Room Service (2 page)

Probably through an American aid program, most of the Western hotels in India now have bell captains. As a world traveller and cultural delegate, this dismayed me. I have warred with bell captains in many US cities and believe it is the traveller's job to re-train bell captains. On my last trip I experimented to see how much it would take in tips to make an American bell captain grin but had to leave the experiment unconcluded.

India, however, is a different question.

My first understanding of the Indian bell captain question came in Hyderabad. I wanted to post two cards to Australia and tried to buy stamps at Reception, but they directed me to the ‘bell captain'.

Bell captains in India smile at you, unlike US bell captains who, having an optical defect, cannot see you. As George Kaufman said on the death of the head bell captain at the Algonquin in New York, ‘I don't know how God did it'.

‘What do you mean?' asked Dorothy Parker.

‘How did God catch his eye?'

Catching the eye of the bell captain in the US requires gymnastics. I found that I have to manoeuvre myself into the field of vision of the bell captain without
getting behind his desk and without taking his head in my hands. Sometimes I found myself leaning over the bell captain's desk, an elbow nonchalantly on the counter, chin in hand, leaning so far as to have one foot off the ground.

Perhaps to lie on the bell captain's desk might have been another way.

But the Indian bell captain, I found, was a different problem entirely. It was how to keep the bell captain's eyes off me.

If I tried to do anything, tie a shoe lace, the bell captain would be there.

And unlike the US bell captain, he did not put his hand into your pocket, take out the wallet, remove the tip, and put it back.

If the Indian bell captain thinks he is not going to get a tip, he looks hungry, dispirited. On the way out of the room without a tip he is likely to stumble with fatigue, lean weakly in the doorway, cough pitiably, spit blood into a handkerchief. He might even fall and have to be helped up, saying, ‘It is nothing, I will rest for one moment'.

Foreign Affairs advise me to tip about 2 rupees for service (about 20 cents), but other Australians told me that this could be got down by haggling. Australians, of course, resent tipping because they never know how much to tip.

I found that if I over-tipped bell captains in the US I got service but it was service with contempt because the bell captain knew that he had me beaten.

If you over-tip an Indian bell captain he will move into your room.

He will send in the sweepers, the valet, they will spray for mosquitoes, polish the drinking glasses, take the telephone to pieces and clean it, replace the sheets while you're still in the bed, gesturing with a hand, ‘No – to leave the bed is not necessary, please remain', and as two assistants gently lift you the bed will be made under you.

But it was the problem of the postage stamps which caused my only doubts and suspicions about the bell captains.

There were stories from other travellers about the postage-stamp racket. And letters in the Indian newspapers said that anyone who handled mail was likely to remove the uncancelled stamps and throw the mail away (and this presumably included bell captains). As one letter in the
Hindu
said, ‘The outgoing foreign mail was not infrequently tampered with for collection of the stamps affixed thereto resulting in the mails never reaching their intended destination. And, nothing used to be heard of them or their fate.'

To forestall this temptation in the Indian bell captain, I intended to buy the stamps and post them personally.

The bell captain was young, perhaps still in training.

‘Where to sir?'

‘Australia.'

‘Ah – back in Australia you are a cricketer perhaps?'

‘No.'

‘Would I be asking a personal question if I enquired of you why it is that you do not play cricket?'

‘I was no good at it.'

‘Surely not, sir, you have the build of a cricketer, a very fine cricketer perhaps.'

‘Thankyou – stamps – do you have stamps?'

‘Sir – which is the finest cricket team in the whole world?'

That was easy. ‘India – definitely India,' I replied.

‘No, sir, you say that to flatter me, to flatter India. The answer, sir, is the West Indies.'

‘Thankyou. How much is it airmail to Australia?'

‘Unfortunately I have no 1-rupee stamps but we will solve it.'

He went to his stamp folder and produced eighteen 20-paise stamps. ‘We will make do, never mind. We will get the mails through.'

‘But they will not fit on the card – nine stamps will not fit,' I said, ‘there is no room.'

‘Not to worry – they will fit – you see. If it is fine by you, sir, I will not lick these stamps, for reason of hygiene.'

‘It is alright, I will put on the stamps.'

