Kevin and I in India

by Frank Kusy

  ‘Right!’ Kevin addressed the waiter here. ‘What I want to know is, do you have chips?’

  The waiter recoiled in surprise, then recovered his poise. He nodded. Kevin gave a short grunt of appeasement. Scanning the menu rapidly (and ignoring curious items such as POTATO-ONIONFRIED and LEMON SOD) he gave the waiter the following directive:

  ‘Okay, I’ll start with cheese and tomato toast – make that four portions – and then...an omelette...and to follow...mmmm...yes, why not, another omelette, this time with cheese – lots of it – and tomato. And two plates of chips. Got that? Chips, not bloody potato crisps!’

  The waiter stared at him dumbfounded and enquired what order he wanted his food served in.

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter what comes first,’ declared Kevin. ‘I don’t care. And see if you can slip a banana pancake – oh, and a chocolate one – in there somewhere, there’s a good fellow!’

  The waiter turned to go, but Kevin pulled him back.

  ‘One more thing,’ he growled. ‘While I’m waiting for my food, and I do hope that won’t be long, I’ll have a whole pot of tea all to myself!’

  Kevin’s mad cackle of hunger as he finished rolling off this formidable order drew cautious, wary glances from every other guest in the restaurant. His own eyes, however, were fixed with a dangerous piggy gleam on the back of the retreating waiter. And his jaws were now champing uncontrollably with the imminent prospect of breakfast.

  When it arrived, Kevin swept the whole table clear for all the dishes, and ate for a solid half-hour without raising his head once or uttering a syllable. Then, his repast completed, he sat back with a look of total satiation on his ruddy features. What a transformation some good food had achieved! Before the meal, his pale mask of tragedy suggested the acute suffering of one who has just lost a near relative. Now, however, he was back on top of the world again. He was so happy, he ordered another omelette.

  Babu, the guide, went out of his way to get us placed in good accommodation. He was a smiley, carefree soul, dressed in a shiny green lunghi and a gay, flowery shirt, and he spoke perfect English. Right at the end of the beach, close to Kovalum’s lighthouse, he found us a charming chalet bungalow for just Rs25 (£2) each. The rooms were bright and clean, and they had things one generally never sees in cheaper Indian lodges. Things like bowl-toilets, hand basins, writing tables, air-conditioning fans that worked and even waste-paper bins. Just as we were moving in, we ran once more into our good friend Andrew. He had arrived yesterday. As before, he was travelling one step ahead of us.

  Kovalum Beach is a favourite haunt of hippies and junkies. Like Goa, further up the coast, people come here not just for the beautiful sun and beaches, but for the freely available (and very cheap) grass, hashish and harder drugs. One English traveller I spoke to was a trainee accountant in London. Every summer he came to India for six weeks. He started off at Anjuna Beach in Goa, getting a tan and spending all day at ‘acid parties’, then moved down to Kovalum for a couple of weeks to ingest plentiful quantities of the famous ‘Kerala grass’, then staggered back to Goa for a final leg of mind-blowing drug orgies. By the time they scraped him off the sand and put him back on his plane at Bombay, he was no better than a grinning idiot. The only reason he came back each year was that he simply couldn’t remember anything that happened the year before.

  On Kovalum beach, all the male tourists find themselves continually approached by shapely Indian women wearing fruit baskets on their heads. They sell pineapples, papayas, jam-fruit, bananas and mangoes at ridiculously cheap prices. All the female sun-worshippers, on the other hand, are surrounded as they lie topless on the beach by hordes of silent, staring Indian men who come specifically to Kovalum to gaze at bare breasts. The only two redeeming features of Kovalum are the excellent restaurants which are dotted all along the main beach complex, and of course the sea, which is calm, warm and quite excellent for swimming – and for snorkelling.

  We spent most of the day on the beach or in the water. This evening we waited two hours in a restaurant for supper. Everything here proceeds at an abnormally slow, laid-back pace. We ended up sending Kevin into the kitchen to see if the cook was asleep or dead, and with instructions to murder him if neither excuse applied. He returned with three steaming bowls of cheese and tomato spaghetti, heavily laced with onions and whole garlic cloves. The cook was pardoned forthwith.

