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Monthly Archives: May 2015

#45: Putting the para in paradise. The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. The bimonthly travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune

30 Saturday May 2015

Posted by thewritingimp in humour, travel

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huts Goa We arrive in Goa just after the rainy season has passed. The raffia/bamboo shacks are starting to spring to life and a few metres down the beach from us two couples of Nepalese are setting up shop – a café and a massage parlour. One of the men bounds across the sand to greet me, and quite miraculously we have met before in the hot-spring village, Vashisht, in the kneehills of the Himalayas, a village a short walk from Manali. Where they had a store selling Nepalese crafts and trinkets, we chatted for quite a while and exchanged life-stories. The men separated from their wives and young children, eventually to meet up with them in Goa; they would have been apart for five months by this time. I was intrigued to know how the operation would work on the beach, and now I could see it, quite literally. It was one of those life-affirming moments, it reminded me of that Maya Angelou quote: ‘Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.’

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I remember thinking up in the Himalayas what a hard relentless existence they had, just to make for a better life for themselves – many destinations, but only one home. But the day we met them on the beach I ‘d had a full English, and the rest of the family had consumed the beloved Heinz beans on toast for breakfast; like the privileged travellers we were, as if on a package holiday to the Med; deluding ourselves that we had earned it, a homely change, after weeks of just Indian food. The day I chatted to the Nepalese men, Yash and his best friend, up in the Himalayas, was the day after the first snow of winter, Yash turned to me and said: ‘First snow, time to move south soon. We may meet in Goa.’Like a line from a movie: No chance, I thought, ships that pass in the sea of humanity; two faces, I think it was this tentative bond of words that made the meet so ‘miraculous’.

The Boy had bought two magic tricks in Panaji (Panjim) and spent a long time in their room perfecting the craft to bedazzle us. But the girl told us how the harder one is performed. He demanded she owed him a thousand Rupees; that he had paid for them, now the magic was ruined. Add to this, tumultuous hormones, those little Gremlins on crack. Plus the fact he is hobbling due to running into a tent peg from one of the shacks on the beach; which he has appeared to run into in some bizarre show of homing pigeon display topography, to prove he knows the way back down the beach. Which is not really that impressive – you can either walk back to our accommodation, or away from it. Then add in his desire to purchase a black ‘Hell’s Angels’ skull and crossbones T-shirt with the slogan: ‘Live fast, die young.’

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Which I’m in two minds about, but his mother is in one only, a definite ‘no.’ Then the rejoinder from a hormonal teenager, ‘You prostitute!’ aimed directly at his mother. If not for the intervention of a husband and a father on the main drag in Calangute, the British Consulate would have been involved in a fifteen minutes of unwanted fame scenario. Normally when you have a hormonal adolescent and they are being ‘I-hate-you-teenagerish’, you can reprimand them and send them to their room. This is not so simple when there is nowhere to hide. The upshot was the boy slept on his own, and our daughter bunked in with us, mainly for her own safety. I’m not sure having your own room is a punishment, but this comment would be best slept on. The next morning there was only one teenager slightly seething! I highlight this warts and all anecdote, as it certainly needs some severe consideration if you are going to take a biologically metamorphosing primate away with you, which is difficult to disown. One massive positive is that strong bonds are formed during the ‘big change’, and when your immediate genetic relatives are your only port of call, even if one maybe masquerading as a, ‘lady of the night’ you become a much closer family unit. On the whole you would have to say in our fast-pasted-materialistic lives’, this is the glue that holds us together. You may also want to think carefully if they might never want to leave the comfort of the nest once you return? It can be a bit like watching a teenage version of the ‘The Fly’ but with more laughs, unKafkaesque, except one of the family is not laughing as much as the rest.

