Sleeping Around (36 page)

John didn't care. He laughed his head off as Shiv turned over each page of his folio. John almost fell out of his seat at one fashion spread. Shiv was wearing some sort of military garb and was trying so hard to look earnest it looked as if he had a serious case of constipation.

Shiv, who was wearing very normal jeans and nothing crocheted at all, had come to pick us up and take us to a nightclub where all the ‘fashionable people of Delhi go'. I didn't have any items of clothing that were crocheted, so I hoped I was considered fashionable enough.

The nightclub, which was in the basement of some flash hotel, didn't consider the country's traditional and centuries-old sari fashionable, though. A large sign at the entrance read ‘NO SARIS'. The interior was like any fashionable nightclub and the drinks were fashionably unaffordable. Every girl in the club was stunning, with huge brown eyes and perfect skin, and they were all wearing the latest and sexiest designer wear. It still felt like an under-16s disco, though. The girls mingled, chattered and danced amongst themselves while shyly shooting passing glances at the men and giggling.

This was a far cry from a Brazilian or Icelandic nightclub. There was no snogging or dirty dancing here. It was all very nice and very tame. The only fellow dancing with a girl was a smiling Shiv tripping the light fantastic with Sarah.

Later in the evening I was speaking to an Indian guy at the bar who told me that he'd been with his girlfriend for two years and he hadn't kissed her yet. No wonder Shiv looked so happy. He'd slept with Sarah on their second date.

I had a terrible dream that the dead bodies in the wardrobes had all risen and were dancing about in the kitchen. That did bring the couch rating down a little bit.

Couch rating: 8/10
Pro: An entire apartment to myself
Con: The dead bodies in the wardrobes

In the morning I waited for more than an hour for a sign of life from the other apartments, but gave up and headed into the city by myself. I didn't really have an idea of where to go, but Penelope had mentioned that there was some sort of large underground bazaar at Connaught Place.

Connaught Place reminded me of England with its concentric circular roads lined with Victorian terraced buildings housing Pizza Hut, Dominos, McDonalds, and Wimpy's. The only difference was that there were Indians and Indian restaurants everywhere. Hang on a sec, that's exactly like England. As soon as I stepped out of the auto-rickshaw, a tout latched onto me. ‘I'll be your very good guide,' he announced. ‘And I will take you to a very good shop.' He harassed me for ten minutes and when he gave up another annoyingly persistent tout took over. I was okay with it, though. I figured I couldn't really have an authentic Indian experience without being hassled incessantly.

There was more persistent pestering in Palika Bazaar, the huge sprawling shopping centre underneath Connaught Place. Without fail, every single stallholder would say something like: ‘Hello mister, you buy something. I have a very good price for you.'

Apart from a few stalls selling saris, most were filled with exactly the same global mega-brand T-shirts—Levis, Nike, Adidas, Ralph Lauren, GAP etc., etc.—that I'd seen in every market in every country I'd been to. What moronic carbon-copy consumers we've all turned into.

In the next hour I did buy a couple of global mega-brand T-shirts for a little bit more than a very good price and also spent ten minutes arguing with a fellow who followed me. If I told him once I told him a thousand times, I didn't really need to buy a bright orange silk dressing gown.

After a kwality lunch of tandoori prawns and rice at Kwality Restaurant back above ground, I stopped at an internet cafe to search for a couch in Agra. John had told me: ‘You have to go to the Taj Mahal. It's foockin' mad.' I said that I would go to Agra if I could find a couch. ‘There must be a few nice ones in the Taj,' John said.

There were only a few couches to choose from in Agra, and some of the profiles weren't that inviting:

Guests should be tolerant. Be aware, I am a heavy smoker.
Arijit, 27

I live with my mother who is a terrible nag—so be warned!
Mukesh, 48

I love to talk about God all the time. We can talk about his great love for mankind, his great plan of salvation and redemption of fallen mankind. I wish to explain this to people and bring them to God's way so their life will be bright and peaceful. He loves you and wants to take control of your life.
Subash, 45

I sent off some requests, then jumped in an auto-rickshaw for the long, hot, dusty and smelly ride back to the apartment. As soon as I stepped through the door, Penelope said, ‘Let's go. We're going to some bars in Connaught Place.'

John tagged along as well and he told me that we were going to ‘run amok'. I had a close look at his pockets to make sure he didn't have any rockets with him. The first bar we went to looked much the same as the second and the third ones. They all had that ‘hotel bar' feel, with lots of panelled wood and chrome and were full of barmen in starched jackets who put down little paper coasters with your beer. They also all had ‘hotel bar' prices.

Sarah was very happy with the first bar we went to, though. Like any good panelled-wood-and-chrome bar, they had hamburgers on the menu.

While we were sitting in our third indistinguishable bar, John suddenly announced, ‘I'm going to steal the motorbike'.

John had been eyeing off the large-scale model of an Enfield motorbike that was sitting in pride of place on a sideboard next to us.

John was serious. ‘What do you want the motorbike for?' I asked.

‘It will look good in my apartment.'

John downed the rest of his beer then stood up.

‘I need one of you girls to attract everyone's attention in the bar,' he said.

The girls were right. John was mad.

‘Is this really a good idea?' I asked nervously.

John asked me if I'd like to help. In my youth I was an accomplished shoplifter, but I'm sort of past that. ‘Just stand by the door and get ready to run then,' John said, getting himself into position.

Sarah stood up on top of the bar and announced that it was an Australian national holiday then started belting out
Advance Australia Fair
.

I was running up the street when John bolted past me with the motorbike under his arm. I stopped dead in my tracks when I heard a booming male voice and both the girls calling us back.

‘Go find John and bring him back,' Penelope hissed as Sarah was trying to talk the very irate manager out of calling the police.