  February 9th

  I returned from snorkelling today to find that Kevin had acquired some tasteful company. A naked girl with very vital statistics had taken up position on the sand right next to him.

  Poor Kevin. All thoughts of sun, sea and rolling surf went right out of his head. All he could think of now were those ninety-one contraceptives going to waste in his rucksack. He tried hard to relax, yet every few minutes or so his eyes would swivel round helplessly to gaze on the buxom beauty sleeping at his side He was particularly fascinated by the small bright ring of red pimples on her fulsome bare buttocks. And as the day progressed, this innocent fascination developed into a full-blown passion.

  Eventually, Kevin’s mouth was flapping open and shut like a distressed clam, with a series of low, unhappy moans drifting out of the side of it. The girl sat up briefly to ask him if he was in pain. All that he could think of in reply was that he had just been stung by a manta ray. ‘Oh,’ said the girl, and went back to sleep.

  But if today presented Kevin with problems, they were as nothing compared to my own. This evening, waiting for our supper of GREENPEACE MASALA, Andrew and I became bored and tried some of the famous ‘Kerala Grass’ to see what was so wonderful about it. There was nothing wonderful about it at all. I spent the next four hours rooted to the sand outside the restaurant trying to claw my way back out of a bottomless chasm of blackest despair. Most of this time, also, I was surrounded by a hungry pack of wild dogs, who sat around me in a large circle waiting for me to peg out. Kevin came to collect me at midnight, and told me that Andrew and I had been given a dangerous hallucinogenic called ‘angel dust’ in with the grass. Now I understood why so many tourists lay around the beaches of Kovalum looking blank and destroyed.

  February 10th

  I woke up this morning very grateful to be alive. Last night’s experience now seemed just a particularly bad dream. To forget it completely, I walked with Kevin down to the fishing village a few kilometres beyond the tourist beaches. We came to it via a beautiful Mughul mosque (built very much in the style of the Taj Mahal) which jutted out to sea on a rock promontory. Passing this, we were suddenly enveloped by a flock of small, dirty children chanting: ‘Peanuts? Pineapple? Papaya? Coconut? Sea-shell? You have school-pen?’ They all looked extremely pleased to see us.

  The rustic fishing village of Kovalum was very similar to that of Kanya Kumari, though its beach was a good deal dirtier. The coastline was dotted with small piles of human turds waiting to be carried out to sea by the next tide. As we picked our way carefully through this minefield of excrement, some local fishermen spotted us. Again, as at Kanya Kumari, they accepted us into their village by enlisting our aid. On this occasion, we were required to help them pull in a catch of fish. Twenty minutes later, however, and with no sign of the catch getting any closer to land, we abandoned our positions on the thick rope line and headed on up the beach.

  Returning to Kovalum proper, we bumped into Andrew. He looked like a walking wraith. ‘I’m still stoned out of my head!’ he groaned miserably. So we hauled him down to the beach, and let the sun and sea soothe away his cares. Later, however, we ended up at the Walk-In Restaurant on the beach, where the menu (MASALA DOSE, BOILED GRAB, BANANA SANE WITCHES and SCROMBIED EGGS) made him feel ill all over again.

  February 11th

  The lodge’s small laundry-girl appeared early this morning. She rapped insistently on my window, and peered in.

  ‘Hello!’ she called. ‘You want peanuts? You taste. It is good!’

  ‘No thanks,’ I shook my head. ‘They’re all black
.’

  The smutty little urchin climbed through the window. ‘You are giving me present?’ she asked. ‘Who invited you in?’ I replied. She crowded me into the wall. ‘Yes! You are giving – please – present!’ I tried to ask her what for, but she continued: ‘Gimme one book. One book. Gimme-one-book-one-book-gimme-one-book! You are giving present!’ I ordered her to go away. ‘Later, you gimme book?’ she eased off slightly. ‘...later? You gimme book?’

  She was just about to finally leave when her friend arrived. Her friend was even more persistent than she was. ‘Hello!’ announced the friend, also climbing into the room through the window. ‘You gimme pen? Gimme-pen-just-one-pen-one-pen-gimme-pen!’

