is probably a highly respected member of Bratislava’s largely unknown, though undoubtedly burgeoning film industry, but with a name like that, I can’t help harboring doubts that her leading roles are quite as wholesome and attired as Ms Winslett’s. I waste a couple of hours drinking Kingfisher, listening to my MP3 player and examining the procession of weird, stressed-out, confused and sometimes certifiably insane travellers who come and go; after snickering under my breath about ‘Silvia’ for what must be the twentieth time, I start to worry that perhaps I’m becoming as strange as everyone else around me. I finish my drink and leave, being swept along in the stream of people flooding down the Main Bazar; it’s like stepping onto one of those moving walkways you find at Heathrow airport, except the miles of featureless corridors have been replaced with an acid-trip vision of hell. Borne along in this swell of jabbering, faceless bodies, I seem to be moving faster than I am walking; my feet are surfing a wave of Kingfisher, my eyes blinking away the ghastly, hallucinogenic flashes of sickening neon light. I get off the conveyor belt at The Gold Regency Bar And Restaurant, which may or may not actually be the Temptation bar at this hour of the night, order a Kingfisher and listen to the thump of the Nightly Disco Dance coming through the mirrored walls until I am sufficiently numbed to sleep through anything – even a visitation by the ghost of Michael, who, for all I know, might have died on the very mattress I am lying on, an empty syringe stuck in the rigor mortis of his cold, tied-off arm.