But I knew they wouldn't fit.

‘No, sir, it is my duty to place the stamps.'

Hah, I thought, I will not move until the stamps
have
been placed.

I would stay anyhow just to see how they could possibly be fitted onto the postcard. The Lord's Prayer
can be written on the back of a postage stamp, my knowledge of Hindi can be written on the back of a postage stamp, but I could not see how this postcard of Hyderabad's Rotary Park could fit onto the backs of nine 20-paise stamps without losing either the address or the message.

The bell captain separated the eighteen stamps individually and laid them out on the glass top of his desk.

He took from a locked cupboard, a jar of clag with a huge brush.

He began to paint the backs of the stamps liberally with glue; the glue overlapped the stamps onto the glass top.

He smiled at me. ‘This will prevent theft of the stamps from the postcards between here and the destination.'

The bell captain then had trouble getting the individual stamps off the glass top of the counter because the glue was making them very wet. He smiled again. ‘Small problem.'

He slid them along the glass counter and off the edge where they stuck. He then used a finger nail to lift them off. He smiled at me. ‘Please, easily done.'

The stamps had picked up a little grime in their journey across the glass top, but you could still see that they were stamps.

The bell captain then had trouble getting the stamps off his gluey fingers. While he held the card he also gave the stamps a second coat of glue. And so with the other
eight stamps. As I had calculated the stamps did not fit. I looked away to ease the bell captain's embarrassment. When I looked back the stamps were all in place, pasted over the address.

‘The stamps are in place but you will see that we have lost the address,' the bell captain said, still smiling, ‘but I will rectify that.'

He went on with the second card, slopping the stamps generously with glue and fixing them on the card. The first card had been placed down on the glass top in the swamp of glue and the ink was running. Both cards looked as if they had been left out in the rain. The bell captain finished the second card and found that the first card had adhered to the glass counter.

The glue, however, was still fluid enough to allow it to be slid off the counter. The bell captain wiped off the excess glue with his sleeve, blurring the message and wiping off two of the stamps, which stuck to his sleeve. ‘Oh dear,' he said, looking at me with a resigned smile.

He peeled them off his sleeve and fixed them back on the card after giving them a good slopping with glue.

At this point a clerk came to the bell captain with the autographs of the Australian cricket team. The bell captain became interested in the autographs and placed both the cards down in the swamp of glue on the glass top of his desk.

I rescued the two cards before they became permanently stuck to the glass top. I took them to
another table and tried to reprint the addresses, but found the cards too soggy to take ink. I leaned back, wiped away the perspiration from my brow and muttered a mantra.

The bell captain came running over. ‘Sir, I will do the mailing of the cards.'

I said no, it was alright, and I took the cards to the lift with the bell captain following, hurt. ‘Sir, it is my duty.'

‘But I have to let the cards dry so that I can reprint the addresses.'

‘No, sir, I will do that for you. That was my plan. You tell me the address and I will print it.'

He took out a ball-point pen.

‘No, it is OK,' I said, tipping him, ‘please – thankyou.'

‘I will not accept the tip, sir, until I have completed the task.'

I reached my room, gently eased the bell captain and the others out of my room and closed the door. I could hear them outside, discussing the matter among themselves with mutual recrimination.

I placed the two sodden cards on the air-conditioning outlet and they dried within the hour, although they curled. They were heavier, too, from the coating of glue and probably required additional postage. I printed the address in minute script around the stamps on the remaining space. I had no confidence in their arrival.

Later in the bar (for a holy person the bar is a holy place) I asked an Indian friend, ‘Why did the bell
captain use the glue? Was it for hygiene, because he didn't want to lick the stamps, or was it to make it harder for someone to steal the stamps? Did it make them removable so that if I had left them with him he could have peeled them off? Which was it?'

My Indian friend said that none of these was the answer – the bell captain used glue because the stamps had been stolen from other mail and consequently had no glue.

‘Why did he handle the glue so badly?' I asked.

