Are You Experienced? by William Sutcliffe

Author:William Sutcliffe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780140283587
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Published: 1997-09-26T18:30:00+00:00

Cross-cultural interchange

And so it was that I ended up on my own. Ranj had been kidnapped by his family, Liz had become a Hare Krishna, and Jeremy was just a lost cause as a human being. Other than them, there was no one I knew in the entire country.

By this stage I was bored of Pushkar. After the argument with Liz I felt that I ought to get moving in order to give the impression that I wasn’t frightened of being alone, but the fact was, even the thought of travelling on my own made my already loose bowels take on the character of a deflating balloon.

I did not want to be on my own. I just didn’t. There was only one thing in the world that would have been worse than being alone, and that was being with Jeremy.

Pushkar was such a small place that it didn’t even have a railway station. The nearest one was a few hours away by bus, in Ajmer. As I walked alone to the Pushkar bus station to buy myself a ticket to Ajmer, I felt like one of those old men who amble around in parks feeding ducks, eating sandwiches out of a paper bag and trying to talk to strangers. This was bleak. Nineteen years old, and I already felt like a lonely pensioner.

I couldn’t recall ever having felt lonely before. It was a weird sensation – for the moment a bit exciting, but I could tell that once I got used to it, it would be awful.

Our plan had been to stop in Udaipur, Ahmedabad and Bombay before we got to Goa, but I decided to ditch the original itinerary and head straight there. This meant that I would be going half-way down the entire country in one go, but I couldn’t face stopping in places where I might end up in some hotel on my own, without any other travellers. I mean, there’d be some people in each of those places, but I’d already learned that in big towns, travellers weren’t very friendly. And I didn’t even really want to see Udaipur, Ahmedabad and Bombay, anyway. I mean, a city’s a city.

If I could just grit my teeth and make it on my own to Goa, I’d be able to hang out there and meet some new people. I was bound to find someone who’d travel with me. Maybe even a female. A lot of that kind of thing went on in Goa, apparently.

I turned to the map of India at the front of The Book and worked out from the scale that the width of my little finger corresponded to roughly two hundred miles. I then measured Pushkar to Goa, and it came out at six little-finger-widths. That couldn’t be right. One thousand two hundred miles? I didn’t even know the whole country was that length.

Whatever. I closed the book. This was clearly a long journey. But it would be worth it in the end. After all, I still had precisely two hundred condoms left.

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