The Backpacker (3 page)

FOUR

Back at Umta Vaddo, hawkers were starting to set up their kerosene lamps for the early evening trade. I glanced at my watch – half past seven – and hurried up the street towards the hotel. Our train south was due to leave at half past eight and I still needed to pack my things, unless Sanita had done it for me. Also I was badly in need of a shower. The day's dust from the streets had stuck to my sweat, and the sun had caked it hard. When I grinned I could feel the skin cracking, like a meringue, and huge bogeys had accumulated in my nostrils.

Some of the travellers' cafés along our street were already filling up, and as I neared the hotel I noticed a group of Westerners sitting outside a trinket shop playing chess with a Sikh man. The scene looked pretty cool. All of the guys were very tanned and they all had goatee beards – except the Sikh who had a huge black beard that was entangled with his turban strap. He moved a chess piece and all four travellers rubbed their chins in concentration. Yes, I thought, I too will start a goatee.

Turning the corner at a trot, I pushed through the big wooden entrance doors to the hotel and climbed the narrow staircase, glancing at the keyboard in the reception to make sure Sanita was in. If the key was on the hook it meant that she had gone out. It wasn't, and the little Indian woman behind the counter looked at me and rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

‘Thanks,' I said, and taking the stairs two at a time reached the fourth floor and strolled to the end of the corridor. Sanita was sitting on the bed reading her guidebook, surrounded by packed bags.

‘Thought you weren't coming back,' she said, looking up as I entered. ‘I've packed all your stuff. I didn't touch your surfboard.'

‘You're coming then?' I panted.

She looked back at her guidebook, expressionless. ‘Doesn't look too bad according to these pictures.'

I walked over to the bed and glanced quickly at the open page. ‘Did you put my jeans in this bag?' I said, unzipping my holdall.

She nodded without looking up. ‘Some of the hotels down in Kovalom look pretty good,' she said, showing me another picture while I rubbed a hand across my face. I hadn't shaved since arriving in India and my stubble was quite long now. I had toyed with the idea of not shaving for the whole holiday, it would be neat to go home and shock everyone with my dirty appearance, but that was until the herd of goats playing chess had changed my mind earlier. Pushing myself up from the bed, I stretched and then tried to touch my toes.

I continued into the bathroom and studied my reflection in the plastic wall-cabinet mirror. My face was already burnt from the day's harsh sunshine, and the stubble on my face looked the same colour as my skin. I squinted, trying to imagine my face with a goatee beard, and wondered if I would look as cool as the four guys in the street had. Maybe a goatee would help me integrate into the traveller scene and be accepted more quickly. During my brief encounter with the tie-dye traveller at the station the previous morning, a distinct feeling of
Us
and
Them
had come over me.

Feeling like an
Us
, I called out to Sanita, ‘Did you pack my razor?'

‘I thought you weren't going to shave,' she shouted back.

‘Yeah. Did you pack it?' I heard the zip on my bag go and a few seconds later a soft hand was placed on my shoulder, holding the cheap razor. Sanita looked at my reflection briefly, unsmiling, then kissed my shoulder and walked out

After five minutes, my cheeks, jaw, neck and upper lip were perfectly smooth, almost shiny. Closing my eyes and running my wet hand across and then down my cheeks to the top of my lip, and then letting it pass my mouth onto the sudden bushy mound of my chin, I was reminded of a woman's body. ‘Cool,' I mumbled, opening my eyes. ‘Extremely cool.'

Sanita looked up from her book as I went back into the room, said, ‘You've missed a bit,' and went back to reading.

‘Yeah, I meant to. It's a beard.' I cupped my chin in one hand and massaged it with thumb and forefinger. ‘What do you think?'

She shrugged. ‘It's all right I suppose. Not much of it though. Shouldn't you have left the moustache or something? It looks like you've dribbled and the dirt has stuck to it.'

I grinned weakly and stepped forward, throwing the razor into my bag. It was then that I noticed her clothes lying on the floor. ‘You haven't packed!'

She closed the guidebook, sighing, and placed it gently in my bag. Flicking a clump of hair from her face she said simply, ‘That's because I'm not going.'

I gagged. ‘What?'

‘You can go alone. I've had enough of this country, I'm going home.'

I hurriedly slapped my pockets and pulled out the tickets. ‘But I've bought train tickets, San! I–'

‘I'll give you the money if you want, but don't ask me to go on a two-day train trip to some other shithole. When you were out this morning I went into town and changed my plane ticket. It leaves tomorrow morning.' She looked up. ‘Coming?'

I looked down at the train tickets and held them out, pleading. ‘But... '

‘Thought not.' She stood up and walked over to the window. ‘You like it too much. You and all the other stupid foreigners pretending to be poor. No Indian likes India you know John. It's a toilet. Just one, big, toilet.' She pulled the curtain to one side and looked out, sighing.

‘I thought your parents were Indian?'

