‘So,’ I asked, not a little incurious, ‘have I got a nickname?’
‘Of course!’ She gestured at the prominent swastika on the cover of my Shirer. ‘We call you Hitler.’
A Handful of Carbohydrate
Two decades ago I spent three months in India. My companion was Turnbull St Asser, the last scion of a North Country dynasty of enormous antiquity (they came over with the Cro-Magnons), who had dedicated thirty generations to dissipation and dilettantism. Turnbull and I had been at the varsity together and we shared a taste for the finer — and fouler — things in life, although coming from East Finchley my dandyism had a curiously neo-Marxist tinge. Inevitably we quarrelled in Kathmandu, after I threw some coloured water on his Shantung silk suit during the festival of Holi. Turnbull departed to stay with some maharaja or another to whom he had a letter of introduction, while I headed by minibus for Varanasi (see ‘The Holy City’, page 83).
Strange though it may seem now, we arranged to rendezvous a month later at Srinagar, in Kashmir, to see if we could resolve our differences; ah, such is the folly of youth! After an unscheduled extra week on the banks of the sacred Ganga, I entrained and took the thundering Himigiri — Howrah Express across the north of the subcontinent to Chandigarh. On the train, slotted into a third-class couchette like a beige filing cabinet drawer, I met a young couple from Maidstone. We discussed life, love, politics, religion and the future of mankind. I wrote some jejune verses in the girl’s commonplace book. When we parted I breathed a sigh of relief.
Fifteen years later she pitched up again while I was signing books at Hatchards in Piccadilly, and, yes, she had the jejune verses. Truly, notoriety is a depth charge to your acquaintance, throwing up all sorts of dead fish, and for that reason alone it is to be avoided.
There was no avoiding Turnbull either. At the appointed hour I arrived at the Tourist Office and sat huddled on a stone bench. It was cold in Kashmir, especially so after the heat of the plains. The locals went around with portable charcoal stoves, which they sat with underneath their djellabas. It looked right toasty to me, who was clad in regulation travellers’ denims, set off with bits of embroidered cotton wrapped around my extremities. ‘My God!’ expostulated Turnbull, striding towards me, his tweeds whispering affluently, ‘you’ve gone bloody native!’
Turnbull, however, had already paid for his cultural arrogance. With his flame of hair and flashing monocle, the impoverished houseboat proprietors had seen him coming rather better than he was able to descry them. In 1984 Kashmir was yet to descend into the war of insurgency that has since devastated the region, but the Indian army was there in strength, and the tension was driving away the tourists. Out on Dal Lake the flotillas of houseboats, with their ornate, fretworked superstructures, were mostly empty. There was hardly anyone about to be taken to the famous floating gardens. Knockdown deals were the order of the day: for $2 a day I was staying on the Houseboat Ceylon, with full board, laundry services and excursion transport thrown in, courtesy of its efficient proprietor, Rashid.
Turnbull, on the other hand, was paying twenty bucks a night for a stinky berth on a muddy barge moored in a sewer running off the Jhelum River. No food, no transport, and certainly no dry-cleaning for his suits. I laughed long and loud when I saw his quarters: ‘Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho!’ I went, hoping to pay back in some small measure the centuries of Schadenfreude the St Assers had exacted from their tenants, ‘You’ve been rooked!’
An hour later Turnbull was ensconced with me on the HB Ceylon and we had begun to bicker all over again. Rashid, hating dissension of any kind, suggested we take a trip into the Himalaya; he would organise everything. He was as good as his word, and two days later we were clopping up into the terrifying Pir Panjal Range, Turnbull and I mounted on laden donkeys, while Rashid took the lead on foot. Turnbull looked ridiculous in a blanket he contrived to wear like a Mexican poncho, and a pearl-grey fedora. I was still cold.
When we reached our destination, a mountain hut at 15,000 feet that looked like a cricket pavilion, I was a hell of a lot colder. We were there for two days but it felt like two weeks. Rashid fed us indigestible meals of bread, rice and potatoes. ‘Carbohydrate, carbohydrate, carbohydrate!’ Turnbull admonished him, ‘that’s three kinds of carbohydrate!’ We took to our sleeping bags, and Turnbull then tormented me by reading aloud lengthy descriptions of princely feasting in a book he’d borrowed from his maharaja: ‘Twenty-eight capons stuffed with sweet almonds, a pie of larks’ tongues and live song birds, jellied crocodile kidneys. .’ — on and on he brayed. In many ways I feel I’ve never left that hideous place, and that my whole life has been spent in a high-altitude cricket pavilion being persecuted by an English aristo. But at least I know I’m not alone.
Thai Strip
In Thailand the sybaritic life on a farang-only island off Phuket was about as appealing to me as a shit-smelling durian. The pink Western porkers were massaged by little brown Thais and served up with that worldwide luxury hotel fare which always involves American pancakes and sculpted melons.
Bangkok felt better; a lot better. Men carried grandfather clocks through the flooded streets, streams of tuk-tuks farted out noxious fumes — two strokes and you’re out. Along every side alley were food stalls offering sizzling snacks. You could graze your way from one temple to the next giant Buddha, being alternately steeped in chilli and the polymorphous perversity of Thai religious iconography. We found a reasonable, family-run guesthouse in the outer northern suburb of Nonthaburi. There were the usual Kiwis playing Boggle, a bespectacled German living out some von Aschenbach fantasy and our landlady, Mrs Rai, who together with her family wove their lives into those of their guests. I chucked a baseball back and forth with her pubescent son, and checked English homework with her daughter.
The garden of the house ran nearly down to the river, and a few minutes’ walk away was a khlong where we could catch the longtail boats into the city centre. The longtails were really the best thing about the city for the visitor — high-prowed vessels powered by enormous outboard engines that sent up great frothy washes as they parted the brown waters of the Chao Phraya at a rate of knots. To ride them, along with two score salarymen and women, was to share vicariously in the frenetic pulse of the working city. Still, no matter how we strived, the sheer scale and hubbub of Bangkok was exhausting, and the afternoon heat usually saw us poleaxed in our room, under the fan, blearying at the curious spectacle of an entire wall given over to a giant poster of the Manhattan skyline at night.
Manhattan is the most iconic of cities, true, but, still, I’d rather have had a wall-sized poster of the skyline of Bangkok; that at least would’ve made me feel I’d arrived. But it wasn’t the most obtrusive Manhattan skyline I’ve ever shared a transient’s room with. That dubious distinction belongs to the Hotel Britannia in Manchester. Here, in the very humming core of the four-square building, with its cavernous bars full of superannuated soap actors, and its hypogean discotheque (called something like Hades or the Ninth Circle), I found myself tenanting a room without windows.