My Indian friend quoted from the novel
The Serpent and the Rope
by Indian writer Raja Rao. In the novel the Indian character allows his French wife to pack the luggage into the car and to drive the car, saying, ‘How incompetent we Indians felt before
things.
'

As you know, Chief, I do not knock people who stay at the Hilton chain while travelling (or ‘Tip Town' as it is known among its devotees). I myself have a fondness for chain motels and am something of a specialist in Ramada Inns, Travelodge, Howard Johnsons, and Holiday Inns. I know the inadequacies of the less than intrepid traveller. I know about Traveller Paranoia, imaginary bed bugs, asbestos moneybelts. And you may remember too that last vacation I stayed at my hometown Hilton in Sydney. But there is something else I want to say about the Hiltons – they are themselves a travelling experience. They are another country. The Sydney Hilton is not Sydney. Rarely do you hear or see an Australian at the Sydney Hilton, the voices you hear are Japanese or American and the staff are foreign. The Hilton concept also contributes to an ethnic shuffling with its menus and decor – it severs you from nationality. So the restaurant in Sydney is the San Francisco, the Istanbul Hilton has an English pub inside it, and in France the Hilton at Orly has a restaurant called La Louisiane in a Mississippi river-boat setting.

I like the bidets in the foreign Hiltons with their erotic possibilities, I like room service Suzy Wong sandwiches
(avail able, as far as I know, only at the Istanbul Hilton) and, of course, the universal club sandvic (as we say in Istanbul). Give me a club sandvic, a complimentary Hilton bubble bath, a dozen Heineken, and maybe a butterscotch sundae and I can find inner peace – going now and then, of course, to the balcony.

My holiday last year was at the Sydney Hilton. I'm such a bad holidayer. I play no sport, have trouble making friends in the lifts of strange hotels in strange countries. I don't get along with bell captains. I have trouble lying in the sun – I think I can do it, but I get over-hot. I lie there thinking too much, I think of things ‘to do' and things I've done wrong.

At the Hilton I could invite friends up for drinks from the automated bar in my room. I knew the best restaurants. I had the Sydney library over the road run by my friends Sara Walters and Fay Lawrence. I had the hotel pool. Massage service. The John Valentine Health Club was closed so thankfully I couldn't do my jogging.

My window looked out on my house in Balmain so I could watch for robbers and see who cared enough to call on me.

You don't hear an Australian voice in the Hilton, so you can pull the curtains and forget you're in Australia.

I sat in front of the television watching midday movies and re-runs of
Upstairs, Downstairs
and
The Streets of San Francisco
and drank and ate my way through the room-service menu, beginning with the
first entree and the first main course and working my way meal by meal through the menu during the week. I even got to play cards with the room-service staff.

But before I do the report on the Hiltonia I think I owe it to everyone to explain Blase's Theory of Pure Travel.

Travelling is essentially the act of travelling – not the destination or the monuments.

As Brecht says, ‘It is the journey not the destination'. Travelling is really about bookings, tickets, finding out how the taps work, power points, tipping, driving the autobahn, street maps, and timetables and meeting other lonely travellers in bars, such as Mr Casapolla, from Sicily, who is an expert on liquid-waste disposal.

But I don't think it's about getting the best rate of exchange, avoiding being overcharged at restaurants or worrying about the taxi drivers taking you the long way around. That's all a very wasteful sort of worry.

But for me, Chief, the essential part of travelling is meeting the inconsequential, face to face. I know Donald Horne has published a book about the museums of Europe. I want to write a sequel called
Inconsequential Europe.
I seem to spend so much of my time with the inconsequential and I find that looking at monuments worries me. I try too hard with monuments. I read too much before and after, or I worry that I haven't read enough or that I've clouded my mind with historical back ground and can't ‘see' the monument for itself.

I worry that I've missed some curious detail. I know from having seen 5000 cathedrals, 2000 Indian temples,
and so many crusader forts, that there are curious details which everyone misses except those who know all about curious details which are ‘the whole point of it'. Someone tells you about what you've missed around the pool later on.

But back to Hiltonia. My most political Hiltonian experience so far was in the Tel Aviv Hilton where I was involved in a political demonstration by the Hilton residents.

My last Hilton demonstration was in Athens where I was trapped by an anti-American demonstration which surrounded the hotel (like an ‘angry sea', I think my story said). I watched it from the twelfth floor with my ouzo. No, I lie. The last was when I was caught up in a demonstration against John Kerr, a former Governor-General, at the Sydney Hilton where I happened to be an afternoon guest with a dear friend.

