Another catching up post. For the benifit of my Mum, who wants a map included (I’ll see), since leaving Madurai I’ve been to Kumbakonam and some small, very rural towns around there, Thanjavur, Tiruchirapalli, Coimbatore, Ooty (the British summer retreat), Mysore, Hampi and now the beautiful, surprisingly undeveloped, beaches of Gokarna. I’m relaxing in the sun doing absolutely nothing and loving it - but you don’t want to hear about that I’m sure. Rather than log all that lot, I just picked a few little snapshots I wanted to write about … and in my usual style, combed through them in minute detail. If you’re interested the next lot of photos will fill in the above gaps. Anyway … hope you are all well. I’m off for a beer.

The Invisible Force

I had my first brush with the sleeping giant of Indian bureaucracy. It was a warning shot, but the experience hinted at the Kafka-like depths of adsurdity that may exist.

I had a couple of hours to kill in Tiruchirapalli (Trichy for short) while changing trains. I checked my bag into left luggage, filled out the requisite forms and headed off to see the city. “How you liked our Trichy ?” said the old guy when I returned and hour and a half later. “Great, very good” I replied patting my pockets and realising I’d lost my ticket. “Ticket ….” said the guy.

“I’ve lost it I’m afraid, but that’s my bag there, you remember ?” pointing to one of three bags beind him in the empty storeroom.

“No ticket ?”

“No. Lost. That’s my bag. You remember ?”

This went on for a while but no progress was being made. I showed him my train ticket with unique passenger number that corresponded to his triplicate copy of my check-in form but no dice. I offered to retrieve my passport from the bag, but the mighty wheels of Indian bureaucracy had begun grinding into motion.

“No ticket. Need to fill form sir.” he anounced solemnly and began to fill in his sections of the document.

I’d got into the way of thinking everything in India was negotiable for a price. I even enjoy a good haggle most days. But now, nightmare accounts of the Indian Civil Service came back to me. I resolved to play the game and stay calm. I had 30 minutes before the train left.

The form wanted to know how and WHY I had lost my ticket, along with all the usual birth certificate data. I then had to sign a lengthy pre-written confession of my irresponsibility that began: “I humbly appeal to the good graces of the Station Master …” 15 minutes to go and the form, stamped, checked and re-checked was complete. “Now you take to Station Master. Signing.” he said pointing to the bottom of the form.

“What !?”

I ran round to the Station Masters office with the form. He wasn’t there and none of 10 deputies could authorise the document. 4 of them grimly set about calling him on mobiles and landlines all over the station. Some stood on the platform periodically looking left and right and sucking their teeth before coming back in to report ‘no news’ with furtive looks. The clock ticked on. With 5 minutes to spare, the great man swept into the office and sat down to the form without aknowledging me. I was not invited to sit. It was like being in the headmasters office.

He didn’t actually read it but listened to accounts of ‘my case’ from his hareem of eager deputies. Then, where the signature was required, he began to compose a small paragraph, pausing several times like a poet, crossing out a word and replacing it with a more fitting adjective. I was close to grinding my teeth into my gums.

2 mintues to go and the composition was finalised. I ran back to the storeroom and gave it to the old guy. Without waiting to be asked I dived behind the counter and heaved on my backpack. The station master’s poetic musings were clearly further ‘case specific’ security measures to be carried out by the clerk before releasing ‘the item’. He began to stop me, holding up the form in protest but I could see he didn’t have the heart to make me miss my train. “THANKYOU, GOODBYE.” I beamed, shaking his hand vigourously to throw him further off the idea. And I was gone. Crazy.

 

Rural ‘Sexy Film’

I went to Srirangapatnam, a bleak village 15km out of Mysore, to see the remains of Tuptu Sultan’s lair. He was the thorn in the side of the British, holding what is now Karnataka long after the rest of India was under colonial rule.

A local sold me the use of his bike for 2 hours to explore the scattered ruins. I met him later that afternoon, smoking grass under a tree in a field, opposite a solitary white building. I sat with him for a while and asked him what he was doing out here. He pointed to the building and said “5 minute time, sexy film. Full Indian ! You come ?” It was completely unmarked and I presumed derelict, though now I looked more closely, there were a few bicycles parked outside and a couple of men standing smoking. I couldn’t say no really. I was too curious to see what rural Indian porn looked like. I mean, how were they going to get the saris off for a start ?

We took our seats amonst a scattered audience of about 10, needless to say, men. The first 15 minutes was a dull story about an arranged marriage with no hint of intrigue. The spool looked like it was from the 70’s, with sepia discolouring and the odd burnt frame. Then, from nowhere, came a shower scene set to music. Hamanth nudged me excitedly “Now starting ! … “. Being as I was a little bit stoned, I had to fight hard to hold back the laughter.

Like all of the women, she was plump to say the least. It was a village shower (buckets poured over the head) that she took wearing a towel that was secured from armpits down to the knees. The peephole camera panned up and down longingly as she lathered her ample knees and shoulders with all the eroticism of a wartime advert for Victory soap. The hush across the small audience spoke of : Phoooooaaaar !