‘So what? I'm not. I'd prefer to go on holiday to Spain like normal people.'

I sat down on the bed with a huff and picked up her guidebook, idly flicking through the pages. ‘Why don't you just give it a couple of days more and then decide? It'll be different down south.'

She was silent, and then, apparently ignoring my statement, looked back out of the window and said, ‘There was a guy looking for you earlier today.'

I put the book down.

‘Said he'd see you later, upstairs. Told me to tell you that he leaves tomorrow for Thailand and wants to have a drink with you before he goes.' She let the curtains fall back. ‘Maybe we should have gone to Thailand instead of this dump.'

Suddenly forgetting our differences, I stood up and said, ‘English? Upstairs? What did he look like?'

She shrugged. ‘Same age as you, I guess. Maybe older. Mid to late twenties, long hair. I dunno,' she crossed the room impatiently. ‘Pretty much like all the other foreigners, he–'

‘What was he wearing?'

‘Huh?'

‘Was it a tie-dye shirt with an orange circle on it?' I said urgently.

‘Might have been. How the hell should I know? What's so important about it anyway? You've got a train to catch, right?'

If I were going to tell her about the life-saving incident at the train station it would have been right there and then. But I didn't. And, I think, looking back, that it was a measure of how far apart we had grown. As my fiancée I should have been telling her everything, opening my heart. Now, not only wasn't I going to go home on the same flight as her, but I was already trying to think up an excuse not to go on tonight's train. It was as though the shock of the train station incident had somehow helped to focus my life. Like thumping a TV set that has a dodgy reception and suddenly the picture clearing.

‘Haven't you?' she prompted, breaking my train of thought.

‘Indian train tickets are re-routable,' I lied. ‘In any case, I'd rather see you off first, San.'

FIVE

I scanned the quiet moonlit bar and noticed the man who'd saved my life sitting in the far corner at a karom table with two others. He immediately put up his hand when he saw us and we went over.

‘Hello again,' I said, pulling out a chair. ‘Didn't really get a chance to speak to you before. I'm John, this is Sanita.'

‘Rick,' said Rick. ‘Nice to meet you, Sanita. This is Zed, and Dudley,' he explained, pointing to the other two.

We sat down and I ordered beer for us all. ‘D'you know how to play this?' I asked, picking up one of the karom pieces from the table.

‘Haven't got a clue.' He turned a plastic disc in his fingers. ‘Basically, I think it's like poor man's pool: you have to flick these discs into these other discs and try to knock them into the pockets.'

We all looked at Sanita for help.

‘Don't look at me, I'm as clueless as you.'

‘Well,' said Rick, taking a bottle of Kingfisher from the waiter, ‘that's what I've been doing anyway.'

Hippies in India all look like down-and-outs. You see them everywhere: unkempt beards, cheap silver jewellery, and reams of beads around their necks. Rick looked different: easy manner, deliberate movements, nothing jerky or nervous; I liked him instantly. His accent was from northern England, and he proved me right by giving the name of a town on the north-east coast that I'd never heard of. With his long hair and big moustache he looked like a long-distance truck driver, or a Dutch rock star from the seventies. When we introduced ourselves, I'd half expected him to say, ‘Hi, name's Thor!' and break into an air-guitar solo or something.

Zed and Dudley, on the other hand, were both younger; students from England on a month's holiday from the same university. Zed was tall and slender, with waist-length curly hair, and pretty in a way that probably attracted men as well as women, while Dudley, of a much smaller, slighter build, looked the spitting image of Kurt Cobain. If he hadn't told me he was English, and hadn't spoken, I'd have sworn he was Californian. He wore a woolly hat even though the temperature must have been in the high twenties.

‘You haven't been here long then?' I said, pouring out my beer.

‘A week. That's enough. Hate the place.' Rick lit up a cigarette and offered one to me.

‘No thanks,' I said, flicking my eyes to Sanita. I'd given up smoking for her but the craving was still there. Rick must have noticed because he sniggered slightly before putting the packet back in his pocket. Shit, I thought, how humiliating.

‘I thought it was going to be non-stop parties,' he continued. ‘You hear so much. But when I got here, well,' he looked around, ‘I thought I was in the wrong place.'

‘Mmm, know what you mean.' I didn't know what he meant but I didn't want to appear unworldly. Sanita gave me a sideways glance.

‘That's why I'm off to Thailand tomorrow; try something new.'

I nodded. ‘How long are you away for?'

‘Supposed to be four weeks.' He pulled the label from his beer bottle and stuck it to the table top. ‘Got a job to go back to unfortunately.' Then added, matter of factly, ‘Got three kids and a girlfriend too.'

It was hard to believe. He looked, as Sanita had earlier suggested, in his mid-twenties, but hearing that he had three kids suddenly made him seem much older. I thought it too personal to ask his age and said, ‘Me too. A job I mean. I was just saying to San–'

‘Right.' Sanita suddenly slammed both hands down on the table and stood. We all reached out and grabbed our beer bottles to stop them from toppling over. ‘I'm going back to the room John. Bye everyone.' She turned and walked away.