But in Tel Aviv the demonstration was inside the King Solomon Grill. I was in the Grill when I heard a New York Jewish woman say that some people she knew had cancelled their vacation in Israel this year because of the trouble in Lebanon.

‘We didn't cancel this year because of the trouble,' she said. ‘We felt we should come, trouble or without trouble. We owe it that we should share this with them.'

I realised then that simply staying at the Tel Aviv Hilton was a political act. This was confirmed later in the bar by a Californian architect named Rene who wasn't staying at the Hilton. He was staying up the road
at the Sheraton. ‘I do my playing at a hotel other than my own,' he said. He explained that he didn't like the barman and the doorman or whoever knowing what he was up to: ‘If you pick up a chick from your own hotel and it doesn't work out, you have to face her in the lift or at the pool next day.' Anyhow, Rene said that it was a common attitude among American Jews that to come to Israel this year was an act of political support for Israel's foreign policy. So while I was having my fifth martini in the King Solomon Grill (where I hung out) I was in a political demonstration. It was the nicest demonstration I've been in.

I did the one-day American Express tour to Sodom which was full of Australian hairdressers. I was told I'd have to organise the trip to Onan myself.

I then checked out the Cairo Rameses Hilton. When people from another country meet you as a visitor they assume that, as an intelligent traveller, what you want to ‘do' is a cathedral, followed by a castle, and then a crusader fort. That's all very well and educational, I suppose, but what Francois Blase wants to do, if the truth be known, say here in Cairo, is to shimmy at the disco where King Farouk used to shimmy. He was a bon vivant of the 1950s. He was our hero at Wollongong Tech. I'd like to ring some of the numbers he used to ring but I suppose those numbers would have changed and they'd be all married by now.

Here in Cairo at the Rameses Hilton I hang out at the Club 36 with Gergius and Tadros, the barmen. They are forever telling me to see monuments.

They insist I see the pyramids. But I say to them that to watch them construct a cocktail tells me more about Egyptian culture than the pyramids. Tadros makes the Seth and it's incredible. Seth was God of the Desert. A Seth is gin, sweet vermouth, orange, cherry brandy and bitter lemon. It's garnished with a whole lime, unpeeled like a mummy, so that the peel winds its way through the drink, like a veil dancer. Pinned to the lime, which is wedged into the huge glass, are a cherry and a lemon slice and two red-plastic monkeys, one hanging from the other by its tail.

You drink it through two long thin straws – one pink, one green. It's a dazzling construction.

‘Tadros,' I said, ‘where did you learn to do this marvellous thing?'

‘You admire?'

‘Very much. I like the way it embodies the colours of the Nile sunset, the flamboyant variety of the market place, the eroticism of the Arabian veil dancer, and it carries the suggestion of mystic potions from ancient times – elixirs and poisons. It is
jameel
[beautiful]. Where did you learn this?'

‘From the Hilton Cocktail School,' he said, proudly.

Next to me a couple of girls on holiday from a kibbutz in Israel talk with a couple of Englishmen who are driving across Africa. One of the girls says she's ‘fitting in as much as she can'.

One of the guys says, ‘You have to get as much done as you can while you're here.'

They agree that it's a pity to waste time when there's so much to see.

I worry that in all the places I've been in my life I have never ‘seen everything' I should have seen.

All I've done in Cairo, apart from shimmying at the night club King Farouk used to shimmy at, is to install my travellers' survival kit, put together by Viking Industries of Yonkers NY ($34.95). It has a dual ionisation smoke detector and an anti-intrusion alarm, which you wedge under the door, and a how-to-survive-a-hotel-fire manual. But they don't tell you about air raids. In the Tel Aviv Hilton they have air-raid shelters. I did my air-raid drill, but I seemed to be the only one.

I found myself with a fantasy in the Istanbul Hilton. An announcement would come over Turkish radio saying that there was unrest in the streets and all foreigners were to stay in their hotels indefinitely. That would be fine for me – to watch civil unrest from the balcony of a Hilton with a Heineken.

