Phir Milenge India

It is my last day in Delhi. It’s sad to be leaving India, but I can’t get out of Pahar Ganj too soon – the last three days have drawn my patience out to its very limit. I walk down the narrow jumble of the Main Bazar, past the cheap bookshops that sell nothing more interesting than guide books and paperback thrillers; past chai stalls and shady looking forex counters, shops crammed with piles of gaudy, un-saleable souvenirs; past endless displays of badly faked designer clothes, awful tie-and-dye hippy gear, and all the absurd New Age paraphernalia anyone could want. The Sonu Chaat House is open but in darkness, the mass of twisted and snaking electricity cables and wires that coil around every post and sag from every shop front dead, the whole tangled mess overloaded to the point of collapse. It is staggeringly hot inside the bhavan without even the half-hearted ceiling fans to create the illusion of a faint breeze, but there is nowhere else to go for the next hour until I can get online and check-in for my flight – if the power comes back on, of course. The waiter appears out of the darkness, picks up the Wills Classic I balance on the edge of the table and sets down a tall glass of black coffee, the whole transaction accomplished without a word being spoken, just the reciprocal nods of our heads signaling our satisfaction. An Indian woman is sitting at a table near the front of the bhavan with her young daughter. She was there when I came in, and ten minutes later is still holding the menu and waiting for someone to take her order; the waiters ignore her completely, until finally one of them stands over her table, looking down at his shoes, and quietly says something only she can hear. I’ve seen this before: the Sonu Chaat House doesn’t serve Indian women. Humiliated but defiant, she gathers her shopping bags and her little girl and walks out into dirty street with unshakeable dignity; the corrosive look she gives the waiter as he backs away could have eaten through a block of concrete. I sit at my gloomy table, smoking Wills Classics and drinking coffee for an hour and a half before the power flashes back on, sweat slowly trickling down the back of my neck, seething about the injustice meted out to the Indian woman: These people will happily take a European man’s cigarettes in exchange for effortless service, but they wouldn’t even entertain giving a tired little girl so much as a glass of water. I leave precisely enough to cover my bill, take all of my Wills Classics and leave the Sonu Chaat House for the last time.
The airline’s website sends an error message back to the screen every time I try to check in – there is no record of my booking – and in a state of rising panic, I ask to use one of the plywood partitioned phone booths lined up along the far wall. If I’m stuck in this place any longer, I will go mad – literally insane. I get through to the airline’s Delhi office and listen to the agent’s disconcerting “Hhmmms” and “Ehhmmms” as her fingers rattle over her keyboard, my heart in my mouth. The power shorts out again, plunging the internet café into pitch blackness; concerned chatter rises from the blinded surfers, someone with an Australian accent swears loudly, but thankfully, the phone’s connection holds.
“Sir?” The agents voice has the tone of finality about it that suggests that she has never heard of me and is about to cut me off as a prank caller. “You are now checked in, have a nice flight.”
I walk through the grotty, stinking back alleys to the Metropolis Hotel with the lightness and cheer of someone who has just received news of some unexpected good fortune, take a table in the shade and order a Kingfisher. In twenty hours, Pahar Ganj can continue its descent into a swamp of squalor and decay without me; until then, I am going to sit on this rooftop terrace - which at least is high enough above the pollution and mayhem of the street to be able to think and breathe - read, write and listen to music on my MP3 player.
But even here, in perhaps the very place where ‘Silvia from Slovakia’ once actually sat, there is no escape from the unpleasantness that hangs like a cloud over New Delhi. There’s some sort of altercation going on between one of the houseboys and a cook – raised voices, accusations, and then suddenly the crack! of a vicious, open handed slap that knocks the skinny little houseboy off his feet. The cook towers over him, thick, meaty forearms swinging at his sides, breathing heavily, ready to lash out again. The houseboy crawls away from his attacker, gets to his feet and blunders into the kitchen’s open annex. The cook is on him in an instant. Another sickening slap sends him reeling past my table and down the stairs, tears of pain and humiliation welling in his eyes. I am so stunned by this ugly scene that I cannot react quickly enough to stop it unfolding. The waiters stand around and laugh as the young houseboy flees down the stairs; the cook struts around with the smug, self satisfied sneer of an accomplished bully. I get up from my table and walk over to the waiters.
“What the hell is going on?” I shout at them with barely controlled rage.
“No, no, everything is okay,” one of them says, smiling in encouragement.
“Get the manager up here immediately,” I order him. “Don’t make me have to go downstairs and find him,” I add as a warning.
The manager is dismissive about the whole incident, offering no apology or explanation, blithely assuring me that the houseboy is alright and that the cook will be dealt with. He then walks round the terrace, using a 12 inch metal ruler to sweep bottles and dirty cups off tabletops and counters where they fall and smash on the floor, smacking and poking the waiters, screaming instructions at them, throwing his weight around.
I take my bag and my Wills Classics and simply walk out, dead eyeing the bullying cook and the tyrannical manager, daring either of them to challenge me about the bill, which, after what I have just seen, I have no intention whatsoever of paying. They both stare at the floor and say nothing as I pass.
There is nowhere to go in Delhi that I haven’t already been, nowhere I want to go other than to the airport – but that’s not until tomorrow, so I walk back to my hotel.
Halfway to the Gold Regency a seedy looking man with a London accent angles out of a doorway and falls into step alongside me.
“Name’s Terry. Want some of this?” He takes a bag of something from his front pocket and is mildly shocked at the two short words I give him as an answer. A torrent of abuse follows me down the Main Bazar until Terry slowly realizes that he’s attracting the curiosity of a unit of QRF troops who’ve just rounded the corner of Sang Trasham Road behind him. He slithers back into his hiding place and I carry on walking towards the next encounter.
“You are a doctor!” This from a seemingly respectable middle-aged Indian man blocking my path, his hand outstretched in greeting. Quite what kind of scam this outlandish but strangely flattering line of introduction was to precede I never find out, as two very implicit words – which Terry would recognize – stop him dead in his tracks.
With less than a hundred metres to go to the Gold Regency I’m intercepted by the Bangladeshi woman who collects foreign signatures in a spiral-bound notebook, the one who professes to want no money, but still charges you 10 Rupees for entering your name in her book. I hide in the darkest booth I can find in the Gold Regency Bar And Restaurant, whiling away the hours until I might be able to sleep. I time an order for another Kingfisher to the exact moment the waiter appears at my table with the hiked-up Temptation pricelist. In a scene that could be straight out of a Laurel and Hardy film, we wrestle each other for the Gold Regency menu, a tug of war that ends in farce when it tears cleanly in half along its middle fold. The waiter crosses his arms and gives a satisfyingly Hardyesque “Hhumph!” looking down at me with comical disappointment. His half has the snacks, masalas and thalis, mine the IMFL – Indian made Foreign Liquor – and beers: I win my last cheap bottle of Gold Regency Kingfisher.
The Disco Dance grinds into life somewhere in the depths of the hotel with all the fanfare and excitement of the start of surgery hours at a health clinic; I light a Wills Classic and begin a study of the Temptation pricelist. Cock Tails – not cocktails – with 60ml of liquor come in at an enormous 575 Rupees, plus VAT, plus ‘service’ – pretty expensive, even with the sheer entertainment value of their misspelled, grammatically challenged, or downright ill-conceived names. How about a ‘Tom, Collins’, or maybe a ‘Bandy Balloon’? Or perhaps a ‘Lady Queen’, even though it sounds suspiciously close to a Lady Boy? There’s a ‘Midnight Beauty’, which, as the bar is ‘Open 24 hours’ is theoretically possible, but room service calls go unanswered after 11pm and the doors are firmly locked. The ‘Virgin Marry’ sounds interesting, if only for the opportunity to try and make some sort of connection between, say, the Immaculate Conception and getting hammered on a mixture of Frisky Bison and White Mischief vodka in downtown New Delhi. And whilst not homophobic in any way, the ‘Fruit In The Night’ does seem to have a faint whiff of irregularity about it, and would probably not be something you’d want to call down for late in the evening if the fictitious room service ever became reality.
The alarm catapults me out of a deep sleep in the morning, the tedium and lethargy of the pervious days vanished, a sense of urgency and purpose in their place, just the faint, dull ache of old Kingfisher to remind me of the last few days in Pahar Ganj. I pack the last few things into my bag, pay my bill and turn my back on the Gold Regency. A decrepit old Suzuki minivan drops me outside the departures hall at Indira Gandhi International Airport, where I sit on a bench under the casual stares of a QRF squad and smoke Wills Classic until my flight to Heathrow is called.
I watch the slums of outer Delhi drop away below the wings of the wide bodied Airbus and then fade into the haze of smog that stretches over the city. My last sight of India is the pristine whiteness of the snow-capped Himalayan peaks of Ladakh as we cross into Afghan airspace and turn west for London.
I stand in the early spring sunshine on Winchcombe station in the Cotswolds and watch the tourists climb into the old British Rail Mark One carriages that one of the preserved Class 37 diesels of the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway will take to Cheltenham Racecourse. My sister and her partner have gone to the garden centre over the road, so for half an hour, I’m alone again on another station.
The Class 37 seems so small, clean and quiet. It leaves with a meek toot of its horns, a thin blue mist of diesel drifting in the air behind it, a faint burble from its exhaust; not the deep chug of an ALCO engine, the deafening and sustained blast of air horns, a massive cloud of black smoke billowing above it like a WDM.
I light a cigarette from my last pack of Wills Classics and watch the train slide from view, turning the pre-independence Rupee coin I bought in Kolkata over and over in my fingers.
I’m home, I suppose; even if the only sense of that word is that home is now just another place in the world where I can catch a train to somewhere else.

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.