We discovered that all the young happen’n cats are in south Goa, Palolem. Bamboo huts off the beach and hammocking abounding. It is where we would have been if we were young, on a tight budget, childless and wanted to get pissed and have sex with intentional strangers–best single for the last one. The kids said it was boring as there were no waves in the sheltered bay. Our beach and many of the beaches all down the east coast of Indian are a death trap of criss-crossing rip rides. We had been told horror stories about the death toll, especially when the interior ‘weak or non-swimming’Indians arrived to escape the heat of the cities, to be quite literally and physically swept away. One afternoon when we were having lunch overlooking a small treacherous bay in Baga, we saw the same Indian guy rescued by a small outboard-motored boat, twice! Maybe he was determinably trying top himself? The guy picking him up said, “Listen you fucking idiot, once more and you’re on your own,” I suspect! It was like a show of idiocy put on to entertain us while we masticated.

Palom

The kids were not allowed to go past chest height, and told to avoid any Sirens calling from offshore on our beach, and not to go in the water without one of us there. Which meant me; a mere moderate swimmer. I’d be like the owner going in to save the pet dog in the iced lake, as I slipped below and the canine survived. (This is an easy way to test if someone is an animal lover, a ‘Blade Runner’ replicant type test, if at the end they say, ‘At least the dog survived,’ that’s a pet lover.) I had instructed them on rip-tide survival and an absence of RNLI, rather than scaring them it made them more brazen to get involved in a survival situation. By the end of the day with the freedom of being allowed to swim without height restrictions and feet separated from the sandy bottom, they did not want to leave. The Girl has no fear; she’ll end up being a rock climber without the restrictions of ropes. Her choice of activity was paragliding, not because she wanted to do it the most, because she thought it was the most dangerous. I went up with the boy so he would feel safer, and she went up with her mother, as she knew her screaming would amuse her! To soar 120 feet into the air, with only the most basic and casual of instructions: Keep your arms in, (there was no ‘in!’), pull both cords when you land on the small strip of beach, trying to avoid breaking any tourists necks, and the thorny bushes, and don’t dislocate your shoulders. This would require a weekends training course in Britain, but not on a holidaymakers’ beach in India with an eight year old girl and a frightened mother! (You could hear the Madonna wailing from the shore, but not the laughter of the child.)

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Everything is relative, Eddie the travel agent due to his ‘pre-retirement’ life in shipping, has been everywhere, except Antarctica, which is only a very slight exaggeration. It is great to have a font of knowledge to tap into for onward travels, saves a lot of research.

One outing I did love was a visit to a spice farm. We observed all the herbs and spices we use in Indian cooking growing. There is something enthralling to see the root crop turmeric pulled from the ground like hidden treasure. I always do the same with the neighbours’ kids in the autumn as we discover subterranean potatoes, and tell them it is hidden treasure. Pepper was another favourite, it’s a creeper. Twining and meandering up large trees. Pretend your body is a fire, raise your interweaving flaming hands between each other until they will extend no more, and that’s pepper, sort of. I liked it a lot. The kids liked the old bones of St Xavier and an elephant drinking water from a hose-pipe more.

We were heading south, eventually to the point of India. Something to be mindful of, are train ticket prices. We had to pay well over the odds as ticket touts buy them up on popular routes to make a quick buck, which they did through us. Go direct to the train station if you can, but even then if you don’t book popular routes well in advance, you will have to pay a tout, or a tout via a travel agent. With this in mind we booked our train back to Mumbai before we even started heading south. Trains anywhere in the word are marvellous, but trains in India are bloody marvellous, wot, wot.

We went and said ‘goodbyes’ to Yash et al the night before we left. These are the people your thoughts turn to years later when earthquakes rip through an already poor inaccessible beautiful country, and you don’t just hope they have made a better life for themselves, but they still have it to make.

Next time: I saw, Mysore.

