by Frank Kusy
Kevin and I in India
Frank Kusy
Published by Grinning Bandit Books
http://grinningbandit.webnode.com
© Frank Kusy 2013
‘Kevin and I in India’ is the copyright of Frank Kusy, 2013.
First published in Great Britain 1986
by Impact Books, 112 Bolingbroke Grove,
London SW11 1DA
Reprinted 1990, 1995
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, digital or mechanical, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
Cover design by Amygdaladesign
Kevin and I in India is the Number One Bestselling sequel to Too Young to be Old: from Clapham to Kathmandu
Contents
Foreword
Map
Part One: Napoleon and the Deep South
Part Two: Mowgli and the Wild West
Part Three: Buddha and the Bodhi Tree
Part Four: Basu and the Roof of the World
Part Five: Revelations in Rajasthan
Postscript
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Dedication
To my mother and the Gohonzon
Foreword
Hi dear reader,
I find it hard to believe myself, but 30 years have passed since I first wrote ‘Kevin and I in India’. It was my very first published book – a year or so before I was commissioned to write a series of travel guides to Asia – so I was both surprised and amazed when it won plaudits from such big international press names like the Sunday Tribune and the Mail on Sunday. I was even more amazed when it became an instant bestseller and ran three editions in paperback.
Three years ago (2013), after publishing a more recent book of my Indian adventures (Rupee Millionaires), I decided to re-release ‘Kevin and I’ as an e-book, but was plagued with doubts. ‘Is it still worth putting out there?’ I thought to myself. ‘Is it still relevant to our times?’ Well, the answer to both questions – thanks to a flood of lovely reviews – was a resounding “Yes”. Of course, India is a much cleaner and tourist friendly country than it was 30 years ago – in 1996, for instance, following a plague scare, the garbage trucks in Delhi—working flat out for once—managed to remove fifty years of accumulated rubbish in 3 weeks, and in October 2014 Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself cleaned the road to spearhead India’s biggest ever cleanliness drive,
Other than that, however, India hasn’t changed much, especially at backpacker level, and people who have never been to this wonderful country, and even those who have, are still enjoying our little ‘diary of disaster’ as we haplessly flung ourselves into three months of fun and self-imposed torture.
So why did we do it? Why did we expose ourselves to the most down and dirty (and yet often hilarious) time of our lives? Well, we really had no choice. We couldn’t afford luxury hotels or comfortable transport or what few Western-style restaurants there were back then. All that we could afford was to tour India like Gandhi – living in the most basic of accommodations, travelling 3rd class by bus and train, experiencing this vital, funny, sad, curious, welcoming and altogether mind-blowing country at grass roots level. Would we do it again? Probably not. Were we glad we did it at all? We wouldn’t have missed it for worlds.
Oh, and if you get to the end of this book, and are wondering what happened to Kevin, he is alive and well and living in Lowestoft. Every Christmas I travel up to see him, and we share the plate of cheese sandwiches that we couldn’t find in India, and we look back and say to each other: ‘Did we really do all that half a lifetime ago?’
Well, yes, we did.
Map
Part One
Napoleon and the Deep South
January 3rd 1985
It was a cold, foggy morning when we landed. I was welcomed into Delhi by a flint-eyed Indian ‘businessman’, lying in wait just outside the airport. He wanted to buy my duty-free cigarettes and whisky. He was followed by six other traders, all wearing the same conspiratorial grins and all wanting exactly the same thing. The incredible prices they were offering sent my eyebrows soaring. I had just been introduced – during my first few minutes on Indian soil – to the country’s thriving black market.
On the airport bus into New Delhi, I met up again with Kevin – the only other Englishman I had seen on my flight. I found him staring out of the bus window at the busy traffic thoroughfare beyond the airport concourse. Suddenly plucked from his sleepy bedsit in Lowestoft and set down on manic Mars, his square, ruddy face wore a look of open-mouthed astonishment. The traffic resembled a stock car rally, with every driver on the road blindfolded.
