English Audio Request

I had heard the old cliché about how when you arrive in India, it’s like stepping into an oven, but this hadn’t prepared me for the fact that when you arrive in India, it is like stepping into an oven.

After queuing for several hours at immigration, we escaped the airport and discovered that it was even madder outside. The minute we were in the open air, several rugby teams of smelly men launched themselves at us and tried to pull us to bits, so that we could send separate limbs to town on different forms of transport.
After the bus dropped us off, we went to the Ringo Guest House, which sounded cool, and was the first place mentioned in the Lonely Planet. It was a short walk from the bus-stop, down a side-street.

Not that our route bore much resemblance to what I’d call a street. There was no tarmac for a start -- just compacted mud which was thick with dust and dotted with green puddles, piles of rubbish and the odd cow-pat. Amazingly, most people were walking around in flip-flops.

I took a good look at the people, and they didn’t look anything like the Indians in England. It wasn’t that they looked physically different, or even that they were wearing weird clothes. There was something else I couldn’t put my finger on that looked completely alien. Something in the way they moved, and in their facial expressions. Whatever it was, it scared the shit out of me. (…)

The hotel was up a dark staircase, and consisted of a few double rooms positioned off a cramped roof courtyard. A man (…) told us there were no more double rooms available, so we’d have to take beds in the dorm. He then led the way up a ladder to a higher corner of the roof, on which a corrugated-iron hut had been built.

The metal walls and roof turned the dorm into even more of an oven than the rest of the country was anyway. The room was crammed with beds, and as my eyes adjusted from the
outside glare to the murky dormitory, I could pick out a few depressed-looking travellers lying around on their beds. (…)

This did not look like a bunch of people having fun. (…) The thought that this could be
anyone’s idea of the best place in Delhi was depressing beyond belief. Due to the heat, however, wandering around with our backpacks until we found somewhere we liked simply wasn’t an option.

Liz fished the guidebook out of her pack, and we saw that there was one other recommended hotel in the area, called Mrs Colaço’s. The book described it as ‘basic, crowded and rather hard on the nerves’, which didn’t sound particularly inviting, but it was the only one nearby that was mentioned, so we hauled ourselves through the hot, soupy air towards Mrs Colaço’s.

This had a marginally less spirit-crushing atmosphere than Ringo’s, and wasn’t quite so full of catatonic hippies. Again, there were no actual rooms available, but we gratefully took dormitory beds, relieved to have at last found somewhere to flop.

We flopped.

Lying on my hard bed, staring at the ceiling fan, which was rotating just slowly enough to have absolutely no effect on the surrounding air whatsoever, I realized that I had never really been hot before. I mean, I’d had hot skin, in the sun, and I’d got hot from running around, but I’d never had this strange sensation of feeling like a slab of meat cooking from the inside. (…)

How could people live like this? How could a country function in these conditions? How could so much air possibly reach such a temperature without heating up the entire planet?

We couldn’t unpack, since there was nowhere to put anything, so once we’d had a good flop, we didn’t really know what to do.