In the Istanbul foyer there are probably more currency deals going than in the London Hilton. I was offered some good illegal deals in the foyer of the Istanbul Hilton (double the bank-rate), but I mentioned the words ‘firing squad' in Turkish. The currency dealer merely shrugged in a ‘characteristically Turkish way' and said that that was the risk you took for double the bank-rate. But what I wanted to tell you about was the day I took the Istanbul Hilton lobby Tour B. Maybe it was just a ragged day for Tour B and I don't
offer this as a general critique because I do not often take lobby tours. This was Tour B (no lecture) up the Bosporus and did not include a Light and Sound show either. The Hilton lobby in Athens offers an Acropolis by Moonlight tour ‘… on the two days preceding the full moon, full night and one day after the full moon when there is no Sound and Light show, the tour will include instead a visit to the Acropolis by moonlight …' But I wander. I took Tour B (no lecture) up the Bosporus, as the old joke goes, it is easy to forget where you are in the Hilton. This tour began with an air-conditioned motor coach from the hotel, to the motor launch in the Golden Horn, up the Bosporus to the Black Sea and then by air-conditioned motor coach back to the Hilton. Assemble 9.30 a.m. sharp. We assembled, the eight Germans and I. I thought at first I was on the German Tour. The Turkish guide looked dapper from ten feet, but fell to pieces closer up, everything seemed to hang from his haggard moustache. At 9.25 a German asked if it was alright for us to board the motor coach waiting outside. The guide tapped his watch and said, ‘My dear friends, 9.30 boarding of the motor coach.' At 9.30 we surged out of the lobby and into the motor coach, scrambling for the best seats. Here the guide addressed us in English and asked if we all spoke English. I nodded, as the only obvious English speaker, and the Germans grumbled and made noises meaning that they could if they had to.

‘My dear friends, do you wish to return by the mountains or do you wish to return by the coast?' We
were still seated outside the Hilton. How, I thought, do we answer that when, presumably, we hadn't seen the mountains or the coast (unless that was Tour A which maybe I should have taken as a prerequisite course).

‘The coast,' said a 30-year-old German in an alpine wind jacket, ‘definitely the coast.'

This German turned to another German, an old man in a dark, crumpled suit, bow tie, with a benign smile and a JAL bag slung in front of him like a bus conductor, ‘What do you think professor – the coast, yes?'

We all looked to the professor, maybe he was an expert in Byzantine art. He motioned with his hand and said, ‘Of no consequence.' I warmed to him, he seemed to have a proper life attitude – that all destinies are equally interesting for those who live them out. We still hadn't moved from the front of the Hilton.

‘My dear friends, the mountains or the coast?' the guide asked again. ‘The mountains, I recommend the mountains.'

‘The coast, there is nothing in the mountains,' said the alpine-jacketed German.

‘The mountains,' I said for no reason.

‘Well the mountains then it is,' the guide announced. We used to call that the forced card trick.

The German moved grumpily in his seat and the Hilton motor coach moved off to the Golden Horn.

‘My dear friend,' the guide said to me, ‘where are you from?'

‘Australia.'

‘Ah, Australia! And which city?'

‘Sydney.'

At this, the German in the alpine jacket broke in with a snort, ‘Sydney, they all come from Sydney – there is no other city,' and was hugely amused by this observation.

‘There is Melbourne,' the guide said with authority, looking at me.

‘Yes, there is Melbourne,' I confirmed.

At the Golden Horn we would board the Hilton motor launch which I pictured, of course, with deck tables, Cinzano umbrellas and white-coated waiters. Maybe deck quoits. Toss down a raki or two. But the tour guide seemed to have economised and bought instead nine tickets for the regular ferry run. A Manly-ferry-sized craft with goats, soldiers, peas ants, and Turkish girls in the national costume of Wrangler jeans and Frye boots.

We set off up the Bosporus after scrambling for the best seats. The guide pointed out the occasional ‘landmark' and the German in the alpine jacket began cracking the whip over the guide – extracting from him an excessive clarity of performance, not, it seemed, for his, the German's sake, but for the benefit of the rest of us. The guide, I must say, came out with some details which were close to the extraneous.