Then followed a medley of scenes where fully clothed rolly-polly adults got down to some seriously adolescent ‘heavy petting’. A fumble for a cardiganed boob here, a feet close-up there, a gentle moan at an erotic shin rub. And just as I remember my own early adolescence, the women all lay ‘paralysed’, doing absolutely nothing at all.

The big finale was a nude scene accompanied by a lounge version of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ with a twangy, almost country, electric guitar picking out the vocal melody. An amusing and perfect metaphor for the passionless performance on screen. The hero at one point mechanically squeezing boobs and alternately attaching his mouth to each nipple. If you didn’t know any better you’d think he was trying to blow them up, and ahem … believe me, they didn’t need inflating.

As abrubtly as it had started, the action then snapped back to the marriage story. Everyone stood up and left, clearly kowing the format. The film kept on playing to an empty cinema.

 

(One of) The Worst Bus Journeys in the World

It’s a title for which travellers fight hard for. Everyone has a saga to tell. This is my best to date.

I took an 11 hour journey by government bus from Mysore to Hampi. A government bus is basically a train carriage on tractor wheels. It is constructed in the spirit of WW2, naked steel panels welded and riveted together and coated in a gloss of army green. They weigh several tons and have no doubt completed several million miles of service. The engine awakes like a roaring beast locked in the basement - an angry tractor, savagely abusing a hoover. Everything that can shake, squeek or rattle inside the bus, comes to life in a mexican wave. We charged out of the bus station and began our 400km journey, shoogling across the country like a deranged mecano set with parkinsons disease.

Before we’d even left Mysore, 3 fights had broken out due to the tension of overcrowding onboard. Each dispute would spread through the carriage like an epidemic threatening all-out mutiny. The conductor, who plays the role of sheriff and schoolteacher would appear in the middle of the crowd, blow his whistle and begin shouting and pointing at the ‘miscreants’ or ‘rowdies’ as the Indian press likes to call troublemakers. In a way that is so typical of the Indian respect for heirarchies and authority, the accused all clasp their hands together in deferance and begin apologising. The whistle blows, the lights go out and we’re all back in the dark, like mushrooms in a transporter.

The bus roared on through the empty blackness over a road surface that I imagined to be the surface of the moon. Every few minutes, on top of the now continual epileptic shuddering of the bus, we would hit a bump that would bang like a gunshot and throw us half a foot off our rock-hard seats. The cold had also set in and we were all huddled like refugees with towels or jumpers wrapped round our heads, shivering in improvised blankets. I started to worry about the windows - galleries of untoughened, household plate glass - bouncing around next to me in their steel frames. I figured if we were to go off a small cliff, the die-cast monster-bus would probably survive intact, though all occupants would no doubt bleed to death from the explosion of shards sent through the carriage.

The engine was now howling at an evil pitch - 2 dog tractors torturing a hoover to the drone of bagpipes. Somehow, out of sheer boredum, I would lose consiousness in the middle of all this. Waking up in motion, being thown into someones lap, surrounded by ‘death metal’ noise, rattling like a thunder of insane typwriters … it’s indescribable, sorry.

At no point was I too disheartened. Perverse as it may sound, I was laughing inside at the absurdity of - the Worst Bus Journey in the World.

Feel free to contend.

Hampi

Hampi is the ruins of an entire city, scattered amongst ‘mountains’ of red boulders and a snaking river bringing a Nile-like greenery to the red desert. To walk around it is a little like discovering it yourself. Like Egypt must have been 50 years ago. A slightly hippyish traveller commuity laze by the river. Everyone hikes off to find their ideal vantage point at the end of the day to watch the sunset blaze across the ancient panorama like a Hollywood trailer. Every sunset feels like the end of time for this fallen kingdom.

I hired a motorbike and burned some desert road through valleys, villages, mountain tracks, along rivers that lead to dams, past kids, cattle, farm workers all smailing, waving and stopping me to say hello. Motorbike really is THE way to see this country. If I’d clicked earlier I would have bought one. I got off the bike at the end of the day and looked in the mirror. I looked like the smiling man in the cartoon who lit the exploding cigar. Sweat-matted, warewolf hair blown back, sunburnt crows feet round my eyes, a frozen expression of deranged bliss on my face. Not at all unlike my man Tom Waits.

The highlight of the day though - photos to come - was being rowed across the river, on my bike, on a coracle. A coracle is a circular boat, like a big lilly leaf, woven out of bamboo or whatever sticks or branches are local. I think Pooh rode on one … I believe you still get them in England. 3 of us on bikes were required to balance it out, so I had to wait a while for 2 more people. You had to stand on your bike to steady it, and the technique to cross is to spin the coracle gently with the flow of the river. It was like being on a kids merry-go-round. Me and two Indians on our toy bikes.