Machinegun Etiquette

I wake in the pitch darkness of my windowless room, fumble for my alarm and silence it; the sound of rickshaws, taxis and humanity streaming along the Main Bazar filters through the air vent above the bed, a ceaseless hum that seeps into the subconscious.
I order coffee in the restaurant, light a Wills Classic and open Trains At A Glance. I have three days in Delhi before my flight, one of which I will use to visit Agra; train 2002 – the New Delhi-Bhopal Shatabdi Express – leaves at 6.15am, and I can combine this with train 2617 for the return journey, arriving back at 9pm. I drop my key at the front desk and walk out into the hammering heat and seething crowds of the Main Bazar. As my introduction to India, Pahar Ganj had prepared me for the possibility that my entire trip might be a jostling, filthy, choking, squalid and seedy test of endurance; after three months, I now see it for what it is: a conflicting and uncomfortable mix of hawkers, travellers, pimps, hippies, drug pushers, immigrants, beggars, pickpockets and opportunists, crushed together in the narrow lanes and warren of back alleys behind New Delhi station, fighting like cats in a bag. It had been cold enough then for a jumper and scarf under my fleece; now the intense heat ferments the drifts of garbage that piles up in doorways and around footstalls, the whole area stinking like a giant vat of pig swill. At the security checkpoint on the corner of Basant Road, I walk through the rickety wooden frame of the metal detector, while everyone else streams unchecked through the open police barrier; the steel and aluminum of my Maglite and Leatherman fails to register, the circuitry and Lithium Ion batteries of my camera and MP3 player go unnoticed. It’s a charade; the policemen completely ignore me. Even the nasty looking QRF – Quick Reaction Force – troops that have appeared alongside the Riot Police since I was last here barely give me a second look. After the bombs that killed more than 60 passengers were placed on the Atari Express, security around New Delhi station, where the devices were smuggled onboard, has been stepped up, and extended into Pahar Ganj. QRF soldiers are everywhere, their blue camouflage combat pants tucked into their jump boots, bristling with riot guns and assault rifles; they stand in small groups, smoking cigarettes, staring down anyone who dares look at them. Their AK-47s have transparent plastic ammunition clips, the curve of gleaming bullets clearly visible, as sharp and deadly as a row of shark’s teeth; they are obviously real, and unquestionably lethal – a simple expedient to disabuse any doubting onlooker. The atmosphere crackles and fizzes with tension, a volatile mixture of menace and desperation, threat and fear, hovering on the brink of flashpoint. It is like walking through the occupied zone of a disputed territory, where the pretense of normal life is faltering under the burden of its protectors; it is impossible to feel comfortable or relaxed in this place, with the weight of all these watcher’s eyes bearing down on you.
I push through the crowds outside New Delhi station and climb the stairs to the Foreign Tourist’s Reservation Centre. Before the clerk will even check the availability of my Reservation Requisition, he demands my passport; some of the Atari bomb victims, thought to be Pakistani nationals, had managed to buy tickets in this booking office without producing their passports – nobody knows who they were, and they may never be identified because of the laxity of an Indian Railways booking clerk. There are Chair Car tickets available for train 2002, but train 2617 – the Ernakulam-Nizamuddin Mangala Lakshadweep Express – is booked solid for the next four days; the alternative is the return Bhopal Shatabdi, but it doesn’t leave Agra until 9pm – thirteen hours after I arrive.
Ticketless, I go downstairs and walk unhindered through the RPF cordon to platform one; there is an immense amount of security on the station, but nobody challenges me – not even an officious Inspector asks for a platform ticket. I stand between a chai stall and a wall of cloth-wrapped bales that are waiting to be loaded into a Luggage-Cum-Guards Van and quickly take a forbidden photograph of the passengers on the opposite platform; surely my behavior is suspicious enough to attract some attention? Seemingly not: I walk back out of the station, right under the noses of the massed ranks of RPF and QRF guards, the evidence of my crime flashed into the camera’s memory for any of them to examine.
I weave my way through the throng of pushy rickshaw wallahs on Chelmsford Road, sidestep the metal detector and join the flow of hand carts, cows and pedestrians trapped between the clamor of shops and stalls along the Bazar, bolts of cloth and fake CDs spilling into the narrow lane, piles of poor wood carvings and cheap holdalls resting on plastic groundsheets. I find the Sonu Chaat House, take a seat at the back, order a coffee and light a Wills Classic. The dhaba is hot, cramped and filthy; exhaust from the endless passage of auto-rickshaws and Ambassadors drifts through the open frontage and mixes with the smell of hot cooking oil, onions and tobacco, all of which is stirred up and then wafted down at the customers by two slowly rotating ceiling fans. A couple of hippies who look as if they just got off the plane at Indira Gandhi Airport are pretending to be cool at one of the other tables, but there’s no mistaking their shocked expressions at finding themselves in Pahar Ganj, and not the mystical paradise they had imagined was waiting for them. The service is slow, haphazard and offhand; I redirect two glasses of chai before my coffee arrives. A Dutch man opposite me loses his temper with the indolent waiter, slamming his fist on the table before tearing up the check and storming out, a trail of tiny squares of paper floating to the greasy floor in his wake. The waiter shrugs and moves on to the next table: business as usual. It is easy to see how the abrasive nature of New Delhi has a way of wearing down the visitor, how quickly the seedy dhabas and fleapit hotels, the clinging hawkers and loitering militias whittle away every ounce of patience and pleasure. I try to ignore it, but there’s no getting away from the fact that I’m here for the next three days. I drop a 10 Rupee note on the table, nod to the disinterested waiter, and catch an auto-rickshaw to Connaught Place.
I walk in circles around the colonnaded ring of shops, crossing the same radial roads again and again; only when I pass KFC for the third time, with its queue of waiting customers held at bay by an armed guard, do I give up and sit on a bench in the central park, surrounded by picnicking Indians lounging over the irregular grassy hump that hides the subterranean Palika Bazar. Within five minutes I am asked whether I would like a shoeshine, a map of Delhi, some cannabis, an ear clean, some postcards, someone’s daughter, a plastic model of an auto-rickshaw, an Indian drum, and most bizarrely of all, a black leather whip. When it comes to making money, it seems India’s moral superiority takes a back seat. I get a taxi out to the National Railway Museum and wander around the grounds, poking at the rusted shells and peeling paintwork of the country’s neglected railway heritage; nothing has changed since I visited in January – it’s just hotter, drier and looks even more defeated than before. In the back corner of the park is the rotting carcass of a WDM diesel, the maroon livery flaking and pitted, the bonnet doors gaping to reveal a black space that once resounded to the chug-chug-CHUG-chug-chug of an ALCO engine, the empty space now filled with the faint tick and snap of termites eating away the wood sleepers beneath its last stretch of slowly rusting track. Even the skeletal frames of the wheel sets are bare: they have been stripped of their motors and the valuable copper wire of their traction cables. The cab windows are broken, and the driving stand is wrecked – every dial and lever either missing or smashed; it is fit for a scrap yard, not a national museum. Unlike the museums in York or Budapest, there is nothing here that will ever pull a train again - no groups of enthusiasts to restore and maintain the WDM like the M61 in Hungary, no commitment to running it on the mainline like a preserved British Deltic. It such a depressing sight after travelling so far behind these charismatic and idiosyncratic machines, so sad to see it dumped here in this undignified and uncared for state that I leave quickly to find an auto-rickshaw back to Connaught Place.
I sit in a plush seat at The Standard Coffee House while the waiter pours an ice cold Kingfisher into a tall, frosted glass and sets it on the linen tablecloth in front of me; the beer is almost twice as expensive as The Gold Regency Bar, the food at the surrounding tables completely unaffordable, but the comfort and coolness of the air-conditioning and the discreet whisper of background conversation is a sublime pleasure after the noise and super-heated pollution of the city. I light a Wills Classic, take my notebook from my bag, and sip my Kingfisher in tiny increments, drawing it out until, an hour later, it is so warm and flat that I feel justified in signaling the waiter for another. It is dark when I get out of the auto-rickshaw back in Pahar Ganj, the night air weighted with heat, smoke and the smell of tons of decaying rubbish, shot through with gaudy coloured light, the flash of QRF torches and the misty flare of cooking fires. I push my way through the jostling, shoving crowds, slipping in piles of cow dung, kicking up dust, crunching over chicken bones and broken glass; faces push out of the gloom all around me – Chinese, Tibetan, Bangladeshi, Eurasian, European – deformed and distorted in bursts of purple and green neon, bulging and contracting with flickering firelight; a cacophony of alien languages rings in my ears, guttural, high-pitched, hard, aggressive.
Two more days of this: it is a waking nightmare.
I spend the evening sitting in a darkened booth in The Gold Regency Bar And Restaurant, which at 8 o’clock suddenly becomes Temptation Bar. There is no announcement, or magical, chameleon like shift in the décor or lighting; the waiters simply collect the old menus from the tables and replace them with Temptation versions, and the change is complete. The bar is so dimly lit that I have to hold my cigarette lighter up to the new pricelist to find that the Kingfisher has just acquired a 20 Rupee premium. There are no windows, and no ventilation; ceiling fans move the stale atmosphere in slow eddies, struggling to make it breathable. The walls are an unbroken run of brown-tinted, marble effect mirrors, so that wherever you look, you catch your own, or someone else’s eye; or see yourself sitting on the plastic, leather-effect seat in your booth and disappearing into reflected infinity with a half-empty bottle of overpriced Kingfisher. The back page of the Temptation pricelist orders me to visit the Nightly Disco Dance; it is quite unequivocal in this – the words an explicit instruction, rather than a friendly invitation. What can I do? I carry my drink through the passageway behind the kitchen and follow the thump of over-amplified bass to a hall at the back of the hotel.
I lean against a wall just inside the door and try to make sense of the surreal scene before me.
Rows of Indians are sitting in plastic chairs that are lined up to face a stage at the far end of the hall; on the stage are perhaps six men and women, sitting behind Formica topped desks, surrounded by boxes of CDs and cassettes. In one corner, a sound system churns out some Indian folk/fusion music with enough decibels to silence a jet engine. Every few minutes, one of the panel on stage gets up, changes the cassette or CD to one of their choice, and then sits back down behind their desk and stares out at the audience, as if looking for any signs of disapproval or dissent, or perhaps the flicker of any thought of dancing behind a particularly decadent pair of eyes. The others examine their fingernails or shuffle bits of paper around their desks until it is their turn. There is no dance floor in the Nightly Disco Dance, and the hall is starkly lit with fluorescent strip-lights; if anyone wanted to dance, why on earth would they want to do it here? It is about as exciting as a public debate about sewage reprocessing, as much fun as being tried for murder. If it wasn’t for the ear-splitting Hindi music, you would think you were watching a council meeting in some provincial town hall. The audience stares up at the panel seated behind the line of desks on the stage; immobile in their stackable plastic chairs, they have the slumped and resigned body language of hopelessly delayed passengers in an airport lounge; there is no applause, no reaction whatsoever between one song ending and another one beginning, just a strange, keening silence punctuated by the odd phlegmy cough and the rattle of the cassette drawer falling open.
I drain the last of my Kingfisher, place the empty bottle on a folding table by the door and turn to leave; swinging my bag onto my shoulder, it catches the lip of the bottle which tips and slowly rolls off the table. Timed to the precise instant, the music fades into silence just as the bottle hits the floor and shatters. With the sickening clarity of a slow motion film, the entire hall turns around to look at me with horrified, accusing eyes; this is what it must feel like to be caught in the act of sneaking into a church service to steal the collection box. I slide around the corner and walk quickly back to my room, the thump of distant music following me up the stairs, creeping through the air vent and sliding under the door.
I hadn’t noticed the distant beat last night, but now I can’t help straining my ears to pick it out from the murmur of the somnambulant Main Bazar. I pick up the rhythm, and out of nowhere the lyrics of a trashy, irritating, 1970s pop song invade my mind:
“Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-Dancing!”

