Nothing to Hide and Everything to Declare

When I finally step out of the station, my thoughts are neither about hunger nor food; these are about order and stability. Walking back, I am mulling over the entire experience, admiring the way things function here. Be it the airport, railway station or the coach station, it’s the orderliness of the English life that strikes everyone, especially an Indian mind that often assumes that chaos is the most natural state for a man to live in. Whosoever said that India is a ‘functional anarchy’ perhaps could not have put it any better. What I find truly amazing is that here everything appears to work to a plan. It’s almost as if there is not a single cog out of place in this huge wheel. It moves as though it is well oiled and well heeled, and grease is something it would never ever require. Just when I was about to break into a hymn in praise of English orderliness, I stepped inside a phone booth across the street. What I saw inside made me wonder if I was right about whatever I had understood about the notion of order and stability. It was while inserting the phone-card into the phone that I found several provocative, hot and steamy photographs staring back at me. Small advertisements, displaying all kinds of women, half-naked or barely clothed, baring their bosoms or fingering their private parts, with telephone numbers and inviting, come-hither messages. These messages were about phone-sex or paid-sex, mistresses or girl friends of all shades and hues, black, white, Thai or Latino. Was this just another face of a society that could justifiably pride itself on its impeccable, flawless sense of order? Was this order only skin-deep? Was there a raging tumult of sex and passion waiting to explode or go bust (that pun is most certainly not unintended)? Was this just another side to this information society? Or was it merely an expression of an unhindered freedom of speech? Whatever it may be, one thing is clear that ‘sex’ is not a private affair in English society. It is something of a public performance, a way of demonstrating to others, more than oneself or one’s partner that you do care or do love. Later when I saw an endless stream of couples, young and not-so-young, hugging and kissing each other or coiled up in each other’s lap, unconcerned making an open display of the emotions or passions they either felt or never felt, I was surprised, less and less. Who were they trying to convince of the intensity of their feelings, themselves or others? It was almost as if the walls of bedrooms in several houses had collapsed all of a sudden and I was left peering inside or was it now, outside? The words of the thickset man behind the counter at Heathrow inevitably rang in my ears, ‘There’s no place in London as cheap as this.’ But the telephone booth appeared to suggest otherwise. Sex, it appeared to proclaim, was cheap; cheaper than the hotel-room where it could be bought and performed. It made me somewhat less guilty about the uncivilized way in which I had satiated my hunger earlier on in the day. The hunger that rises a little below the stomach is perhaps much more unsettling than the one that rises from it. 

Late in the evening, quite accidentally, I had turned in to BBC 2. Louis Theroux was cruising the streets of US again, in his inimitable style, searching for yet another subculture. And this time his cameras had trained themselves on Porn Industry in the US, picking up some lurid images that easily reminded me of the pictures I had seen inside the phone booth, earlier on in the evening.  It was sheer curiosity, of whichever kind you might say, that made me stay tuned in. Was I disappointed? Frankly, no Louis Theroux had managed to trick me in. Much before I could sit back, turning into an incorrigible voyeur, he had already slipped out of his position of narrator-commentator and become a subject himself. An aspirant model, hunting for an assignment that could, quite literally, help him ‘strip off’ all his talents.

He went ahead and got himself photographed in nude from one of the agencies that did talent hunting for the industry. It was quite bizarre! Perhaps, he was going too far in search of a journalistic story or was this his way of creating sympathy for his subject? Here were men and women, willing to risk everything they had, including their lives, by making ‘live performance love’ to just about anyone, all for what they called ‘great money.’ It was interesting to see how Louis was on the trail of subcultures in American society, when his society had far too many of its own thriving in its backyard. If every spectator were to become a participant and every voyeur, a victim, perhaps human world would have a much better understanding of itself than what it has today. These are the two faces of English society, one that makes ‘cheap sex’ available and the other that warns against the dangers of giving in to it.

