Indiaaargh

“A land where nothing is ever black and white. A land of lights and darks, cool marble palaces and warm golden sands. A land where thousands of years of history rubs shoulders with 21st-century luxury.” That’s what the advertisement says, anyway.

As far as I was concerned, India really was a case of black and white: a land where hundreds of diseases and parasites were waiting to kill me, if the cows roaming the highways didn’t get there first, where my extended family’s conversation was restricted to asking how much I earned, when I was going to get married to a nice Indian girl and, in the case of my male cousins, whether I fancied a puff of opium.

I had visited twice, at the age of four and then at the age of 19, on both occasions in the company of my Punjabi parents, and didn’t want to visit again. Experience had taught me that it wasn’t so much a case of “Indiaaah”, as another India Tourist Office advertising campaign once proclaimed, but a case of Indiaaargh.

This needn’t have been a problem. But in recent years it had become one for several reasons, not least that I am the offspring of Indian immigrants and, actually, it would be nice to feel some connection with their heritage. Also, most of my friends adore India.

It was one of these friends, Lottie Moggach, who eventually persuaded me to give the subcontinent another shot. “It’s a land of lights and darks, cool marble palaces and warm golden sands,” she cooed. “You’ll love it!”

A couple of months ago I found myself booking a two-week trip that would take us to Delhi, Rajasthan and Goa. From the outset I realised we’d make odd travelling companions: Lottie, the Indiaphile north Londoner, had spent months travelling around the subcontinent and adored it, whereas I, the Indiaphobe British Indian, had spent a couple of weeks in one Punjabi village and loathed it so much that I spent most of my time locked in a bedroom, reading novels, hoping to avoid introductions to prospective brides and class A drugs.

There were certain conditions attached to the trip: no relatives, no cheap hotels, no rucksacks, no buses, no rickshaws, no hippie crap, no poverty tourism (i.e. spoon-feeding/hugging/bathing of Indian beggars/lepers). Lottie added two conditions of her own: I had to make some attempt to see the real India and couldn’t moan too much. It was going to be difficult, but I agreed.

I could say that I started regretting the trip as soon as we landed in Delhi, but, actually, I started regretting it some time before then: in the hot, shambolic, two-hour queue for an Indian tourist visa in London. I continued regretting the trip as we landed in Delhi.

We were meant to have a taxi waiting for us at the airport but couldn’t spot a placard, so ventured outside to get one – a task that sounds simple enough, but, given the touts and beggars and thieves and scammers and cows launching themselves at visitors, required the patience of a sadhu.

To make it worse, as we got a taxi, Lottie and I had our first argument. The subject: haggling. Lottie’s position, based on extensive travelling, was that one shouldn’t unthinkingly accept the price quoted by a driver. You expect to pay over the odds as a tourist, but when a driver asks for 30 times the going rate, it is worth negotiating.

My position: no haggling under any circumstances at all. This goes back to a time when my Punjabi mother would haggle over everything – tomatoes in Tesco, washing machines at Dixons, utility bills – and I would have to translate her unrealistic demands into English to bemused supermarket cashiers and sales reps. It was mortifying and to this day I would always rather pay extra than ask for a discount.

In the thick heat of a Delhi night, I conceded, on condition that Lottie would take responsibility for haggling for the rest of the trip. But I couldn’t stop cringing as she did so, and it wasn’t a good start to the trip. I was already finding India hard on the nerves, and Delhi still had its pollution, traffic, disease and harrowing poverty to unleash on us.

I hoped for relief the next day, when we were due to travel from maddening Delhi to Jaipur, but when we arrived in the capital of Rajasthan, it became apparent that things would be even worse here. In addition to Delhi’s stresses, the area of Jaipur we were staying in had the novel problem of being littered with hundreds of pigs.

If it had been my choice I wouldn’t have left the grounds of our rather nice palace hotel, but on Lottie’s insistence we went for walks around the city. I thought I was doing a good job at hiding my paranoia that we were about to get mugged or killed by the traffic, until Lottie remarked that my expression reminded her of the one Princess Diana would sport when visiting leper colonies.

Contributing to the stress was the fact that something that should have been an asset was turning into a problem. Namely, my language skills. I had assumed my fluency in Punjabi would be useful, as it is similar to India’s national language, Hindi. But it turned out to be a source of frustration and confusion. Assuming I was a proper Indian, Indians would invariably ask me a question in Hindi, I would reply in English, they would ask me whether I could speak Hindi, in Hindi, I would reply that I could speak Punjabi, in Punjabi (albeit with a slight West Midlands accent), and they would continue, sometimes in Hindi, sometimes in English.

Some of the time this worked, but at Jaipur railway station, catching a train to Udaipur, it resulted in a bit of a drama when I approached a middle-aged man and asked him, in English, where I might find a certain platform. In Hindi, he barked: “How dare you address me in English! Speak in your mother tongue! Who are you trying to impress?!” But I’m British, I whimpered back, in Punjabi. “Doesn’t sound like it.”

The episode encapsulated how odd it can be to be a British Indian in India. You look and sound like you belong, but you don’t. You are in a country that should feel more like home than anywhere else in the world, but you feel homesick for somewhere else. And then you can’t help feeling guilty about feeling homesick for somewhere else. By the time we left Rajasthan, I was quite miserable.

Thankfully, the guidebook offered some hope: it said our next destination, Goa, was very different from north India. And I needed something different. The book was right: in Rajasthan we had woken to the sound of temple prayers and mooing cows/oinking pigs, but in our hotel in Goa we woke to the opening tracks of The Ultimate Chillout Album.

If I was a coconut (brown on the outside, white on the inside), this place was full of people who were wedding cake (the only foodstuff I can think of that is white on the outside, brown on the inside). Hopefully, some of their enthusiasm for India would rub off on me.

One of the first wedding cakes we met was Thornton Streeter, a 36- year-old former futures trader who moved from England to India 14 years ago. I talked to him on perhaps my worst day in India, which began with a breakfast of malaria pills, diarrhoea tablets, paracetamol and mosquito repellent. I thought I could kill two birds with one stone when he described himself as a doctor, but my heart sank when he revealed that his specialism was “human auras” rather than gastrointestinal disorders.

“I had two houses in Fulham, was financially independent, had a life with a girlfriend but gave it up to come here,” he began, speaking, as so many westerners in Goa tend to, at a rate of about 10 words per minute. “I now have a wife and family here.”

I asked him why he loved India and he gave a list: the spirituality of the people, the weather, the fact that it is cheap. “What I also love about India are the ‘tamashas’, the Hindu word for dramatic occurrences. England is bland and sterile, you zoom along in your air-conditioned cars, seeing nothing. I feel more alive here.”

But I like air-conditioned cars. For that matter, every Indian I know in England likes air-conditioned cars. There are few things we love more than spending Sunday mornings blocking streets outside temples in west London with motorcades of BMWs and Mercedeses and Audis.

Letting the comment pass, I asked him what I could do to fall in love with India, something I wanted to do, but couldn’t. “Well, I’m a follower of advita,” he remarked, pronouncing the Indian word with an accent better than mine. “That is basically a concept that says: it’s either going to happen or not, it doesn’t matter. But why should you love India anyway? It’s just like any other place: some bits are nice, some bits are not so nice.”

Now I never thought I’d find profundity in Goa, let alone at the feet of a former public schoolboy who investigated human auras and had the irritating habit of lecturing me about the meaning of Indian words – but Streeter’s words seemed wise.

India is nearly always discussed in terms of love and hate, a phenomenon that William Sutcliffe satirises in his rather marvellous gap-year novel Are You Experienced?. “India is at the same time the most beautiful and the most horrific country,” remarks a character at one point. “I love it here . . . but hate it here.” After a short pause, another character adds: “I . . . hate it here. But love it here.”

As simple as it was, Streeter’s idea that you could like some bits a little bit and dislike some bits a little bit, seemed novel. When I got back to my hotel room, I drew a line down the middle of a sheet of A4, wrote “nice” at the head of one column and “not so nice” at the head of another. Under “nice” I put: the weather; cheap private airlines; cyber cafes; improving telephone connections; religious diversity; cheap cocktails; great five star hotels; nice food.

Under “not nice”, I listed: the weather; religious fundamentalism; disease; illiteracy; poverty; haggling; the treatment of women; cows that enjoy the kind of right to roam that human beings don’t enjoy in Britain; the treatment of any animal that is not a cow; the compete lack of rules on the roads; the caste system; poo.

Looking back at the list now it seems that I mostly liked the bits of India that were most like London. But with the pressure to love everything removed, I suddenly found more things to like than before. When I saw Lottie, I asked her to do the same exercise. Her “nice” list was somewhat longer than mine but then, as a British Indian, my relationship with India was always going to be complex.

The remaining five days passed in a bearable blur of more nice things than not-so-nice things. On the plane back, I even caught myself talking about a land of lights and darks, where nothing is ever black and white. But, admittedly, it was rather nice coming back.

Published 4 December 2004
Copyright Financial Times