A few years ago, I was invited to a dinner in Paris at the home of an English couple I thankfully barely knew. They had just been to India, and their apartment was awash with buddhas, Ganeshas and Krishnas, and they had taken to sitting cross-legged on the floor all of a sudden. Now, most of the evening has been happily erased from my mind, although one quote, which they seemed to have chosen as a mantra, stuck in my mind:
“There are two kinds of people – those who’ve been to India… and those who haven’t”.
Why you sycophantic, patronising little sods. I’ve never liked English travellers much, but English travellers in India have always seemed to me to be among the very worst. The very people who take photographs of all the poor people are the very same people who go home and worry about having enough “nibbles” for their dinner party and whether the Krishna will look good next to the lampshade. These very people wind me up.
Or maybe I’m just being a snob? In many respects, I admit that I am. My tea must be Darjeeling, and like my coffee, must be made to very strict instructions. I don’t like most American cinema, and I’ve never watched anything hosted by Graham Norton. I hate crowds and can’t stand too much noise, so what on earth would I make of that same country that so transformed that couple in Paris?
Thanks to Shanaz, otherwise known as my better half, I was relatively well prepared for what was to come. We had met two summers previously on a Eurolines bus between Paris and London, and seem to be destined to continue having ‘unusual’ journeys. Having put her previous bad experiences of travelling to and from India down to incompetent airlines (Alitalia, I shall name and shame!) – we put our trust in Lufthansa, an airline usually so expensive, it had to be good. Unfortunately, that had not filtered down to the idiots at Heathrow, who messed up the booking procedure, leaving us without seats on the connecting flight. A few choice words with the poor Lufthansa employee in Frankfurt solved that minor problem, and we arrived in Delhi at 1am as planned.
And that’s where it all started.