‘And I’m not just going to hang around waiting for you. We’ve got an itinerary to keep up with. There’s a whole country out there that I came here to see. I can’t just waste all my time here, can I? I’d go mad. There’s no point in coming to India and not seeing anything. I’ve got to get moving. I have to get to Goa.’
‘Impatience is a typically Western state of mind. You don’t realize it, but you’ve become a self-parody.’
become a self-parody? That’s hilarious!’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘You… you… you’ve just become an arsehole. That’s the only way of putting it. And you haven’t even got enough personality to become a self-parody. You’ve become a parody of someone else. Despite the fact that Fiona is one of the biggest bullshitters ever to walk this earth, you have decided to try and turn yourself into her! It’s pathetic’
‘If you had said that to me a week ago, I would have got angry. Fortunately for you, in the last few days I have made significant progress, and have come to know myself well enough for a pathetic little shit like you to be unable to get to me. My real self is simply impervious to the likes of you. Whatever you say, you simply can’t offend me, you… you slimy little PIECE OF SHIT! YOU TURD! YOU FEEBLE MOANING CYNICAL PATHETIC PSEUDO-LAD PISS-HOLE FAKE! I HATE YOU AND I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE! YOU MAKE ME SICK!’
And so it was that I ended up on my own. Ranj had been kidnapped by his family, Liz had become a Hare Krishna, and Jeremy was just a lost cause as a human being. Other than them, there was no one I knew in the entire country.
By this stage I was bored of Pushkar. After the argument with Liz I felt that I ought to get moving in order to give the impression that I wasn’t frightened of being alone, but the fact was, even the of travelling on my own made my already loose bowels take on the character of a deflating balloon.
I did not want to be on my own. I just didn’t. There was only one thing in the world that would have been worse than being alone, and that was being with Jeremy.
Pushkar was such a small place that it didn’t even have a railway station. The nearest one was a few hours away by bus, in Ajmer. As I walked alone to the Pushkar bus station to buy myself a ticket to Ajmer, I felt like one of those old men who amble around in parks feeding ducks, eating sandwiches out of a paper bag and trying to talk to strangers. This was bleak. Nineteen years old, and I already felt like a lonely pensioner.
I couldn’t recall ever having felt lonely before. It was a weird sensation – for the moment a bit exciting, but I could tell that once I got used to it, it would be awful.
Our plan had been to stop in Udaipur, Ahmedabad and Bombay before we got to Goa, but I decided to ditch the original itinerary and head straight there. This meant that I would be going half-way down the entire country in one go, but I couldn’t face stopping in places where I might end up in some hotel on my own, without any other travellers. I mean, there’d be people in each of those places, but I’d already learned that in big towns, travellers weren’t very friendly. And I didn’t even really want to see Udaipur, Ahmedabad and Bombay, anyway. I mean, a city’s a city.
If I could just grit my teeth and make it on my own to Goa, I’d be able to hang out there and meet some new people. I was bound to find someone who’d travel with me. Maybe even a female. A lot of that kind of thing went on in Goa, apparently.
I turned to the map of India at the front of The Book and worked out from the scale that the width of my little finger corresponded to roughly two hundred miles. I then measured Pushkar to Goa, and it came out at six little-finger-widths. That couldn’t be right. One thousand two hundred miles? I didn’t even know the whole country was that length.
Whatever. I closed the book. This was clearly a long journey. But it would be worth it in the end. After all, I still had precisely two hundred condoms left. (Fortunately, the condoms were in my rucksack, and whatever happened when we finally separated, I was going to make damn sure that I took of them with me.)
With a ticket to Ajmer in my money belt, I spent the rest of the day phrasing my farewell speech to Liz, and finally settled on:
‘I realize that things have been difficult, and that whatever happens we’ll never be able to say that we parted on the friendliest of terms – but I just want you to know that I forgive you for what you’ve done to me, and I won’t hold it against you that you abandoned me. I wish you all the best on your spiritual journey, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity to travel alone in Asia.’
Unfortunately, when I woke up the following morning, she had already left. I found a note on the floor of the room which said,
D,Bye.Peace,L
I crumpled up the note angrily, then decided that I wanted to keep it and flattened it out on the floor, folded it up and slipped it into The Book.
With a start, I realized that I had overslept and was late for my bus. Liz had normally taken charge of the getting-up-in-time-to-catch-buses side of things. Shit. In fact, she had taken charge of everything.
I got dressed, threw the stray piles of scattered clothes into my pack, put my shoes on, checked under the bed, then paused for a second, threw my stuff out on to the bed and counted the condom boxes. Yup. Thought so. There were two missing.
Some fucking ashram was visiting. Typical. So that’s what she meant by spiritual furtherance. Absolutely typical.
I contemplated the pile of condom boxes on the bed, all of them with the Cellophane still intact, and felt briefly paralysed. I was a failure. My life was a mess. I belonged in a monastery.
However miserable I felt, it dawned on me that missing my bus wasn’t going to improve the situation, so I forced myself to repack my bag and head for the bus station. I arrived almost a quarter of an hour late, but fortunately the bus was still there. To my horror, though, I saw that the front three seats of the bus were already occupied by Liz, Fee and Caz.
My seat was in the row directly behind them, and as I got on, Fee and Caz smiled at me in the way you’d smile at a naughty leper. Liz looked the other way.
Despite the fact that it was only a short journey, Caz managed to puke out of the window twice. Due to the speed of the bus, a significant portion of vomit flew out of her window and back in through mine, splattering me in the face.
How apt, I thought, as I wiped half-digested flakes of lentil from my face. First you steal my travelling partner, then you puke in my face. Do you have any other desires? Would you like to crap in my bed?
Ajmer isn’t the kind of place where you’d actually want to stay, and given that Fee, Liz and Caz were on the same bus as me to Ajmer, it seemed a fair bet they’d be heading on somewhere else by train. We didn’t speak on the bus, not even, for example, to apologize for vomit shrapnel, so the details of their onward journey remained a mystery.
The bus stand in Ajmer turned out to be small and almost empty of buses. This made it pretty clear that they were going to be continuing their journey by rail. The bus station was on the opposite side of town to the railway station, and having seen the three of them squeeze into a rickshaw with their rucksacks, I got a separate rickshaw on my own and followed them across town.
I lost sight of them during the journey, only to find them again at the railway station, right in front of me in the queue for trains heading south to Udaipur. None of them turned round to look at me, but I could tell that my presence had been registered by the way they all stiffened up and started exchanging fevered whispers.