Falling in love
Michael Heath
Done the Isle of Wight, been to Brighton, went to Paris in the Fifties when it looked and smelt like a foreign country — I saw Bud Powell play piano and lived off baguettes and cheap vin rouge. I’ve since done America, done and still do Italy, been to Australia, South Africa — you might say I was becoming a bit of long-haul bore. ‘I always drink green tea and wear my own travel socks. And never, never sleep.... ’ Should I now push on and turn myself into a cartoon version of Somerset Maugham? Get out and discover new sights, new aromas, change my wretched life? Should I take romance by the hand and go to India? Why not? After all, it’s cheaper to get there than to go by train to Glasgow. It’s half the flight time to New Zealand. Maybe I could start a rubber plantation (or is that Malaya?), go mad drinking whisky and soda and shoot myself? Maybe I could buy some jute and discuss Gandhi, the original Slimmer of the Year, the anorexic’s anorexic: ‘Get out of India or I’ll starve myself to death.’ (It worked, we got out and now we’re all going back again.) God, the Heat! Did the Taj Mahal by moonlight look like a biscuit tin, as Noël Coward once said when people had Private Lives?
Having made the decision to go, I felt like Kipling. Gunga Din. We — me, the other half and our two girls — were going to see fakirs who’d been standing on one leg for 50 years staring at the sun with burnt-out hollowed eye sockets, and watch boys vanishing up ropes. Here we come. The children’s lives would change overnight. They’d throw their PlayStations away on seeing starving kids in Bombay begging for crumbs among a million others, and realise that having 50 Bratz dolls was, in a way, as bad as Indian rajahs with their wealth and dia mond-studded elephants. But, first, injections and anti-malaria tablets. We were going to a real foreign land, not Hove.
Goa is, I suppose, India Lite. It is wonderful to behold its buildings, its temples and its Christian churches. Its eclectic mix of rice paddies and Portuguese architecture. And oddly enough the dwellings were gummed together with advertisements for Kit Kat, for God’s sake, and internet online gambling. Untouchable goats and cattle roam around the roads at their own snail’s pace — like English yobs.
You don’t realise it but you are falling in love — in love with the rhythm of it. The people are smiling, the people are happy, this is all very odd for us dreary EUs. Where we’ve come from they are only happy in short bursts: being drunk, on drugs, or beating someone up. This is different. These people seem kind, they will help you, not think of you as a mug. Well maybe they do, but it’s done with charm. It’s like I imagine England was 100 years ago (you see what it’s done to my brain?). They say thank you, and excuse me.
At the hotel, we were greeted by beautiful girls in saris who lassooed us with garlands of flowers. Then it dawned on me that the beautiful beach was covered with huge British people, 30-stone women clutching puzzle books full of dots to join up, and unread copies of The Da Vinci Code. May I make a plea to all car clampers and their wives to lose at least two stone and burn their baseball caps before plonking themselves among beautiful, perfectly proportioned Indians? And don’t say to the barmen, ‘Me Dave, and this my wife Joline, you treat us right and we’ll treat you right, OK? We’ll have two lagers. You carry them 200 yards over there to our deckchairs. Chop Chop.’ We got out of the gated hotel and hired a cab for the day, saw temples made of silver, huge chariots full of gods that we were told needed 5,000 men to pull them (‘Not with my back!’ said an Englishman). You can ride on and wash elephants, eat out, feel safe, be happy, leave your depression with your therapist. Goa now!
We flew back to Bombay and stayed there a few days. We were shown around by a man who just materialised out of the crowd. From a distance the streets looked frightening with their mix of tiny children, the crippled, the old and withered. But there’s something about them. Millions of them live on the streets. How can they do that and still have hope? I talked to an Indian who was looking forward to coming to London. He wanted to thank the people who had brought him democracy, taught him English, how to be friendly and to see our greatest games of football and cricket. He wanted to meet decent men wearing suits and doffing their bowler hats to ladies. I hadn’t the heart to tell him otherwise. We will go again. I am sure it is true love.
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