I flipped out my phone and called the hotel. We were wait­ing out­side the Mum­bai air­port, it was late, dark and the pickup area was badly lit by the low light­bulbs com­mon all over the coun­try. There was a long line of wait­ing taxi drivers all hold­ing plac­ards, but none with my name on. They stood all silent, like the crowd in a Greek tragedy, watch­ing our every move. As if, sud­denly, we were about to remem­ber who we really were and claim the name on one of their boards.

The phone con­nec­ted and rang.

“Hello?” Came a voice, its strong India accent being the very first I had heard since landing.

“Hello, there. Basho here, I booked a pickup. Tell me, has our driver arrived at the airport?”

“Yes, he is there,” assured the voice.

“Great,” I looked around at the horde of drivers. “Where­abouts? I can’t see him.”

“15 minutes he will get there, he’s leav­ing now.”

15 minutes? I asked myself, “You said he was already here. Is he here?”

“Yes. He is there.”

“Where?”

“15 minutes, he will leave in a moment.”

I was begin­ning to get con­fused. “Leave? The hotel? But, is here actu­ally here or not?”

“Yes, he is there.”

I must admit that a little incredu­lity crept into my voice, “So, you say he is here already, but he hasn’t left yet and will be here in 15 minutes?”

“Yes I call him and tell him to leave to come pick you up.”

“Thank you,” I said and I hung up.

Cesca came up to me, saw the con­fu­sion in my face and said, “Where is the driver?”

“He has yet to col­lapse as a wave­form. He is both right here and yet also 15 minutes away.”

She fur­rowed her brow, Quantum jokes being lost on her, “What?”

“He has not yet achieved a Quantum state of 1.”

“Look, I’m tired, please make sense.”

I handed her the phone, “You will have to open this box your­self to col­lapse the wave­form.” She took it and dialled, watch­ing me like I was a crazy per­son who might explode at any moment.

“Hello,” she said into the phone, “Cesca Bell here, I booked a pickup to the hotel, is he here?”

I turned away and went to find buy a drink of water, behind me I could hear Cesca continue.

“What do you mean 15 minutes, you just said that he was here!”

Wel­come to India, I thought.

And sure enough this was our first hour in India. At the time I couldn’t grasp some­thing that later, after a month trav­el­ling, I took for gran­ted: Indi­ans hate to say “no”.

Hate it.

When presen­ted with a ques­tion with a yes and no answer, Indian people will always say “yes”. Always. Quite how a coun­try like this is going into space is bey­ond my understanding…

“Hello home base, this is Astro­naut Choksi.”

“Read­ing you loud and clear Choksi, this is home base. Please advise your pos­i­tion, have you reached the moon yet?”

“Yes, home base.”

“Great, prep for landing.”

“15 minutes, home base.”

“Now listen here, stop play­ing silly buggers…”

Stranger still is the fact that after a while this beha­viour starts to make sense; after you have lived amongst the loc­als you even­tu­ally get it. There is some­thing about say­ing “no,” some­thing about let­ting the per­son down with that word. There­fore, they simply never say it. As a vis­itor, you need to ask an indir­ect ques­tion to get any­where with local people. So, “Is this the right way to the shops?” will always received the answer, “yes,” even if it clearly isn’t. You have to actu­ally ask, “What is the way to the shops?” I have been in situ­ations where I asked the first ques­tion and was told the requis­ite “yes” only to have the per­son grab my arm and steer me in the cor­rect dir­ec­tion, and not the one he recom­men­ded. Some­times, if the per­son likes you or is try­ing to be polite, they will use a little hand wiggle along­side their answer, a sort of raise of the arm to face height and a twist­ing motion; like they are try­ing to screw in a light bulb. Any time you see this, then the infer­ence is that you should ignore everything com­ing out of their mouth. “Yes,” they are say­ing, “this IS the way to the shops… to a given value of ‘is’”

For a per­son from a coun­try with very little left in the way of social val­ues and cus­toms. That is val­ues in com­mon to all, to come to coun­try with so many can be quite a con­fus­ing exper­i­ence. We coined a phrase to cover this feel­ing. When one of us was exas­per­ated with an Indian cus­tom, the other would try and defuse the situ­ation by whis­per­ing, “TII” into their ear. TII means, “This Is India,” and it soon became a man­tra for us on our whole jour­ney through this massive coun­try and its amaz­ingly com­plex social customs.

