Duncan Campbell: How I found myself in India

Tag : string bead

There were six of us in the room: an Englishman called Ian, fromBraintree in Essex, who believed that his body had becometranslucent and who asked us to watch him drink a glass of lassi sothat we could observe the liquid passing through his digestivetract; an American Vietnam war deserter, who had shaved his head,burned his passport and dispensed with all his clothes, except fora pair of baggy khaki shorts; a French junkie, who went throughother people's belongings while they were asleep; an Australiancouple - both Capricorns, I think - who had quite seriousdysentery; and me.
It was December 1971 in Calcutta (Kolkata)and I was staying in whatyou might call, but we did not, a hippy hotel. The day I arrived,India had declared war on Pakistan - a war that would shortly leadto the independence of Bangladesh - and Calcutta, like all majorcities, was subjected to a black-out. Millions of refugees had fledthe fighting and hundreds of thousands of them were sleeping in thestreets. What happened to half a dozen little people in a room offChowringhee did not really amount to a hill of lentils, but thatdid not stop the residents of our hotel being in a constant stateof real or imagined turmoil.
I had given up my job as an advertising copywriter at Ogilvy &Mather in London a few months earlier to head for India. I waspropelled by a mixture of motives - wrong job/wrong woman - andrunning away from trouble is one of the earliest human instincts.India was the inevitable destination. I had grown up with photos onthe wall of a dashing grandfather who worked on archeological sitesin Agra so there was a pilgrimage element to it, but much of theattraction was not really knowing what awaited.
"Aren't you a little old for that?" said Dan, the creative directorat the O&M offices in Waterloo when I told him I was off. I wasalready 26 and had been working, I think, on a campaign to increasethe sale of bread. I never came up with a memorable slogan, butsomeone else had thought of "Six Slices a Day is the Well-balancedWay".
But, after a few weeks in India and Nepal, what did age and slicedbread matter? There were afternoons in cafes that advertisedthemselves as "Where the Jet Set Meet the Beat" and nights on thenear-empty beaches of Goa, journeys linked by the seductive miracleof the Indian railway system. There was a brief spell in jail inKathmandu, due to an immigration policy not dissimilar to the onenow being advocated here - round up the ones with weird hair andclothes. We had our bibles (On the Road, Siddhartha, The TibetanBook of the Dead) and, if you did not know in which direction youshould head next, you could ask the I Ching and it would deliverits verdict.
It was in the days before the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet, buteach city had its hotels where, for half a dozen rupees, you couldget a bed in a dormitory, swap your Catch-22 for a BrothersKaramazov and wake up to the sound of a chillum being lit or abowel voided. Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar and the Velvet Undergroundprovided the background soundtrack.
I cheated and flew straight to Delhi, but the Magic Bus, whichdrove all the way from London to Kathmandu, through Turkey, Iranand Afghanistan, was still the cheapest entry route and there weremany stories of the road. One I heard in various forms was aboutthe Dutch or Belgian or French family in a VW camper who hadinadvertently hit and killed an Afghan child playing in the road.As they tried to apologise and express their grief, a beardedAfghan arrived, so the tale went, grabbed a Dutch/Belgian/Frenchchild and beheaded it. Was it true? Who knew? Such storiesproliferated. Did someone called Eight-fingered Eddie who hung outin Goa really exist?
Some went in search of gurus, some in search of dope, which couldbe sent home in the days when the arrival through the mail of acarved Indian elephant did not necessarily arouse the interest ofCustoms. Some got stuck in no-man's land. Literally. Coming throughthe border between India and Nepal, we ran across a guy who hadbeen deported from Nepal but not allowed into India and was thuscondemned to linger in the 200 yards between the two border posts.I'm sure we promised to get him help and I'm sure we meant to atthe time and I'm sure we forgot. Maybe he's still there.
Just before I left London, a new weekly underground paper, as theywere known then, had been launched. It was called Ink and wasjointly edited by a trio of journalists: Richard Neville, recentlyreleased from jail where he had briefly been held after beingconvicted in the 1971 Oz magazine obscenity trial; John Lloyd, afriend from university, and Alexander Cockburn.
I had written one piece for it about advertising, quoting,inevitably, Bob Dylan, and his thoughts about how "advertisingsigns they con you into thinking you're the one" from It's Alright,Ma, I'm Only Bleeding. I carried a sheet of their headed notepapersaying, fancifully,
"To Whom It May Concern" that I was Ink's correspondent. I did,after all, desperately want to be a journalist, so I still had thenotepaper in the back pocket of my bell-bottoms when I arrived inCalcutta. War had been declared; surely I should try and cover it.That was what journalists did. But how?
The foreign journalists who had by now arrived in Calcutta to coverthe war were based at a luxurious hotel called the Uberoi Grand,not far away from our little place but a million miles apart interms of comfort. They had a pool! Waiters! Cocktails! No one wentthrough their sleeping-bags at night to try and nick their Zippolighter.
These were real, grown-up journalists with dog-tags and safarijackets and an easy self-confidence. Understandably, they looked onsomeone in a headband, wearing a Mr Natural T-shirt andbell-bottoms embroidered by their long-suffering ex-girlfriend, asa freak. But one of them took pity on me. This was the Sunday Timescorrespondent, Nick Tomalin, a familiar name to every journalist ofhis generation. It was he who coined the phrase that all ajournalist needed was "ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and alittle literary ability". Somehow he realised I was out of mydepth, explained where and how to get accredited and told me to beoutside his hotel at 4.30 the next morning if I wanted to go intoBangladesh with him and the Indian troops. Just like a realjournalist.
