‘Maybe I did, but that doesn’t make me a toff.’
‘I am a… a bloody…’ If he hadn’t been a wimp, he would have hit me. I saw it cross his mind. Instead he took a few deep breaths, picked up his book, and stormed off into the hotel. In the doorway, he turned round and shouted at me, ‘I hope you… I hope you… get malaria.’
Liz showed Jeremy our bus tickets to Simla. He kindly pointed out that seats 52 and 53 were going to be at the back, and that it’s basic knowledge to make sure that you get a seat near the front if you don’t want to have your spine shattered by the bumps in the road. He also mentioned that our tickets said ‘Luxury VT’ on them, which meant that the bus had a video and we would be deafened by Hindi musicals for the entire journey, which, he gleefully added, took at least fourteen hours.
‘How long were you queuing?’ he said.
We both scowled at him.
‘Two hours,’ said Liz.
‘You should have got the hotel to send a boy for you,’ said Jeremy.
‘Do they really do that?’ said Liz.
‘Of course – costs a few rupees, but it saves you a day. Oh well – live and learn.’
More than ever, I wanted to pull out Jeremy’s toenails.
It turned out that the stuff about shattering your spine wasn’t just a turn of phrase. The rear wheels of the bus were roughly half-way down the chassis, turning the back fifteen rows into a pivot which magnified the slightest bump in what was already a staggeringly uneven road. As a result, we travelled in a kind of sadist’s zero-gravity chamber, where you spent half the time floating in mid air and the other half having your arse spanked by the seat.
It was the first time I had got close to a local for any length of time, and it struck me that all the stuff about Indians accepting their fate was true. The guy next to me didn’t even seem to notice how uncomfortable the bus was. Occasionally, if we’d just floated to the ceiling and then been given a triple-whack which was hard enough to send all five of us on to the floor, he would give me an isn’t-this-funny grin, but other than that, he just stared out of the window, seemingly content that he was being simultaneously paralysed and castrated.
The one advantage of being at the back was that you were further away from the Hindi musicals playing at the front of the bus. In the course of the trip, the same film was played four times, and although I could only see the screen when I was in mid air, by the end of the journey I’d watched most of the film piecemeal, and could just about follow the story.
As far as I could tell it was about a guy who wants to marry a sexy girl, but his parents want him to marry an ugly girl. Just when he’s about to marry the ugly girl, he discovers that the sexy girl has been kidnapped by an ugly man who wears black leather and scowls at the camera. The hero rushes out on a horse in search of the kidnapped sexy girl, and has a punch-up in the desert with the ugly man. He’s about to save the sexy girl when it emerges that the ugly girl is in cahoots with the ugly man, and she has somehow tied the father to a chair in the sand and is in the process of pouring petrol all over him. The ugly girl pulls out a box of matches, and they all pause to sing a song. Just then, fifty blokes in black jump out from behind a bush that wasn’t there until they jumped out from behind it and start shooting at the hero, who hides behind a small wooden box. Eventually, he comes out, holding a white handkerchief, but when the ugly man in black comes to gloat (which he does in song) the hero trips him up, steals his gun, and shoots all the fifty men in black who jumped out from behind the magically appearing bush.
The father, whose petrol seems to have dried off, frees himself from the chair and has a comedy fight with a fat man who appears to serve no purpose. The sexy girl points out to the hero that the ugly girl is escaping through the desert just as the father defeats the fat man by putting a bucket on his head. The hero, the father and the sexy girl then all sing a song in which the father seems to give his blessing to their marriage. Meanwhile, the ugly girl on the horizon shakes her fist, and says something which can only be a vow of revenge. A few seconds later, just as she is on the point of dying of thirst, she comes across a lonely hut on top of a sand-dune. She knocks on the door and is welcomed by a man who tries to seduce her (in song). She is unimpressed by his advances until she notices that in the corner of the room is a mini-laboratory, containing what appears to be a half-finished nuclear bomb. Together they hatch a plan.
After that, the plot became a bit too difficult to follow. As far as I could tell, in the end the sexy people married each other, the ugly people got blown up, and the fat people ended up with buckets on their head.
Now that’s what I call quality entertainment.
The journey included plenty of stops where everyone got out and drank glasses of tea which was sweeter than Coke, and only marginally less milky than milk. At first it made me gag, but as the trip progressed I gradually got into it as a drink. The secret was to avoid thinking of it as tea. As long as you persuaded yourself that it was a warmed-up soft drink, the taste was O K. And it gave you enough of a sugar rush to restore your will to live after several hours of arse-spanking.
There was only one other Westerner on the bus, and despite the fact that he had the best seat, right at the front, he seemed distinctly miserable. Every time we stopped, he was the first one out of the bus, hitting the ground at a sprint, and dashing off, clutching a loo roll.
Liz struck up a conversation with him at one of the stops, but when I noticed that his shirt was flecked with vomit I decided to steer clear. It turned out that he was Belgian and had blood in his stool, so we both avoided him after that.
We discovered that lunch was included in the price of the ticket when someone plonked a cardboard tray filled with unidentifiable blobs of curry on our laps. I waited for Liz to try each blob before I had a go, but I only really trusted the yellow blob, which I could tell was made of lentils. In one corner was a tub of unidentifiable white stuff which had set into a firmish lump with a smooth surface. The guy on my left saw me poke at it and said, ‘Crrd’.
‘What?’
‘Crrd.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Crrd.’ He took a spoonful. ‘Very good.’
‘Liz, what’s crrd?’
‘It’s that white stuff.’
‘I know, but what is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you going to try it?’
‘Don’t see why not.’
She tasted a large floppy lump.
‘It’s nice. Kind of like yoghurt.’
‘Bloody hell – I’m not touching that.’
‘Please yourself.’
She ate the whole of hers, swearing that it was delicious, but I thought she was mad. After all, yoghurt’s basically off milk, isn’t it? It’s insane to put all that effort into an against-the-odds struggle to avoid eating disease-infested food, and then deliberately shovel rancid dairy products into your mouth. No way.
The rest of the journey took twice as long as I had expected, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that random people kept on appearing out of nowhere and selling bananas and nuts through the window, I would have starved.
By the time we got to Simla, I’d eaten so many bananas that I already had the shits, despite the fact that I’d only eaten two curries so far on the entire trip.
Liz found it hilarious that I’d given myself a bad tummy by avoiding curry, which I took as a symptom of the worsening vibe that seemed to be developing between us. Once, on the bus, I tried to clear the air by venting my anger over the fact that she had invited Jeremy to come with us, but it didn’t really work. She just got all het up, and ranted on about how we didn’t own the bus, and we didn’t own Simla, and it was always nice to travel with a bit of company. I couldn’t help feeling as if this meant that I didn’t count as company any more, which also seemed like a bad sign.