Ten hours later and I find myself in another airport, shuffling in search of my connecting flight to Cochin. The plush grandeur of the new domestic departure terminal at Bombay airport is an oasis of calming marble, steel and glass, a world away from the mayhem that exists but yards from the terminal entrance. The air-conditioned serenity, the gently ordered protocol of check-in couldn’t be more blatantly anti-Indian in its sensibility. Where are the betel nut-chewing fat men, their shirts stiff with days of perspiration as they attempt to wedge themselves between you and the ticketing counter? Where is the dried daal seller, chanting the words he has chanted a thousand times a day, rendering their meaning meaningless? Where is the teeming mass of humanity, struggling to fit its own circumstances?
The tannoy announcements beckon and lull and herd us travellers into some brave, new world of becalmed tranquillity. Our queues are orderly, our voices unraised as we wait patiently in our marble edifice to undergo security checks.
Although India has had a woman Prime Minister and beloved manifestations of the female form come in many of their polytheistic deities, one soon realises the sweet quaintness of Indian pre-feminist culture as one negotiates security. Women are siphoned off into a separate queue, off to a dedicated channel where they pass through the beeping security doorway into a small curtained area where the outline of their bodies is discreetly described by the handheld detecting machine. (Quite what it detects but harmless items, Ray Bans and the foil on chewing gum packets, one can only guess …) In fact, the women aren’t even called women. They’re ladies.
While the queue-less sari-clad ladies glide through their clandestine curtain check, we men (who outnumber our gender counterparts in this terminal by at least seven to one) shamble ignominiously to our communal and very public moment with security. There are several doorway security machines; once we pass through this initial check we are confronted by a uniformed guard with the handheld – beeping – detecting machine. At this point we are offered a small raised dais in order that we may elevate ourselves for our body check. This may be to save the strained backs and injured vertebrae of the security staff. It could be, but it feels much more as though they simply want the rest of the terminal to have a good view of us, legs apart, arms outstretched, in a pre-star jump pose.
I await my star-jump moment. Ahead of me I see the drunk man. He sways upon his dais. It’s a minor victory that he managed to uplift his lanky six foot three physique up to what (for him) is a challenging height. He is further impeded by the fact that the overwhelming majority of his six foot three frame would appear to be almost exclusively legs, clad as they are in static-garnering beige-coloured slacks. (So long are his legs I wonder whether he holds some junior ministry amongst those with silly walks.) Baby giraffe-like he steadies himself, as if unused to the world. He places his feet together, arms outstretched, perhaps more in an attempt to steady himself rather than to facilitate this particular security check.
The drunk man empties his pockets, and the small change, tissues and detritus of drunkenness spill and crash into the small metal dish. Very deliberately he returns his arms to their outstretched position. The irony that he looks like a three year old pretending to be a plane is somewhat lost on him … The most cursory of checks reveals nothing remarkable. His boarding pass is stamped, in the best traditions of Indian bureaucracy, and he is invited to alight the dais, the queue behind him heaving noiselessly in anticipation.
Trying his very best to maintain all the dignity that a lunchtime drunk can muster, he tries manfully to retrieve his change, his tissues and his detritus from the small metal dish. The height of the dais further accentuates his already accentuated sway. Coin by coin, rupee by rupee, tissue by tissue he retrieves each item, steadying himself as he places each into his pocket before attempting to replace the next. This is clearly going to take some time. The duty sergeant loses his patience, although given the taciturn look he had fixed on his face, this was no great loss. The sergeant grabs the dish and empties it into the surprised hand of our drunken friend. Miraculously all but one of the coins lodge themselves in his skinny-fingered hands. All but one.
As I walk through my own security check the last thing I see is the drunk man, his face a portrait of concentration, trying to collect his single, stray coin from the floor of the dais.
Cricklewood to Cochin. Welcome to India. There’s something very satisfying about starting a journey at the very tip of a country. Kovalam is an India I would have never visited had I not undertaken this journey. It couldn’t be less like the India I know. The heat is oppressive, even in the winter. The food is utterly different and the vistas are tropical. In a few weeks time I will have zigzagged my way, east then west and finally north to the other tip of the subcontinent, Kashmir and Srinagar, some two and half thousand miles away.
But I’m not quite there yet. It was all going so smoothly. Too smoothly. From north-west London to almost the southern tip of India. It’s that ‘almost’ that is so very crucial. What any sensible traveller would have done would have been to fly directly from Bombay to Trivandrum, an hour’s flight, but where’s the fun in that? Having taken a flight to Cochin, I thought that it would be a shortish cab ride from Cochin to Trivandrum (now called Thiruvananthapuram, at least by the Indian government; it’s just far too many syllables for me).
What I had failed to check in my haphazardly ‘creative’ way was the distance from Cochin to Kovalam: 260km. I am faced with a stark choice. A charmingly helpful gentleman at the pre-paid taxi desk tells me that a cab from Cochin to Kovalam will cost me about fifty quid and take five hours. Now what you have to realise is that in the UK we have great motorways which means a 260km journey, approximately 150 miles, can be executed in two hours or so. In India however no such roads exist. If it was early morning I might consider the cab ride, given that daylight brings an enhanced degree of safety on the roads of India. The fact that it is just past three o’clock in the afternoon mitigates against a journey that would inevitably end under the canopy of a chaotic Indian evening.
Thankfully there is a flight to Kovalam – in seven hours’ time. It transpires that it will cost the princely sum of seven good British pounds. I have to wonder why the price of a fl ight is so cheap. In India, given the massive differential in exchange rates, there are two prices for everything: the Indian Price and the Tourist Price. I suspect that the small airline from which I have purchased my ticket has mistaken me for an Indian, a proper Indian rather than a British Indian interloper. And why wouldn’t they? This is the south. No one really speaks Hindi here; they speak Keralan. I have only just arrived in India and I am already being mistaken for an Indian. But I have a decision to make: fifty quid for a five-hour cab ride or a seven-hour wait for seven quid? The sevens have it.
With hours and hunger to kill, I realise I have more than enough time to travel into town, look around, eat and come back. I hail a cab for Port Cochin to a place called the Chinese Fishing Nest. Intriguing.
Once in the cab I realise that my decision to fly has been vindicated.