Sex is an absorbing subject, but only for the great minds. Yes, someone like Freud could talk about it intelligently. For lesser beings like us, it is not a matter to be theorised, only to be performed and experienced. Or perhaps, one could digress, as we often do, when ‘sex’ is the subject and talk not of the performance, but of the post-office. It was only my first day in England and I was already looking for a post-office where I could buy a few aerograms to be able to write letters back home. It was, indeed, amazing the way in which I had suddenly found myself outside a post-office quite by chance. As I bent down to ask for the aerograms, I saw an Asian face looking up at me; a long face with buckteeth and hair blown back. Handing in a pack of ten aerograms at a concessional rate of one pound ninety, she surprised me by asking a personal question I least expected her to, “Are you from India?” When I told her that I was from Chandigarh and had just come in that day, her face did not light up. It fell rather unexpectedly as she mumbled, “I, too, am from Chandigarh. My parents live in Sector 35.” I told her that we, too, had stayed for long, not very far from her parents. Our conversation over, I came out. I do not think we are ever likely to meet again. Though we may not meet, I would perhaps always remember that a little way off the Belgrave Road is a post-office where a woman from Chandigarh sits behind the counter, selling stamps and envelops. It is strange how sometimes fleeting moments seal off bonds one may never be able to return to, ever. And repeating the name of Chandigarh had worked like a mantra. It had carried me back home almost instantly. Walking back to the hotel, I was already writing out the letter in my head. Back in the room, they just had to be copied down. There was so much to write and so little space within which I'd have to write it all. For a traveller in a foreign land, what he experiences always exceeds what he expresses and what he expresses is always much more than what he can ever make sense of. It is something like the excess baggage we all carry, hiding it from the prying eyes of the customs or the airline officials. When it comes to experiences, we can easily off-load it and say, ‘Well, I have nothing to hide and everything to declare.’

Much as you want to, you always find things to hide when you travel abroad. There are always things you like to stuff in those corners of your bags where no one can easily find them. Just as you press down secrets in your heart that threaten to break out into the open. One thing that I had not been able to declare to Christine Wilson was my pathetic ignorance about the computers. When in her letter she had sought to know which computer programme I used, Microsoft Word or Word Perfect, I simply didn't have the heart to tell her 'neither.' It was perhaps hard for her to imagine that there were people living in certain parts of the world who still managed life without the computers. Only on arriving in England was I to learn that professional life was, indeed, inconceivable without computer(s). How could I tell her that I had a certain dread of computers and that the very sight of the machine filled me with all kinds of unimaginable fears! While indicating my determined preference for the Microsoft World, I had not quite anticipated how my harmless lie would return to haunt me, one day. It was not much of a lie, really. Before starting from home, I had taken a crash course in computers from Roopinder, a friend. He had overestimated either his own ability to teach or mine to learn. Armed with a crash course but little practical experience of using computer, I had landed in Norwich, only to be given a Toshiba laptop. I still remember how triumphantly I had walked back to Norfolk TerraceA.03, laptop in one hand and the printer in another.