Last Passenger To Bangalore

I leave Ooty on the TTDC’s shuttle to Mysore at nine o’clock in the morning; the porters and waiters who have followed me at a discreet distance around the hotel, or camped outside the door to my cottage and made sure I wanted for nothing during my stay are disappointed to see me leave. My morning coffee is waiting in the dining hall when I arrive; a porter for my luggage when I close the cottage door behind me for the last time. The TTDC might be as architecturally unexciting as a multi-story car park, and as ramshackle as a run-down farm, but its sheer eccentricity and the friendliness of its staff make it an especially pleasant place to spend a few nights. I would rather stay in one of the TTDC’s hopelessly out-of-date cottages than at the five star Oberoi Grand - or in one of the Socialist reality Standard rooms of the Hotel Akademia, with an unrivalled view of the surrounding concrete forest of grim, workers’ tower blocks, than the upscale Hotel Slovan in Kosice, for that matter.
The shuttle is a minibus with a roof rack for luggage, frayed brown velour seats, and a gaudy postcard of Jesus performing a miracle tacked to the dashboard next to the cassette player; the windscreen is cracked and chipped, the tyres are worn smooth, and there is a hole where the speedometer should be. I have an argument with the driver when he refuses to chain my bag to the rack, and eventually push past him, climb the rusty ladder onto the roof, and do it myself. The shuttle drives around Ooty for the next half an hour, stopping at a dozen small hotels to pick up more passengers; we eventually climb out of town on the mountain road with at least twenty five people crammed into the sixteen seat bus, sharing seats and sitting in the aisle. It is hot, cramped, and airless; as Ooty drops away behind us, someone passes a cassette forward to the driver, who slams it into the player at Jesus’ right hand and turns the volume all the way up. The music is so loud and distorted it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a woman’s voice or a violin that has set off the high pitched ringing that has affected my ears; it does, however, drown out the worrying sound of the overloaded bus’s chassis dragging on the road when we hit a pothole of a bump.
It takes five hours to reach Mysore - including a fifteen minute stop at a suitably remote, overpriced, and unpleasant roadside bhavan – where I am dumped outside a seedy hotel behind the City Bus Stand that the driver insists I must take a room in. He blocks my path to the rooftop ladder, and I have no choice but to give him the key to unlock the chain on my bag. I’m forced to pay 5 Rupees ‘Luggage Fee’ before it’s thrown off the roof into the roadside dust; it’s a pathetically small amount, and to annoy the driver as much as possible, I make a big show of pulling wads of 500 and 1000 Rupee notes from my pockets before I find a few coins to toss at him. He watches his hotel commission disappear as I shoulder my bag, walk over to the nearest auto-rickshaw, and ask for the Mayura Hoysala; the look of perfect dismay on his face is pleasing to note, after all the hassle and irritation he has caused me, and I’m very tempted to finish him off by telling him that his five Rupees ‘Luggage Fee’ was all the journey had actually cost me.
For the third time, I check into room 104 at the Mayura Hoysala. I turn the air-conditioner to its highest setting, and sit beneath the ceiling fan as the room’s temperature slowly drops; after the freshness of Ooty, Mysore is like a steam bath, and there’s a blast of hot, damp air when I open the door to the veranda for the waiter with my room service bottle of Kingfisher. Even as I walk down to The Kwality Bar And Restaurant after sunset, the air is thick with heat and humidity; in the few days since leaving for Tamil Nadu, the Karnatakan spring has given way to the full ferocity of high summer.
I walk back towards the Mayura Hoysala, turn right at the traffic lights and follow the tree lined avenue to Mysore Junction; I buy a bottle of water from one of the wallahs on the pavement outside and sit on a bench at the end of platform one, in the darkness beyond the reach of the station lights. The Mysore-Chennai Kaveri Express is waiting at platform two behind a pair of WDMs, the driver checking behind the bonnet doors and cleaning the cab windows while passengers hurriedly buy drinks and snacks for their journey and run back to their seats. The train is a mix of air-conditioned two and three tier sleepers – 2AC and 3AC – Sleeper Class coaches, and ordinary Second Class. I cross over the tracks in front of the leading WDM and walk alongside the Kaveri Express until I am standing at the door of the first Sleeper Class carriage. It is absolutely packed inside, people and luggage jumbled together in the bunks, the aisles, and the doorways; the floor is littered with food wrappers, paan leaf, nutshells and banana skins. A barefoot man in a dhoti and open necked shirt frees himself from the tangle inside the coach and steps down onto the platform to buy a small plastic bag of dried fruit, bringing the tangy smell of sweat and urine on the draught of stale air that follows him. I would have spent more than forty hours in a carriage like this had I not booked the flight to Delhi. The driver locks the WDM’s air horns on for departure and drops his green flag from the cab window; people run for the carriage doors, hawkers quickly take money and give change, boxes and bulging cotton sacks are anxiously shoved onto the train; there are panicked shouts, babies crying, the metallic clang of something falling from an open door and hitting the tracks, the blast of a conductor’s whistle, the deepening chug-chug-CHUG-chug-chug of the two WDMs as they take up the strain, the deafening tone of their air horns, the hiss of their compressors. The Kaveri Express creeps slowly out of Mysore Junction and disappears into the balmy night, the red glow of the Luggage-Cum-Brake van’s tail light gradually diminishing and then suddenly winking out as the train slips around a bend somewhere out in the darkness. I walk of the end of the platform, cross the running lines and pick my way along the line of abandoned YDM diesels in the yard; on the other side of the station’s fence, I buy a bottle of Kingfisher at a hole-in-the-wall beer shop in the poor and decaying part of town, which is almost literally, on the wrong side of the tracks. The owner wraps it in the business pages of the Vijay Times, and I discreetly open it back at the bench on platform one, ready to dispose of it should anyone approach. But the station is quiet for the moment, just a few families huddled together under the canopy lights, the odd down-and-out bunched under a blanket in a corner, no RPF officers scouring the platforms in search of Europeans flouting the unequivocal prohibition of alcohol on Indian Railways. Dots of red and amber light twinkle and shimmer in the distance, and as I strain my eyes to pick out the dark silhouettes of signal posts and gantries, one of them blinks to green. An orange and white WDG coasts out of the night, the beam of its headlight sparkling off the polished rails in front of it. It comes to rest beneath the footbridge halfway along the station, well away from my bench and my proscribed bottle of Kingfisher, where a fresh crew is waiting; as quickly as it arrived, it is gone again – fading back into the blackness where it came from, probably to pick up a freight train from the goods yard on the edge of town. Somewhere behind me, in the carriage sidings, another WDM bursts into life with a deep grunt, the huge cloud of exhaust fumes a black plume against the ink-blue night sky; it draws a long line of Second Class coaches out of the sidings and then pushes them back into the station for the 2am Bangalore Passenger. The next train from Mysore after that will be the six o’clock Passenger, and it is hard not to feel sad that once I get on board, I will be starting my journey home to England; it will almost certainly be the last WDM diesel I see on my trip, and may well be the last train I catch on Indian Railways. These thoughts preoccupy me as I walk back to the Mayura Hoysala, and it is a long time before I drift into a fitful and unhappy sleep.
I sit on a bare wooden seat in the Luggage-Cum-Ordinary Class coach at the front of the Bangalore Passenger, the huge engine of the South Western Railways WDM rocking the whole coach gently as it ticks over, the acrid whiff of diesel fumes drifting through the open doors and windows on the cool morning air. I chain my bag to the seat post and push it underneath, out of view, then take my daypack and Wills Classics and sit in the open doorway at the front of the carriage: if this is going to be my last Indian Railways journey, I’m going to do it properly and footboard ride the whole three hours to Bangalore – I can wash the soot off and pluck the bits of carbon from the corners of my eyes when I get to the airport. At six o’clock precisely the air horns blare and the driver opens up the WDM; the pre-dawn slipstream is uncomfortably cool against my face as I lean out and watch the big ALCO diesel pick up speed, but I am not moving. I light a Wills Classic and watch indiscernible shapes whip by in the gloom beyond the dim carriage lights: shacks or huts, crossings or bridge parapets - I can’t tell. Sometimes a lonely oil lamp or cooking fire flares briefly in the distance, but otherwise there is nothing: the darkness is as flat and deep as an ocean. I look ahead, trying to pick out the tracks the WDM is following, but see nothing other than the tiny speck of a green signal floating way off in the void. Anything could be out there, hurtling towards us at 70 kilometres an hour; I grip the handrails even tighter, hoping that the driver is more confidant than I am that the line is clear. I try not to imagine we are speeding towards some unseen obstruction – an overloaded Tata truck that has broken down on a remote level crossing, a shoddily built apartment block that has collapsed across the line, a piece of line side debris that has been deliberately placed to fulfill my fears – but still shudder at the memory of seeing an auto-rickshaw jump the crossing barriers a few seconds ahead of the Ganga-Gompti Express to Lucknow.
The sun rises as we approach Mandya, turning the chill slipstream into a baking, gale force wind. The noise of the WDM’s engine and air horns rings in my ears when we stop at the quiet station, and I can taste diesel at the back of my throat; my hair is thick and gritty with exhaust fumes, my face streaked and smudged with oily residues. I light a Wills Classic and walk in circles on the platform, forcing the circulation to return to my tingling, cramped legs. After three and a half hours I unchain my bag from its hiding place beneath the wooden seat, step onto the platform at Bangalore City station and walk forward to the cab window of the WDM; I thank the driver, and he smiles back uncertainly. Finally, I pat the sole bar of the WDM, then turn and walk out of the station.
I catch an auto-rickshaw out to the airport, check in for my flight, and take a seat at the back of the Boeing 737 that operates Spicejet’s Bangalore-Delhi route. Four hours later, I get out of an Ambassador taxi at the top of the Main Bazar in Pahar Ganj, walk down the hot, noisy, dirty street, check into the Gold Regency Hotel, and begin the wait for my flight back to London.

