Here and There (22 page)

Now, I'm not going to lie to you, Calcutta is probably the most polluted place there is, and though the UN no longer keeps a league table because it's pejorative, mention Calcutta off the record and they'll hold their noses and make throat-slitting signs. A large proportion of flights have to divert because visibility is so bad. There are 11,000 factories, 750,000 cars, all on 24km of collapsing road, and the millions of inhabitants all cook on charcoal, so a yellow pall hangs over the city, giving it a rather romantic and mysterious gloom. The 90 per cent humidity makes the air thick; it tastes as if you're sucking coke. Blow your nose at the end of the day and it looks as if you've been nasally attacked by a sturgeon.

And it's communist. One of the last red governments in the world, it can barely get a collectivised game of bridge going. They banned computers because they thought they'd put people out of work. While other Indian cities leapt ahead riding the software boom, Calcutta was left with its smoke, draconian capitalist tax, no investment and high unemployment.

The reason you should book a ticket right now is because this is one of the most entertaining and beguiling places you can see that no one you know who doesn't wear a wimple has ever been to. Because let's face it, part of the pleasure of travelling, as opposed to tourism, is exclusivity and rarity. The fact is that Calcutta has the lowest crime rate of any comparable city in India. You'll find more beggars in Alice Springs. Thanks to the communists, there are no more power cuts, and because of compulsory schooling, there is a high literacy rate.

But that's not it. Calcutta is the heart and soul of India's post-Mogul culture. Tagore and Satyajit Ray are from here. This is where Indian drama, poetry and novels are gestated. It boasts an embarrassment of world-class universities, medical schools and specialist colleges. Just walk down College Street and see the biggest open-air bookshop in the world. Thousands of stalls with piles of second-hand books. Whatever you want, from a tome of obscure jurisprudence to the plays of J.M. Barrie, they're here. And up a flight of stairs next to a bookshop is the coffee house once called the Albert Hall.

It is the Brasserie Lipp, the Spago of Calcutta. A beautifully run-down, sparse room where turbaned waiters serve coffee and mutton curry on tables rubbed smooth by millions of elbows. This is where Bengalis come to argue. There is a table of theatricals; here, newspaper editors; and over there, a gaggle of girls gossiping. The thing that Bengalis do better and more than anything else is argue. They are the past masters, born with opinions and rhetorical flourishes. The rest of India says a Bengali would rather talk than work.

Calcutta was invented by the English on the banks of the Hooghly, the last stretch of the Ganges. It was a stupid place to build a city, but that never stopped the English. And it became, for most of imperial history, the capital of an India that ran from Burma to Ceylon. I initially came to look at the crumbling architecture, that glorious propagandist style, part-Mogul, part-Roman, with a touch of Home Counties vicarage. It's impressive, and a guided walk around the old capital, its churches and graveyards with their sad inscriptions putting a brave face on the vicissitudes of rebellious natives, turgid bugs, rotting alcohol and broken spirits, is all fine, but if you come from a post-colonial country, this will all be familiar stuff, though not on this scale.

What you should do is sit on a
gadh
, a landing stage on the river, and watch the astonishing life. Or go to the flower market and watch them make garlands. You might go to the Kalighat temple and see the most striking votive statue of Calcutta's patron goddess. Go to the new market – you should eat Bengali fish with mustard in banana leaves, and Calcutta's famous puddings and sweets. You should play cricket on the
maidan
in any one of the deathly serious games. And you should start an argument with a local.

I loved Calcutta because it's a city on the way down. Cities on the way up are all very well, but they're also vain and aggressive. Cities that have been something and seen stuff have stories to tell. Places can be trippers or tourists or, like Calcutta, they can be travellers.

Flight of fancy

You don't have to travel far
when you're taking a holiday
from reality. Simply put a new
spin on history, buckle up and
enjoy the ride.

Have you ever taken a holiday at home? I don't mean stayed at home instead of going on holiday, done a bit of mending and decorating instead of flirting and fornicating, but actually pretended to be a tourist in your own town. It's a bizarre experience. It first came to me when a friend asked if I would look after a couple of his friends who were passing through London for five hours. I took the nice people to dinner and then asked them what they'd like to do with the three hours that were left.

