Sleeping Around (35 page)

‘You're our first house guest from GlobalFreeloaders,' Penelope said, when I asked if they'd had anyone else stay with them. ‘We've had lots of requests, but they've all been from sleazy Indian businessmen.'

My very own apartment was huge. I had three bedrooms to choose from, plus my own lounge room, kitchen and two bathrooms. Just when I was longingly eyeing off one of the beds, Penelope said, ‘We've been waiting for you to arrive, so we can all go to a party'.

The party was taking place in another block of apartments shared by expats. There were around twenty people at the party, including Swedish, Irish, French, Spanish and a couple of Indian fellows. All of them were drunk. It really is not that much fun being the only sober one at a party and I didn't feel at all like trying to ‘catch up'. I had a whole bunch of those wonderful conversations with seriously intoxicated people who either didn't make any sense or did make sense, but told me the same story five times.

When someone dragged out a guitar at least it gave me something to do. I was the only one sober enough to play.

It was a bit creepy going back to my empty apartment. The apartment was fully furnished, so it looked as if someone had left in a hurry—or their dead body was stuffed in a wardrobe somewhere.

Before I hopped into bed I went through all the rooms and turned on the lights. And checked inside all the wardrobes.

‘You're up early,' John said when he saw me traipsing down the stairs to the girls' apartment.

It was ten-thirty.

‘The girls don't get up until after twelve,' he said, after inviting me up into his apartment.

John's apartment floor was totally covered with newspaper. ‘I'm house-training Vindaloo,' John said, as an almost hairless, ratty creature that vaguely resembled a puppy timidly tottered into the kitchen. John had found him cowering in a pile of rubbish by the side of the road. He had already spent a fortune, or an Indian fortune at least, on vet bills to simply keep the poor thing alive.

The girls wouldn't be up for a while, so I joined John who was heading out for some brunch. My first view of India in daylight was of the upscale but somewhat fading neighbourhood we walked through on our way to the main road to get an auto-rickshaw. As a total contrast to the large upper-class homes and apartments that I'd just walked past, families had set up their homes, which were made of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting, on the median strip of the busy main road.

This glimpse of destitution was only a brief interlude, however. Our auto-rickshaw soon turned off the main road and pulled up in front of a trendy cafe full of Indian girls in designer jeans clutching mobile phones. Although most of the girls were in their twenties, they were talking and giggling like young teens. When we sat down at our table, a group of girls behind us were whispering about which boys they liked, and when one of the girls said that a boy had held her hand the others went ‘ohhh'.

‘They may dress and act like Western girls,' said John, ‘but they still follow strict Indian traditions. They don't even kiss their boyfriends and don't have sex until marriage.'

John eyed off the pretty girls next to us. ‘It's a pity 'cause I'd love to get into an Indian girl's pants.'

While we ate our delicious omelette and drank our huge mugs of spicy
masala chai,
John told me that he'd been travelling and working his way around the world for six years. ‘I don't know if I'll ever be ready to settle down,' he shrugged. ‘I like to live on the edge.'

Before we headed back to the apartment, John had a bit of shopping to do. Not far from the cafe was an arcade of elegantly shabby shops selling clothes, kitchenwares, shoes, electrical goods and flea collars. We went into a pet supplies shop and John bought a flea collar, two giant bags of dog biscuits, a leash and some squeaky dog toys. I couldn't help thinking that the money John spent on his scruffy street dog would probably feed one of those families on the median strip for a month.

John still had one more bit of shopping to do on the way back. ‘I need to buy some dope,' John said, as he hailed an auto-rickshaw. Twenty minutes later we climbed out of the auto-rickshaw and into another world. We'd entered the slums. We walked briskly across a small bridge over a stream that was grey with oil and filth. Fetid rubbish piled a metre high lined the banks as naked laughing children splashed in the knee-deep water next to a bloated floating dead dog. It was a dismal assault on the senses. This was like the slum of slums. The ‘slums' in Soweto looked like middle-class suburbia compared to this. As soon as we entered the squalid maze, bedraggled children followed behind us while feckless youths threw us furtive looks. ‘Hello, Mister John.' Mister John had obviously done a bit of business here before. Five minutes later we were back in the auto-rickshaw and John was tucking a large bag of hash under his jacket.

When we got back to the apartment, the girls were just getting out of bed. They were looking a bit dishevelled, but the apartment was absolutely spotless. All the pizza boxes and beer cans were gone and even the comfy velvet bottle-green couch looked like new. ‘As part of the deal for our job we get a magic cleaning fairy who comes every morning,' Penelope said.

The girls had the weekend off and they were excited about showing me around Delhi—or showing me around the bars of Delhi, which seemed to make up the bulk of their itinerary for the next two days.

The main thoroughfare into Old Delhi was a wild and clamorous confusion of ox-drawn carts, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, bicycles, cars, horse-drawn carriages, cycle-rickshaws, trucks, buses and the odd roaming totally nonchalant cow. I've been in huge cities where you are confronted by inconceivable masses of people, but I'd never seen anything like this. There was a barely an empty space anywhere. Everywhere I looked there was someone standing, squatting, walking, lying down or tripping over someone standing, squatting, walking or lying down. The footpaths were so packed in Old Delhi that folk were just wandering on the road in between the crawling traffic. But if they weren't flirting with death, we certainly were. As we crept at an excruciatingly languid pace through the virtual gridlock, we were slowly getting choked to death. The exhaust pipes on the ancient buses were at a perfect height to blow black toxic smoke right into our faces. Then every time we stopped, even for only a second, a bevy of beggars, often with some body part missing, would rush up to our auto-rickshaw not pleading but demanding that we buy newspapers, matches or toys, or simply asking for money. I'm pretty good at ignoring beggars, but the Delhi expat gang had it down to a fine art. They didn't even blink when flapping plastic birds were just about shoved up their noses.