Bedlam And Botany

I open the cottage door on my way to the dining hall for breakfast and find one of the porters asleep in the porch; he opens his eyes and clambers to his feet, apologizing profusely.
“Good morning, good sir,” he greets me, pulling up the collar of his greatcoat against the post-dawn chill. “Can I be of assistance?” From the corner of my eye I see one of the waiters hovering beside the path to the main block. I ask the porter to find someone from the laundry and send them over after breakfast, and he gratefully accepts a Wills Classic in return; the waiter intercepts me halfway across the garden, takes my order for coffee, and then dashes off ahead of me so that it’s waiting at a table when I arrive in the dining hall, which, for some unknown reason, has been strung with brightly coloured bunting since yesterday morning. I order toast and a masala omelette, which takes the waiters by surprise; the paper trail brings out a previously unseen chef, who examines me from the kitchen door before approving the order and disappearing again. My toast – which actually seems to be fried bread – arrives via one waiter, and a second coffee by another; there’s no sign of the omelette, but I am joined by two sparrows, who hop through one of several windows that are left open regardless of how cold it is, or how many insulating layers the waiters are as a result forced to wear. The sparrows perch hopefully on the chair back opposite me, and then hop onto the tabletop to peck at the little pinches of fried toast I leave for them. The cashier watches disapprovingly from behind his 1960s mechanical cash register, but is suddenly distracted by the arrival of a large party of Indian tourists; the dining hall is thrown into a state of chaos; the waiters watch in horror as families and couples file in and settle across a dozen separate tables; the sparrows fly up to the bunting, twittering and craning their heads to watch me with bright, glassy eyes.
My omelette is dumped on the edge of the table by a speeding waiter; he passes on his way back to the cashier with a wad of requisitions for dosai and sambar, a look of alarm passing between them. The dining hall echoes with the animated conversation and bright laughter that only Indians are capable of making this early in the day; somebody turns the television volume up, and the jangly notes of a sitar rises above the bedlam; in the background, it sounds like someone else is destroying the kitchen and murdering the chef. Breakfast in the Hotel Akademia, on the other hand, whilst equally as unpredictable, would be a somber ritual, conducted in the fearful silence of a Soviet era Party funeral. And the hottest paprika in Slovakia would be laughed out of the TTDC’s kitchen: my masala omelette, along with diced onions and tomatoes, is studded with chunks of fresh green chilli, seeded and uncompromisingly hot. A sheen of sweat breaks out on my forehead, even as the cold morning air puckers and goose bumps the skin on my arms. The monkeys cling to the window frame behind me, bouncing up and down, mooning in at me; a pigeon glides beneath the bunting and lands on my table, much to the disgust of the sparrows who drop down and take up their positions on the chair back. None of them is fooled by the large piece of glistening, dark green, searing hot chilli I slip into the pile of toast crumbs.
The porter tells me the laundry man is “coming ten minutes, sir.”
I sit on the veranda and work out how I am going to get back to Delhi for my flight to London next week. Trains At A Glance tells me it’s 2700 kilometres and 60 hours via Chennai Central from Combiatore Junction, which I can reach by taking the Nilgiris Railway from Ooty; or 2500 kilometres and 40 hours direct from Bangalore, via the bus to Mysore, and then the Bangalore Passenger train. Allowing for connections and delays, and if I can get a reservation, it is going to be a grueling, three to four day journey.
After half an hour I give up on the laundry man and go to find the porter. I give him my bag of washing, 20 Rupees, and a Wills Classic, and tell him to make sure he brings the cleaned clothes back to my cottage no later than six this evening. I walk through Charing Cross and the Big Bazar to the reservations office at Ooty station. Train number 2615 – The Chennai-New Delhi Grand Trunk Express – has two hundred people Wait Listed for the day after tomorrow; the Bangalore-New Delhi Karnataka Express only has berths in Sleeper Class: two uncomfortable days on hard wooden seats, and two sleepless nights. I book it and try not to think about the promise of being packed into a torturously small space, surrounded by strangers and noise, and being suffocated by the enveloping odor of filthy toilets. I decide to take my mind off it with a visit to Ooty’s botanical gardens, and as I walk back along Commercial Road to find an auto-rickshaw, I notice a poster in the window of Blue Mountains Tours And Travels for Spicejet flights to the capital. I find an internet café in the jumble of shops behind the Hyderbadi Biryani House and buy an e-ticket for the three hour Bangalore-Delhi flight for little more than I paid for the Karnataka Express. Ten minutes later, I am back at the railway reservations counter and filling out a Reservation/Cancellation Requisition for a refund on my redundant Sleeper Class ticket. I call the Mayura Hoysala in Mysore, reserve a room for tomorrow night, and ask them double check the early morning Bangalore Passenger train times, the ‘Peoples Trains’ that aren’t listed in Trains: I can leave Mysore at 5am, and be in Delhi by 5pm. I breathe a huge sigh of relief and barely complain about the absurd fare the rickshaw wallah demands for the short ride to the botanical gardens.
I admit to having maintained a studied ignorance of anything that grows, flowers, or blooms for my entire adult life, an admission made even worse by considering myself otherwise inquisitive, and trying to impassion others with my fascination about railways. I put it down to the seemingly endless chores in the family garden when growing up in Leicester, which didn’t sit at all well with the spiky hair and Doc Marten’s of my teenage years; the Walkman had yet to be invented, so I couldn’t even rebel by listening to The Buzzcocks singing ‘Boredom’ while I mowed the lawns or trimmed the front hedge. I buy a guide book from the shop near the Fern House and navigate my way along the paths that wind through the gardens, trying to identify some of the 1000 species of plants and trees without any success whatsoever – they all look identical, and the pictures in the guide could easily be of the same cacti or palms, photographed from different angles on different days. If it wasn’t for the fact that the place has the credibility of being laid out by a team from London’s Kew Gardens in the mid 1800s, I might have suspected The Emperor’s New Clothes had been rewritten in Hindi, and The Maharaja’s New Shrubs is being played out around the neatly clipped lawns of Ooty’s Botanical Gardens. But that’s ignorance for you. The gardens are undeniably beautiful, and immaculately maintained; and you don’t need any specialist knowledge to enjoy this peaceful escape from the hustle and bustle of the Big Bazar and the traffic of Charing Cross, much as you don’t need to know the difference between a Russian M62 diesel and an Indian WDM to enjoy a railway journey.
I buy some coffee at a roadside shack outside the gardens and drink it sitting on a wooden stool in the afternoon sun; even at an altitude of two and a half kilometers, Ooty’s spring days still reach more than 30 degrees. I cross the road to the Tibetan Market and wander around rows of identical concrete stalls selling cheap training shoes and badly made sportswear, fake designer labels and plastic houswares; there is no sign of Tibetan craft or culture, and nothing on offer that couldn’t be bought at any Bazar or Chowk from here to Lucknow. The stall holders aren’t doing any business; they sit next to their piles of worthless and uninteresting goods and watch the tourists drift by, a uniform look of utter boredom settled across their strong, Oriental features.
I catch an auto-rickshaw back to Commercial Road and order a Golden Eagle in The Blue Hills Hotel. A group of young Indian men are getting roaring drunk in one of the booths in the dimly lit bar; the stewards are lined up against the wall, arms folded across their chests, watching with obvious distain. A glass of beer is dropped and smashes on the floor; the waiters’ expressions don’t even flicker. One of the young men pulls himself to his feet and reels off towards the toilet, lurching from table to table, crashing into chairs, fumbling along the walls for support; there is a retch and a splash as he is sick on the floor outside the kitchen door. The waiters look at each other; they’ve seen it all before.
I walk back to the TTDC and book their private shuttle bus service to Mysore in the morning; it costs 20 Rupees more than the KSRTC bus, but it will collect me from the hotel and deliver me to the Mayura Hoysala within, I am promised, four hours. I ask them to prepare my bill and bring it up to the bar. As soon as I sit down the barman appears with a chilled Kingfisher and a little bowl of masala cashews, places them on the table in front of me and then backs away, bowing slightly, and smiling his brown, gap-toothed smile. The porter from the dining hall puts his head around the door: “Good evening, good sir,” he nods at me enthusiastically. A few minutes later he returns with the laundryman, and the clerk from the front desk; in exchange for 30 Rupees and three Wills Classics, I am given a bag of clean clothes, a tissue-paper thin Invoice For Rooms, and the dedicated service of the porter for my ‘evening’s requirements’. For some unknown reason, the front desk has decided to apply a 10 percent discount to my final bill; have they forgotten that they had already reduced the price of my cottage by 100 Rupees a night? I ask the clerk to check the amount again, and after borrowing the barman’s calculator, he manages to reduce it even further, rather than remove the discount; most of my bar bill, and the cost of my lift back to Mysore have suddenly evaporated.
I ask the porter to come up to my cottage at 8 o’clock with a menu, pay cash for another bottle of Kingfisher, and then sit on my veranda with my headphones on.
If only I’d had an MP3 player for the tedious hours spent working in the garden back at home. Half the size of a pack of Wills Classics, hidden among its three hundred files are some of the same songs I came to know then, half a lifetime and two continents ago.

