F and I took the last of our anti-malaria tablets today. God knows we’ve whinged about taking them for the past few weeks. Complained about the nightmares they gave us, the nausea they incurred, panicked when we forgot to take them, shoved the missing ones down our gullets, and tried not to gag at the chalky quinine that covered our tongues. Now the packet’s empty, we both miss them. A broken link to an unreal place. So although I’m only half way through reformatting the photos, hardly touched typed up the journals, let alone fit them for public consumption I’m going to write up India before it completely fades from my mind.
The Flight
The screen in front of me, the one that marks our journey with a dot and too thick line of black, is lying. We did not turn right at Saudi Arabia, there is no such place. It’s never meant more to me than a badly drawn rectangle and a broken ankle anyway, and so this stupid screen will not make its existence any more tangible now. We have not crossed the Arabian Sea; we are not travelling parallel down the coast of India. India does not exist. Nothing exists. The world has ended and only we remain – F and I – stuck in this bright-lit box with its blocked up toilet and rows of irritating people. This is hell, with the added indignity of airline food.
This is hell. F is sitting beside me. We travel well together. In fact, if I had to pick one recurrent theme throughout our life, one memory that summed us up then it would be this, the two of us travelling through the night – in silence. I like that. Like that we do not have to talk our way through time, to make the journey shorter than it is. I’ve always been wary of those who feel the need to speak. Only, now and then, the touch of a hand upon the others, the glimpse of a jaw-line through eyelash fringed sleep, a half-sentence that cements the fact that we are together. Besides which I know, know from the look on his face that right now he is a million miles away from here, lost in notes as black as the sky outside, spread out into sound; that for him, the white noise whine of the engine, which is slowly driving me insane, is translating itself into a symphony. I envy that about him. All I have are words, which do not stick in the brain but slip unremembered through the gap between paper and pen.
No. Not the engine. The people. The people on this plane are driving me insane. I’m terminally allergic to the middle classes and this plane is swarming with them. There’s something about their tone (not their accent) that sets my skin to crawl and my tolerance to zero. Like Charlie Brown in a room full of adults, their wahwahwah bounces off the walls and buzzes around my head like a fly you can’t swat.
Take the woman sitting in the seat directly in front of me. God knows I’m praying for the plane to crash just so I can see her buy it. I’ll die happy if she gets sucked out of the gaping maw in the planes side a millisecond before I do. Not just because anyone with a mirror should realise that if Kate Moss can’t wear horizontal stripes then the rest of us have no chance, although on aesthetic sensibilities alone that’s a good enough reason for her execution. But, as soon as the seatbelt sign went off, her chair went back. Not in a smooth and considerate motion. Oh no. From 90 to 180 degrees with an acceleration that would have left Schumacher breathless with envy. I ended up with half a bottle of red, a litre of Evian and a large cup of black coffee cascading Niagara like across my knees. That it ended up staining the rather nice cream, brand-new never used calfskin handbag mum bought me for Christmas some years ago isn’t a big deal. Accidents happen. I know that.
What is a big deal is that she knew she’d caused the accident. She knew she caused the accident because in answer to my involuntary shriek of “ouch” as the scalding coffee hit my skin, she turned around just as I was attempting to salvage the handbag by holding it in the air and watching the stream of liquid pour down its side.
“Oh” she said, “That wasn’t because of my moving my seat back was it?”
Anticipating an apology and wanting to make it as painless as possible, I did the English thing. I smiled. “The seats do move back very quickly,” I said
Her (somewhat over plucked) eyebrows shot into the depths of her (over dyed) fringe and she turned round and sat back down again.
“This is the last time we travel economy,” she said to her partner. “Look at the sort of people you get stuck with”
(To any family members reading this. I know you’re thinking that I used that voice when I answered her. I wasn’t, I swear it. For the benefit of the uninitiated, that voice is imprinted in our families DNA. It’s extremely cold, clipped, and proper. Despite the fact there is nothing in the words that could possibly be construed as being offensive – in fact, it works better if there isn’t – somehow the overall effect is more insulting than to baldly state that the adversary’s mother sucks…oh well you get the idea. That was not the voice I used. I know when I use that voice because it comes with an involuntary squaring of the shoulders, straightening of the spine and walls of ice behind the eyes.)
The sort of people you get stuck with! The sort of fucking people you get stuck with. The ill-mannered, inconsiderate, over plucked eye browed twat. You know, I wouldn’t care if she were the only one. Truly, I wouldn’t. Law of averages means that you need one moron on a plane, its something to do with the thing staying in the air. But it’s not just her. They’re all the same.
I swear that in the last ten hours I’ve heard the words “it’s so filthy there” emanate from every single seat on the plane within earshot. I have. Just one question. If you have such a problem with how fucking filthy it is in India then why the fuck are you going there? It’s like people who sniff milk – say that it’s off, take a swig of it and then offer it to someone else so that that they can drink bad milk too.