Though I had little understanding of computers, whenever I thought of acquiring a PC, it was none other than a laptop. Mohan Bhandari has a story on a young man whose childhood dream of becoming a poet had been soured by his poverty and he had ended up as a donkey-herd. It is perhaps not right for the mule-herds to dream of becoming poets. Nor is it quite right for someone mulish to dream of acquiring something as poetic as a laptop. I had visions of endless reams of papers rolling off the printer as I worked on the laptop through the night. So the moment I reached my flat, I cleared off the table and created the space where laptop could sit in all its splendid glory. I fixed up the wires as best I could, plugged the switch in and waited for the miracle to happen. Roopinder had warned me that I should not use the computer until I had read the instructions very carefully. Ignoring his cautious advice, I decided to press on ahead when it offered no resistance and instead obeyed all the commands I keyed in. I was already typing out a short story. Lo and behold!  My work had begun with a singular flourish. So overjoyed was I with this initial success that I could not simply wait to get through to the end of the story. I decided to take the printouts of the very first page I had so cleverly keyed in. Pressing the print command, I relaxed in my chair, waiting for the laser printer to show its magic. The printer ran full steam, but nothing came off it. I checked all the points and repeated the command. This time, a few jumbled letters spluttered off the printer and again it stopped. How could a mere printer fail me when I was so close to success! I simply refused to accept defeat and in my impatience pressed, I don’t really know, how many and which all commands. Even a child balks when he is given contradictory commands and this was, after all, a computer. It immediately went into a long sulk. Believe it or not, it just got into a logjam and stopped functioning. By now, signs of real worry had begun to appear on my brow. Beads of perspiration thickened as the prospect of having ruined a BCLT computer on my very first day of arrival in Norwich came back to haunt me. What would happen now? How would I face Christine? Where would I take the computer for repairs? All kinds of questions started hammering inside my head. Meanwhile, it flashed a sudden message, which dipped my spirits only further as it said, ‘Low battery.’ That moment I just wanted to run out of the room, into the wilderness of the forest outside. It was becoming impossible to stay closeted with this computer in the same room, any longer. I rushed out for some fresh air, thinking it just might help my mind or bring the computer back to life through some unexpected miracle; neither happened. On the contrary, as I was gingerly walking back to my room, half an hour later, I lay surrounded by all kinds of feverish, nightmarish images. I could see the computer going kaput right before my eyes, sparks flying out, my room and my flat on fire. And the next moment I heard Christine tell me, ‘Oh dear, I’m afraid, you’re being asked to return home.’ I’m sure people have had to face deportation for several reasons, but never for the kind of reasons I then imagined myself being deported for. Now, when I think about it, I can afford to laugh at it. But that moment it was a question of life and death. My blood pressure had suddenly plummeted and so had my confidence. More than the blood pressure, I was concerned about the fall of my confidence for it can sometimes help us sail through situations, which are otherwise hopeless. It was, after all, April 8. So the number eight had played its sinister role, again. It was hard to believe that this black numerical sign of Saturn had come all the way from India, tugging at my sleeves to this far-off land of the whites. Does our destiny travel with us? Do our superstitions and prejudices overleap themselves, travelling faster than we do? Is travelling a way of confirming one’s half-baked ideas or growing out of them? I am yet to know and discover.

Often when we travel to other cultures, we carry a cartload of stereotypes with us. We continue to look at the people through this invisible, myopic lens permanently grafted to our eyes. It is always more convenient to fit people into the categories we know rather than invent categories to fit our knowledge of people after we have known them. Besides, how does one know people well enough to be able to talk about them with a degree of certitude? Was it Eliot who said, “What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them! They have changed since then, but to pretend…” yes, when it comes to knowing people, one always has to pretend that one does know. My first meeting with Peter Bush, the Director of BCLT, was surprisingly informal I had been with him for barely ten minutes when he looked at his watch and declared, “How about some lunch?” It was still 12.30 p.m. and I was quite undecided. He thought my hesitation was a sign of affirmation. Coming out of his office and peeping into Christine’s, he asked her to join as well and together we walked down the long corridor of the Arts building, talking of translation and English weather. Of course, he did most of the talking and I, the listening. I was still at a stage where one listens more than one talks, and one observes more than one sees; something of a silent stage that a child goes through in the process of language learning.

