The Bard

The final part of my travel blogs for India

The full series of posts from my India trip can be read here.

As it happened, Gusztáv and I were on the same flight out to Doha and we discussed briefly what we might do on our last day, if we would go to Charminar in the city centre where Gusztáv had been the day that I was doing the University recruitment event, and had a market, but we decided against it, given how little time we had. Instead, we put all of our bags in his room and I checked out and we went to a coffee shop to talk again, about everything that had happened, to theorise again about the different experiences, and work through the final steps of the trip, like it hadn't already ended, that it wasn't ending as we talked.

We talked about writing and about memory as a kind of analysing and organising device in our lives and how it compares to just writing things out as they happened, something I had been doing on this trip for a few hours every day like it was a kind of report of the trip. Gusztáv looked at a page of my writing on my phone and said, This is great, this is like what the kings used to travel with, the guy who recorded everything.

I tried to remember the word in English, Was it stenographer? Or reporter?

He thought for a moment, I know the word in Hungarian, but…

And I said, What's the word in Hungarian?

Bard, he said.

Yes, I said, that's it. That's the same one. Come bard, read us the report for the last seven days.

We packed up again and went to find the hypermart, this mythical supermarket that Gusztáv assured me existed around the first hotel and which I was sceptical of until we did finally find it walking up a different road and we both bought things for our kids and families. I wandered around and for the first time in our two-week friendship, Gusztáv was more worried about the time than I was and urging us to go, while I picked up different things and said, Hey man, look at this, it's like nine rupees, that's crazy.

Back at the hotel, Gusztáv left to get a larger bag and came back with a range of other things and a huge suitcase to put everything away in and I left to get him more cash and thought to buy him a coconut water on the way back. The woman cut the coconut open and said 60 rupees, but I only had 50 and then larger bills and we went back and forth until she said, Okay next time, 10 rupees, and I said Yes, of course, the next time I see her I will give her ten rupees, that would be no problem.

I booked the cheapest Uber to the airport, forty minutes for under 900 rupees, a laughably small amount for the trip, and an old, beat-up car with a massive dent in the front picked us up and in the back, my seatbelt worked but Gusztáv's didn't and again, we had the same set conversation about impending death in a cab, about the value of life in a country of billions, and how sadly comical it would be to get this far and then die. The Uber driver stopped on the highway on the way out at the side of the road, saying wait, wait, and I looked at my watch, and Gusztáv got out of the car too, returning to say, He's getting lunch here, I'm going to get something too, it doesn't matter, we're here anyway, do you want something?

As a rule, you should not travel with someone you just met, certainly not for two weeks, certainly not sharing a room for a significant part of the time, certainly not in India, unless you have met this person through Chris, Swedish Chris, and then you should trust that you will be completely fine the whole way. Gusztáv and I discussed at some point the necessity of being able to talk about your shits with your travel companions in India, but that also, you needed to know when you should stop talking about your shits, because it could be too much. The Goldilocks Principle of Shit Talk. It is also unspoken, but you need a kind of Shit Second, like you are in a duel, a person who will aid you when you need to immediately, desperately take a shit, who might even stand in front of you while you shit in a ditch, to block people's view of you shitting and to give you something to wipe your ass and have hand sanitiser ready and to never mention this again in polite company.

You need someone who will laugh with you about the absurdity of what you are experiencing, who will not get angry when the wrong food comes, when you order something and it's not what you expected, someone who will laugh at that, who will say when you ask if it's good, No, and then laugh and laugh. When there is no toilet paper and you have to wash your ass, someone who thinks, maybe we've had it wrong all along with our ass-wiping technology, someone who can discuss this seriously with you before bursting into laughter. If you are uptight and schedule-oriented, you need someone less so, who will talk you into doing something you wouldn't normally think you had time for, who will tell you not to worry at times you don't need to worry. If you are not worried about the schedule and don't pay much attention to detail, you need a body man, someone who will steer you towards the exits when it's time to leave, who will watch carefully when things have gone on too long, and you need to go to the next thing. Who will tell you it's time to cut things off.

Gusztáv, I said throughout the trip, is a master interviewer and ethnographer; he leaned forward listening to people talk even when he couldn't understand the Tamil because if you listen carefully to someone speaking a language that you don't know, you can actually hear what they are saying. He asked questions and said, I don't understand, when he didn't understand and pushed people to explain every step of a process that they did so naturally they didn't realise it was so complex. He would talk to everyone; all the times I had been in places where people came up and talked to me, and I tried to get them to leave. Gusztáv would not. He would put his hand on their shoulder or their knee and look in their eyes. He spoke to a barefooted real estate agent on the street in Hyderabad as we were leaving and marvelled at his lack of shoes, how important of a detail this was. When he wanted to be free, he would speak Hungarian to them, and they would smile and laugh and leave us alone most of the time.

The flight was without incident and we left the airport at Doha to see the city, as we both had long layovers, but my energy fell out of me, and the city, all curated and clean, with men in robes and sweepers everywhere swooping in to pick up rubbish, felt artificial: this is Disneyland isn't it, I said. We stood to cross a six-lane highway through the city, huge SUVs driving shockingly fast, but legally and orderly and I joked: look, it may seem intimidating, but you just need to step out into the traffic and make eye contact and they will stop for you, and we laughed about the insanity of this. We took the metro back to the airport, and tried to find a quiet room for Gusztáv to rest, the same thing I had done with the girls when we came through two summers ago on the way to Japan. The sleeping rooms were $117 and we wandered a bit more before deciding that it was time, finally, to part ways. We took a selfie in front of the giant, ridiculous teddy bear sculpture and then Gusztáv was gone.

From then, it was nothing. A random bag search. A protein bar. On the plane, a man was standing in my seat, an Asian man with two other Asian guys sitting in the same row, all middle-aged and he said, I was wondering if you could swap seats with me, and I said, where are you sitting, and he said, the middle seat up there, and I laughed, no man, sorry, if you had kids maybe, and I pushed past them. And then sleeping and waking and sleeping and then circling Birmingham, delayed, and then in an Uber, the radio playing Rocking around the Christmas Tree, because yes, right, it is Christmas in this world, in this reality. Home, if there is a home.

Gusztáv said at one point, Do you ever think about how these people here, these lives have all been going on this whole time you've been alive, that all of this will keep going on when you leave, how mad that is. It is mad. It's too much to bear if you think about it, those palm tappers now eating rice for lunch in their homes, the white men who were there last week already a memory. A cow right now is rummaging through a rubbish pile in Dindigul and no one is looking at it because it is completely normal. No one is taking pictures. I walk down the high street in Harborne and no one wants a picture with me. I pay with an app on my phone and sit and wait for another friend to come and talk to me about what I've missed while I've been away. The sun goes down at 3:30 or 4 and it's warm for the winter, but cold under any other circumstances. You can cross the road when there are no cars because there are frequently no cars. You can drink the water, but now, as you fill your cup you can think to yourself, It's strange that I can drink the water.