Distant Home Signal

Ooty is cold enough in the morning for me to see my own breath; there is no heating in my cottage, and the stone floor numbs my toes when I pull back the thick blankets and walk from the bed-sitting room to the enormous bathroom. I pull on a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt, grab my fleece, and walk across the garden to the dining room for coffee. The TTDC ( Tamil Tourist Development Corporation ) Hotel is a huge, rambling, tatty complex of 1960s concrete and dark wood buildings set amidst an equally erratic spread of lawns, flowerbeds, and towering evergreens. The main building has had bits haphazardly added over the years, and at some point in the mid 1970s, somebody thought it would be a good idea to put some cottages in the middle of the garden. The place is a warren of passages, corridors, courtyards, and stairwells that you could get lost in for hours; it is gloomy, run-down, faded, and worn, with unexpected dead ends and echoing of footsteps. As I walk down a dimly lit corridor around the edge of an overgrown courtyard, a monkey suddenly leaps through one of the open windows and tears off ahead off me, hotly pursued by its playmate. I hear them chattering and screeching as they crash through some unseen part of the hotel, and see them again from the window of the dining hall.
I sit at a small table in the vast dining hall; it reminds me of a school canteen, with its institutional green walls, high flat ceiling and woodblock floor – there is even a suitably austere clock above the serving hatch to complete the picture. It could easily seat 200 people. Even at this hour, a big, old-fashioned television set in one corner is playing a Bollywood movie. There is an Indian couple several tables away in the middle of the room, but nobody else apart from me for the four waiters and the cashier to serve, each of them bundled up against the morning chill. I order a coffee. The waiter writes out a requisition, one part of which is handed to another waiter who takes it to a third waiter posted at the hot drinks vending machine; the second part is lodged with the cashier, who transfers the details into an A4 ledger before spiking it pending payment. After a full five minutes, a small paper cup of black coffee is relayed to my table by the team of waiters, a curl of steam rising into the cold air of the hangar-like dining room. I throw them into complete confusion by immediately ordering a second cup; there is a lot of discussion, but they eventually manage to bring it to my table just as I finish the first and light a Wills Classic. They look longingly at my cigarette. What the hell? I smile at them, and push the pack across the Formica tabletop. Service is a lot quicker after this.
The two monkeys are chasing each other around the gardens outside the dining hall. They shoot up drainpipes, swing from window ledges, and leap from balconies; but their favorite pastime is tumbling around inside a large satellite dish that is mounted on the flat roof of the laundry. It rocks alarmingly as the monkeys roll around inside it, pulling each others tails and twisting their ears. The television picture flickers and rolls, snow clouds of interference blowing across the screen; the waiters take it in turns to poke at the controls, scratching their heads and rechecking cable connections. Over the waiters’ shoulders, I watch the monkeys jump up and down in the dish, using it like a trampoline; the television goes haywire, the waiters are baffled. It is hilarious.
The TTDC front desk was apologetic that they had nothing available for me apart from a cottage; they sheepishly pointed to the Xeroxed tariff pinned to the dark-wood veneered wall and said it would be 600 Rupees. By the time I had looked at it and returned to the lobby, the price was down to 500. A whole family could live in my cottage – although bungalow would be a better description; it has a long, monkey proof veranda, which leads into the bed-sitting room; a large bathroom with a hot water geyser; and a dressing-cum-dining room. The furniture is an eclectic mix of dark wood, Formica, plastic and vinyl, all of it truly dreadful, but perfectly suited to the spirit of the TTDC. Two 1970s bucket seats in bright orange plastic and a hideous Alpine print in a cheap, gold coloured frame are my favorite pieces. It is such an unexpected, endlessly entertaining and eccentric place that I cannot help but love it. There is a knock at the front door. One waiter and two porters are waiting outside.
“You would like coffee,” the waiter asks, “breakfast?”
“You would like laundry,” one of the porters enquires, “washing?”
“You would like anything, good sir?” asks the other.
It is pleasantly warm as I walk down the hill to Commercial Road, past the strikingly colonial British secondary school, and find the Irani Coffee House. Inside, shafts of dusty sunlight poke through the gaps in the timber roof and fall across the old and scarred wooden tables; little silver pots of thick, strong coffee are served beneath verses of the Koran woven into silk wall hangings; the atmosphere is redolent of strong tobacco, incense, and Persian mystery. A white bearded old man in a skullcap welcomes and serves me with warmth and politeness; it does not matter that I am a English catholic, he an Iranian Muslim; and neither of us need to patronize the other to prove how tolerant and accepting we are. I wander through the maze of steep alleys and lanes of the Big Bazar, past shops full of cooking pots and sandalwood carvings, bags of tealeaf and bolts of cloth; past squalid yatri lodges and stinking mutton stalls, shops full of gold with shotgun toting guards outside and dingy little chai stalls. Further past the racecourse and the bus stand, I find Ooty’s railway station – the terminus of the Nilgiri Blue Mountain Railway – and buy a cardboard Edmondson ticket for the 12.15 departure for Coonor.
The train is waiting in the station’s only platform behind a metre gauge YDM diesel – almost identical to the ones stranded at Mysore Junction, except that ‘Powered By Bio-Diesel’ is painted on its cab side. Almost a scaled down version of the broad gauge WDM, the YDM works the upper part of the line, after which a steam engine takes over for the most steeply graded part of the route down to Mettupalayam, where its Rack-And-Pinion gearing is needed. I sit on a wooden bench-seat in the first coach and drop the window down on its leather strap; although the steam engines date from the line’s completion in 1908, I would guess that most of the coaches date from somewhere around the 1940s, along with a few others that are quite obviously much more modern. Built by Nilgiris tea planters and the colonial British, the railway’s 46 kilometre route appears in table 93 of Trains At A Glance, and nearly 100 years later, you can still get a train from Ooty and on to anywhere in India. There are few places left in the world where the national railway schedules century old steam locomotives in their timetables.
The tell-tale signs that the nation which gave the world railways built this line are everywhere; from the ground frames that control the points outside the station, to the old water tower at the end of the platform; from the station master’s Acme Thunderer whistle, to the block token signal machine in the porters’ office. And the semaphore signals that could have been plucked from the Great Central, or the erstwhile Great Eastern railway, and planted beside these tracks, high up in the mountains of Tamil Nadu. Different types of signals for different functions, like the one the train is approaching now, the growl of the YDM’s exhaust belying its size: a distant home signal, cleared for the run to the last section; perhaps a reminder for me, also, that I am approaching the end of my journey.
As I lean out of the window, I see the front wheels of the YDM suddenly jump and then crash back down onto the track; a second later something clatters off the underside of my coach and the drivers applies the brakes in full emergency. The crew walk down the train and pull a metal rail chair from between the carriage wheels; someone deliberately laid it across the tracks, and would have derailed the train had they chosen a curved, rather than straight section of the line. At Coonor, a steam engine waits under the home signal to take the train down Mettupalayam; the YDM drops onto the return service to Ooty, and after smoking a Wills Classic, I climb up behind the diesel for the slow, steep crawl back to the terminus.
I walk back to Charing Cross and go into The Blue Hills Hotel bar; they have no Kingfisher, so I order a Golden Eagle. The red and gold label reads De Luxe Premium Beer – Specially Bottled For Connoisseurs – Quite A Chiller! Quite a mouthful. I debate asking the barman if he has ever caught anyone posing as a Connoisseur to surreptitiously drink one of his bottles of Golden Eagle, but decide it is not worth explaining Mohan Breweries’ strange and slightly ambiguous assertion. I buy some chicken tikka and rice from the Hyderbadi Biryani House to take back to the crazy TTDC Hotel; the uncooked kebabs hang on skewers outside the shop, unrefrigerated since whatever time they were made, and are cooked in a pot of charcoal out on the street. The rice appears from somewhere in the back of the grimy kitchen-cum-dining room, and the whole lot is presented to me in a purple carrier bag that encourages me to Fly Emirates. I call down to the bar for a room service Kingfisher, and eat my dinner on the veranda while the monkeys do their best to wreck the picnic tables on the lawn below me. If the TTDC arranged an exchange program with the Hotel Akademia in Slovakia, it would herald a whole new era in adventure tourism – one that would remain Exclusively For The Connoisseur of such places, I hope.