I returned to Cesca and gave her a drink of water. Water is cheap here and the most plen­ti­ful thing to drink. There are lit­er­ally hun­dreds of bottled-water com­pan­ies, because the tap water is very unsafe to drink. We later met the Amer­ican CEO of one such com­pany. The cool­ing water was my first taste of the fil­tra­tion levels com­mon here. It has a slight tang quite unlike any­thing in the UK. There are bottled waters by such com­pan­ies as Coke, Pepsi and even King­fisher, but they all tasted the same. I didn’t care, as long as they were cold, and they were. She took the bottle and drank a deep draught.

“Well?” I asked.

She fixed me with an eye and simply handed my phone back. Even­tu­ally, after about 15 minutes, the driver arrived. We clambered into the taxi and it sped off into the night. Off into India. Into the heart of Mum­bai. The roads win­ded through the city and I craned to see the build­ings pass. I don’t know quite what I expec­ted, but just saw thou­sands of people run­ning shops by lamp light, hun­dreds of run down roads with build­ings mixed in and large over-sized mod­ern infra­struc­ture that clash with all of it. It looked a mess. I remem­ber being very nervous, but I can’t even now under­stand why. We sped through the night for quite a while before pulling into a park­ing space on the side of the road by a large fly­over. To one side of this wide and busy road was our hotel.

We were glad to have made it.

The hotel was old and had much in com­mon with other trav­el­ler hotels in India. The staff was brisk and unfriendly, seem­ing to be the mem­bers of a fam­ily, or at least a com­mon people run­ning the place. The cost was (in Indian terms) astro­nom­ical, but as this was our first night, we put up with it. They showed us into a very old and dan­ger­ous look­ing lift and up to our room. At first, I thought they had per­haps brought us to the broom cup­board, but no this tiny space was our “Two-bed Deluxe” room. Ter­rible. We were left and Cesca opened the win­dow; it opened into the shared toi­lets so she closed it again. We sighed to each other and sat on the two ridicu­lous single beds that were for some reason end to end. I stood up to take off my top and imme­di­ately and pain­fully caught my hand on the ceil­ing fan. Crouch­ing, I got undressed and pre­pared for bed. Cesca tried the TV, it was stuck on the “God Chan­nel” show­ing the “Hour of Power” Amer­ican evan­gel­ical broad­cast. It was like the pre­vi­ous occu­pants were try­ing to send us a mes­sage, one I com­pletely under­stood. I had only been in this room for ten minutes and already I felt like ask­ing the Almighty for deliverance. I was feel­ing very tired and needed to sleep before even think­ing about try­ing to see this city and get some idea of it. Cesca pulled out her silk sheet from her bag and froze as she unfol­ded it. Sit­ting atop it, clearly con­tras­ted with the yel­low of the sheet, was a bed­bug. There was a moment of sheer frozen hor­ror. Then Cesca killed it. This find neces­sit­ated the total empty­ing of her bag fol­lowed by a pain­ful inch-by-inch check for fur­ther bed­bugs. Only when fully sat­is­fied that there were no more in her bag, did I lay back on my pil­low. It was full of straw and about a com­fort­able as a house brick.

TII, I thought. This Is India. What have we let ourselves in for?

The next morn­ing, it became clear.