‘He only did it for a prank,' Sarah pleaded. ‘He's a bit mad.'

I found John around the corner puffing and panting. ‘That was foockin' brilliant,' he gasped.

‘You have to take it back,' I said.

‘No, I want to keep it.'

‘No, you have to take it back,' I protested. ‘The manager and a big security guy have got the girls.' It took me a few minutes to talk him into going back, but that worked out well. It gave the girls enough time to convince the manager that John was mentally deranged.

18

‘Maximum Surfers Per Night: 99.'

Vikram Gupta, 29, Agra, India

CouchSurfing.com

I thought Vikram might have been a tad ambitious thinking of fitting 99 surfers into his one-bedroom apartment, but then I saw that many people trying to squeeze into one small second-class compartment on the train. As I watched I was quite happy that I'd waited over two hours in the ‘foreigners' ticket office' to get a First Class ticket for the three-hour trip to Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal.

I only got one reply to my couch requests, but that's all I needed. Vikram's profile sounded relatively normal, although I was a little worried that he lived in a corridor:

I have a hall with a couch. I am very positive and open mind guy who mix with other peoples very soon and want to listen about them what they want to tell us. I don't smoke or drink, but enjoy hanging around while others are drinking.

There probably wouldn't be much time for Vikram to hang around me while I was drinking because I wasn't going to be hanging around long enough. By the time I'd crawled out of bed and got to an internet cafe to check my emails, it was almost midday, so that meant I wouldn't get into Agra until after five. I planned to get up before dawn the next day to see the Taj, then hop straight on a train back to Delhi.

I was tempted to sleep on the train (I had my own bunk bed), but there was just so much to see out the window. Although the passing landscape itself was nothing exciting— endless dusty fields and shantytowns of flapping sheets of plastic—there were people everywhere. Which, with India's population being 1.3 billion, really wasn't that surprising. There were barbers and hairdressers working away on the roadside, mothers bathing their babies and doing laundry in brown rivers, women traipsing through fields with bundles on their heads, cyclists on rickety bicycles trundling along dirt tracks and lots of folk just wandering about. Mostly, though, there were men sitting everywhere and men shitting everywhere. India, it seems, is one big open latrine. I have never seen so many bottoms—and I've been to the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras after-party. All along the side of the train track, lines of men were casually squatting down and fertilising the plants, so to speak. A friend who'd been to India had told me that ‘Most of India is a shithole'. I now realised he had meant it literally.

I got the shits too when I got off the train in Agra. The cycle-rickshaw drivers were so fiercely relentless in their persistence that even my time-tested ploy of ignoring them didn't work. I ended up picking the one and only person who didn't hassle me. Mind you, that was more to do with the fact that he couldn't see me. The Professor, as I immediately dubbed him, was wearing mega-size Coke-bottle glasses that made his eyes look as big as saucers. The only small downside was that he could hardly see all the other traffic on the road as he pedalled slowly through the dusty, dirty and rather charmless city streets of Agra.

‘Which hotel?' the Professor hollered over the traffic.

‘I'm not staying in a hotel.'

‘I know very much a good nice one for you.'

‘I'm not staying in a hotel.'

‘Where are you staying then?' he asked, looking somewhat perplexed.

‘I'm staying on someone's couch.'

That only threw him for a second. ‘I will take you to the Taj Mahal tomorrow. What time do you want to go?'

I decided I quite liked the Professor. He was almost the spitting image, albeit an Indian image, of Jerry Lewis in
The Nutty Professor
.

‘Pick me up at five o'clock tomorrow morning,' I said to the Professor when he dropped me off out the front of Vikram's apartment block, which looked as if it was made from papier-mâché.

Vikram looked like an Indian version of a younger Danny De Vito. ‘Welcome to the city of Taj Mahal, the great symbol of love,' Vikram said as he greeted me into his tiny and sparse apartment. ‘This is your couch,' Vikram said, pointing to a couch that would struggle to hold one person, let alone 99.

It was getting late, so we headed straight out to dinner (Vikram had seemed very excited in the email he sent back when I said that I would take him out to dinner).

‘So, what do you do for a job?' I asked Vikram as we walked down the street dodging potholes and broken bits of concrete. On Vikram's profile under ‘occupation' he had put ‘business'.

‘I work in restoration and artisan objects,' he said. ‘I will like to show you something very good.'

The something very good was his family's large ‘marble emporium' where he then tried to sell me some ‘unique marble works'. Including a large marble table for a thousand dollars. After explaining that I'd have a bit of trouble fitting it in my backpack, he passed me onto his uncle who tried to flog me cheap marble ornaments for 50 dollars. It was obvious that I was being taken for a bit of a shopping ride. Even as I tried to leave I was ushered into the ‘last chance bazaar', which was chock-full of cheaply made crap—except that they were not cheap.

This definitely wasn't in the spirit of couch-surfing and I was already drafting the ‘Negative' reference for Vikram's profile in my head. Vikram seemed nice enough, but this obvious ploy to get me into his shop had definitely put a red mark against his name. Mind you, Vikram's couch-surfing ‘scam' was modest compared to some of the ‘negative', or even ‘extremely negative' references I found.

Among the worst hosts were a rip-off travel agent masquerading as a couch-surfing host, sleazy men, stalkers and someone who was dubbed ‘a clown, a liar and fucking stupid'. However, most of the ‘negatives' were for couch surfers who hadn't bothered to turn up, leaving hosts waiting at train stations or airports—or vice versa.

I should point out though that I did an extensive search to find these very few bad references. To be fair there is only a tiny, tiny minority of bad seeds out there in the big wide world of couch surfing—in fact, 98.8 per cent of users have rated their couch-surfing experience a positive one.