Traveller's Tales 3- An Old Asia Hand

From October 1981 to September 1982, I lived in Sutton, Surrey, right on the edge of Banstead Common, where the southern end of the great metropolis of London finally yields to countryside. I was working in the South Thames Cancer Registry on the Sutton site of the Royal Marsden Hospital. It was not a very happy year for me. I was supposedly a scientist but was employed on NHS administrator pay and conditions, and I got precious little science done. I had come from Edinburgh Medical School where the research facilities were amazing, to a satellite of a hospital with a library about the size of your spare bedroom. I was a young chap with no girlfriend and not a lot of common sense.

I shared a house with three other people. The others were continually moving out and being replaced, and one chap who was there for three months was a radiologist from what was then called Bombay, called Mukund Joshi. Mukund is a lovely man and is now a grand old man of medical imaging in India. At the time he was an early-career consultant radiologist on three months leave from his hospital in Bombay, working at the Marsden to gain experience of use of ultrasound in oncology.

After his return to India, he and I wrote to each other regularly, and in 1983, by which time I was working at the Clinical Research Centre in Northwick Park Hospital, I flew out to India to visit him. He and his wife Asha lived on the pretty Bandra peninsula on the far west side of the massive city of Mumbai. I had planned just to spend three weeks mooching about Mumbai and staying at Mukund’s house, but he very wisely said, What is the point of coming all the way to India and seeing only one city? He bought me a sort of air rover ticket. For two hundred dollars US (it had to be paid for in foreign currency- the rupee was not fully exchangeable then), you could have unlimited internal travel on Indian Airlines for two weeks, and that is what I did.

Before that, however, I needed medical attention. On my first day in India, I did one of the major don’ts: I ate some ice cream. This gave me the most appalling stomach bug, but Mukund purged me with metronidazole and after a couple of days, I went off on my travels. As far as I remember, my itinerary was:

Aurangabad

Udaipur

Jaipur

Delhi

Khajuraho

Agra

Varanasi

Calcutta

Bangalore

Back to Bombay

 

I had some strange experiences. I have never read Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, but I am told it gives the impression of India as a timeless oasis, where the pace of life is slow and unchanging. My arse. It is, or at least was, in the early 1980’s, the most frenetic place in the world. I was hassled incessantly by beggars or persons trying to sell me something. You would walk down a street and people would run out of their houses and demand money from you. Mind you, I was Scottish and living off the largesse of Mukund- they got short shrift from me. Everything you wanted to do was fraught with complication, and they had not only inherited British nineteenth century bureaucracy, but built on it with impressive style.

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In Jaipur, I had to resist so many hard sells that I retired to my hotel bedroom in the early afternoon, exhausted. I sat on my bed, reading a book, then noticed something moving, in the corner of my eye. I looked up. A cockroach, between three and four inches long, was making its way slowly across the tiled floor of the little ensuite toilet and shower room. I put on my shoes and stamped on it, making a crack which turned my stomach. I returned to my book. Again, I thought I detected a movement. The cockroach was continuing its progress across the tiled floor. Again on with the shoes and I stamped on it again, this time with such force that it must be dead. However, after another paragraph, I sensed the movement again. This time, I went over it and examined it more carefully. The cockroach was indeed dead, but was moving because a squad of ants was carrying it off, presumably to devour it elsewhere. I picked it up and flushed it down the lavatory.

The book I was reading was Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with the terrifying sermon about Hell, and Stephen Daedalus’ subsequent nightmare. The cumulative effect of this, the continual hustle of street life in India and the monstrous insect life combined to give me a nightmare that evening. I found myself in my childhood home in Fife, watching a procession of peculiar double acts, all singing a very lugubrious song. Laurel and Hardy, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, Morecambe and Wise, Terry Scott and June Whitfield, Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch, they all slowly danced past me, singing a song about how I had been free to choose, had made the wrong choices and was now going to Hell. I awoke in terror, and on the following Sunday found the catholic cathedral in Delhi and went to mass, something I hadn’t done in years.

In Varanasi, I stayed in a rather more rudimentary hotel, where the rooms were concrete boxes in a square around a garden which would have been picturesque but for the rats running around it. The man in reception told me that the rats had a ‘house’ under the cupboard in his room. Great. In my box of a room, there was a centipede which seemed to me to be about a foot long and I spent some time chasing it round and round the room with a broom handle. Later that evening I ate in the hotel’s rather institutional dining room. After my biriani was ordered, a little waiter, who I think was Korean rather than Indian, approached me.

‘Like drink?’ he asked cheerfully, ‘Beer?’

This was music to my ears in the rather dry state of Uttar Pradesh.

‘Yes, please, I’d love a beer,’ I replied.

He smiled winningly, and said, ‘Beer is not possible.’

When I checked in to the various internal flights, they would not only ask if I were a smoker or non-smoker, they would also ask if I were a vegetarian. The non-vegetarians were given seats at the rear of the plane among the smokers. I was in both categories, so it didn’t bother me. On the last leg from Bangalore back to Bombay, changing planes at Madras, now called Chennai, there was a terrific monsoon thunderstorm. The plane was lurching distressingly. I looked out of the window and saw the wings shaking like my dad’s hands on a Sunday morning. When we finally landed at Bombay my relief was immense.

The above are just snapshots of that holiday. One day, I might tell you more. A couple of years later, I worked for the best part of 1985 in Singapore, after which one of my colleagues described me as an old Asia hand. If three weeks holiday in India and a few months working in Singapore make you an old Asia hand, nice work if you can get it. No wonder the colonial administrators were such a bunch of nincompoops.