Blue Mountain Ultra Deluxe

I wake in the opaque pre-dawn light and repack my bag for the bus out of Madikeri; the restaurant will not open for another forty minutes, so I ride the Yamaha back to the tourist office, push the keys under the door, and walk back to the Rajhandi through the empty streets. Mist rolls across Kennett Lane and slowly swirls around me, dampening my hair and brushing droplets of dew on my shirt, but somehow leaving the dust under my boots untouched. A few metres from the hotel car park, I disturb an enormous brown rat feeding on the waste from yesterday’s slaughter at The Best Mutton Stall; its nose twitches at the air, but it does not move off; its thick brown fur is beaded with mist; it is the size of a small cat. I order a pot of black coffee from room service, sit at my table, and watch the town slowly wake up outside my window.
In Delhi or Kolkata, I would see smudges of smoke tainting the sky above the bastees and slums, hear the constant growl and clatter of traffic, and the howls of stray dogs; I would smell cooking fires, rotting garbage, exhaust fumes, decay and human waste. In Madikeri I see the mist cloaked hills, hear birdsong and the distant call to prayer from the mosque down in the valley; I smell only the tang of evergreen sap and lighter notes of jacaranda and bougainvillea. High in the Coorg hills, surrounded by plantations where coffee bushes shade beneath trees strung with pepper vines, Madikeri seems as distant from the madness of urban India as it is possible to be; the chronic social problems that shock the senses in other cities – the slums and street dwellers, the pollution and the poverty – are unseen. It is as if it has placed itself, literally, above that.
I wave down the solitary auto-rickshaw that sometimes cruises Raja’s Seat Road looking for a fare and load my bag onto the small shelf above the engine at the back of the passenger compartment. Across the road, the little train waits silently in the station, the driver and conductor dozing on two platform benches; it will be a long day – the tour buses won’t arrive until six o’clock, and the Rajhandi’s bar will have first call.
There are two buses waiting to leave from the KSRTC bus stand for Mysore. I check the Deluxe service for any sign of video equipment, buy a 95 Rupee ticket, and stow my bag behind the driver’s seat. I buy a litre of water, smoke a Wills Classic, and take a farewell look at the town; further up the hill at the circle, a white uniformed traffic policeman stands with his hands on his hips and glares down at me with a decidedly non-plussed expression. I creep back to the bus and take my seat.
It takes five hours to reach the suburbs of Mysore. I step down into the burgeoning City Bus Stand and back into the noise and chaos I had escaped in for a short while. After the freshness of Madikeri, the heat and humidity is intense. I take an auto-rickshaw to the Mayura Hoysala and check in to my old room; they welcome me like an old friend and ask whether I would like a bottle of Kingfisher in the bar, or served to my room. I sit on the veranda with Trains At A Glance and work out a route to Udhagamandalam – or, as it’s more commonly known, Ooty – in the Ghats of Tamil Nadu. Although it lies only 130 kilometres from Mysore, there is no direct rail link, and I calculate a journey of 30 hours on three different trains via Bangalore and Combiatore Junction. I walk over to the station booking office and find that train 2677 - The Bangalore-Combiatore Intercity Express - for the following morning has only Wait Listed tickets; I change the date on my Reservation Requisition Form and push it back over the counter: Wait List or Reserved Against Cancellation.
“You take bus,” the booking clerk advises, “every day, nine o’clock, Ooty in six hours only”.
I thank him, take an auto-rickshaw back to the City Bus Stand, and within 10 minutes have a ticket for the morning’s Ultra-Deluxe coach to ‘The Queen Of The Hill Stations’.
It is getting dark as I walk back through Devaraja market to The Kwality Bar And Restaurant; the worst of the heat has backed off, but the evening air is like a hot breath on my face. I sit under an ancient, wobbling ceiling fan and hold a chilled bottle of Kingfisher against my neck, flicking perspiration from my finger tips.
“Please, you must help my friend.” A tall, well dressed Indian stands beside my table, his hands clasped in front of him. “Please speak to him, before it is too late.”
His friend is a middle-aged plantation owner from an area south of Coorg; I am told that since his wife left him, he has spent his time drinking and has lost interest in his coffee bushes, his estate, and his friends. A further concern is his cigarette smoking. I sip my Kingfisher, light a Wills Classic, and ask him exactly what sort of advice would he expect me to offer his friend. The irony is lost, however, and his friend summoned to my table. I point out that I am neither a doctor nor a psychiatrist, and that I smoke and drink on a near biblical scale; but it doesn’t matter, the tall Indian assures me: “You are English – he will listen to you.” His friend turns out to be quite content with his apparently decadent and destructive lifestyle; his staff is quite capable of running the estate, and he is relieved to be free of the conventions of a boring marriage. He has lived a full life, and is looking forward to the day when one of the big co-operatives will buy his plantation and allow him to retire and fully embrace the pleasures of McDowell’s and Navy Cut.
“If there is one thing you could say to him,” the tall Indian asks me, looking at his friend, “what would it be? What piece of advice?”
What indeed?
“Enjoy yourself,” I tell his friend, finishing my Kingfisher and standing to leave. The tall Indian looks at me with disappointment; I shrug apologetically: he is fighting a moral crusade to save somebody who doesn’t want to be saved, but he simply can’t see that.
I cover myself with Odomos mosquito repellant and sit on the veranda late into the night; as the traffic noise subsidies I can hear the Chug of a WDM idling in Mysore Junction station, waiting to back onto the 2am Bangalore Passenger train. Bats swoop and flit around the trees that line Jhansi Laxmi Bai Road; the shrill cry of a startled kite and the occasional bark of a stray dog penetrate the darkness, but otherwise it is eerily quiet.
I have less than two weeks left in India. It doesn’t seem possible.
In the morning I drink my usual tall glass of hot black coffee, shoulder my bag, check out of the Mayura Hoysala once more, and take an auto-rickshaw to the bus stand. I walk the line of buses that are parked nose-in to the main concourse until I find my Ultra-Deluxe, waiting with the engine running and only two other passengers on board. I buy a breakfast of potato chips, which I throw away after a few mouthfuls: thick, hard, and greasy, they are caked in a mixture of chilli powder and sugar, rendering them inedible to anything but the most hardened local palette. On the bus, I am pleased to note a gaping square hole in the laminated hardboard wall behind the driver’s seat where the video screen once faced the passengers. In fact the whole interior looks as if it has been burgled of most of its fittings; more holes appear in the ceiling with speaker cables poking out, and all the knobs have been removed from the seat reclining levers; there is nothing left of the seat back tables apart from empty screw holes to show where the hinges were, and the door to the pilfered first aid kit hangs open, swinging backwards and forwards with each bump in the road. My seat is stuck at an uncomfortable and random angle, neither upright nor reclined; what’s left of the handle won’t budge, so I spend the journey halfway between sitting and lying, like a hospital convalescent. The drive is hair-raising; there is no concession to traffic or road conditions; from the minute we leave Mysore, the driver keeps his foot to the floor and his hand on the horn. Sometimes we drive with the nearside wheels on the hard packed mud of the verge, kicking up stones and dust as we undertake a Tonga or an old Ambassador taxi; at other times, on the wrong side of the road, dodging and weaving through the oncoming trucks and rickshaws. After three nerve-wracking hours we pull off the road at an isolated truck stop for a break. Before any of the passengers can prise themselves from their broken seats, the driver and conductor are inside the shabby little bhavan and claiming their commission. While the owner serves the bus crew a meal of steamed iddli, dosai, and sambar, the passengers are ignored and left to study the stale contents of a dirty, glass fronted food cabinet balanced on a sagging wooden serving counter. I stand in the desolated car park and smoke a Wills Classic, looking through the doorway as my fellow passengers reluctantly select what they think they can stomach from the tired and old fried snacks on display; as the driver and conductor accept cups of hot chai from their host, a woman in a cobalt blue sari leads her young daughter back to the bus, disappointment and disgust written across her face. The little girl is clutching a cold, sickly brown bonda to her mouth and taking small bites; her mother is going hungry.
There is a rough, stinking, wooden lean-to behind the bhavan marked ‘Ladies.’
I ask where I will find the gents.
“Outside,” the owner says, with a dismissive flick of his hand. I feel like leaning across his filthy counter with its three yellowed plastic bottles of overpriced drinking water and punching his lights out. Outside means exactly that: anywhere outside. I choose the back wall outside the open kitchen door and add the smoking butt of my Wills Classic to the puddle.
We cross into Tamil Nadu at a military checkpoint outside the gates to Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary; the park is out of bounds to visitors, even though the bus drives right through the middle of it. Banditry linked to the trade in illegal sandalwood has made whole tracts of the Ghats no-go areas; roadside signs prohibit stopping unless absolutely necessary, and forbid leaving your vehicle in any event. Dense, scrubby bush rears up on either side of the thin ribbon of Tarmac; thick and seemingly impenetrable, a whole army of dacoits could hide unseen in this vast jungle. Other signs show pictures of elephants, monkeys, and even tigers, with ’30 KM MAX’ in large red letters; our driver carelessly throws the bus from one side of the narrow road to the other at twice this speed. Beyond the teak and sandalwood trees, the peaks of the Ghats soar above the foothills and lower valleys; somewhere in those mountains is Ooty, but that the road will reach such a height seems impossible to believe. The climb is torturous; each time we reach a pass or a saddle between these huge ridges, we face another wall of sloping rock rising still higher into the thinning blue air. Eventually, we clear the highest ridge and begin to drop into the mountain valleys where the colonial British rulers would retreat from the suffocating summer heat of the Tamil Plains. Forests of eucalyptus and sandalwood gather in the clefts and folds of the mountains, and plantations climb the steep valley walls, a carpet of emerald green dotted with the tiny, brightly coloured figures of tea pickers.
After seven hours, we reach Ooty’s bus stand. Following my introduction to Tamil Nadu in Chennai, my first impressions of the town do little to dispel my negative feelings about the state. Spanning a long, wide valley, Ooty seems to be a hotchpotch of scruffy shacks, red-brick colonial public buildings, ugly concrete boxes, and alpine ski chalets. A faded and overgrown racecourse occupies the oval of land between the bus stand and the Big Bazar; further west, the boating lake receives the town’s sewage and pervades the air with a faint, but unpleasant smell.
I find a pokey little bhavan on Lower bazaar, order a coffee and a cucumber sandwich, and study my map; I settle on the TTDC Tamil Nadu Hotel just off Commercial Road in Charing Cross, pay my bill, and catch an auto-rickshaw.
In the evening I sit in the wood paneled bar beneath reproduction prints of Victorian English gentlemen playing croquet and hunting with dogs, sipping Kingfisher, and thinking about The Hotel Akademia in the distant central European city of Kosice. If my stay there was like a post-Soviet version of Fawlty Towers, then my stay at the TTDC Hotel is promising to be the Bollywood remake.
And then there’s the Nilgiri Blue Mountain Railway.
I think I’m going to enjoy Ooty.