  ‘Where the hell did you come from?’ I enquired. She drew her brows together in a determined grimace. ‘YOU GIMME PEN!’ she shouted. ‘No gimme pen!’ I concluded firmly. ‘Just gimme peanuts, and push off!’

  They both went out the same way they’d come in – through the window.

  The girls returned at noon, just as we were moving out. They gave me a card for our lodge which read: ‘Hotel Holiday Home – If you stay here, you fell away from home.’ Then they gave me a massive jack-fruit which seeped juice all over the bus going back to Trivandrum.

  Not only was this particular bus packed to capacity to start with, but it stopped shortly to cram in an additional thirty-three schoolchildren. I spent the rest of the trip with a startled-looking child spread-eagled over my knees, listening to Andrew interrogating an Indian schoolmaster about tapioca plants.

  Trivandrum bus station was a scene of absolute chaos. It was full of passengers sending out search parties for buses which seemed to turn up wherever and whenever they felt like it. The information desk was submerged with enquiries from panic-stricken travellers. And most people we saw were running blindly from one packed bus-rank to the next – or, more commonly, just standing in the middle of the mayhem looking stunned and lost.

  We ourselves had just given up all hope of progress when, quite unexpectedly, the bus to Quilon turned up, exactly where we were standing. Two hours later, we were at our destination and had retired to our rooms in the Tourist Rest Home, ready to explore Kerala’s inland waterways early the next morning.

  February 12th

  The eight-hour boat trip from Quilon to Allepey is one of the most beautiful and enjoyable experiences the foreign traveller can have in all India.

  Sitting ‘up top’ involved a customary payment of two rupees each to the tiny, bird-like crew member on the boat’s roof. His name was Hassan, and he wore a constant manic smile. I climbed up to meet him along with Sandra, a young Bavarian girl who was heading towards Calcutta to work in Mother Teresa’s mission for handicapped children. As the trip progressed, Hassan took a real shine to the two of us. He kept up a non-stop monologue about his family, pausing occasionally to throw his arms around us, to dip into our cigarette packets, to fondle our necks and heads, or to jig up and down on the roof with my cassette headphones blasting big band music down his jug-like ears. Most of the rest of the time, however, he was busy harassing a group of intransigent Americans who refused to pay his tiny baksheesh for their seats on the roof.

  Considering the view they had up here, two rupees was a small price to pay. While the Americans argued, the rich and varied treasures of the Keralan waterways were continually revealing themselves to the rest of us. Everywhere, lining the banks, were rows of jungle coco-palms, all swaying to and fro in the warm, gentle breeze. Their reflections appeared mirror-sharp in the calm, steel-blue waters, to be broken only by the passage of primitive canvas and wood craft, bearing Chinese cloth-sails.

  In the shallower stretches, local men bathed by the bank, taking care to avoid the regular schools of giant jellyfish passing downstream. From narrow shaded canals, we passed into large, spacious inland lakes, and then towards green, verdant banks thronged with waving children from local Catholic missions, churches and schools. Stripped fishermen, standing waist-deep in the waters, stopped to greet us before casting out their wide, strong nets. Shoals of flying fish leapt and dove in the wake of the boat, their rhythmic action accompanied by the regular, hypnotic throb of the vessel’s pumping engine. And all around us there were birds, all kinds of exotic birds, adding the final touch of sound and colour to this delightful scene.

  Kevin’s love of the water was really in evidence today. He was in raptures throughout the trip, and spent much of it thinking of possible designs for the boat he himself would build some day. One stretch of water was of particular fascination to him – where the water-lilies and algae had grown so dense that they covered the entire surface of the water like a bright green carpet. It seemed rather that our vessel had turned into a huge mechanical plough which was carving its way through a thick green swathe of meadow grassland.

  The boat stopped just twice in the long eight-hour journey. At the first stop, Kevin tried to buy some food. All that he could come up with was a desiccated banana encased in a leathery pouch of dried batter. It looked obscene. And it tasted revolting. Kevin tried to donate it to a beggar, but the beggar took offence. Then he tried tossing it to a scrofulous dog foraging by the water-bank. But the dog took one sniff at it and ran away.

  We reached Allepey at sunset, the last light filling the fields and pastures lining the waterway with an unearthly luminous-green glow. It was a fitting conclusion to a perfect day.