We've never been to London before, she said. We'd like you to show us everything. Everything? I doubt if we'll ever come back again, he added, with a tinge of pride. We got in the car, and I said, I'll see if we can cover the whole city. It might be a bit tight, but we should manage it. Let's start here. On your left is the site of the Battle of Waterloo (Hyde Park). Next to it is the famous Battle of Hastings (Kensington Gardens) where Harold got the arrow in the eye, and down there is the beginning of the Channel Tunnel.

Where does Charles Dickens live?, asked the husband. Funny you should ask that, we're just passing his house here – Albert Hall. It's big because he lives here with the cast of most of his books. Except Miss Haversham, of course. She lives down the road in the V&A Museum. We saw the Thames, where the Spanish Armada was defeated, and Harrods, where Henry VIII bought all his beds. You can find The Blitz on the fifth floor, along with Cockney spirit.

After a couple of hours of driving around a very small patch of Kensington and Knightsbridge, the happy couple had seen all of London. And I don't think it's any exaggeration to say they'd experienced most of London's gay pageant and a great deal of English history as well. Here was the bench where Richard Curtis first met Thackeray. This was where Keira Knightley fell in love with Mr Darcy. That newsagent is where Sweeney Todd bought his copy of
Coarse Fishing
. Don't look, but the man running it now is the illegitimate son of David Niven and Enid Blyton. That's the traffic island where Charles I was executed by Mussolini, and here's where Bonny Prince Charlie bravely but foolishly danced a highland fling on a zebra crossing before taking the equally bonny boat to Skye, which is just next door to Battersea Power Station.

Stop, stop, said the chap. I can't take any more. How can you live with so much history? It's all over you, everywhere, everywhere you turn, coming out of the windows and through the cracks in the pavement. There's a story and an anniversary in every bump and brick – how can you bear it? Back home, nothing's ever happened, or nothing that would count as history.

Oh, I just think it's so exciting, said his wife. But I couldn't live with all that stuff happening under my feet. So exhausting. We like a quiet life. Yes, the quiet life, he added for emphasis. There's nothing like the down-home feeling of boredom. Mind you, we wouldn't have missed this trip for the world. We'll be talking about it for, well, I expect for as long as we have teeth. It was a nice thought.

Hemingway pointed out that Paris is a moveable feast. That wherever you went in the world, as Bogart had it, you always had Paris. Well, I think that history is like that. The past should be a moveable picnic. You can use it to brighten up a dull town or a tedious suburb. Why shouldn't the Battle of Lepanto have taken place in your municipal boating lake? And Marco Polo would've stopped at your out-of-town shopping centre if he'd had the time. Attaching the past to specific lumps of geography is very narrow-minded and pedantic. The past happens in books, films and photographs and in your head. You can take them where you fancy.

I realised the great relative truth of facts released from geography the second time I went on safari in Africa. The first time I went, I asked the questions everyone who's confronted by Africa asks. Mostly, what's that, and, why's it doing that? I must've asked it a couple of thousand times a day for a week. And on each occasion I was given a sturdy answer, until I was weighed down with stout and hard-wearing facts. When I went back the second time, I started with the whats and the whys again. I realised almost immediately that I was getting completely different answers. The go-away bird was actually a grey lory and not a Gabriel's banded cross-beaked hoebird. The lion doesn't roar at a decibel-level that will kill a junior wildebeest with the vibrations of terror. That acacia isn't known as Hottentot birth control because the seed pods can be used as condoms. I realised that my first guide had been making up things as he went along, and I, far from being angry or feeling a fool or being cheated, liked him all the more for it.

I had been shown a tailor-made, bespoke place. Anyone can learn stuff from books or experience. But to take the trouble to invent a place specifically for my pleasure was very touching. And, still, a lot of what we know about the world is what people who are keen to please us have told us. History and geography and the factual past are a relatively recent invention. Before there was real biological and topographical Africa, there was a continent of ghosts and ancestors, of myths and fables. The bushmen will still tell you, with a certainty that will cold-cock a polygraph, that the moon is one of mister praying mantis's swollen testicles.