The Gladiator And The Gulag

In the morning, I order black coffee and sit at a table in the restaurant overlooking the garden. Madikeri is shrouded in early morning mist; ethereal fingers of vapour curl through the evergreens that climb the hillsides above town, and only the minarets of the Rajas’ tombs rise above the rolling cloud that fills the valley floor. The air is already hot by the time I finish my coffee and The Vijay Times and walk downstairs to the car park. The Yamaha refuses to start; it’s become used to being left on ‘reserve’ tank and doesn’t like that I turned the petrol tap to ‘off’ the previous evening. I spend 10 minutes kicking it over and shaking it around before the sediment in the bottom of the tank allows some fuel to reach the carburetor, and then gun the engine and ride down Kennet Lane into town. I pull over and walk through the private bus stand to buy Wills Classic and a bottle of water; a line of battered, bent and leaning old buses are reversed up to the kerb outside a row of bare concrete waiting rooms where women sit on rickety benches in near darkness. The men wait beyond the barred doors of these cells, spitting paan leaf onto the littered pavement, smoking beedis, and arguing fares with the touts who compete loudly and with wild gestures for passengers. There is no timetable, no booking office, nor any hint of where any of the buses might be going; it is even more intuitive than the KSRTC bus stand in Mysore.
As I ride the Yamaha across the traffic circle and past the auto-rickshaw stand I hear the shrill blast of a whistle; the white uniformed traffic policeman points at me and waves me down with his lachti stick. I pretend not to see him, drop the bike into second, and accelerate down a side street behind the Capitol Hotel; I have no helmet, and although everyone else in Madikeri flaunts this law, I have just saved myself a lot of hassle and a large fine. Consulting my map, I work out that I can circumnavigate the centre of town, and, when I need to, park out of sight behind the Canara Bank and walk the short distance to the main street.
The road to Abbi Falls is a strip of narrow, hilly Tarmac that winds its way through coffee estates and thick jungle; after six or seven kilometers it hugs the edge of a steep valley with views that disappear into the haze surrounding the distant peaks of the Western Ghats. Every so often a shared jeep or Ambassador taxi passes in the opposite direction, sending me fishtailing onto the dusty verge with an incessant beep-beep-beep of its horn; otherwise the road is hot, empty, and meandering as it snakes through the lush, green countryside peppered with hamlets and smallholdings. I pull over beneath the shade of a jacaranda and drop the Yamaha onto its side stand; as I reach for a Wills Classic movement catches my eye: a bright green viper – perhaps three feet in length – slides from beneath the bike and arcs towards my feet. I unashamedly run a good twenty metres down the road until I deem it safe to smoke a cigarette before going back to the Yamaha. I reach the waterfalls from a footpath that runs from the car park at the road’s end; a steep descent through a coffee plantation brings me to a wooden bridge beneath the trickle of water that spills over its lip, and a litter strewn picnic area patrolled by a bored looking park ranger. I cannot imagine a less inspiring scene; it has a fraction of the charm of even the most mundane stretch of the road from Madikeri. But I am at least satisfied that the Yamaha Gladiator is as much a match for the roads of Coorg as I am, and leave Abbi Falls for Kushar Nagar, some fifty kilometers to the east.
I follow Mysore Road out of town, dropping into the Cauvery River valley through a series of hairpin bends; the road is quiet, but the few buses and lorries I meet drive straight at me and overtake each other on blind bends, making it is far more dangerous than riding around town. I overtake whole families of Indians balanced on scooters and small motorbikes, and often slow to wind my way through herds of cows that cross or simply stand in the middle of the road. When a long stretch opens up, I push the Yamaha to its limits, streaking up behind other riders and then overtaking with a blast of the horn, tempting them to see if they can catch me. Two young men on Hondas take up the challenge but give up as the Gladiator’s speedometer creeps towards 90 kph on a sweeping bend; when I slow to take the road to the Durbar, they smile and rev their engines as they pass, waving and holding up their thumbs. After ten kilometers of crumbling Tarmac, dust, gravel, and compacted mud I reach a crossroads with a hand painted sign showing a badly drawn, smiling elephant; a narrow lane snakes through a few hamlets and a wide plain of paddy fields and eventually ends at The Durbar Hotel on the banks of the River Cauvery.
The elephant training camp is on an island in the centre of the river; I pay 5 Rupees to park the Yamaha under the hotel’s porch, and another five to take the ferry across to the camp. It is hot, still, and humid on the island; the thermometer at the deserted feeding centre sits at 36 degrees, and my forearms tingle with wind blasted sunburn from the ride.
Sweat trickles down my chest and darkens my shirt in large patches; clouds of mosquitoes gather around me. The trainers lead two small elephants into the water below a sign saying ‘Bathing Area’, screaming instructions at them and beating them with bamboo lachtis until they lie in the shallow water; they scrub at the leathery skin of the animals’ ears with soap and stones, and smash them repeatedly on the head if they attempt to resist the brutal treatment. Beyond the feeding area, another trainer is forcing a larger, older elephant to lift its front feet for the visitors; thick, heavy steel chains are wrapped around its legs, and the scrubby bush that covers the island resounds to the crack of the trainer’s stick hitting the elephant’s shins. Excited Indian families pose in front of these cruel, degrading, and ugly little scenes, and then turn their backs on the animals’ fate and compare photographs over their picnics. I feel sick and ashamed of myself for coming to this place. As I take the boat back to the Durbar Hotel and leave the hopeless elephants to their life of slavery in this rotten gulag, a park ranger smiles at me and asks: “You like our camp? You will come again?”
I ride the Yamaha twenty kilometers to the picnic area at Kushal Nagar Dam; the River Cauvery is a crucial element in the life of Karnataka, and, further east, Tamil Nadu. It irrigates the paddy fields and farms, and provides drinking water for millions; it is also the source of tension between the two states, and a political powder keg. The dam at Kushal Nagar is almost empty, but The Vijay Times is full of editorial comment and angry letters about the Cauvery Dispute – the division of the precious supply of water between the two states. Back in Mysore, demonstrations are paralyzing the city; at Mandya, protestors have blocked the railway line from Bangalore; in the countryside, impoverished farmers are committing suicide as their smallholdings literally dry up; across both states violence is rising as the water levels slowly drop. Central government in Delhi has finally awarded each state a share after more than a decade of wrangling, but nobody is satisfied: there simply isn’t enough flowing from the Western Ghats for everybody. There isn’t even enough in Kushal Nagar to attract the flocks of wading birds Karnataka State Tourism guaranteed.
I ride back to the Mysore Road and find the Pooja Bar And Restaurant; I order a Kingfisher and take a seat at a dirty wooden table with a cracked plastic ashtray advertising McDowell’s No1. The local men eye me curiously: a Western visitor in their dark, pokey, and flyblown local bar is probably unprecedented - and one that has arrived on a motorbike?
I take a circuitous route back to The Rajhandi Hotel, turning off the main road on the outskirts of Madikeri and riding in on Racecourse Road past Raja’s Seat. The state tourism leaflet I picked up in Mysore says that ‘not an inch of railway line has been laid in Coorg.’ But they are wrong: across the road from my hotel, just below Raja’s Seat, a narrow gauge railway trundles in a loop around a small amusement park. The tiny yellow engine pulls three open-sided carriages at snails pace in a small circle, and it looks like the kind of thing you’d find rusting away in a forgotten English seaside resort. But in Madikeri, this is the closest thing you will find to a white knuckle ride; the tour buses that ferry people to watch the sunset from Raja’s Seat also bring a stream of young people who get tanked up on Kingfisher Strong in the Rajhandi’s bar before riding the train. It is quite surreal. They hang from the sides of the open carriages and whoop as the little engine totters out of the station; as they reach the first bend in the tracks, they wave their arms in the air and close their eyes; there are blood curdling screams as the train plunges very slowly into the six foot long mock tunnel halfway round. Even after a skin full of Hayward’s 5000, it really couldn’t be much more frightening than nearly stubbing a toe, or anywhere near as exciting as watching a pair of snails mating.
I sit in the hotel bar with a Kingfisher as the riders return to finish off their evening with a few more Hayward’s before getting back on their buses. Keyed up to fever pitch, they gulp down whole bottles in one go, some of them trying to appear worldly by pretending to smoke Wills Navy Cut cigarettes, coughing and holding thier affected cigarettes at amueturish angles. I buy a bottle to take out, walk over the road, and climb over the gate into the darkened and empty amusement park. The station signs, signal posts and platform benches are identical to those in Bhubaneswar and Lucknow; the rails, although only two feet apart, are standard Indian Railways patterns; the ballast between the sleepers is the same grade as the South Western Railway’s mainline across the Deccan plateau. A small, almost real railway, running to nowhere and in the middle of nowhere. And no WDMs. I finish my Kingfisher, walk back to my room, and lie on the bed. A real white knuckle ride is sitting in the doorway of a Shatabdi Express as it rockets through a small town behind a WDP-4.
The nearest mainline is 130 kilometres away in Mysore; the bus from Madikeri leaves at 10 o’clock in the morning.
Tomorrow.