As he was leading us into the Bowl, the campus restaurant, I noticed his impressively tall frame, which occasionally gave him a natural swagger as he walked. But that was not a sign of arrogance as I was to soon discover. Once in, he not only bought lunch for both of us but also carried our trays across to the table. Looking at him, I wonder if an Indian professor in a similar situation would have ever done what he had. Peter certainly had no professorial airs and graces and was remarkably unpretentious, quite the observe of what I had anticipated an average British professor to be. Where was the proverbial stiff upper lip or the somber, self-absorbed look, I wondered all to myself as Peter quizzed me about my other interests, apart from translation! His soft and benignly curious eyes often peered at me from behind a bespectacled face, wonderstruck, especially when I made some off-the-cuff comment, which to my discomfiture I did make quite often. It was my first ever meeting with a British professor and though he was disarmingly informal and courteous, I was certainly more self-conscious and guarded than was necessary. All along I was being cautions, avoiding an unfavourable impression upon him or Christine. It was, I suppose, this self-consciousness that often led me into the trap from which I was desperately trying to save myself. After we had finished our meals, I stood up, little realising that the tray had to be carried back to the kitchen. Halfway across the hall as I turned back, I saw Peter lifting my tray off the table. Do I need say what an acute embarrassment it was!

Without a word, Peter had made it known to me that while I was in Britain it won’t be a bad idea for me to practise a wee-bit of self-help. And this was the beginning of my education in the mores and customs of the English society. I was to learn in the days to come that self-help was not only an important part of table manners in a restaurant but almost a national attitude, practised on a much wider scale. It was perhaps the only survival kit that an advanced, competitive society puts at the disposal of its people to get through the daily business of living. Later, at every stage, I was to learn the importance of self-help. Whether it was the computing centre or the library, one had to know how to find one’s way or to get around things. A certain amount of basic techno-literacy was almost taken for granted. For instance, it was expected that once you were given your user number and a password, you knew exactly how to operate your e-mail account. (It took me good fifteen days to start using it without getting into many scrapes). Or walking into the library, you could not only sit in front of the computer but also access information on the books and periodicals available there (I had to seek Eliff’s intervention and that I did, after much hesitation, that lasted, if you please, only a little less than a month). Or that net surfing was as much your passion as it was anyone else’s. (I got to read The Tribune after a month and a half, first time on May 20). Perhaps it was hard for the English society to imagine that there were people in the world who were simply neo-literates in computer and almost illiterate when it came to its multiple operations. (Apparently, I’m not making any insinuations, only talking of my own peculiar case). Not that there was any dearth of information; it was everywhere. In catalogues, brochures, tables and assorted printed material, even on the tip of people’s tongue; only it rolled off the white tongues very rarely. The personal help was not given, unless it was actively and consciously sought. Having put everything down in black and white, it was as though the English had absolved themselves of the responsibility of sharing information through human agencies. That is when it dawned on me, for right reasons or wrong, that a society becomes advanced not when it invents things or starts using them in daily life, but only when it begins to rely less upon the spoken word and more upon the written word. It’s the transition of a society from the inchoate oral stage to the orderly materialization of the written stage that actually puts it way ahead of others. As people begin to speak to each other more and more through the written documents such as books, reports, diaries, newspapers and recorded histories, they also begin to speak less and less to each other. What makes people more productive is exactly what makes them more impersonal, too. Meeting Peter has been quite thought provoking. Walking back to my flat, I’m already turning over in my mind the possibility of fighting long spells of silence that lie ahead, of course, with black ink spilling over reams and reams of white paper.

                                    

                                                        *           *           *           *            *  

(Excerpts from TO ENGLAND, WITHOUT APOLOGIES: A Travelogue)  

A Passenger in Transit

Dear Friends

I had visited England in 1999. That was my second visit.

I've this bad habit of maintaining a diary. That, I suppose,

is my way of staying in touch with myself, and also recording

every little experience I have. Slowly these jottings turned

into an interesting travelogue, which I have tentatively titled it as:

TO ENGLAND, WITHOUT APOLOGIES.

I'm sharing the opening chapter of this travelogue with you, in the hope that

it may strike some chord somewhere in your heart, too.

