Tuesday 30th September 2008

“Women don’t read the news,” says Mansoor, over Americanos in India’s only outlet of Costa Coffee. The walls are covered with Italian odes to the coffee bean, as beneath them the only white faces indulge in blueberry sponge cakes masquerading as muffins. “Women only like romance. They just read the fiction. They watch the movies.” He pauses, and reaches in his Diesel jeans for his chortling Nokia, “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

Mansoor and I had met in McDonald’s thirty minutes earlier. Always shunning the Golden Arches of Capitalism in London, they had this morning saved me from the men haggling for my attention in Connaught Place. He was the forth Indian man to ask me for a cup of coffee in less than fifteen minutes, but this time I felt it was better to be with someone I half-trusted if only to buy some relative peace and quiet. He was busy assuring me that he had “only Western friends.” He seemed disappointed that my reaction wasn’t more enthusiastic.

“I read the news all the time. Two, three newspapers a day. And the only TV I watch is news.” He nods enthusiastically. “You have to watch what is real, you know?” I politely agree, pondering whether he would be giving the same spiel to a female Indian journalist, or indeed, to any male. We part on the promise that I might come to a Bollywood movie with him next weekend, and that I will take his mobile number. In my time in India I am making a collection of these. I wish bleached-blonde hair worked this well in Britain.

India is the only country in the world where journalism is growing – and it’s growing at a prolific rate. Waiting for a friend to finish a project in the offices of the Hindustan Times this evening, I perused just a tiny fraction of it’s rivals: the Hindu, the Times of India, The Mail Today (which, disconcertingly is the Indian arm of the Daily Mail. Seeing its unmistakeable typeface sent a small shudder down my spine). The Times of India has just overtaken The Sun (!) as having the largest circulation of any English language newspaper in the world (3.8 million), and a readership of 14 million. Indian Vogue has just celebrated its first birthday. India has it’s own People magazine, the Times Group (which owns the Times of India, among others) has just bought Hello! and Grazia, and young women guzzle the European edition much gusto. While in the West, the rabbit loses impetus, the Indian tortoise eases merrily on by. And as Indian women get their fix of fame and fashion, Mansoor gets his antidote to romance.


A few streets away, and a few coffee offers later, I meet Raj, a boy of about fifteen. He’s dressed in a checked shirt and jeans, and, head cocked nonchalantly to the side, asks me if I’m shopping.

Earlier, I’d had an unfortunate incident with an overzealous tuktuk owner and a cartel of emporium workers. The owner, persuading me that the shop I was standing outside was ‘too’spensive’, took me to a ‘good quality, fix-price emporium’ for 10 rupees. Here, I was fawned upon and plied with cups of tea by carpet sellers and women peddling £300 pashminas. I politely refused. When their smiles turned to scowls, I persuaded them that I would buy a 400 rupee (£5) scarf – the cheapest in the shop – but only so that the gods would bless them (and their first customer). After this, I vowed never again to follow the advice of someone on the street who told me it was ‘too’spensive’.

Except Raj, because he doesn’t appear to be working on commission; because he says, dubiously, that he is trying to practise his English; and because he had simply one of the brightest grins I had ever seen. He’d take me home, he said, and he’d point out some shops with ‘good price’ along the way. Walking me through the streets of New Delhi, he tells me that he is on his school holidays, but that he is learning English and that he wants to get a job. What job? “In an office.”

Raj has many ideas about what I should do in life. But mainly, he says, I have to have what he called ‘Indian Mind’. “You must get map so you have Indian Mind,” he says, prancing between lanes of deranged traffic. “You must put away guide book. This is not Indian Mind. People will give you the Five Fingered Direction,” he laughs, splaying his left hand in front of him. “You ask for direction here, they will point anywhere with any finger. Doesn’t matter. When you know this you will have Indian Mind.” (I had already experienced the ‘Five Fingered Direction’ when I asked the guard at our door where India Gate was. Though vaguely visible through some trees to my right, he smiled, nodded and pointed at the sky).

Raj had made me consider how far I was from Indian Mind, map or no map. There was so much that confuses me about this country, and so much that they misunderstand about me in return. Try explaining to the man selling me a turquoise-encrusted sitar that I am technically jobless, saddled with a student loan, and only have a fixed amount of hold luggage on my return flight. And yet I had spent a sweaty, dusty morning resenting these merchants and their long teeth.

As we near home (or so I think), Raj turns and asked me if I would buy him an English textbook. He was finishing school this year, he says, and needs to carry on learning if he wants to get a job. I feel hurt. Somehow I thought that Raj wasn’t one of these men in RayBans and Diesel denims, seeking the kudos of a white girl’s company for coffee. I thought he wasn’t a member of a tuktuk-merchant conspiracy, or a behind-the-counter scowler. I offer to pay him part of it, but he shakes his head: he doesn’t want my money. In fact, he seems just as hurt that I would want to pay him. And it was there I stop, and think, I don’t understand Indian Mind, but I’m going to see if it works. And, as he pulls me towards an old bearded bookseller, I feel strangely benevolent bequeathing Raj with a Hindi-English dictionary (and fairly clever that I’d bartered for it). I reflect on my sense of British propriety and instinctive distaste at the charity-ask. I think, why can’t we trade the things we have: me my 700 rupees (£9) for a textbook, and he, his knowledge of the Indian Mind and the Delhi Map? I feel like there was something I had learned from Raj, something counterintuitive and yet, perhaps, ever so right. This, maybe, was Indian Mind.