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@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

I write books. You can buy any of them at very reasonable prices here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ian+m+pindar

#44: Goa: and exhale. The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. The bimonthly travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

15 Friday May 2015

Posted by thewritingimp in food, religion

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We have set off from Agra en route to catch a plane to Goa, via Delhi. We have a driver and arrive just after midnight at large chain hotel right next to the airport; only seven hours before we have to get up to catch our flight. I go in with the boy and enquire about a room for all four of us for just the few hours. The female receptionist suggests the equivalent of about £50. I tell her we are not paying that for a room where we will only sleep for a few hours, seconded by the boy. She reiterates the price is not negotiable and her look seems to suggest we are not haggling in flea market, and she has a very important role within the top-end hoteling company. I tell her thanks, but no thanks, we have a driver and we will find somewhere cheaper. We are about to get in the taxi, having explained the situation to the others when the receptionist runs out flustered and says, ‘Ok, you can have it for £22.’ We decline, as the driver knows somewhere decent for half the final offer.

We are embracing the culture, we are not all ‘family-toileting’ in a field together yet, and my aphorism of, ‘We have nothing to do, and all day to do it’ is a massive factor, and in this particular instance, having the luxury of a driver also helps. I had an enquiry last week to ask where we got the money from for this year off. We had a house in the Shadow of the Kippax, (Man City’s old ground) that we lived in–the girl was born in the same house, we rented it out when we moved. It became a lot of hassle renting to cash-strapped students and we sold it. With the proceedings, (£40,000), we should have maybe done something sensible and paid off a chunk of our mortgage, but instead we blew it all on investing in memories that will keep us warm when our knees and bladders have given up. The sub-text of the email was, ‘are you stinky rich, so you could give your jobs for a year?’ The answer is quite simply: ‘no’, but even coming from working class backgrounds, the wife’s was much further down the socio-economic rung to mine, education was, and still is for nearly all of us, except the minute, minute, lucky few, the key.

The boy learns that something is only worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it, but that price should not leave one/or either party unable to survive. Like his mother always says, ‘I’d rather pay more and know people are not being ripped off’, but that’s a luxury only available to some, and even those it is available to, greed can often cloud the vision through their moral googles. What might look like ‘healthy capitalism’ on the horizon; is in fact voracious gluttony come what Fannie Mae, at any cost.

At breakfast in the hotel there are Buddhist monks eating meat. We are all shocked, and it ignites a discussion we all thought we knew the answer to. It appears with further research the Dalai Lama is to blame–only a vegetarian every other day when he is outside Dharamsala. The monks are playing their ‘get out veggieism card.’I could be a vegetarian if it involved a bacon butty every other day. Apparently, we all are not to be judge by one action, Hitler was a vegetarian, and he was downright rotten scoundrel. So were Ghengis Khan, Charles Manson and Pol Pot, does beg the question: What the hell were they actually eating? If you leave out Manson, the others are responsible for nearly 50 million deaths either directly or indirectly. Can anyone else see a link between not eating meat and mass genocide? Now I can see why the Big L has a break every other day. Maybe eating meat is cathartic? (Not for the animals obviously – I have digressed somewhat!)

I’m going to tell you an anecdote that is a little dull, I know it’s dull because I’ve told other people, and they look at me like they are trying to work out string theory in a foreign language, whilst holding their breath. We are going through security at Delhi airport and I have forgotten to put my Swiss Army knife in the hold-luggage, it’s a schoolboy post 9-11 error. The security man can see I’m genuinely disturbed to be having it taken off me. “I’ve had it for over twenty years; it’s like a son to me.” The last bit is only a slight exaggeration. He tells me he will give it to one of the cabin staff; but I know, even if I search for it for the next few decades, there will be no Hollywood reunion. It feels like a scene from Sophie’s Choice, except I only have one child and that one is being taken from me, ok, I’m exaggerating again, but I know it’s gone. Getting off the plane in Goa I ask a member of the cabin crew about the whereabouts of my beloved knife, she has no idea what I’m talking about and fobs me off with, ‘It may be at some desk or other.’

