Incredible India - Part 1

Shanti Seldon looked at me with considerable scepticism when I told her where I was staying in Mumbai. It was the Coral Hotel, not at all far from her fashionable apartment on the edge of the Oval Maidan, but it clearly had an unsavoury reputation. I already knew why.

I had arrived the night before, tired by a long train journey from Delhi and weakened by illness — a naïve stranger in a distant land. I had bundled my luggage into the old-fashioned grid-cage lift and selected the fifth floor. As the cage rattled its way upwards, a buxom girl in a frilly frock tried to keep pace with it using the staircase which wrapped around the lift shaft, four flights to a floor.

As I turned the key to enter room 513, she caught up with me, panting. “Are you needing company?” was the gist of what she asked. Before I could answer, a smaller, lighter girl arrived, similarly attired and apparently with something similar in mind.

I told them both that their services were not required. Had I been less tired, less stressed, and less weakened by my recent exposure to Delhi-belly, I would have still declined their offer. Health, hygiene, and cost would all have been critical factors. But clearly, the hotel was not coy about these unlisted guest services.

Shanti was the mother of an Anglo-Indian school friend of mine. His parents were now apart, and his mother, an accomplished concert pianist, was back in her homeland. She was one of the very few contacts I had in India for what turned out to be one of the most formative, exciting, and thought-provoking experiences of my whole life.

In the year that followed, she was always a slightly arm’s-length source of poise and cautious advice. At that first meeting, she came up trumps, finding a painter in her address book whom she vaguely knew who rented out her spare rooms. Hence, my second night in what was then called Bombay was in a room bedecked with large flower paintings. Bella Spencer, my new landlady, was as flamboyant as her art — a large English woman given to extravagant gestures in real life as well as on canvas. The living arrangements were ideal, and the location was superb.

Now to confirm my job.

I had travelled overland to India in one of the many private minibuses making the 7,000-mile journey, thanks to a wonderful driver and guide, Jim Latif, along with about seven other paying passengers. This was slightly after George Harrison and the Beatles made the Maharishi famous, and hippie ‘magic bus’ trips were becoming popular. Ours was a far less psychedelic arrangement and Jim was going to connect with family in northern Pakistan. We were, in effect, making his trip cost effective.  Apart from me, a journalist, others included a policewoman taking a career break, and an author who write for Reader’s Digest.  The exciting overland journey, in a specially adapted ‘Commer FC’ van, went quickly through Europe, then Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan and on, eventually, to Delhi. This was only really possible for a brief period in the late sixties. Many of the borders we went through are now closed. Most of the other passengers were going and coming back, like Jim himself. I was going out to India to work on the ‘promise’ of a reporter’s job with the Press Trust of India (PTI). Not that the promise came from the employer itself, but from another former school friend who was handing his job over to me and moving on. If you have already sensed how nave this was, you’re ahead of me. I hadn’t twigged. Perhaps I didn’t want to.

So when, on my third day in Mumbai, I presented myself at the PTI offices, they had never heard of me, didn’t employ non-Indian journalists, and would have never, ever have allowed an ex-employee to ‘pass on’ his job.

I was 22, and the lure of working in India with all its exotic connotations had completely overridden any common sense. Now my former school friend, Satish, was uncontactable. In fact, I never did discover whether he had actually ever worked for the PTI, or whether this was just one aspect of a very common Indian characteristic. I came to learn quite quickly that many lovely, kind, well-intentioned people from that land have a habit of telling you what they think you want to hear, rather independent of the real-life situation…

This was my first, gobsmacking experience of just that syndrome! The bottom line was that I was now alone in India with very modest savings, an open-dated plane ticket home (my safety belt), no job, and no way to earn a living or pay my way.

To make matters worse, I quickly learned that all jobs in journalism had to be offered to Indian nationals first. It was not just a rule for the PTI. Fortunately, what I also learned was that, like many aspects of life in India in the late sixties, the official rules were just that: official rules. The realities were quite different.