After wak­ing, I ven­tured into the shower. It was in the same room as the toi­let. Well, I say toi­let, because all it really com­prised of was a hole in the ground with a dodgy shower­head above it. I washed, shaved and told myself that I was semi-used to this already (steeled by our months in SEA) and I had bet­ter just get on with it. Sure enough after a month I no longer missed a Brit­ish bath­room. When we were both ready we went look­ing for food. The hotel staff recom­men­ded the place next door. It looked like a staff canteen open to the street, but we went and sat down any­way. The loc­als eyed us sourly. I wondered if this was our rel­at­ive white­ness, but after a moment I real­ised that it was because Cesca was the only women in the joint. Seem­ingly, again, we had come up against a local cus­tom and blundered right into it. Obvi­ously, this was a male eating-place. Cesca was get­ting the sort of look a women might get in Eng­land if she went to a sports centre, entered the wrong chan­ging room and got changed in front of a room full of men. We ordered toast. It was the only thing on the menu I had a clue what it might look like. It came quick, so we ate, paid and left.

Back in the street, we walked towards the city proper. We were clearly stay­ing in an area that wasn’t actu­ally the nor­mal tour­ist part, but then this suited us migh­tily. I hate feel­ing like a tour­ist and, while tour­ist I am, I like to “muck in” and get local.

Over the com­ing months we would test that idea to extremes.

For now we had a short mis­sion. At least, if should have been a short mis­sion. We were going to pick up the Lonely Planet India that Cesca’s mother had pos­ted to Mum­bai for her to col­lect. Post Rest­ante. It is an old word, but then this was an old city. The city sprawled out as we walked down the street packed with the unusual taxi’s they have here; an model from the stone-age.  It is a mir­acle that they still run, but they hang to them the way a Lon­doner would a black cab.

Cross­ing roads is another chal­lenge. Cesca almost died on the first attempt. No joke. Only my pulling her back saved her from a Police Car run­ning her down. It wasn’t her fault; the light was on red for stop, but in this city it was more of a recom­mend­a­tion than a com­mand­ment and doubly so to a Police Car. After my heart recovered, we found the post office. It was huge and ancient build­ing, the sort of which would have been con­ver­ted into either flats or chain-pubs in Lon­don. It had a won­der­ful and hum­bling front­age that reminded me of the old Brit­ish Museum. Inside we found chaos. Hun­dreds of people queued for what seemed like over a dozen coun­ters. Behind these a pla­toon of people wheeled large bas­kets, full to burst­ing with post, to and fro. It was like step­ping back in time or watch­ing an old movie. We tried to work out which of the coun­ters we needed to find the post rest­ante sec­tion, but it was hope­less. We tried to garner some help, but nobody either under­stood us, knew what the hell we were on about or both. Even­tu­ally, we real­ised we were in the wrong build­ing. After com­ing out we roun­ded the corner and found another enorm­ous build­ing behind that post office. It was a maze of com­plic­ated rooms sim­ilar to a major Eng­lish hos­pital. After wan­der­ing place to place, we found an office. Inside a couple of people listened, nod­ded and reached into a fil­ing cab­inet and pulled out Cesca’s package.

The whole thing had taken over two hours and couple of chewed fingernails.

Now, armed with the Lonely Planet; indis­pens­ible for its map if noth­ing else, we were free to explore the city.

“TII Baby” I said to Cesca and we set off with a purpose.

“I am hungry again, how about we go visit Landor (Cesca’s old employer) Mum­bai and see if we can have lunch with my friends Lulu and Anaheeta?”

“Great idea.”

Half an hour and a few phone calls later we were in the north of the city on the roof of the Landor build­ing. Lulu and Ana­heeta are two ex Lon­don employ­ees of Landor that Cesca knew well. We had arrived in their office and, after a short con­ver­sa­tion and catch up, they invited us to lunch with them in their alfresco canteen on the roof.

The sun was high and we sought the shade of some tables with umbrel­las and tucked into the amaz­ing food. We dicussed our plans for trav­el­ling around India, and I got the idea of ask­ing something,

“Can you teach me some local phrases?”