I was stunned. Speechless.

‘Seems nice,' Zed said as she marched across the rooftop.

There was a pause as we watched Sanita disappear into the stairwell.

‘So,' Rick said, pulling a little bag of something from his pocket, ‘she goes tomorrow and you stay behind. What are you going to do?'

I turned back to the table, taking and lighting a cigarette in defiance. ‘Was going south, but I missed the train.'

‘Come with me if you want.' He pulled some leaves from the bag and mixed them with cigarette tobacco on a Rizla. ‘To be honest, it'd be good to have someone to travel with in Thailand.'

Self-consciously I looked over towards the door to see if Sanita had gone, and whispered, ‘Whereabouts in Thailand are you going?'

‘Dunno really. A couple I met here earlier told me that Ko Pang Gang was a good place. But I'll see when I get there.' He licked the edge of the cigarette paper and stuffed a piece of card into the end. ‘Smoke?'

‘Not for a long time,' I said, glancing back at the door again. ‘OK.'

Ten minutes later the effect of the marijuana was taking hold and I began to giggle out of step with the conversation. Actually, I couldn't really keep up with the conversation at all now, my head was buzzing so much, but I tried to laugh at the right time to make it look good.

‘Deformities.' Rick said, smoke easing from his nostrils, ‘They're the most interesting sight in India.'

‘You too?' I giggled, forgetting to double-check that Sanita had gone. ‘I thought it was only me who found them more interesting than bloody temples.'

‘Have you seen those guys who go around on the little trolleys?'

I laughed harder, nodding. ‘Skateboarders from hell. They're brilliant!'

We ordered another beer and I told him about the boy I'd seen at the fort that morning, with the huge foot.

‘The best,' he agreed. ‘Number one in the top ten of deformities.'

‘You haven't, like, seen Big Balls then?' asked Dudley.

‘Yeah, Big Balls is number one,' Zed nodded. ‘He's a legend. Though only one confirmed sighting of him and that was by a woman we met on the train coming down here. A Welsh woman.'

‘Like, Welsh women don't lie, right?'

Rick leaned forward, placing his forearms on the table, and looked into Zed's eyes. ‘You're not seriously telling me that there's a guy walking around carrying two huge testicles?'

He nodded. ‘Not carrying though; he wheels them around on a little barrow that the hospital made for him. As big as melons.'

We burst out laughing.

‘I swear it. Dud?'

‘Like, he's telling the truth. Or that's what she told us, anyway.' Dudley took the joint from Rick. ‘Forty-year-old Welsh housewives studying contemporary women's issues in India don't, like, lie.'

‘According to her,' Zed continued, ‘that's where
Viz
got the idea of Buster Gonad from.'

‘That's years old though,' I said, wiping the tears from my eyes.

‘That's right. She saw him in Varanasi twenty years ago.' He leaned back on the chair. ‘There were loads more deformed people back then, before modern medicine really began to have an impact. Her and her friends were working in the hospital that made Big Balls' barrow and treated all the others. She reckons there are nowhere near as many elephantiasis cases out here as there used to be.'

‘Fooking spoil sports.' Rick took out his bag of grass and started to roll another joint. ‘Is he still there?'

‘Big Balls?' Zed shrugged. ‘Probably dead now. But the legend lives on.'

‘Why don't we start an expedition to find him?' I said enthusiastically. ‘Our task: to find and photograph Big Balls.' I took the joint from Dudley, inhaled, held it down, then let out a thick column of blue smoke into the night air. ‘I've already spotted Big Foot, so Big Balls should be a doddle.'

‘No can do,' Dudley said. ‘We're going north to see the Dalai Lama.'

‘Bombay first, though,' Zed corrected.

Dudley shrugged and said, ‘Mm-hmm,' through the pursed lips. ‘Why don't you two, like, come with us?'

I looked at Rick with a ‘why not?' expression, but he said that he'd already bought his ticket for Thailand and couldn't afford to waste it. In any case, he'd seen enough of India to last him a lifetime.

‘Don't you need an appointment or something?' I asked. ‘The Dalai Lama's a busy man, right?'

A second rush of the drug suddenly swept through my head and I found myself asking the same question over and over again. As far as I can remember Dudley reassured me that chilled-out people like the Lama wouldn't mind other chilled-out people like us knocking on his door at all. Probably invite us in for tea, I kept saying to myself. I think Dudley said that the Welsh woman on the train had met the Tibetan leader before, and she'd had no problems, but I can't be sure; everything was getting a bit woozy in my head.

However, I do remember thinking that a lot of incidents in India seemed to occur on trains, or in railway stations, but I was too stoned to talk about it. It was definitely the last topic that entered my head that night, though, because I always remember my last thoughts before I sleep.

I think I passed out a few minutes later.