At length we reached the Red Fort, whose high red sandstone walls rose above the surrounding chaos of Old Delhi like a proverbial red beacon. ‘The Red Fort was the palace for Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan's new capital Shahjahanabad, after he moved his capital from Agra in the seventeenth century,' John said as we walked up to the imposing main gate. ‘The fort was captured by Britain in 1857 and was made the headquarters of the British Army until India gained independence in 1947. It wasn't until December 2003 that the Indian Army moved out and let the tourists in.' John wasn't actually an authority on Indian forts. He'd brought along a guidebook. Inside the fort was teeming with families and couples, but it was just lovely to wander around the peaceful gardens and pavilions, breathe the non-toxic atmosphere and enjoy a brief respite from the utter madness outside.

It was getting near dusk when we climbed the broad and steep steps to Jama Masjid mosque, the largest mosque in India. The courtyard inside the mosque may hold up to 25 000 worshippers, but the steps leading up to it can hold up to 2000 beggars. I have never seen so many skinny people with skinny hands reaching out and demanding money. ‘It's actually illegal to give money to beggars in India,' Penelope said, brushing a withered hand away from her face. ‘The “giver” can be given three years in jail if they are caught.' The threat of our possible incarceration certainly didn't deter the beggars.

After just about every beggar in Old Delhi had asked us for money, we headed into the old town and John led us up and down narrow lanes then back up and down the same narrow lanes in search of a restaurant that he'd been to ‘a hundred times'. Karim's Restaurant should have been easy to find. You could probably see it from the moon. The banks of fluorescent lights inside were so bright that it felt as if you were about to dine while undergoing police interrogation. The restaurant was full of men, and men only, sitting at large communal tables sharing metal plates and bowls filled with intensely coloured and intensely aromatic food.

We ordered a selection of dishes, including a rich mughlai chicken, mutton qorma, a sweet chicken jahangiri, goat curry, romali rotis and rice (sadly we couldn't have the tandoori bakra, which is an entire goat stuffed with dry fruits, basmati rice, minced meat and spices and costs around $A100, because you had to order it a day in advance). John, who must have also liked to live on the culinary edge, ordered ‘brain curry' as a side dish.

While we were digging into our food, I noticed that Sarah was only eating the rice and rotis. ‘Are you vegetarian?' I asked.

‘No,' Sarah shrugged. ‘I just can't stand curry or Indian food.'

‘What about at work? Don't you have curries everyday?'

‘Um . . . yeah, but I just eat a bit of rice, then order pizza when I get home.'

I didn't want to sound rude, but you'd think Sarah may have guessed there would be a fair bit of Indian food in India before she decided to come live in the country for six months.

After dinner we plunged into the crowded medieval labyrinth of Chandni Chowk where there were narrow alleyways given over to an extraordinary array of jewellery, perfumes, spices, carpets and lurid textiles. The girls got quite excited as they pored over exquisite gold, pearl and ruby jewellery, but nowhere near as excited as John and I became when we found an entire street devoted to fireworks. We both regressed to mischievous 10-year-olds as we pulled out boxes of Catherine wheels, ground spinners, fountains, Roman candles and rockets. John got a little carried away, however, and bought a ‘MEGA WOW' box of gargantuan rockets from a stallholder who said ‘I am making you a special price'.

‘How much to Kalkaji?' Penelope asked an auto-rickshaw driver who was about half her height.

‘One hundred and fifty rupees,' he barked.

‘We'll pay you fifty rupees.'

‘No,' he said, shaking his head vigorously. ‘It is one hundred and fifty rupees.'

‘Put your meter on then.'

‘No. It is broken.'

‘Take us there for fifty or I'll get the police,' Penelope glowered.

‘Get the police then,' he sniffed.

A few minutes later Penelope returned with a big smile and a policeman in tow.

‘You must take them for fifty rupees,' the policeman told the driver.

John thought it would be a good idea to wait until he'd smoked a huge joint and downed a few glasses of whisky before he set off the rockets. We were all a little wary of the ‘MEGA WOW' rockets, so when John lit the first one in an empty beer bottle in the front garden we all scampered behind a large tree. But it wasn't our safety that we should have been worried about. The bottle tipped over during takeoff and the rocket shot over the fence towards the apartment across the road and straight into their security guard's open booth. When the rocket exploded with an almighty BANG! on impact, the guard's heart probably did the same.

John was undeterred, however. The next rocket also tipped over and hit the side of the house next door with a horrendous BOOM. ‘Fook that!' John bellowed as he picked up the next rocket, lit it and held it up in his hand.

‘I don't know if you've figured it out yet,' Penelope said, ‘but John's a bit mad.'

A deluge of sparks poured down John's arm just before the rocket shot into the air, but he still had the same demented smile on his face.

Being a human rocket-launcher must have hurt because he let the next one go too early and it shot over the fence again. This time it hit the windscreen of a passing car. The driver slammed on the brakes and the screaming from inside the car was almost as loud as the BANG.

Just as John finished tormenting and petrifying the neighbourhood, Sarah's ‘hot fashion model' boyfriend Shiv turned up. He certainly was a tall, dark and handsome model, but I wouldn't have called him fashionable. When he found out that I was an ex-advertising art director, he went back to his car to get his ‘model' folio.

As Shiv set it down on the coffee table, Penelope whispered, ‘Try not to laugh'.

It was very hard not to.

Not only did the poses he was striking look like they were either straight from a 1950s Sears catalogue or from an issue of Gay Weekly, but the ‘fashion' was things like a crocheted waistcoat revealing a bare chest and silk baggy pantaloons.