Tag: India
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INDIAN RAIN
Suli Ram. Evening is near.Soon the clouds will cool the earth with showers… – South Asian Lullaby It was winter in India. The dry, cool season. The earth lay parched and brown under the sun. The rivers, full-bodied and fierce during the Monsoon, lay flat and lifeless: muddy trickles between their banks of clay. Even […]
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Locomotive Breath
LOCOMOTIVE BREATH Say, porter, when’s the next train down? – Rudyard Kipling, My Sunday at Home On the platform at Allahabad Railway Station I saw a dog asleep on a pile of luggage. Or perhaps it was bales of cotton, sewn up into jute parcels. Whatever they were, the dog looked very comfortable: stretched out […]
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Ninety-two and Twenty Twenty
Nothing changes but everything changes… – Sharon O’Neil, Kids in Our Town (1983) I turned 29 in India. It was 1992. My girlfriend Linda (now my wife of 27 years) and I were four months into a nine-month journey from Britain back home to New Zealand. On this trip we had already visited Egypt, Kenya, […]
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NIGHT TRAIN TO GONDWANA
The lights went out. And we were on our way to Gondwana. There is something ineffably romantic about an Indian railway station at night. The hot air, the rumble of steel wheels on iron rails, the beggars, the dogs, the huddled forms of people sleeping, wrapped in their blankets; the squawk of the tannoy announcing […]
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CHURCHILL’S GHOST
Life is a whole, and luck is a whole… – Winston Churchill, My Early Life. At Sassoon Dock, the fishing boats lay moored in a tight jumble of keels, masts, rigging and flags. The foetid water, where it showed between the wide-beamed, hand-built boats, was grey-black, oily, stinking. In the shaded alcoves, slippery with fish […]
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SEVEN ISLAND SUITE
Seven islands on the high side of the bay as you’re looking west… – Gordon Lightfoot Dusk on the Arabian Sea. As the sun dips behind the distant skyline of the Deccan Traps, a warm breeze ripples the bay where the sea touches Mumbai. The ferry leaves its stone pier beside the Gateway of India, […]
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KARMA POLICE
I heard the Radiohead song Karma Police playing… In Nagpur, I found the best Eggs Benedict in the world. And some of the best coffee I’ve ever tasted. Perhaps it was the location. India was the last place that I’d expected to find a café serving such superb food and coffee. I had Googled the […]
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Lights and Sound
I dived headlong into the crowded, feculent, rubbish-strewn alleyways… Evening on Marine Drive. Crowds of locals stroll along the concrete bund overlooking the choppy waters of Back Bay. Hawkers sell water, chai and snacks. A few hustlers try their luck with the occasional tourist…including me. Offshore, the sun is setting in a bright orange ball […]
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Two Feet in Asia
India lies before me… Midday in Mumbai. Outside the airport doors, it is a hot, blue day. A haze of dust hangs in the air. I can see palm trees and mynah birds, a flurry of taxis, a cohort of buses and a knot of people waiting at the kerb for their turn to depart […]
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