Part 13. Delhi to Bombay

 The Delhi hotel was a haven of peace by comparison to the chaotic market below. The cheapest option was to sleep in the open on the roof, then there were the rooms, very basic with an eastern ’hole in the floor’ toilet at each end of the balcony. Cleaning your bottom with your hand and water from an old tin can was a skill to be learned and these places often showed evidence of westerners coming to terms with an Indian diet.

There were a variety of different types of traveller in these hostels. Some like myself on a kind of pilgrimage to eastern philosophy and religion, dreamers, escapees with nothing much to go home for, some backpackers on a round the world gap year journey, some that we called “bread heads” who travelled out to buy clothes, jewellery, antiques and religious artefacts to ship back to their home country to satisfy the demand for the exotic by those who wouldn’t or couldn’t travel, simple low budget tourists and then the ‘narco tourists’. While probably we all had a bit of all the above in us, the latter group were, for me, the most problematic.
The easy availability of cheap class A drugs meant that at most places where travellers gathered there were a few Junkies. These few would steal the shirt off your back or sell their children at the drop of a hat. Occasionally you’d find a group outside a railway station, begging (purportedly for their train fare but really just for another fix) alongside Indian kids with no legs, elderly blind ladies and holy men. I could always indulge almost all the diversity of people I met on the road apart from this group (predominantly French, I have to add, as they had no repatriation rights, like many other countries).Having twice almost lost my money and passport to one, I learnt to avoid them.
The whole begging scene in the city was beyond comprehension. There were organised groups of beggars run by gang bosses, seen distributing their beggars at key locations at daybreak and collecting them with their takings at night, there were Indians with some savvy who dressed as Sadhu ( holy men) but were simply con artists, muttering holy platitudes to gullible Europeans and every time you turned a new corner a new group of either adults or filthy cow-eyed street children would ask you for money. A lot were simply destitute people drawn to the city by the promise of a better chance. There was plenty of genuine hardship and extreme poverty blended into the mix of organised professional begging.
My taxi driver took me to get a photo done and on to the back street printer who produced me a perfect student card. Hillary arrived and we spent a couple days in the hotel, with me going out and getting the food and stores until she was better adjusted to this new intense environment. The best of the travellers we met were travelling back from Goa, calm and tanned, with tales of deserted beaches and idyllic alternative lifestyles. It was coming up for my 23rd birthday and we decided to head down to Mumbai (then Bombay) to see if we could pick up some paid work as extras in the fast growing film industry ( we were told it was easy), before getting the ferry down to Goa .
It took some getting used to, travelling as a couple, fighting for the space on trains for 2 people and there was much more unwanted attention from young Indian boys now that Hillary was with me too. Some of the problems were generated by the Bollywood film industry, based in Bombay . Hippies had been simply portrayed as villains, immoral gangs, stealing the virtue of clean living Indian girls while getting them to become degenerate slaves to their international drug deals. The hippie girls depicted as corrupting all the eligible boys with their loose morals and seductive clothing. Occasionally groups of youngsters would burst into song as we passed “Dum ara Dum, Meta jai Gum” songs sung by handsome Indian film stars as they rescued their womenfolk from the evil freaks. Occasionally in quiet suburbs small children would throw stones at us, imagining us to be the villains from their favourite movies. On the upside, they had just released a blockbuster entitled ‘BOBBY’ and whenever I told and Indian girl or woman that my name was Bob they would make swoony eyes and call me Bobby.
When we got to Bombay we abandoned the idea of trying to work as extras, far too many of the narco tourists were trying to earn money to support their habits, cheap hotels with blood splatter on the toilet walls. We booked tickets for the ferry down to Goa.






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