images (15) We are waiting at the luggage carousel, the airport is heaving, and there are several officials standing around in pairs or individually. I decide to ask a lone individual where I might possibly get my knife back. He looks belligerent and uninterested in the world in general, propping a wall up and waiting for his pension. I walk over to him and he eyes me up and down as I walk over, as if I’m a subordinate monkey come to take on a much bigger and strong alpha male or cuckold one of his harem. I start to explain assuming he can speak English: “I handed a knife in in Delhi, do you know where I might get it back from?”He adds withering to his belligerence and without taking his eyes from mine he places his left hand in his pocket and pulls out my shiny red multi-gadget with embossed white cross. My eyes light up, this is the best magic trick I have ever seen, this makes all those street magicians look like an eight year old that has just be given a magic set for Christmas. I literally cannot believe my eyes, he passes it to me without a word, and I go off to tell the wife about this miraculous event as she is still waiting for our worldly possessions that now compactly fit into four travel cases. She is the first to be unimpressed with my regaling of the story as she is wrestling one of the kid’s cases from the carousel, but she won’t be the last. It is what religious people would call a ‘miracle’, and I have heard believers state far less spectacular occurrences as such. I call it the parable of the lost Swiss army knife. But my journal simply states: ‘I had my Swiss Army Knife confiscated, but it was given it back in Goa Airport.’ In the King Charles version after my gospel has been ‘lost’and reinterpreted it will be a much more impressive parable with a very powerful moral ending, and involve killing, forgiveness and redemption. I still have the beloved knife and it lives in my wash bag. Its sole function appears to be cutting the tags off new clothes! As the Lama might say after good chicken curry: ‘stuffs just stuff, it won’t make you any happier, just take up more space in your life, i.e. your wash bag.’ Then after greater thought following a particularly juicy lamb chop: ‘Have you thought about those tiny travel scissors you can ‘borrow’ from hotels?’ This is why he is so learned.

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We were heading to Goa to stay with an English travel agent, Eddie and his wife, whom we had befriended in on safari in Ramthambore. He rented a large Indian house, along with a Goan family, set back from the beach. Once he told us there were two separate rooms, we were sold. Having at least one of the children in the room with us, especially sometimes when the girl slept in the same bed as us, is a pretty effective contraceptive. This is one drawback having your children with you on your travails. There are moments when the sun is bouncing off your pineal gland and you are reduced to discrete body language towards the one you love/desire; that is not dissimilar to a gay-sauna liaison. This usually happened when the kids were happily playing in a pool, how apt.

The kids were a little disappointed that the house did not run directly onto the beach, but it was a proper south Indian house; large swaying coconut trees, sandy open back courtyard, in which they burnt coconut husks at dusk to keep the mosquitos away.

When people say that you cannot consider India as one country, just a collection of smaller ones; walking down the thick sandy beach towards Calangute, it is a long, long way from the much of the bustle we encountered in the north. From that first night in Delhi when our daughter was freaking out as we were greeted by rabid dogs outside the airport, children begging in the street and lizards climbing the guesthouse wall. This was the first time it felt like a holiday within a holiday, the reward for ‘The North.’ Like I have said before, if you are intending to travel a large portion India start in the north and finish in the south. It is much easier coming from the ‘stress’ of our everyday lives’ to end the holiday on a beach. I imagine that even in the few years since we were there, mass-tourism has mutated in Calangute and the surrounding coastal villages, now the back-packers with residual hippy tendencies will have moved elsewhere.

It felt as though we had all exhaled together. We would spend at least ten days there. Happiness and utopia are different places for different people. The nearby restaurant served Indian food as well as some western, so the initial conversation with a waiter from the boy always went like this:

“Are the baked beans Heinz/Do you have Heinz baked beans?”

One this occasion the waiter replied with a friendly but casual affirmative. Neither of the children believed it, a tourist lie, but the proof of the pudding was in the eating.

Ask yourself what happiness is for you? It sounds a simple question, but it is actually quite a difficult one. One that some of us delude ourselves with, or never give it enough analysis. If you do, some of you may realise that when you look across at whom you have been competing against, you might just see your own reflection. As Baz Luhrmann once said, ‘The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.’

download (1) So with a little more than a collection of tinned haricot beans in a secret over-sugary tomato sauce, both children were ‘happy’, sometimes, it’s just the little things in life.