Everywhere we looked, buses, coaches, auto-rickshaws, taxis and huge public carriers were hurtling down the highway, cutting each other up with total disregard for their (or anyone else’s) safety. There were indeed so many vehicles passing each other on the wrong side of the road that it was almost impossible for us to guess what the right side of the road was.
Kevin’s sense of order and propriety was grievously offended. He hopped off the bus to see what would happen if he tried crossing the road on a nearby zebra crossing. All that happened was that he nearly got run over.
Peering through my round Lennon spectacles, running a contemplative finger over my bearded lips, I wondered what Kevin was doing here. Me, I’d come looking for the ‘spiritual’ India – I had taken up Buddhism recently and wanted to know where it all started. Kevin had no such excuse. If it was a holiday he was after – watching him so rashly dice with death – I didn’t think he’d be getting one.
Teeth gritted, I took in the scene. Every vehicle, large or small, seemed to have a loud horn. And it weaved recklessly in and out of the speeding traffic, blowing its horn again and again. It was apparently the only way it expected to ever get anywhere. The collective effect of all these bus air-horns, car bleepers, rickshaw hooters and bicycle bells screeching and blaring away in competition with each other was absolutely deafening.
Our bus plunged into this chaos without warning. Two passengers having a quiet smoke outside were left behind. A couple of minutes up the road, the driver figured he’d missed a turning somewhere and ground the bus to a halt in the middle of the frantic traffic. Then he reversed it slowly back up the highway, leaning out of his window in search of the lost turning. The Red Sea of speeding vehicles bearing down on us from behind magically parted to permit this terrifying manoeuvre. One auto-rickshaw came so close, I could smell the wheels burning. Its tyres, I noted with astonishment, were not only bald. but the rubber was flapping away in loose strips along the hubcaps.
Kevin calmed his nerves by taking photographs. He managed to take a whole roll of film in just an hour. Mind you, there was a great deal to see: every few seconds we were getting tantalising glimpses of Indian life wholly unfamiliar to our jaded Western eye. Bullocks and camels strolled past, indolent and slow, impervious to the noise of the traffic. Old men and beggars were selling roasted nuts and holy blessings on the pavement. Large families of destitutes were lighting smouldering fires beside open sewers. Ragged women were scraping around in the filth and offal of the gutters for food for the next meal. Cripples and starving children lay helpless on the side of the road, empty-eyed and listless in their despair. Everywhere we looked, people were living on the bottom, bottom line. After a while, Kevin put away the camera.
Despite both coming to India alone, Kevin and I decided to take a room together this first night, at the YMCA hostel in Jai Singh Road. Little did we know it, but this was the start of a great adventure – we would be travelling together for the next two m
onths, and covering the whole length and breadth of India.
It made sense to share accommodation in Delhi, which could be pretty pricey by Indian standards. Our double room cost us Rs135 (£10), but the Y’s facilities for guests were superb. They included two resident travel agencies, where I was able to book a bus tour of Delhi, a traditional dance entertainment for a couple of days ahead, a three-day tour of Rajasthan, and finally, a first-class train berth for Madras for the following week. The latter arrangement was a huge relief. I had heard that queuing up for train reservations in Delhi station itself was the nearest thing to purgatory for the foreign tourist.
The hostel also had a useful currency-exchange desk in the reception area. This saved guests another supposedly awful ordeal: having to change money in regular Indian banks. When, however, I appeared at this desk to make my first purchase of Indian rupees, it was deserted. But just outside the hostel entrance my problem was solved. A horde of unemployed rickshaw drivers rushed up, all wanting to buy my cash dollars on the black market. The exchange rates they offered were at least 20 per cent better than advertised by the hostel. I selected a taxi driver – a red-turbaned Sikh – and he drove me somewhere discreet to make the transaction. As he handed his money over, he warned me that if the police turned up I should be prepared to run in both directions at once.