The Road To Madikeri

The waiter appears with a glass of black coffee as soon as I take a table in the courtyard restaurant; the first hint of dawn is tinging the sky to the east, the crows and kites starting their morning reveille. At 7 o'clock I leave a 10 Rupee note under my empty glass, collect my bag, and leave the key to room 104 at the front desk. I walk down an almost deserted Dhanavanthri Road until I find a rickshaw pulled up on the dusty verge, the wallah waking himself up with a cup of chai from the little wooden road-side shack that never seems to close; his hair is tousled and his shirt crumpled, and it takes him a few moments to register his first fare of the day. It is common for drivers to live in their rickshaws, and many only go home to their villages and families for a day or two when earnings permit the luxury; they live a harsh, unforgiving life, renting their vehicles by the week with no guarantee of covering even that modest cost. Before we reach Mysore's City Bus Stand, the wallah coasts into a garage and asks apologetically if I would pay my fare now so that he can afford some fuel. He buys 20 Rupees worth of petrol and puts the other ten in his back pocket. It will go towards the costs of rickshaw hire, and sustaining himself; and, if it is a good day, there will be a few coins left over to take home to his family.
An Indian city's bus stand is at the tumultuous heart of its already chaotic transport system; at any hour of the day, it is a thriving, animated circus of noise, light, and movement. Where Mysore Junction railway station follows the pattern of logic laid down by timetables, platforms, and bilingual loudspeaker announcements, the City Bus Stand works under the premises of guesswork, intuition, and some sort of unspoken collective understanding. I ask a brown-uniformed official, who carries a clipboard and seems to be some sort of controller or despatcher, where the bus to Madikeri will leave from; he gestures in the vague direction of the parking bays at the back of the building, where a long line of battered coaches with homemade destination signs in Hindi and Kanadian stand. At the front of each bus there are more uniformed people, and crowds of passengers urgently negotiating prices and arguing over luggage fees, buying tickets and passing bags and suitcases through bus windows to unseen friends and relatives inside.
Like Indian Railways, the state operated buses have different classes. Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) offers the choice of Ordinary, Semi-Deluxe, Super-Deluxe and Ultra-Deluxe travel; increasing in increments of less discomfort, more cost, and fewer and shorter stops, they run everywhere but to the smallest towns and villages. I find a Ultra-Deluxe from Bangalore that is making the run to Mangalore over the Western Ghats via Madikeri and pay the conductor 105 Rupees for a reserved seat - twice the price of a train journey of comparable distance, had a line serving the Coorg region of Karnataka ever been built. The bus is a dented Ashoka Leyland with blacked-out windows, balding tyres and frayed reclining seats; there is no luggage hold, and my bag is too big to fit in the overhead rack; I wedge it between the back of the drivers seat and the transmission housing, chaining it to a handrail for security. I buy water and some cashews for breakfast, smoke a Wills Classic, and push my way down the aisle of the already crowded bus to my seat. The driver sounds his horn as we pull slowly out of the bus station, provoking a stampede of last minute passengers who shoehorn themselves into every inch of standing space left; the conductor turns on a large television at the front of the bus, inserts a video in the player and adjusts the volume to an ear-splitting, distorted scream. The Ultra-Deluxe is what is known as a Videobus service - one of India's most disagreeable ways to travel - but it is too late to change now that we are on the main Eliwala Road. The man sitting next to me unpacks the breakfast of iddli and copra chutney he has bought from the bhavan in the bus stand, sprawls himself out in and stares fixedly at the screen as an attractive Indian actress launches into a screeching love song against the backdrop of a misty Punjabi plain. I slide my window open and watch the streets of Mysore slip by, trying to ignore the deafening music and crowding limbs of my travelling companion.
I have never understood having entertainment on transport other than, perhaps, aircraft. There is little to see at 39000 feet at night on a long flight, but in daylight, I would much rather look out of the window and cross reference what I am seeing with the interactive map on the seat-back screen. But on land - whether in a car, a train, or a bus - there is always something interesting, exciting, bizarre or occasionally shocking to see - day and night. Why watch a film on a Videobus or a car's seat-back DVD player when the world is outside your window? Are we that indifferent to what is happening around us, whether it is the brightly dressed women working in the paddy fields of Tamil Nadu, or the old man walking his dog through a housing estate in Milton Keynes? It takes the best part of fifty minutes and a lot of stops for even more passengers to pile aboard before we are on the open road with Mysore behind us. The road varies from brand new dual carriageway - where once, we are overtaken by another bus driving head-on into the oncoming traffic on the other side of the central barrier - to little more than a beaten earth track through dusty farmland; the driver bullies rickshaws and scooters out of the way with his horn, and keeps the bus a scant couple of feet from the bumper of the vehicle in front. I have no choice but to slide my window shut against the choking dust thrown up from the road, and endure the airless, sweat-scented atmosphere inside and din of the television with gritted teeth.
At 11 o'clock we swing into the bus stand at Bylakuppa for a ten minute break; I fight my way to the door and stand on the forecourt with a Wills Classic and my map. I estimate we are less than 50 kilometres from Madikeri - which is borne out by the blue outline of the Coorg hills on the horizon - a journey of perhaps an hour and a half at most. I buy a cup of chai, more water, and get back on the bus. The handful of passengers who got off at Bylakuppa have been replaced with twice as many more, and it takes me several minutes to convince the occupant of my reserved seat that under no circumstances is he staying in it. There is no deference to age, gender, or infirmity on Indian buses - unlike travelling on Indian Railways; pregnant women and tired old men will stand for a journey of hours while younger and fitter passengers doze contentedly in the reclining seats. To offer my place to the exhausted old lady with her bags of market vegetables would be a breach of social etiquette, and could be misinterpreted in any number of ways. There is a momentary respite from the pummelling noise from the television while the tape is changed; the next film is what appears to be an action/comedy/romance/musical filmed in the 1970s, with creaking, garishly painted sets, awful contemporary costumes, and lengthy and entirely unconvincing set-piece martial arts fights. If anything, it is even louder than before.
After an hour I begin to doubt my estimate of being in Madikeri before one o'clock; the road rises steadily through the lower hills, then begins a twisting ascent into the mountainous coffee growing region of Coorg. The hairpin bends are so tight, the climbs so steep, that the bus grinds uphill at less than walking pace in first gear. The scenery, though, is idyllic: coffee bushes and pepper vines growing under the shade of sandalwood and palm trees; thick forest jungle and blossoming jacaranda; tiny villages and plantations with names like Fairlands and Hillyside Estates hidden behind white painted picket fences; rivers and mountain streams sparkling in the sun, unpolluted and undisturbed. When I open my window, the air is fresh and warm, free of the heat and fumes of Mysore which seemed at the time a relief after Chennai. We stop at Kushal Nagar just after one o'clock; a sign outside the bus stand tells me it is still 30 kilometres to Madikeri. The road becomes ever steeper, the forest thicker and lusher, as we toil up the last stretch to the outskirts of Madikeri and drive the short distance to the bus stand - just as the end credits of the terrible film roll down the screen, as if they had been timed to the very second. I retrieve my bag from behind the driver's seat, dust off the prints where it has been used as a footrest, thank the conductor, and step down into the refreshing air of Madikeri - or Mercara as it is known in Kanadian, the Karnatakan language - capital of Coorg (Kodagu), an area proudly described as The Scotland Of India by those who live here.
The bus stand is at the bottom of a hill behind the main Chouk. I follow a narrow lane between the backs of some ugly concrete office blocks and climb a steep flight of stone steps up to Mahadev Pet and the rickshaw stand opposite the Canara Bank. The entire town centre would fit inside the confines of Mysore's Devajara Market; there are two or three hotels - each with a bar and restaurant - a handful 'Meals Ready' halls, a couple of dozen 'General Sales' and beedi-and-paan stores, and the odd 'Coorg Honey-Coffee-Cardamom' shop serving the few tourists who pass through. A small traffic circle in front of the public bus stand, where old and decrepit coaches wait to ferry villagers out into the nearby countryside and backwaters not served by KSRTC, is presided over by a policeman in a crisp uniform, complete with white gloves and bush hat. There isn't very much traffic for him to direct, apart from the endless stream of buses that grind up and down the hilly main road. I ask a rickshaw driver to take me to the Hotel Valley View - part of the same government run chain as the Mayura Hoysala - but dismiss any thoughts of staying there as soon as we reach the main gate. The ramshackle colonial building that was the original accommodation has been elbowed out of the way by a new, starkly modern, characterless block, which sits in the middle of a waste ground of builders debris. The car park is a field of rubble, and a apart from a bicycle leaning against the hotel wall, it is completely empty. The tariff board facing the road asks for 1000 Rupees a night, and I doubt many people get any further than this before turning around. The silhouettes of five or six staff gather behind the smoked glass lobby doors and then drift away in disappointment as my rickshaw u-turns back onto Race Course Road. I find the Rajhandi Hotel a hundred metres below Raja's Seat - once the site of the Maharajas' belvedere overlooking the valley below - and check into a room with a view of the garden and the two resident ducks that waddle around the lawn and paddle in the small pond.
The Rajhandi is built into a hillside on the edge of town, its four floors descending from Raja's Seat Road to the car park entrance on a narrow lane called Gowhli Street. I sit at my window table with a room service bottle of Kingfisher and look out over the town. Ringed by low green hills, the brightly painted bungalows with their red terracotta roof tiles stand shoulder to shoulder with the minarets and domes of the rajas' tombs, surrounded by tall trees and colourful splashes of bougainvillea; it is so quiet that I can hear only distant birdsong and the whisper of a faint breeze in the palms along the lane.
I walk down Gowhli Street into town and eat a simple meal of stewed pumpkin and rice in the Capitol Bar And Restaurant. I am their only western customer; the houseboys serve me with something akin to reverence for a rare European visitor, and the manager makes a point of coming to my table to welcome me. I tell him, in all honesty, that his food is excellent, and leave a generous tip for their obliging service. On my way back to the Rajhandi I notice a sign for 'Motorbike On Hire' with an arrow pointing to a rickety staircase and a first floor office lettered Nisarga Tourism. Half an hour later I sit in the hotel bar with a Kingfisher and plan a route for tomorrow using the hand-drawn maps that came with the Yamaha Gladiator. A web of minor roads radiates out from Madikei and connects countless tiny settlement and plantation estates with the capital; and more destinations lie off the main Mysore Road that my bus crawled up today. But for my first trip, I decide on a short orienteering ride to Abbi Falls and back - just to make sure that both the bike, and myself, can negotiate Coorg's roads.