The Backpacker

by John Harris

  ‘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.

  SIX

  Indian flip-flops are the best in the world; there’s no question about that. Flip-flops, as the British call them, are what Australians call thongs. I don’t know what they’re called in America. A single piece of foam as the sole, held on to the foot by a V-shaped strap that goes between the big and second toes; wherever you go in the world the design is exactly the same, but quality varies. In India the sole is made of rubber, pure rubber, not foam and that’s why they’re the world’s best.

  As I walked away from the flip-flop stall in the airport I listened: flip, flop, flip, flop. Amazing, even the sound was right. ‘Yep,’ I muttered, ‘the Lunar Flip-flop Company of India certainly knows how to make ’em.’

  Still watching my feet, I stepped onto the bus that would take me back into town and thought about Sanita again.

  We had hardly spoken to each other over breakfast, and hadn’t talked at all on the bus journey to the airport. I’d spent the night on the rooftop with Rick, Zed and Dudley, and Sanita, having woken and found the bed empty, had wandered up at six in the morning and found us all sprawled out around the bar. She flared up, and demanded to know why I’d spent our last night together fucking about with them instead of her, and why I hadn’t come back to the room, and... The list of complaints went on. To calm her down, and make her feel a bit better about going home without me, I reminded her that it was only a three-week holiday, and that we’d probably spend the rest of our lives together.

  Making love when we’d returned to the room after breakfast hadn’t really helped matters either. Her annoyance at my disappearance the night before, at first softened by the closeness of our naked, sweat-slippery bodies, only seemed to return with a vengeance once we put our clothes back on, turning into genuine anger. It was as if she felt taken advantage of. The anger boiled over and she slapped my face.

  Sanita had demanded to know what I was going to get up to over the next few weeks without her. That was easy to answer: Zed, Dudley and I would leave the next morning to go to Bombay, the three of us would then go up to Dharamsala where the Dalai Lama supposedly lived, travelling through Delhi and a few other places en route. Simple. It all fitted together quite nicely really, and I’d even managed to change my flight so that it left from Delhi.

  When her flight was finally called we both stood up immediately, as though each of us wanted to make the first move. It was an awkward situation, especially as I’d persuaded her to take my surfboard home with her. ‘You are coming back aren’t you John?’ she’d asked. ‘You’re not going to Thailand with that man Rick?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘I’ve seen how well you two get on together.’

  I told her not to be silly. ‘He’s already left,’ I assured her, ‘how can I?’ The fact that he’d left me with instructions on how to get to the place he’d be staying at had conveniently slipped my mind. Anyway, I was only on a short holiday, and all of my time would be taken up getting to the north of India and back.

  I watched her struggle out onto the runway with her rucksack over one shoulder, which was now twice its usual weight as she had insisted on taking home anything that I thought I wouldn’t need for the rest of my holiday, and my surfboard over the other. She loaded the gear onto a bullock-drawn baggage cart, before turning and giving a last traumatic wave and boarding the plane.

  The bus back to town was packed to bursting point by the time it moved off, and the only available seat was next to another traveller. She moved her huge rucksack between her knees and shuffled to one side, smiling at me as I squeezed my way into the seat and sat down.

  ‘On a long trip?’ I said, pointing to the pack.

  ‘A month,’ she replied, still smiling. Her white teeth were like piano keys against her beautifully tanned skin. ‘Only two weeks left though, and then I fly out of Bombay. You?’

  ‘Umm, a few weeks.’ I was still holding the leather sandals that Sanita had bought me for the holiday, and they suddenly felt like ten-tonne weights in my hand. ‘M-maybe longer,’ I stammered, tucking the sandals out of sight.

  The bus driver got into the cab and started the engine, while the bus conductor walked up the aisle shooing off the beggars before closing the doors behind them. They ran alongside the bus banging on the window until we picked up speed and they fell away.

  When we arrived in town, a new set of beggars poured onto the bus and we had to fight our way out of the doors. As I stepped out I felt something touch my leg. A small boy was tugging at the hem of my shorts and pointing to the leather sandals I was carrying.

  ‘I think he wants your shoes,’ the other traveller said, hoisting her rucksack onto her back. ‘It’s them or money, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What?’ I glanced down at the ragged boy. ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, and hesitated for a fraction of a second before handing them over.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THIS IS YOUR LIFE

  ONE

  The next morning we checked out of the hotel and boarded a train to Bombay; Zed and Dudley struggling under the weight of their unfeasibly large rucksacks, me skipping happily alongside, almost floating on air without baggage or girlfriends to slow me down. By the time we boarded the train to Delhi on the fourth day, after a brief, uneventful stop in Bombay, we had our sights firmly fixed on new horizons. However, our new horizons were slightly blurred by the quirks of India’s transport system. Getting to the hill stations of northern India, where the Dalai Lama lived, meant going through Delhi, and then from Delhi to Dharamsala by bus: two days worth of sleepless travel at the outside, three or four if we rested halfway.