Before history, we had the myths of gods and heroes. We still move around the classic world saying, this is where Odysseus slept, this is where Hercules had a bit of a barney. The other world hides under the certainty of maps. When I was a child, my bedroom was Troy, and then Treasure Island and Narnia and Mowgli's cave. If you've got a day, go on holiday around your own neighbourhood. Give it a lick of relative truth. A polish with a myth.

Out of place

Algiers is not your usual
Mediterranean port, but it is
memorable. Sometimes the places
that stay with you the longest are
the awkward, demanding and
frightening ones.

‘Is this your last time in Algeria?' the man in the cake shop asked me. He obviously didn't get much of a chance to practise his English. Foreigners are rare hereabouts; everybody asks ‘Is this your first time?' (or indeed your last), as if wishing the rare visitor to say ‘No, no, I come here often, spend my summer holidays here, do business, have fun,' in the hope that visitors might return like the swifts that dogfight over this great white city. People don't come here unless they're from here. There are precious few journalists. Getting visas is like getting a transplant – someone had to fly from London to Algiers to get mine, and I'd just come here for three days to write about food.

You forget that this is just the other side of the Mediterranean; Spain is over there, Italy there, France over there. This is the same pond we crowd around in the summer, but not at this bit, not in Algeria, which has some of the most beautiful and empty Mediterranean coastline. Algeria is a place out of place.

Algiers is a memorable city, perhaps the most imposing on the south side of the Mediterranean, built around the bay, which is the great natural harbour that made it the port of choice for the Barbary pirates shipping kidnapped slaves from as far away as the Black Sea. It started off as Berber, then was invaded by the Arabs, then the Ottomans, and finally the French. Now it's confused and furious.

The stucco front of the French town elegantly curves in a promenade around the shore, echoing the Rue de Rivoli, looking rather like Marseilles. The windows and shutters are all painted a clear, beautiful blue. The broad boulevards are shaded by ficus trees that have been pollarded into a parasol hedge. Behind the fading and well-thumbed colonial city is the kasbah, crammed and higgledy-piggledy, a dark expressionless scatter of alleys and winds and staircases. This was the Ottoman city, the boroughs that incubated the bitter war of independence from the French. Of all the grim and desperate conflicts of colonial disentanglement, the battle for Algiers was the most bitter and tragic. In an inglorious final chapter for Western empires, this was the most shaming, and has left psychological scabs on the winners.

The volume and the intensity of the bitterness that Algerians feel towards the French is shocking. Only the very old could even remember the colonial period, but still it's an abscess in the mouths of almost all Algerians, and it informs and colours all political thought.

As always, when you come from Old Europe to the Maghreb it's astounding to see the rivers of youth that run everywhere, through every doorway, round every corner, torrents of the young. North Africa looks like the whole world's playing truant here in an open casting for an epic remake of
West Side Story
. Gangs of young boys, skinny, sharp-elbowed, dressed in the kit of British, Spanish and Italian football clubs, handsome and inquisitively malevolent, stand in the wings of the city. There's precious little for them to do but practise their walks and their cool looks.

The unemployment figures are a state secret, but they run pretty high. The children play-fight and shout and sulk, and the rest of the city throbs irritably by, the traffic grinds and hoots and waves its impotent hands. Cafés are full of men drinking tea and animatedly shouting at each other. Women with shopping bags barge through the pavement with faces of implacable determination. The whole place vibrates with a gnarly repressed anger, which would be overwhelming for a visitor if it weren't leavened with a broad streak of dry, acid humour.

Algerian conversation seems to be mostly threats and insults. The threats are vicious, the insults brilliant. You spend your time gasping, and laughing. For more than 15 years, Algeria has been impaled on one of the most terrifying civil wars of the last century and this is barely reported because few journalists want to take the risk. The fight was between a military-backed residually centralist communist government and a radical fundamental Islamic movement that was imported by Algerians who had gone to fight with the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan.