When I arrived at Calcutta airport on 4 May, I thought the pilot had got it wrong and had just landed in a car park somewhere. There was nothing ‘airporty’ about it: the steps from the plane looked like a decorator’s step ladder; the terminal was better than a shed but less impressive than a disused garage. When I tried to change $20, I created 35 minutes’ work for seven men, who each had to count the money and sign a piece of paper to say they had done so before the person standing next to them did exactly the same.
David met me at the airport in a taxi that was held together with string and hope. We drove through the night streets with no lights on, not because the driver hadn’t turned them on but because a tangle of wires was hanging from the front of the car where the lights should have been. David and I sat in the car and prepared to die.
We spent a few days in Calcutta trying to sort out the bikes and to allow David time to get over a stomach bug. The brief pause enabled me to explore the city and to form an opinion of it that I also ended up extending to the whole country. In my view, India is like onion-flavoured ice cream: it has the potential to be something special, but no matter how good the good bits are it still leaves you with a bitter aftertaste.
People have said to me that you can love and hate India within the same minute, but I don’t think it takes that long. The biggest issue I found in the country was the poverty. Even though you could see some people had money, the level of accepted poverty was incomprehensible. People would use the main street as their toilet, and I’d see children with twisted limbs that had been bent at birth by parents who had sought to give them a chance to earn some money begging on the streets.
It was the poverty that the children faced that upset me the most. How could you blame them for chasing Westerners for change to buy food? I hated the fact that you would see children no older than five living on the streets and wearing rags, with nobody to look after them, as they scrambled for whatever food they could get. But what I hated most about India was that I got used to this level of poverty; so used to it, in fact, that I found myself waving children away as they stood with their hands out. There were excuses: there were too many of them; I had often been riding for hours in oppressive heat; it is wrong to reward begging as it confirms to them that that is their lot in life. There were many excuses, but you can’t help feel some small part of your soul dies when you refuse a child some pennies.
David and I split after the first day in India. His illness had taken its toll and he needed time to recover, but I needed to press on home. It was evident within the first few hours that India was going to be hard work. The drivers made the lunatics in Thailand look like grannies on a Sunday afternoon. This was proved within the first hour when we rode past a smartly dressed, middle-aged man lying in the middle of the road, with deep red, almost black blood oozing out of him, the injuries making it clear he was taking his last breaths in life. Around him people paused for a second, then carried on with their day. The driver of a truck with a smashed wing mirror stood by, smoking a cigarette. There were no sirens, no police or emergency services, just a man dying on the road. A reminder, if I needed one, that our hold on life is so fragile it can be broken at any time, and I owed it to more than myself to try to ensure the same did not happen to me.
I continued alone. Mistakes such as riding 100 kilometres the wrong way due to misreading road signs did not enhance my enjoyment of India. In each village or town I rode into, I was immediately surrounded, mainly by men who just stood and stared. There is nothing stranger than walking into a chai house or shop and turning around to find 30 or 40 men standing within five feet of you, staring intently. Being English, I assumed the locals could speak English. This proved wrong as, even if I spoke to them, they just continued to stare. Which was good practice for a future life where audiences did the same.
In a town called Bankura, I needed to find a hotel and decided the train station would be a good place to ask. The station in Bankura is like many in India, the best building in the town, a proud Victorian construction and a monument that stands as an indication that the British once ruled and that, despite the persecution and theft of the country’s natural resources, we did at least give them a decent railway.
I went to the transport office and spoke to a proud, uniformed man with a neat moustache. ‘Can you tell me where there is a decent hotel, please?’
He just shook his head at me, looking slightly bemused.
‘Do you know where I can find a hotel, please?’
Again a blank look. So I raised my voice, repeated the question and started to engage in a game of charades where I acted out sleeping in a building with a roof called a hotel.
‘A HOTEL. I need a HOTEL. With a BED to sleep. Do YOU know a HOTEL with a BED in it?’
He creased his brow again and then replied, ‘Walk half a mile down this road, take the first right and the next left and you will find a reputable establishment. If you are in India, you should learn to speak English. I am sure you will find it very useful.’