By now, we were ready to partake of some genuine Indian cooking. Our mouths were watering at the thought of all those delicious curries, tandooris, birianis and assorted relishes for which India is so famous. What we ended up getting, in the YMCA’s gloomy restaurant, was a chicken curry – with no chicken in it. When we complained to the waiter, he fished around in the thin sauce and came up with a single sliver of chicken – about the size of a matchstick – which had been hiding behind a tomato. He gave us a triumphant grin.
Soon after coming into the vast circus of Connaught Place this evening, we attracted the attentions of a small, persistent beggar-girl. Her hair was lank and greasy, her nose was running with snot, and her whole body was painfully thin. She followed us halfway round the square, begging for just one rupee. Or the cost of a cup of coffee. What were we to do? Confronted by a tiny infant, her eyes wide with hunger, her clothes a single torn rag, her grimy little hand stretched out in a desperate plea for money, were we going to give her the price of her only meal of the day? Or were we going to be deterred by the many, many similarly impoverished and starving Indians all around, and simply turn her away?
No sooner had we ‘paid off’ the beggar girl, than we spotted three Indian workers wheeling a massive movie billboard up the road on a creaky old car. ‘SEX AND THE ANIMALS!’ shouted the poster slogan, ‘THE MOST SIGNIFICANT PICTURE EVER MADE!’ Astonished, we followed it down the road to see what was so significant about it. ‘BANISHES MAN’S GUILT AND FEAR ABOUT SEX!’ we read further, ‘ANIMALS HAVE NO SHAME!’ Proving the point, the rest of the billboard was full of tigers, horses and rhinoceroses all coupling away with big grins on their faces. We later learnt that this curious epic was the most popular film playing in India at the time – it was packing them out in every cinema throughout the country.
Stepping back in our amusement, we nearly fell down an open sewer. These gaping holes in the pavement, often full of fetid green excrement, are quite common in the area of Connaught Place. And it is very easy to fall down them, especially in the dark. Parts of this large circus are unbelievably filthy. One particular wall, for instance, ran about a hundred yards round the outermost circle of Connaught Place and had been turned into some sort of public toilet. Long lines of Indians were squatting down by it, as we passed, to relieve themselves.
We walked back to the lodge, through laughing throngs of nut-roasters, bicycle repair men and rickshaw drivers, noticing the beggars beginning to gather together round heaps of old smouldering tyres for warmth. Elsewhere, the many small herds of itinerant cows and bullocks were huddling up together also, mainly on the lawns of the public parks. It was a cold night.
January 4th
During a coach tour of the city this morning, our young Hindu guide suddenly became very excited. ‘Look, there!’ he pulled at my sleeve and pointed. All I could see was a hugely fat Sikh puttering past on a tiny motorbike. ‘You are seeing?’ exclaimed the guide. ‘Is not this man looking healthy?’
The afternoon tour took us on to Old Delhi, stopping first at Laxmi Narayan Temple. The moment the bus stopped, we were surrounded by beggars, salesmen and traders. They all had just two things to sell – a road-map of India, and a pack of ‘dirty postcards’ which were actually just photos of erotic temple-carvings. To get rid of them, I bought the road-map and Kevin the dirty postcards. This freed us to watch a local snake-charmer trying to coax two sleepy cobras out of a basket. He didn’t have a lot of luck. The snakes didn’t like the cold, and slumped back into the basket moments after showing their faces.
At the back of the Red Fort, our final stop, I came across two young Hindus performing a levitation act. Lying under a large red sheet spread across the ground, they took it in turns to rise up in the air to a height of about twelve feet without any evidence of props. This spot, below the Fort and overlooking the Yamuna River, was apparently famous for local acts – rope-climbers, magicians, conjurers and dancing bears – being performed for the benefit of tourists. The Fort itself was also full of large monkeys. By the entrance of the Lahore Gate, I saw one of these inquisitive creatures assault a fat lady tourist and rob her of a bunch of bananas. Chased up the fortress walls by a fierce turbaned guard, it grinned back down on us from the battlements, a half-banana still jutting from its mouth like a Churchill cigar.