Next time: Putting the para in paradise.

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

I write books, some humorous, some serious, when I’m not writing blogs and getting washed about in life’s laundry. You can buy any of them at very reasonable prices here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ian+m+pindar

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#43: The Taj Mahal, Ooh, doesn’t suit you, Sir. The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. The bimonthly travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

02 Saturday May 2015

Posted by thewritingimp in family, holidays

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blue moon taj

Jaisalmer to Jodhpur: The Wife is Berating the bus drive under the Trades Descriptions Act, which does not extend to India. The bus ticket clearly states: ‘luxury tourist bus.’– The only part of the description it does fulfil is; it’s a bus. The expression on his face suggests his role is to just drive the bus, not assign semantics to either the transportation vehicles, or journeys. I try levity by suggesting, “Imagine what the ‘economy’ bus is like?’The look on her face suggests she is not imagining it. She soon calms down as we watch goats, sand, sparse scrub trees, and farming pass by. I am amazed how many tractors I spot–not just here but in most of India. I did not expect so many, they are costly items, and it’s a sure sign that even the poorest parts of India are on the rise. I have a close friend I used to teach with from the outskirts of London that went to a grammar school and a red-brick university, who came up to teach in Manchester, why?, I or he, have never worked out. On his second week in the pub, he said to me.

“Manchester’s not anything like I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Lots of flyovers with cows underneath.”

For those outside the UK, Manchester is the capitol city of the north of England, and after the unrivalled capitol of the world, London, the second biggest generator of wealth in the Britain. As you can imagine I was little dumfounded and amused.

“How did you come to that conclusion?”

“It’s what I’ve seen on the tele.”

“Do you have a dedicated northern flyover/cow channel in the south of England?”

He doesn’t challenge his own skewed image, at least now he knows it to be unfounded. I’m still perplexed. “How many elevated roads did you expect to find in the grim north?”

“A lot more,” he says with complete honesty, whilst laughing. Simon (real name) is a self-effacing beautiful human-being that lets light into people’s lives, and is a constant source of joy. Even now I can think of a dozen anecdotes about him that make me smile, he is not the sort of person you forget, for all the right reasons. My view of Indian tractors is not quite in the same league as his. When I explain my tractor epiphany to the wife, she looks at me and laughs. “And you’re an intelligent person.””But I’m a little surprised by the abundance of advanced agricultural vehicles.” ”You’re also a loon.”

Night bus to Udaipur: Cramped, the beds are supposed to accommodate two people, they would have to be extremely thin, emaciated, or anorexic to enjoy a ‘shared’ night’s sleep in one of these ‘double-bunks’, this not the mode of transport for the obese, or chubby even. It soon turns from scorching to cold heading through the desert. I’m sharing with the boy. We stop in the middle of the night at what looks to be a bank-holiday in a refugee camp. The boy has been moaning about needing the toilet, and after asking the driver, this is probably the reason for the unscheduled stop. He is very reluctant even in his desperate ‘bladder hostility’ state to use the only free toilet at the back of a bustling restaurant we are now parked outside. The restaurant looks that the hygiene inspectors do not even know it exists, no such luck for the flies. He is so desperate he grabs a box of matches and shoots off. His toilet rating system never sleeps, so I’m intrigued to know where this will figure on the 10-point scale.

“How was it then?”

“I never want to think about it ever again in my life-time.” – He is not joking. So obviously I’m intrigued and start asking questions. It is a hole in the ground–holes in the ground, even in France lose the proprietors a lot of points, I cannot tell you exactly, as the criteria is very complicated, both to explain, and not lose concentration as it is being extolled. There is no light, or electricity. He has had to strike matches while taking what has now turned into his constitutional. “Toilet paper?”A tap and a bucket, some parts of others’ cultures, some people can never truly embrace! There is a tap–bonus! So later, more relaxed.

“What grade are you giving it, then?”