  To avoid Bombay’s Monday morning rush-hour madness on the buses we took a taxi to the railway station, making us feel like millionaires. I dreamed of the old days; the Raj, with the spires of Victoria Station above us and our chauffeur-wallah carrying our bags under the huge stone arches.

  Ten minutes later, when we settled into our second-class sleeper with five others, the old days were the last thing on my mind. The man sitting next to me had a perpetual cough, and brought up huge amounts of phlegm, which he projected like glistening, wobbly bullets from the open window. One of the blobs landed on the head of a passing beggar who looked up at us. I happened to be gazing out and caught th
e brunt of his stare, ‘Not me!’ I mouthed.

  Zed and Dudley were no better off in their choice of seat either. Zed, who had sat down and opened a book to read, had inadvertently joined the ranks of Mensa, the Indian chapter. It was a seat I eventually learned to avoid like the plague whenever boarding trains or long distance buses in India. He had sat next to a man in a suit and tie, which automatically meant he would have to answer hundreds of questions of such intricate detail as to drive anyone crazy.

  A traveller has a choice upon entering a train compartment, a choice that needs to be weighed up very carefully before sitting down to a twenty-hour journey. Pick your poison with caution because it could be a very slow death. The choices fall into three main groups, all of which have their good and bad sides: Smelly Labourer, Couple with Kid, or Man in Suit.

  The Smelly Labourer is, as I’ve already explained, a spit merchant but other than that he leaves you in peace. Oh yes, another bonus with him is that beggars tend not to bother his end of the compartment. As I was sandwiched between him and the exterior window, the chances were that this would be a relatively beggar-free journey. Most of the limbless tend to stick to the people nearest to the corridor for obvious, logistical reasons. Only if they spotted a suit would they bother to crawl into the depths of a compartment on the off-chance of a rupee. They definitely wouldn’t bother for a labourer.

  Man in Suit (or Death by a Thousand Questions as he’s also known) is a nightmare come true. To the unwary traveller he looks like the best choice: clean when compared to the labourer piled in one corner, and uncluttered when compared to Couple with Kid who’re spilling all over the place in the other corner. And when you first sit beside him with an ‘Excuse me,’ he replies, in the very best English, ‘Oh! Please,’ and wipes your place clean with his spotless handkerchief. ‘Great!’ you think, ‘I’ve got the right compartment this time.’ Wrong! What starts out as idle chit-chat: ‘How long will you be staying in our beautiful country?’ and ‘Which places have you visited?’ soon turns into a non-stop barrage that drives into you like a dentist’s drill on low speed. Budget travellers have been known to upgrade to first-class, just to get away from Man in Suit. The effect of twenty hours sitting and answering questions about the price of a car or a washing machine, or the standard of English in India, or how to cook a spot-on tandoori can induce suicide. I once spent four hours under such duress and almost collapsed at the end of it. I was tempted to throw myself out of the window to escape.

  Husband and Wife (one child), also known as Couple with Kid, present the third choice. Like all Indian families they seem to be unable to travel without taking the whole of their household contents along with them, including the kitchen sink. Not a terrible prospect in itself, and even the child, seven years old in this case, shouldn’t shit herself or cry too much. So what’s the down side here? Food. If you choose to sit next to them you’ll be force fed until you explode or puke, whichever comes first.

  Couple with Kid (and occasionally couple without) always take enough food to feed the entire occupants of all twelve carriages of the train, and still have leftovers for their relatives. They’ll offer to share a mind-boggling array of different curries, breads and sweet desserts, all of which, unless you are visibly ill, you’ll have to eat. Fat travellers vomit, skinny ones die, and Couple with Kid still scoff merrily in the corner.

  So, I had the Labourer, Zed had the Suit, and Dudley chose the food scene from Caligula. Within an hour of the train leaving the station the three of us were out of our seats and standing by the open door at the end of the car to escape the torture. Oh, and we wanted to smoke a joint, too.

  TWO

  Snowflake’s in hell. That’s how one of the other travellers in our guest house described our chances of getting an audience with the Dalai Lama. He knew someone who’d spent a month up here waiting for a chance to meet the Big D and hadn’t even caught a glimpse of the man. ‘Flies in and out in a Lear jet,’ he’d said, leaning in the doorway to our room. ‘Unless you’re the leader of a foreign country he’s not interested. Dope’s pretty good up here though.’

  Three rain-soaked days later, Dudley, having not left the room except to eat and shit, was busy testing that last comment. With a truly obsessive zeal, and a kind of ‘proof of the pudding’ logic, he had lined up three different types of dope on the cabinet beside his bed and was trying each one in turn. Some days he even mixed them together to see just how they affected him. To us the effect was the same, or at least the end result was: he mooched around the room all day in a half-sleep/half-dead, zombie-like shuffle that reminded me of a wind-up toy. If the door was open he’d waddle out and down the corridor to the toilet, but that’s all.