I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised. It started when I went with mum to pick up the visas from the Indian Embassy in Edinburgh. A tiny office shoved into the basement of the building. No-one had bothered to read the forms properly in the first place, even an instruction as simple as “please complete in black ink only” seemed to be completely beyond them and yet they complained vehemently about having to fill them in again. No apology to the rest of the queue about the delay, just complaints that the guy at the desk wasn’t going to bend the rules for them, wasn’t going fast enough for the amount of money they’d put into the parking meter. On top of it all some middleclass twat, standing in the centre of the room, telling the room at large “of course they don’t know how to hurry” He got a bit annoyed with me when I asked him who “they” were. Like I’d broken some unwritten rule. “Well them” he said and then lowered his voice, “Indians, you know”. “Oh” I said. “This your first visit?” he said “yes” I said. “We’ve been going there for the past ten years now. Twice a year. You wouldn’t believe how filthy they are, piles of rubbish lining the streets, oh and the stench, you wouldn’t believe the stench. Turns your stomach it does. But, it’s very cheap” he finished.
“It’s very cheap”….well most of this plane should fit right in then. Because a bigger bunch of cheapskates I’ve never seen in my life. They’re the sort that would get out a calculator to split a bill – work out who had what starter instead of just dividing the amount equally amongst the table and chucking in some extra for a tip. Hell, the couple over there - the ones with the child between them (and is it really fair to drag a child on a twelve hour flight unless it’s a matter of extreme emergency) are doing just that over the duty free bill. “Well the perfume I wanted was £20 but your cigarettes come to £23.50 so if I pay with my card then I need that from you”. For Christssake, you have a child with this person – buy them a box of cigarettes.
(Funnily enough, I’m typing this up as all that furore about Jade Goody/Big Brother and racism is stirring up a media frenzy. You know what? After spending two weeks in India and watching British peoples behaviour there - I’m surprised that so many people phoned in to complain. We are racist. And xenophobic and bigoted. It shocks me. God knows I’m the most intolerant person I know. But I don’t judge people on their skin colour, sexual preference, class, appearance, accent, or anything else like that. I judge people on what my gut instinct tells me about them. I completely agree with herebes latest post - shock horror! hendrixcat agrees with herebe! – but after spending 2 weeks in India, the inherent racism of the British people, their boorish, insensitive and downright ill-mannered behaviour towards the people who live there laid me on my ass with shame. This isn’t the “uneducated” British person either, it’s the educated ones. You just wait until I tell you the story of the Indian carol singers)
Got to calm down. But it’s difficult. Listening to music isn’t working and neither is reading a book. I’m nearly finished Green Mars (again – the whole trilogy is worth a second and even a third read) but I can’t concentrate. I’m too tired. We’ve been travelling for nearly 24 hours now. By my reckoning – even taking into account the 5 hour time difference we should be there now. That stupid black line says that we’re nearly there – about an inch and half away according to them. Why couldn’t they have made it so it looked like the map in Raiders of the Lost Arc – it wouldn’t have taken so much more effort as far as the animation went. I mean, a dot, a plane, it’s not that much difference.
Look out of the window. Try to calm down. Breathe. My stomach churns with too much coffee, my mouth burns with a nicotine craving, Slug back some whisky, hold it there till it burns the urge to smoke away. I am so tired. Tired beyond the point of pale, to the point where nothing is real anymore, where I am not here, I’m dreaming this journey in shades of shivering cold white, we are not flying but driving over the Pennines and the night is so dark.
Has there ever been a place so dark? It devours. Bites out those faint white lights that trail haphazard below. It swallows them whole. One moment they’re almost visible, the next fled. I thought we were still high above the ocean until I glimpsed their shine. Not the orange grid of the Saudi oilfields, square and vast, stamping a heavy pattern on the ground. These lights tumble fairy tale chains, like the lights that shine from the moors on weary nights when the wind blows cold. There is no rhyme or reason to them. They blink. On one moment off the next, while I sit, cheek pressed hard against cold glass and try to see below. There are no stars. Nothing above, nothing below, only this forgotten castle of lights that glimmers faintly to my left.
The plane has banked I think. Banked hard left, or right, it’s difficult to tell. Upside is now down. Left is right. It bounced three maybe four times hard, there was an indrawn breath of air that held for a couple of seconds then exhaled into a nervous laugh.
The lights are now above me in the sky. They grow closer, touchable and tiny houses hover over the ground. No streets they flow in haphazard low voltage swags impossibly close.
The wheels drop with a stomach churning sound. The plane brakes hard (too hard) to a stop. The world outside streams orange, the planes windows have steamed up. We grab our bag. Walk out of the plane. Stop for a second at the top of the steps…
Steam tent warmth, a fog so thick that just breathing in fills your lungs with water. The taste of the place is in my clothes, in my hair, it seeps through my skin, sliding under my nails like bamboo slivers. It tastes of mildewed books, dry spice, wet earth, hard rain, and fire. It tastes alive. This land lives like nowhere else I’ve ever been. Not the sleepy sun of the south of France; the gentle shuck of sea against sun, nor the somnambulant silver of the North East, wild winds of crystal cold and grey. This land lives. It is alive. It conspires. We have no place here. No dominion over earth. It will shake us off and cover us over and we will disappear without a trace. This land crawls inside your bones, infects your brain and if you are immune to it you do not breathe. This is a strange and wondrous place. A magical place. A place not of this world. I’m going to like it here.