Here's the text of Chapter I, titled A PASSENGER IN TRANSIT :

When you are up in the air, the earth seems so inconsequential and insignificant. From the little window of the jet plane, the skyscrapers appear flattened on the ground, their sky-mocking Pinocchio-type noses rubbed into the green of the earth. Whosoever says that the earth is fast losing its green cover should look at it carefully when the plane, having taken off, becomes air-borne and not exactly cloud-borne. The earth appears, unrealistically, unbelievably green. Even the most polluted city would, in such moments, put its worst detractors to shame. Not that I have seen Delhi from his vantagepoint. I never can, for the flights not only leave Delhi but also return to it, under the cover of darkness. I have a feeling that this is part of some international or anti-national (does not really matter how you put it, for in the ultimate analysis, one just means the other) conspiracy. They just do not want the reputation of Delhi to be salvaged even in those fleeting moments when you’re air-borne. In the daytime, they allow the pollutants to have their way and at night, too, they let everyone believe that it’s no better.
The twinkling stars across the surface of Delhi, however, do give you a comfortable feeling that all is not lost, that Delhi still has a sky overhead and sometimes, especially when it’s not wet, it dazzles as well. As one is slowly lifted out of the darkness overhanging Delhi, one strangely feels sad, not comforted. Leaving darkness behind should ordinarily be an uplifting experience but it’s not. Somewhere deep down, I believe we begin to love that darkness, especially if we have lived among its shadows for far too long. Besides, somewhere in that darkness shine faces you have known, of the people you have shared your life and light with. Once you get air-borne, you know that the earth is behind you, that the human settlements are beyond your reach, that among those hazy, lost, black-hole like structures, you too have left a little home or a part of your heart behind. As the darkness gets thicker, with the clouds floating in, faces blur into memories. Over the vast ocean of darkness, when one cannot reach out to the faces in flesh, one clings desperately to the memories racing through the mind. The sound of the over-heated jet engine only makes the mind race faster. Then it begins to fatigue. But now, the plane is very much in a commanding position, steering straight ahead on its chosen path, but you slowly lose control over your senses as drowsiness washes over you. Sleep comes unannounced, unexpectedly, very much like the sound of the pilot or the flight-bursar on the microphone. It comes and goes. Drifting in and out of sleep, you do not quite know which world you belong to – the one you have left behind or the one to which you are so determinedly headed.
Sleeping in one zone and waking up in another – such is the fate of every jet-traveller. The time-zones change for everyone but for most of the travellers, it’s just a question of re-setting their watches, not their mind. We carry ourselves through all kinds of time/space zones, unblinking, without so much as noticing that a change that has occurred demands that we, too, change. How and in what manner, I don’t quite know. All I know is that time zones do something fuzzy to our consciousness, our whole being in a way. It is re-made, re-set like our watches; almost re-invented without our knowing it. And it’s this re-invented being that peeps out the next morning as the plane touches the ground of Charles De Gaulle airport. The misty, rain-swept morning is something like the uncertain, memory-ridden night you have had. As the plane zeroes in upon the runway, you try and shed your bleariness so that you can be more focussed and alert; ready to hurl yourself into the arms of a new day, a new morning. All your dreams of watching the Seine or the Eiffel Tower from the French windows of the airport lie buried under the announcement you’d heard a few minutes before landing, which said: “Paris is some thirty-two miles from the air-port.” There you are. Things rarely turn out the way you expect them to. Having lost the opportunity to get a visa entry to France on your passport, all you can do is comfort yourself, saying: “Well, I did it for a good reason. The evening with the wife and children was well spent.” No, you do not regret it in the least. You do regret not having armed yourself with information on Paris, though. When I travel, I let my wanderings prove to me how and in what different ways have I gone wrong! It’s like the road telling me that I am not walking on the right track. The more I travel, the more knocks I get; the more knocks I get, the less I know, the less I know, the more mistakes I commit. And the more mistakes I make, the more I travel. I am no Ulysses, and I do not have to travel beyond the utmost bound of human thought. For me, travelling does not mean accepting yourself as a superior being, it means accepting yourself as a lesser mortal, as a human being, warts and all.