“It does not reach the scale, it is off the scale, in a way I never want to think about.”He contemplates negative numbers for his already complicated system, but decides against it. A zero pretty much says it all.

I hold the torch up and enquire why he did not take that with him. As relaxed as he is pretending to be, the look suggests parricide.

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We arrive in Udaipur, now in our seventh week of travel, completely blasé about finding accommodation. We settled on a heritage guesthouse on the edge of the lake with a lovely garden, pool and a tortoise that my daughter is besotted by. Even now due to this liaison, she occasionally asks for one. Even when I point out what happens to it when she goes off to Uni, and I’m left preying that it’s not escaped all summer, not been sent in a box to the charity shop, and if not, then the hope it has survived the ridiculous amount of time it ‘sleeps’ in the winter–no thank you. I’ve seen enough Blue Peter as a child to know a tortoise is a shit pet. I compromised and bought her a very realistic stone one. I hide it in the garden and she has to find it, except now she has grown bored of that game, like she would have with the slightly more mobile one.

Udaipur is a beautiful but polluted city, and it is worth the visit just to see the white palace in the middle of Lake Pichola, it is where part of Octopussy was filmed, and at least one of the hotels shows the film every single night! There is the magnificent City Palace and opulent havelis. The next day we all wake up ill, I’m adamant I have a viral infection, the rest have the symptoms of hay fever; it is in fact: pollution-fever, the pollution lays heavy in the air like a medieval stalking miasmas and appears to have nowhere to escape to. The second chemist we try says exactly the same as the first pharmacist, ‘pollution.’I have double whammy: pollution plus Rajasthani man-flu. The one thing my daughter wants to do in the family-democracy-picker, is ride through the streets of the city centre on an elephant. So I’m dispatched with her to do this, you can’t get more conspicuously tourist than a white man and his daughter atop of an adorned pachyderm holding up the traffic in a busy city. I don’t mind spreading disease in my wake. Elephants do not hold the same fascination to your average Indian as they do to the tourist. I remember being in a shoe-shop in Paghwara when one passed outside along the pedestrian pavement, the assistant didn’t even look to see if I was lying, just nodded like she was there to dispatch my medication. Here in Udaipur the elephants are not popular with the shopkeepers as they defecate in quite large quantities and the owners don’t clear it up. The wife does not even get as excited as we all do (see as evidence of her lack of love for Asiatic elephants here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/6946206-28-a-woman-in-bloom-travails-through-life-sometimes-avoiding-the-p.)

I have some bespoke suits made on the promise they will make any up in future for €100, and post them onto England, and it is only the third fitting of these three days after the first visit that keeps us in Udaipur a day later than we would have stayed, purely due to the pollution and associated moaning. Even with the pollution I like it, some say that Udaipur is the most beautiful city in India. I suspect most of these are Udaipurians (with facemasks), or are one of the many couples that got married there. Liz Hurley got married in the White Palace on the Lake, which in the show-biz world is probably an ex-husband by now, and she will have moved on to a crazy ex-sports-star or a convicted psychopath.

 taj boat

The sleeper to Agra is supposed to be ‘super-delux,’ as we arrive peasants are loading it up with sacks of rice and enough possessions to suggest partition is about to reoccur. The wife is beyond reproach now, but remains quiet. “Imagine what the ‘delux’ bus must be like?”I suggest, the muscles in her face contort into what appears to be a smile. On these occasions I have a simple aphorism, ‘We have nothing to do, and all day to do it.’ (Night in this case.) It’s an aphorism my son appears to have turned into a personal philosophical life-style choice. The bus is three hours late. We arrived in the wee small hours of a Friday morning, and if there is one attraction you may want to visit Agra for, it is likely to be The Taj Mahal, but this opulent mausoleum is shut on Fridays! Except for Muslim prayers, which my son is keen for us to try and blag our heathen selves’ in for a gander, like a set of drunken Mancs trying to get into a Happy Mondays concert. I tell him it isn’t an Arabic brothel, whereby a Hyman decrees the married man a divorce for a few hours while they visit their ‘temporary’ wife, to then divorce them, as they go back to their more permanent wife/wives.