It meant that I was able to freelance for a wonderful, mis-titled news journal, the Economic & Political Weekly, which then came out fortnightly at the time. It meant that I could write the occasional feature for the Indian Express and The Times of India.

But reality also meant that, busy as I might be, the payment for my work came nowhere near matching the terms agreed with Bella. My savings, in £10 notes carefully stored in a hidden place in Bella’s bungalow, were dwindling. Even at the generous unofficial exchange rate readily available everywhere, I was not paying my way.

But once again, help was at hand.

To recap, my first jobs as a journalist had been for trade journals in London. Coming from a scientific family, I had started studying Maths and Physics at A-level before taking up journalism, first with the Electrical & Electronic Trader and then with Instrument Practice. This had been my training ground, and now The Indian & Eastern Engineer in Mumbai needed an editor. They couldn’t put my name anywhere in print, but that didn’t stop them from giving me the job. At Rs 300 (rupees) a month (then £15), it meant I was almost solvent.

I moved out of the flower-art bungalow and got a room with Mrs Lalvani in Colaba, not far from the famous Gateway of India monument. Instead of paying Rs 600 a month for a lovely room in a Western-style bungalow with breakfast, I now had a simple but adequate room in a lodgings with two other tenants, both South Indian men studying in Mumbai. Although the rent was Rs 320, with my column for the magazine and my feature articles, I was more or less solvent, even if I wasn't accumulating any savings.

I could feed myself at the numerous street cafes for a pittance—I rarely paid as much as Rs 2 for a meal (10p). Mrs Lalvani, an overweight Sindhi widow in spotless, flowing white robes, was unobtrusive and pleasant. An added bonus was that the two other boarders, T.K. Chakrapani and N.S. Rao, were delightful, helpful companions who became lifelong friends and who added immeasurably to my ability to learn and understand an Indian way of life. They never once told me something just because they thought it was what I wanted to hear!

I tried to catch up with Satish to straighten things out, and several times over the following months I went to his elegant apartment block near the Chowpatty beach area on spec. These were the days long before mobile phones. Each time, I rang a buzzer intercom, gave a message to whoever answered, and was never buzzed in. “Not here.” No explanation, nothing. It was a stark contrast to the generous hospitality I experienced almost everywhere else.

I quickly got into the groove at the magazine, setting up more professional systems than they had perhaps been used to. The large editorial office was on the second floor of a typical Mumbai town-centre building. Walking up the stairs, you encountered loose electrical cables hanging from makeshift clips and hooks. There were bare wires and frayed insulation. The walls, perhaps once painted white or cream, were now spattered with the red-brown stain of betel nut juice. Like the chewing tobacco of old, many Indian men chewed what is known as paan — an edible leaf folded around a package of lime, pieces of betel nut, and other substances, used as a stimulant and narcotic. You need more than a toothbrush to remove the stain of the nut from your teeth and typically, excess saliva is spat out almost anywhere. It was always a wonder to me that any electrical circuit worked anywhere in India!

In those days, journalists worked on paper with pencils, making special marks for the printers to follow. I used an old Underwood manual typewriter, roughly the size of a modern microwave. The proprietor of the magazine, among several others, was an easy-going Indian businessman who probably had many other enterprises to dabble in. I worked alone in the office most of the time, easily finding my feet and settling into a practised routine. I can remember little of what I actually wrote or edited, except for a special edition in July when the Apollo 11 mission successfully transported astronaut Neil Armstrong to the lunar surface. It was big news everywhere around the world, and for a technical journal, it had extra significance. The American publicity machine was in full spate!

Back home in Britain, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister. His Labour government was struggling with economic difficulties, major industrial relations battles, the lowering of the voting age to 18, and the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland requiring the deployment of British troops.

All this needed explaining in my "Letter from London" column in the Economic & Political Weekly to an Indian audience who had, the year before, been horrified by Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. It was already clear that many people could not even begin to understand what was happening in what they regarded as the home of democracy.

I have no idea what I might have been asked to do working for the PTI, but the work I was doing was fun, interesting and nicely varied. I was never once homesick.