Paris fails to hold your attention when you are just passing through, when you are a passenger in transit. Not that I have seen it, but I imagine that Paris is somewhat like those French wines that are silently brewed in cold-cellars for long and that demand a connoisseur’s well-attenuated taste and attention. I am more like a non-drinker, walking past a rich haul inside the cellar with the perfunctoriness of someone who doesn’t care. But even the most hardened of non-drinkers have a secret wish to taste the wine, if nothing else but to know how it feels on the tongue. But I have to pass it over. There is hardly any choice. Passengers cannot be choosers, least of all, the passengers in transit. They have things to worry about, things such as their baggage, which terminal to go for their next flight, how to get there, how not to react when the French customs’ official demands that you empty out your pockets and pass through the metal detector, the second time. So wrapped are you in doing what is either demanded or not demanded of you that you have no time to worry. Besides, you almost bless your stars, stop worrying altogether when you find that someone, who has the same colour as you or is perhaps from the country of your origin as well, has been asked to step out of the queue for a more rigorous questioning. It leaves you temporarily disturbed to find that all the white passengers of Air France have been allowed to go through the security check with minimum of fuss. Is this the miracle of your skin, the charisma of your colour that you get more intrusive attention that you can cope with? I do not know. It’s perhaps, too, early for me to thinking such thoughts, too early to form any impressions, good or bad, too early to start judging people or situations. Besides, does a single swallow make a summer? Paris is cold and wet and the summer appears far away, too far for comfort.
With these thoughts criss-crossing my mind, I follow a charming hostess of Air France, holding up a placard with London Heathrow written on it, leading all the passengers across the gate from where we/they have to board the plane again. Another boarding pass, another queue, except that this time round, all of it is rather rushed. From a 336-seater jet jumbo on to a 100-seater carrier, you not only feel somewhat cramped but also diminished. You have been second time lucky. Again, you have found a seat next to the window. As the engine is set into motion, you cast one last longing look at the little strip of Charles De Gaulle (for that’s about the only thing you can see outside) and turn around to look at the fellow passengers. The same couple with a small child, who howled through the night, punctuating your sleep, is now seated next to you. The man is in a white kurta-pyjama and a sleeveless black jacket. He is extraordinarily tall, but his height does not overawe you. It’s either his long nose on an otherwise handsome, well-cut face or a well tied, tuft of hair at the back of his completely shaven head. As you spontaneously mumble ‘Hare Rama Hare Krishna’ he twists around to give you a cold, hard stare. Sheepish, you pretend to smile at his bawling child but your smile withers away hopelessly under the strain of the effort. And you retreat behind the newspaper which he already has thrown open, right next to your nose, mercifully not even half as long or half as sharp. Nursing your nose, you sneak a glance or two at his wife who is not very short but is dwarfed each time he stands up next to her. His voice is self-assured and authoritative, but she only mumbles each time she speaks. Occasionally, he puts his arm around her in a sudden rash of affection, gives her a tight hug or a peck on her cheek. And each time he demonstrates his affection or love or whatever else it is, she appears gratified, somewhat overburdened with his perfunctory kisses and the child’s insistent bawling. Only when she decides to put the child to breast to soothe him do you look away, out of well-imbibed sense of propriety. You are glad that this propriety has travelled with you from your land of birth and has not been left behind in the darkness that hung over Delhi the day you left.