They both looked at each other, “How do you mean?” asked Lulu.

“Well,” I smiled, “we like to blend in a little more than most trav­el­lers, and so we have always learned basic phrases like ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’ wherever we go. It helps break the ice.”

“Sorry, no.”

“Oh…” I replied, unsure.

“No one out­side the city would under­stand you.”

“Er, why?”

“Oh, how to explain,” Lulu began look­ing to Ana­heeta for help.

“Try this, do you have an Indian note?” ask Anaheeta.

“Sure,” I said and pulled a 50 Rupies note from my wallet.

“Take a look at it.”

The notes in India are sim­ilar to those in Eng­land, which is not supris­ing given the her­it­age Eng­land has here. I took a look at it. The first thing that struck me was the pic­ture of Gandhi on the front. Indeed, he is on the front of all Indian notes. No won­der, he is one of the most import­ant and influ­en­tial Indi­ans that has ever lived. Per­haps, second in the all time stakes. Behind the Buddha, of course.

“See the lines of small text on the left?” Ana­heeta asked.

“Yep,” I squin­ted to read the approx­im­ately 15 lines of small text stacked neatly on the left of the note.

“They are writ­ten, one line each, in the offi­cial lan­guages of India.”

“Amaz­ing, what do they say?”

“Each one is just the value of the note.”

“So, they print this for all the local dialects?”

“I don’t think you under­stand, you may call these local dia­lects, but they are all spoken by mil­lions of people. Remem­ber that there is over a bil­lion people in India. It is a huge place. You need to real­ise that it has four times the num­ber of people than even in the US.”

“Blimey.”

“Each state of India speaks a dif­fer­ent dia­lect and won’t under­stand a dia­lect from the North. Your plan is to head south, you won’t be under­stood speak­ing the lan­guage of Mumbai.”

Sud­denly, this soun­ded a lot harder than I expec­ted. “OK, so, how should we make ourselves under­stood in these places?”

“It’s simple,” said Lulu, “The com­mon thread between the vari­ous states is not an Indian dia­lect. It is English.”

“Yes,” con­tin­ued Ana­heeta, “If someone from Karnataka (the state in which Mum­bai resides) wants to speak to someone from Ker­ala (in the far south) they speak English.”

Cesca smiled, “Cool!”

After the meal Lulu and Ana­heeta had to get back to work. How­ever, Ana­heeta had an offer for us.

“My hus­band and I would like to take you for din­ner,” she said.

Cesca was very happy, “Great! We would love to.”

So, it was set for the next evening.

“Where are you off to now,” Ana­heeta asked.

“We are head­ing down to the museum areas.”

“If you want to try on Indian clothes, you should go to a store I know near there called FabIndia, it will be per­fect for you if you want to dress like an Indian.”

“Per­fect!” Cesca said brightly.

“Thank you Ana­heeta,” I said, “we will see you tomorrow.”

I was glad when we left Landor; I had seen Cesca eye­ing up the office. I wondered how she felt leav­ing all this, her old life. The office, the coffee’s, the work friends, the func­tional cre­ativ­ity on demand, the stress, the being passed over, the being made ill and the long recov­ery back to health.

“What do think about Landor now? Would you go back?” I asked as we walked hand in hand. I tried my best to keep my deep wish­ing for a cer­tain answer out of my voice.

She turned and smiled up at me, “No baby, I’m free. I’m never going back.”

I smiled back, Cesca was truly cured.

And free we were.

Com­ing up: We visit the fam­ous Leo­polds café from the novel Shant­aram (just recovered from its ter­ror­ist gun­ning), watch the Bol­ly­wood Super-film Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire with the Mum­bai loc­als, eat and drink in the city’s top hotel, try the best Kofi Ice-cream in the world and Basho gets offered a part in a Bol­ly­wood movie! All to come in the next week. Stay tuned.

Regards,

Basho

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