  February 13th

  Our second trip down the Keralan backwater – on from Allepey to Kottayam – was a good deal shorter than yesterday’s but just as enjoyable. By way of variation, this stretch of water provided far more interesting views of native cargo boats. These were generally about fifty feet in length, shaped like canoes and round-bilged, and were propelled by small sprite-sails mounted well forward on punt-poles. The cargoes they carried, as best we could judge, were mostly bananas, cashew nuts, fish, logs, silt and various building materials like bricks, cement and solid blocks of cut stone.

  Our lodgings tonight, the Kottayam Tourist Bungalow, were a hard slog to get to, but turned out to be well worth the effort. The large, spacious quarters we gained were, we learnt, originally used by British officers in the days of the Raj, and they still contained much antique Victorian and Edwardian furniture. They also contained, it must be added, armies of ants. But these didn’t trouble us, so we left them well alone.

  The hotel’s resident cook told us he was a medical graduate unable to find any job outside of a kitchen. He served such an excellent meal, however, that Kevin ceased bemoaning the mosquito bites under his right kneecap and fell to with a will. Our meal finished, we both agree that we should shortly have to slow down the furious pace of our travels, and get some rest. So far, we had not stopped in any one place in India for more than three days.

  February 14th

  The 10.30am bus to Kumily failed to appear. Everybody expected it to appear, but it didn’t. The information desk clerks shrugged at us, and said it had most certainly left in our direction. Why it never reached us was quite beyond them. And they seemed to have little idea of what was going on in the rest of the bus-station either. We had three long hours till the next bus in which to observe this confusing terminus, and we couldn’t make head or tail of it.

  Scores of different buses were arriving and departing all the time, and each one, as soon as it drew up, was surrounded by a melee of Indians trying to guess where it was going. None of the buses had any destinations posted, so the potential passengers were reduced to leaping up and down outside the driver’s compartment shouting for information. By the time they had got it, and had realised that this was indeed their bus, it had already left. No one bus we observed stayed in the station for more than thirty seconds. Scores of hapless Indians trying to board these restless juggernauts were sent flying – briefcases, baggage and all – back into the dust as with a crazed blast on the air-horn and a screech of burning rubber, one bus after another tore out of the station.

  Our long
wait was made even more tedious by the arrival of a loquacious old Indian who gave us his entire life history, plentifully sprinkled with sentimental reminiscences of his service with the Gurkhas in the good old days of the Raj. But our relief in escaping from him onto the bus – when it at last put in an appearance – was short-lived. A vast tidal wave of humanity swept aboard along with us. The next four and a half hours, spent squashed like sardines in the rear seats, were absolute torture.

  After a lifetime of soft, easy living in the West, one’s buttocks take an awful hammering out here. Backpacking around India is just one long round of sitting on bone-hard, chafing, bruising and generally uncomfortable seats – whether in buses, or trains, or restaurants or cinemas. There is no such thing as a padded seat in the whole country. And if this isn’t bad enough, an enforced crash-diet as one travels through Tamil Nadu and Kerala strips away the last protective layers of fat from around your rump, so that a roller-coaster ride on a bumpy bus like this one is enough to reduce your bum to a bruised jelly of destroyed tissue. No wonder fat people are so envied in India. They must be the only people able to sit down or travel in comfort.

  Kumily lies at the summit of a high mountain plateau, and is approached via beautiful green tea-plantations, stretching out for miles in all directions. With the approach of dusk, their earlier lawn-green hue gives way slowly to a deep shade of pine. It was while leaning out of my window to observe this that the five Indians sharing my back seat toppled over asleep on my shoulders like a row of dominoes. I spent the remainder of the journey helplessly pinned against the window.

  At Kumily, we booked into the Lake Queen Tourist Home. It had a ‘luxury’ restaurant downstairs, but when we went down for super it was completely empty. We split up to send search parties out for the waiter, but we couldn’t find him. Giving up, we went out into the street looking for another restaurant. But then the whole town suddenly went black. A nearby magnetic storm had caused a total power-cut. Stumbling back into our dark room, we could hear it buzzing with mosquitoes. Kumily, remarked Kevin prophetically, was going to give us problems.