By now, the plane has pierced through the clouds. Huge bundles of rain-washed cotton wool lie scattered all around. No object in sight! It is almost as if the earth has ceased to exist, at least, temporarily. White clouds have pulled themselves over the earth, spreading like the crumbled map of the colonial ruler that used to send all the dark strains into hiding, cloaking the ugly nakedness of the earth almost instantly. The unsettling symmetry of the human settlements as they appear to the naked eye from somewhere in the sky, is also forgotten like Karl Marx’s dream of social equality. Clouds have a way of making you forget that you’re an earthly being, that the earth is not as beautiful as it sometimes appears, that human beings are not equal though the distance might make you think they are. In short, nothing is what you either think or feel it is. Clouds have a way of telling you that you cannot always know or penetrate everything; that there are limits to what your mind can know or your heart feel. Floating on the huge bundles of cotton wool, you feel like a real dwarf, not just an optical one that the tall man’s wife begins to appear as soon as he stands up. Your reverie breaks only with an announcement in broken English, saying, “Soon, we’re going to land on London Heathrow.” The way they put it, it almost sounds as though London is the name of the airport and Heathrow, that of the place. Never you mind. It sounds good the way it is pronounced. Besides, who are you to question it? They like it this way. Why must you always question the logic of things? And whose logic is it, anyway? Yours or theirs? It is certainly not everyone’s.
This time round, you are not as shaky to find yourself at the Heathrow as you were the first time you landed here. That was some two years ago. You had been told to call up the British Council office from Heathrow to find out about your accommodation. Remember how you had gone round and round in circles, trying to figure out how to make a call from the phone booth. Too embarrassed to admit your ignorance to anyone, you had stood outside a booth, observing others make calls. That is how you had found out that calls couldn’t be made without a phone-card. After buying the card, you had kept turning it over for a long time to figure out how to use it. All those memories of wasting almost two hours trying to put a call through are still with you as you confidently walk into the nearest shop to buy a phone-card, almost with the flourish of a native. Calls through, you walk across to a counter to find out about hotels/hostels in London. In your feigned spiritedness, you greet a thickset, bespectacled person behind the counter with a more than usual warm ‘Good Morning,’ He unsettles you by saying,
‘No, it’s not a very good morning. But what can I do for you?’
Still collecting your wits, which get easily scattered in a foreign land, you shoot a nervous query, ‘Please tell me about a decent place I could spend the night in? Reasonably good but not very expensive.’
You immediately realise that it’s your third-world syndrome that has made you add that bit about ‘not very expensive.’
‘What’s your expectation?’
‘Say, fifteen to twenty pounds.’
‘I’m sorry, there’s no place in London as cheap as this.’
You feel guilty for having thought that London, too, could be cheap. You are glad that he has put you straight on that rather early on in your wanderings. You do not even know how this fortuitous remark is a preparation for much of what you have to meet in London, later that evening. Despite the gruffness of his tone, his suggestion about looking for a hotel on the Belgrave Road turns out to be sound one. This road runs close to the Victoria Coach Station from where you have to catch the coach for Norwich, the next morning. You discover that the coach station is not more than five minutes walk from Leicester Hotel on the Belgrave Road, that eminently forgettable place where you end up spending the only night in London.
No, I had not really planned to stay at Leicester Hotel. To be honest, I did not even know it existed. As I was dragging my luggage sullenly on the pavement outside the Victoria Station, wiping the sweat off my face, unable to breathe in the fresh, cool draught of London, I suddenly came across this modest-looking hotel. Modest, of course, it was not by my standards but only in comparison to the other hotels in the neighbourhood that towered far above it. Right across the road stood the majestic-looking Eccleston Hotel, neon-sign beaming even in the daytime. As I was to discover later, Belgrave Road is known for its endless rows of hotels, stretching out in all possible directions. But did I have the patience to check out on the other hotels and compare the tariff? No! It was sheer fatigue of a ten-hour long journey, made worse by having to drag my luggage, which made me enter the first reasonably looking lodging I could. When the young man with a ponytail, sitting behind the counter announced ‘Thirty-five-pounds’ in his heavily accented-voice, I simply gave in. I did not ask him all those questions that the experienced travellers often do ask. For instance, I didn’t ask him if the room was on the ground floor or the top