  To be fair there was little else to do. The rain and sleet hadn’t stopped since we had arrived, and it didn’t look like it would clear over the coming week. In any case, we knew it would continue because Dudley had said so.

  In one of his rare appearances outside the guest house, he had befriended an old Indian man who claimed to be able to forecast the weather by looking at the marijuana leaves on the bushes in the hills. According to him, when they hung down limply it meant that there was no end in sight to the bad weather. That, combined with the taste of this year’s harvested and pressed grass, was as good as looking at a barometer. A bit like wine tasting Dudley supposed. Most connoisseurs can tell the year a grape was harvested just by tasting the wine, so why should marijuana be any different?

  Dudley believed the old man’s prediction, and I believed my own eyes. None of us believed that the weather would let up, and, having grown tired of our wet surroundings, decided to head back south before the week was out.

  ‘Shimla,’ I suggested, lying on the damp bed opposite Dudley, trying to think of a possible next destination for us. ‘Cliff Richard was born there you know.’

  He leaned up on one elbow. ‘Cliff Richard is not a good reason to go to Shimla, John.’

  We hung around for the rest of the day to watch the hustle and bustle before catching the evening bus south, arriving in Shimla early the next morning. The difference between the two towns was so striking that we might well have taken a bus to another country altogether.

  As usual, where the ‘right-on’ travellers were raving about Dharamsala, and telling us to avoid Shimla like the plague, the opposite was true. In Shimla there were no pretentious backpackers walking around quoting from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and not a ‘Free Tibet’ T-shirt in sight. The town seemed to have gone in reverse: from being one of India’s colonial hill stations, where stiff-upper-lip British officers went during the summer to escape from the heat of the plains, to being the weekend retreat of Delhi’s yuppies; Delhi being only half a day’s ride away in daddy’s car.

  Shimla must be the most Westernised place in India, too. Or, at least, a place where Indians can behave Westernised. School kids in maroon blazers skip along the main street on their way to class, while, in the evening, Indian gents wearing natty tweeds sit around taking in the cool air, puffing away thoughtfully on briar pipes. The town has a town hall, a Scandal Corner, mock Tudor houses, a theatre and a Christ Church. It also has a YMCA that’s situated at one end of the main road. Housed in a rambling old colonial house, the Shimla YMCA is like a cross between Colditz and Fawlty Towers. With a fireplace in every room, a billiards hall, table tennis tables, a bed and breakfast-style dining room where one gets ‘gonged’ for breakfast (tea, toast and marmalade) at eight o’clock sharp, and a ruthless lights-out policy that the governor of Alcatraz would have been proud of, it was, ‘Like, far out,’ as Dudley put it.

  One night, about a week after we’d arrived in Shimla, as the three of us walked through the freezing streets, I started to think about Rick. I hadn’t thought about him since we’d left Goa, but I needed to provide myself with a distraction and he proved to be just the thing.

  I wondered what he was up to. Was he really still in Thailand? What was he doing there right at this minute, right now? Whil
e I was walking down a snowy street in a quaint hilltop town in northern India, was he sitting in a beach bar in Thailand sweating freely in the tropical heat? I especially wanted to know whether or not he was having a better time than I was. Maybe he had simply had his fill and gone back to normality, back to his old job and suburban life in England.

  Dudley, Zed and I had less than a week left before we were due to fly home and I was beginning to think about my life in England. My regimented, mundane, nine-to-five life. The whole trip so far had been played by ear, and, though it didn’t lend itself to any logical order geographically speaking, I was beginning to like the spontaneity of travel without any plans. No airline tickets and no guidebook, just a sense of moving forward as a particular set of events dictated.

  Neither of my two companions had actually mentioned our impending departure. On the contrary, the opposite was true. As far as I knew they hadn’t even discussed it with each other; a kind of refusal to accept the facts. It’s just like going to school for the first time, or Monday morning at work; nobody wants to face it. Human nature I guess. Whenever I thought about going home, really getting on a flight to London, the feeling in my stomach was the same feeling I got as a kid on a trip to the dentist.

  Over the past week, the mood between Zed and me had changed from one of complete freedom at having no boundaries, to one of resignation. We were like convicts who had escaped from prison, and, after being on the run, had been caught and told that we were permitted one more week in the free world. Seven days of fun in the knowledge that it would all be over soon.

  Dudley, on the other hand, had said nothing, and was generally difficult to read. He’d bought a tabla in the market and was learning to play in the room most evenings. Unlike Zed and me, who were simply dreading going back home and showed our unhappiness, Dudley looked forward and said that he would continue to learn the tabla in London, taking lessons at the local evening institute. He wanted to meet Ravi Shankar. I told him that Ravi Shankar played sitar but he was undeterred, and felt sure that he had what it took to be concert-class, if indeed that’s the level that tabla players attained.