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If Agra didn’t have the Taj and The Fort, there would be little incentive to stop here, not when there is so much more bounteous beauty to behold in Hindustan. I get the blame for ‘forbidden Friday’; as I’m the only one in Udaipur bothered to read the guide book, but neglected to read the very small print in the Rough Guide at the very end. Someone has to have the blame, we live in a blame culture, and even with Rajasthani man-flu, I take the ‘with responsibility, comes blame’ blame . We make the best of it and hire a tut-tut driver for the day. I can’t help thinking to myself, this reproach is the exact reason why some humans shun positions of responsibility: and those that don’t probably shouldn’t be allowed any. We start early around the back of the Taj, we get a prospective most tourists never see; across from the river at the rear. We meet another Sunny, his tourist name, an eleven year old boy that can speak perfect English. He has a camel, the kids have photos taken on it,‘We don’t have to pay’for the privilege. We do the uber-tourist compulsion of pretending we are holding up the top of the Taj Mahal in our finger tips. We are in no rush, I have an aphorism for such occasions, and we get chatting to Sunny, not dissimilar to the Sunny we have met in Manali.  I can’t help thinking Sunny, both of them, are the sort of people that if given an education and the privilege of some financial backing would be billionaires, but maybe with privilege of those two factors, the urge would not be as great to push themselves? That is the paradox I suppose. Of course we give Sunny enough money so he can pay for the rent of the camel and put some in his own back pocket. We have learnt more from Sunny and the Tut-tut drive of the true India, than we would have done on a hermetically sealed tour of The Taj. I’ve read the guide book, ok, hands up–not very well, but it is better to have (insert your own aphorism here)… We go on a guided tour of the Fort, which is fascinating, if you like the drama of a son locking his father up in a room to observe the monument to his dead wife, oh, and your own mother! This is‘big-character ’pre-Shakespearean without the pox and people urinating next to you at the theatre, good job in this heat.

I tell the wife I’m building a memorial pond in the back garden when we get home, she will be buried at sea, with full humanistic military honours. I have to explain to the kids I’m being a little flippant–their mother has never been in the uniformed services. Unless you count ‘The Samaritans’, just checked, no uniform, just a big brown woolly cardigan.

We complete our world wind tour of Agra, the Tut-tut driver has given us his life story like a TV box set every time we get back on board. He wants our email and home address, and is threatening to come and visit us in England, he will never turn up. He’s affable enough for my liking, but just to be on the safe side the wife gives him a false email address, quite unlike her, but she’s travelled enough to know that we will turn up home, and he just might!

Next time: Mum-Jai Ho.

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

I write books. You can buy any of them at very reasonable prices here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ian+m+pindar

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  • #18  From Manatee to Yucatan, Every Woman, Every Man.  Swimming with Dugongs: Adventures in Central America.
  • #17 Literally swimming with Dugongs: Adventures in Central America.
  • #11  Oh look, there’s a jungle cat and its offspring: Swimming with Dugongs: Adventures in Central America.
  • #11 Celebrating the Rain. Swimming with Dugongs: Adventures in Central America.

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Recent Posts

  • #19  This is the end, my beautiful friends, the end.  Swimming with Dugongs: Adventures in Central America.
  • #18  From Manatee to Yucatan, Every Woman, Every Man.  Swimming with Dugongs: Adventures in Central America.
  • #17 Literally swimming with Dugongs: Adventures in Central America.
  • #11  Oh look, there’s a jungle cat and its offspring: Swimming with Dugongs: Adventures in Central America.
  • #11 Celebrating the Rain. Swimming with Dugongs: Adventures in Central America.

Recent Comments

20: 50 (17-15) mista… on 20: 50 (17-15) mistakes of the…
Graham Mercer on 1: So you want to be a fiction…
thewritingimp on 1: So you want to be a fiction…
Graham Mercer on 1: So you want to be a fiction…

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