And with that, Raj calls me a tuktuk, since, it appeared, he actually has no idea how far we are from my home. He also explains that his name was really Ricky, writes down his cell phone number, and runs off, kicking dust into the air as he goes.

Monday 29th September 2008

Heathrow airport is perpetually grey. Greyness seeps from the pores of check-in desk stewards, from the temporary boards which unapologetically hide eternal ‘refurbishments’; from the sky in the outside terminal under which plumes of cigarette smoke arise from those desperately trying to inhale their last tar and nicotine before the long haul. Weary travellers traipse around the Duty Free, snuffling for substances to giggle at during their holidays, or to lighten the heavy transition home.

Air India flight AI0112 is almost deserted. Each of us could probably have an entire aisle of seats to ourselves. But sari-ed, elegant women glide trolleys through the plane as if it was their daily intention to serve only the select few. A few rows over, two thirty-something Indian men conceal a bottle of Johnny Walkers from the eagle eye of the silver haired, thick-waisted air stewardess. They giggle, and watch Bollywood. One turns a stubbled face to me, the blonde young white girl, as I pass on sporadic trips to the toilet and each time asks how I am today, with a grin. Half way through the flight he stands, leans on one of the seats between us and simply stares at me for a full ten minutes.

Being able to stretch out over several seats, with the aid of several blankets, makes the eight-hour flight pass much more quickly. A modern Bollywood – Shilpa Shetty on a journey from potential adultery to accepting the importance of marriage, accompanied by Hindi rock-ballads.

And then, before we know it, dark sky has spread itself out for the night, and on each side of the plane, below us, the bright halogen line that marks the border between India and Pakistan appears. So strange to think that the source of fifty years of bloodshed, inhumanity, and the largest single migration in history should shine so much from the earth.

And twenty minutes later, Delhi is below us, the clusters of settlements twinkling so clearly through the atmosphere. It’s as if the milky way were reflected on the land. The plane descends gingerly through black night-clouds. We hit the tarmac of Indira Gandhi International Airport just before midnight.

And here is the plane’s load disembarking: a few bemused white faces dotted amongst the Indians, bustling in saffron or rainbowed saris, or Sikh turbans of cornflower blue. Those returning home carry Primark bags, probably back to their original destinations, I think to myself wistfully. Their own social inferiors most likely made them less than a train ride away from here.

The heat hits us immediately outside, and the thickness of the air. It smells like the inside of a clay oven – all hot spices and heated concrete. There’s a driver to meet me, his sign bearing my name which is just about visible among the dozens of others that jostle for space. He takes me to a car, marked ‘press’. I grin, if only because in London that would be incentive enough for someone to cause you an accident.

Cars which are parked too close aren’t a problem in the car park: the answer is to push them out of the way; they all seem to leave the handbrake off for such an eventuality. And then we are zooming down the highway, weaving in and out of tuk-tuks covered with tinsel, and yellow and black cabs, which are all supposed to be less than 20 years on the road, but instead look like a lurid, rusty version of something that might have been chugging through Whitehall in the 1950s. At a traffic light, we pull up next to a man on a motorbike, his sari-ed wife riding sidesaddle and his young son on the handlebars. He is wearing the only helmet.

We speed past the patchwork of enormous compounds that house the international embassies, the politicians, the prime minister. Only the tops of the trees are seen above the barbed wire. And then to our guest house, which is a kilometer from the great India Gate, where I attempt to speak to the driver and then the houseboy, both of whom, I realise, know the English words to speak, but not to understand.

The boy quietly shows me my bed in the enormous crumbling building that will be home for three months. Every white wall is crumbling, and lizards shoot across them. It’s beautiful, even in the dark; the huge open spaces, lawns and trees that bow over them. The air smells of warm honeysuckle and the gentle chirruping of unknown insects seeps up the balcony and through the shutters. The boy smiles as he opens doors: ‘washroom,’ ‘kitchen’. He points to the bed and stifles a laugh, ‘single or double’? I choose the single and realise that the others, when they arrive, won’t be happy at the prospect of sharing for three months.

And then he is gone, but not without leaving water and a jug beside my bed on a silver tray. And I feel awkward about being served, but I also don’t want to make him nervous. So I accept gracefully, and realise I will keep having to accept gracefully for a while. A thank you is all I can say; there’s no means with which to communicate anything else. And then, after a moment on the balcony, smoking a cigarette as the smoke moves slowly in the thick, hot air, the ceiling fan murmurs a soft, droning lullaby, and I fall into bed.