floor; whether or not it was equipped with a telly and channel music; or if there was a porter around to help me with luggage. The moment he said ‘Thirty-five pounds’ I wearily took out my purse and handed him a fifty pounds bill. He slipped in the key along with the change, without so much as explaining the directions. When I asked, his cryptic reply was “The third floor. Walk down the corridor and then go up the stairs.” Until then, I hadn’t quite realised what I had let myself in for, which I did only when I had to carry my huge suitcase up the steps. The climb was simply endless and the steps small. It was not possible for me to rest the suitcase on the steps. It had to be carried all the way up to the floor. By the time I had finished lugging all my baggage up to Room no; 65, my fatigue had reached a breaking point. What was worse, all this effort had made my back-strain return. I cursed myself for not having hired a taxi, for being a stingy traveller, for not having found a hotel with a porter. I certainly hadn’t come all the way to England to feel so miserable. Besides, the prospect of nursing my back-strain through the only evening I had in London was not particularly an encouraging one.
What a mousetrap of a room it is! No bigger than a solitary-cell. Though there is a large glass window overlooking the street, it has curtains that block out the natural light. Not that there is much of natural light, anyway. It is a windy, sunless day. I retire to the bathroom for a hot shower, which almost brings me back to life. The bathroom barely has a space for one person to stand in, but what more? Modest-looking places can be quite cramped and self-limiting, at times; just as the large, open spaces can, sometimes, be frightfully intimidating. It all depends upon where you are and how you are experiencing whatever you are. I console myself by saying it aloud, ‘Well, how does it matter? I just have to spend the night here, not my entire life.’ As I say it, image of worn-out, dilapidated shanties and ramshackle tenements flash across my mind – images of all those cramped spaces, somewhere in a Delhi slum where people spend their entire lives without complaining, without a demur or protest. I have seen one often gets into the habit of complaining only if one has. For the one who does not have, life itself is a complaint. But for the one who has never tires of complaining every minute of his life. It surprises me immensely that I am whining so much. I have not been particularly notorious for it. Does it mean that I am acquiring a new set of habits, too? Is this what the re-invention all about? Time inventing us, and re-inventing us. We, inventing a story, and someone re-inventing it. Repetition. Endless repetition. Of words, of experiences, of stories, even of time. When you are on your own, you have a plentiful of everything but no thought of how to use it, and upon whom or against whom.
My journey has just about begun. I’m still a long way off the destination where I’m supposedly headed. So I decide to walk across to the Victoria Coach Station to book myself on a coach leaving for Norwich, the next morning. Though every kind of information is being put out through the video-screens, I decide to approach the man at enquiry desk. He gives me a folder with complete information on coaches leaving for various destinations in and across England, encircles Norwich for my convenience and directs me to the reservation counter. It does not take me more than five minutes to get the reservation done. The man behind the window, a black with a genial smile and elegant manners is as helpful and polite as anyone could be. As I am about to step out of the station-gate, it suddenly occurs to me that I have not had anything to eat since the last meal served on the plane. It does not really matter when it was, for I had not re-set my watch at that point in time. What matters is that it is 13.00 (GMT) and I suddenly in the grip of severe hunger pangs. Scouting around for an eatery, I find myself outside an outlet that sells sandwiches, bread and buns of a wide variety. I buy myself a cup of tea and three thick-looking buns with black currants, and retire to a bench in the corner. That moment as I sat crouched in a corner, nibbling hungrily at the buns with black currants, I was suddenly reminded of a beggar at Delhi bus station, whom I had bought puree-chana and who, too, had sat in a corner and sated his hunger, just the way as I did now. Is it that the hunger has a way of reducing all of us, regardless of who we are or where we are, to plain and simple beggars? Or is it that on being placed in a situation where we are not observed or watched, we all tend to eat as hungrily as the rest of us? It is strange that we forget our manners when we need them the most, in presence of the strangers.