January 5th
This afternoon, we took a rickshaw into the old city of Delhi. We walked the final stretch along a long main road which had been turned into a street bazaar. The pavements were crowded with traders and salesmen selling clothes, books, watches, old boots, umbrellas, even complete sets of dentures. The iron railings by the footway were the province of astrologers, palmists, gurus, holy men, and sex specialists. This bazaar, we had earlier learnt, was also a favourite stamping ground for ‘marriage brokers’ who regarded foreign tourist as highly eligible prizes for their high-born clientele. Many Indian ladies, it seemed, would like nothing better than to marry a rich Englishman or American who would gain them a quick passage out of India. And it would be little use telling the broker you weren’t rich. The very fact that you could afford to visit his country would be conclusive proof of your great wealth.
We cut across a park towards the Jami Masjid, the world’s largest mosque, and were hailed by a succession of half-naked Indian masseurs sitting on rush mats, who were keen to give us a good massage and then to clean out our ears. Another tourist, whom we met later, told us that their services were actually very good.
What was not very good about the old city was its incredible squalor. Coming out of the central bazaar area of Chandni Chowk, we found ourselves in an impossible madhouse of congestion and noise. Adults and children alike were urinating and defecating on the streets, the public urinals having overflowed through overuse. Pitifully disfigured cripples huddled in doorways or in gutters. Scabrous rabid dogs – painfully thin and crawling with fleas – foraged weakly among the heaps of refuse. Cows and goats lay in their own dirt, swarming with flies and maggots. And into all this ploughed an urgent convoy of traffic, cutting a horn-powered swathe of din through the sea of human and animal debris and filth.
The bazaar itself was a full-scale assault on all the senses. The noise was deafening. The stench of rotting fish, vegetables and meat, and the acrid reek of offal, urine and sweat, was overpowering. And what we could see both fascinated and repelled us. In between heaped piles of excrement, legless cripples wheeled themselves about on fruit-box trolleys. On the mud-caked pavements, small swollen-stomached infants were dying of hunger. And everywhere we looked, hundreds of starving eyes followed us, begging money to relieve their misery.
In the middle of a
muddy swamp (which used to be a street) appeared the Hotel Relax. ‘Welcome!’ said its filth-splattered sign, ‘Come Make Nice Comfortable Stay With Us!’ The grinning old bandit at the door spat a jet of red paan (betel-nut juice) across the street and beckoned us eagerly inside, his gaze travelling covetously over our possessions. We nodded polite refusal, and continued on our way.
We next came across a flamboyant character mixing up what looked like raspberry-coloured puke in a huge cauldron. He was surrounded by a crowd of attentive Indians, all watching his activity with silent, respectful interest. It turned out to be a cake-making demonstration. We stood and looked on for a while, and then a smartly-dressed young Hindu turned up and said, ‘Hello. You are wanting hashish?’ He made this surprising offer in a loud tone, audible to half the crowd, and in the casual, offhand manner of someone offering a friend a cigarette. Kevin quickly drew me away from the scene. He had heard that many dope-dealers in the old city were in fact police informers.
Both of us returned to the hostel in a state of shock. Kevin, however, soon rallied to show me his surprise import into the country – a parcel containing ninety-two condoms. He then disappeared into town with two Italian schoolgirls, both of whom were devout Catholics and due out on the morning bus back to Rome. Kevin, I was coming to realise, was one of life’s born optimists.
January 6th
This evening, we went to the Parsi Anjuman Hall, near Delhi Gate, to see an entertainment called ‘Dances of India’. We were expecting great things of this, the programme having promised us ‘Seventy-Five Minutes of Glorious Music, Dance and Song in all their Exquisite Finesse.’