As soon as we crossed the border the following day, the Indian armywas welcomed with open arms in what was very soon to becomeBangladesh. Victory was in the air. The atmosphere wasintoxicating. Bangladesh had been the victim of the vilest ofatrocities from the Pakistani troops and was finally beingliberated.
The Mukti Bahini, the freedom fighters who had led the resistance,emerged from their hiding places, dashing young men in plasticsandals and singlets, with rifles slung casually over theirshoulders. Supposed informers were rounded up, some to be killed infront of journalists. A photograph of one of those killings inDhaka would win a Pulitzer prize the next year. I was taken to seeone such "informer" being killed in a ditch by paving stonesdropped on his head. Garlands of flowers were draped over thebarrels of the Indian tanks. Fleeing Pakistanis abandoned theiruniforms and ran off in their underpants. Bodies lay in the fields.Tahmima Anam's wonderful novel, A Golden Age, tells the story well.
The war itself was over within two weeks and it was back to thehotel in Sudder Street and its increasingly deranged but somehowcherishable - well, except for that French junkie - clientele. Ianfrom Braintree had slipped over the edge. On Christmas Eve we hadto take him to the British consulate to be repatriated. I oftenwondered what Christmas dinner was like in Braintree that year. TheAmerican consulate, sandbagged against possible reprisals becausethe US had backed Pakistan, were unwilling to let us do the samefor their casualties. (Americans were unpopular in Calcutta. Iwatched the Pan Am building being set ablaze and chattedknowledgably to the attackers about cricket so that they would knowI wasn't a Yank.) Some of the hotel guests drifted off to ashramsin the south. I sent my copy back to Ink where, a week or two afterthe war was over, it appeared.
"What is your purpose?" was a favourite question of Indians whowere puzzled by the arrival of these westerners with their buffetapproach to religion - some Hinduism, some Buddhism, a Sikhbracelet, perhaps. Well, what was the purpose? VS Naipaul, in hisbook An Area of Darkness, refers dismissively to the travellers hemet in India "whose privilege it was to go slumming around theworld, exacting a personal repayment for a national generosity". Hewrote that "India, the world's largest slum, had an addedattraction: 'cultural' humility was sweet, 'spiritual' humility wassweeter." I preferred the less judgmental Robert Louis Stevenson'sidea that "the great affair is to move".
Certainly, it was easy to mock and condescend but, with a fewexceptions, most of that ragtag army in Bombay and Pondicherry andPuri and Pushkar were respectful of where they were and who theymet and curious, often in both senses of the word. Some of them arethere to this day. Everyone learned a little, some a lot.
I carried on travelling east and did not return to England until1973. I never got to see Nick Tomalin again to thank him forrealising how out of my depth I was and for showing that ajournalist, beyond the cunning, manner and literary ability, couldalso be something else. He was killed that year in the GolanHeights during the Yom Kippur war.
Ink had run dry long before I got back and its editors scattered tothree corners of the world: Richard Neville I met again a few yearsago in Sydney, where he is a futurologist, and he will soon beportrayed by Cillian Murphy in Beeban Kidron's film of that era,Hippie Hippie Shake; John Lloyd is the director of the ReutersInstitute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford and writes for theFinancial Times; Alexander Cockburn, one of the tribe of Cockburnjournalists, now edits the leftwing newsletter Counterpunch inCalifornia. One person I met on the road, at Mr Jain's hotel inDelhi, the journalist David Jenkins remains a good friend to thisday. Amazingly, Ogilvy & Mather survived without me and, by thetime I came back, they had a young whippersnapper of a copywritercalled Salman Rushdie working for them.
I have been back to India since and recently revisited the oldhaunts. Goa has changed beyond belief. Where once half a dozensouls had solemnly applauded as the sun went down on a desertedBaga beach, now thousands stretch out on loungers. You can watchPremiership football while you eat roast beef and yorkshire puddingwith Oxo gravy. Charter flights arrive by the hour from Britain andRussia and Israel. It was jarring to watch a Russian couple chaseaway an elderly Rajasthani woman selling bracelets on the beachwith an angry "Go away!" There are drunken brawls and worse. And Ispotted the traveller's equivalent of the dead canary in themineshaft - a copy of the Daily Express for sale.
In Calcutta, I went back to the hotel and the room where once wedrifted off to sleep while someone tried to play Cat Stevens songson their new sitar or exchange black-market rupees for dope. Thepatient manager whom I recalled was long since gone but I was shownto the room where we had argued through the night over what BobDylan really meant by "the ghosts of electricity howl in the bonesof her face".
It seemed, of course, smaller than in my memory. It was cleaner,too, and the guests wore shoes and carried bottled water and theRough Guide rather than rolling papers and Steppenwolf, and theywent to internet cafes rather than queuing in the poste restanteline at the GPO. Still, for a moment or two, I was right back in1971 with my own ghosts.
I never found out what happened to Ian from Braintree, whether hegot home safely and if he ever found someone who could indeed seethe lassi going through his digestive tracts. Maybe he gets theGuardian. So if you're reading this, Ian, listening perhaps to theIncredible String Band on your iPod as you eat your free-rangescrambled eggs in Hebden Bridge or Ludlow or - who knows? - asyou're driven home from a stressful day at a merchant bank in theCity, get in touch. I still have your copy of The Glass Bead Game.
· The Paradise Trail, Duncan Campbell's novel - set in a hippy hotelin Calcutta in 1971 - is published in paperback next week byHeadline, priced £6.99.