Patience. You need a lot of it in India; a country shakily independent for half a century now and a country which thrives on confusion. The age of imperialism may be officially over but hoary old Raj ghosts are still haunting certain aspects of Indian life. Apart from the roads, railways, bridges and irrigation systems established by the British, there infamously remains also a complex system of civil services administration. Tortuous bureaucracy that is inescapable and involves so much waiting for things to happen that it made me wonder if Samuel Beckett had ever been to India.
India devours time, gobbles it up, which is where the need for patience comes in. Something as deceptively simple as posting a parcel in Delhi, for instance, took me an entire morning. This involved shuttling from the man with the weighing scales, to the man who sewed up my belongings into a swaddle of white cotton, from the man who put sealing wax on the parcel to the man who subsequently made an impression on the wax, from the man who stuck on my customs forms to the man who sold the stamps, and finally, from the man who franked the stamps to the man who took the parcel. By that stage, I was gibbering, not to mention awe-struck at the methods of job creation.
No one knows exactly what the current population of India is, but it seems to veer between 800 million and 850 million; a floating statistic that mirrors the essence of India - vast discrepancies, huge numbers, and elusive finites.
In the four months I spent there, I never quite got used to the weirdness of Indian bureaucracy, which permeates the most unexpected areas of day-to-day life and defies logic. Take banknotes. Indian currency comes from the bank pre-stapled in thick wads. Unless the teller is exceptionally dextrous, each brand-new banknote emerges from the wad with a staple tear. Nobody in India wants to accept damaged currency and yet practically all the notes in circulation are torn before they even leave the bank. I lost track of the number of arguments I had with hotel owners, shopkeepers, restaurateurs and rickshaw wallahs over torn banknotes.
In the end, I simply presented my torn banknotes to whichever person I owed money to and said it was all I had. This was the only method that worked. And the banknotes? They had to be taken back to the bank by disgruntled merchants and exchanged at the Damaged Currency counter for yet more newly-torn notes.
Yet, after a while, the haphazard begins to make its own sense. I began expecting the unexpected a few days after arriving when I succumbed to the torment of amazing smells from a street stall near my hotel and sat one afternoon devouring samosas and jalebi (rings of deep-fried batter, soaked in syrup). Mice darted around my feet and the ubiquitous cows hovered greedily nearby, waiting for the bowls made of leaves, which I threw them when I was finished. That night, I waited for hell to invade my body, but nothing happened.
During the months that followed, in the inevitable conversations of Asia where everyone enthusiastically swaps stories of their bowel movements, I had no stories to tell. The unexpected cast-iron constitution I discovered in India became almost embarrassing in its reliability. Memsahibs of the Raj had fallen like flies but I seemed to be the unromantic equivalent of a Celtic dustbin.
Everything about India is contradictory. Bombay is a staggeringly wealthy city, where real estate is now more expensive than in Tokyo, but half of its 15 million citizens live in slums. For most of the year, there is drought across the country and then the monsoon comes and there are floods. Millions of people who do not have enough to eat share the streets with millions of sacred cows, who cannot be eaten. Fifty years after independence, English is still the common denominator of official communication - in government, business and media - even though it's spoken fluently by less than 5 per cent of the population.
One of the advantages of being able to read newspapers in India is the insight it allows into the social structure of the country. You cannot become a Hindu: you are born one, and so born into an accompanying caste system, within which there is little mobility. Brahmins are at the top of the caste system and Untouchables at the bottom and the twain seldom meet. Subsequently, it is the norm for marriages to be arranged. There are pages upon pages of extraordinary small ads in all the papers, in which prospective brides and grooms offer themselves with uncomfortable honesty.
The ads placed by prospective grooms always asked for beautiful, slim, fair, homely, sweet-natured girls. The would-be grooms invariably lived in a posh house, were smart, well-established, highly-qualified and healthy. Apart from specifying the physical appearance of their intended bride, there were requests that she be natural, simple, virtuous, chaste and well-versed in household affairs. One prospective groom stated firmly that his bride should expect nothing. Another wanted a pretty genius girl.
Even flaws, physical or otherwise, were scrupulously mentioned. Failed exams and lost scholarships were ritually listed. Missed university admission by 2 per cent; unsuccessfully considered for junior research position. In the same vein, illness and physical defects were openly admitted. Fully treated small patch tuberculoid leprosy; slightest defect hand, leg; polio in left leg non-judgeable; wears lenses, uses crutches - all made it into print.
The ads placed by women were as traditionally old-fashioned as the values expected by men. Women declared themselves expert in household work, thrifty, sensible and home-committed. One advertised herself as competent of various dishes and expert in tailoring, embroidery and painting. I became an addict of The Sunday Times Of India, compelled by the Victorian-sounding lives advertised there.
Apart from the yards of red tape, the bridges and railways and the English language which is part of the imperial legacy, there are certain places whose names still carry a resonance of a particular time. These are the hill stations beloved of the Merchant Ivory school of film-making, which the British established as mountain refuges from the thick heat of summer on the Indian plains; Darjeeling, Simla, Ooty, Kodai Kanal, Dharamsala.
Like all the other hill stations, the architecture of Darjeeling's public buildings would blend seamlessly into an Edinburgh streetscape. The severe grey stone of Darjeeling's clock tower, the bank and the post office confused me into a moment or two of deja vu when I first saw them: where was I, Scotland or India?
Yet, while the structures remain, the functions of many of these imperialist buildings have changed. It was a couple of days before I realised that the vast old Anglican church in Darjeeling has now been appropriated by a different generation for their own uses. The devout still congregate at the church, not for prayer, but to view one of the Hindi movies that resound to the rafters twice daily. The place has been reincarnated as a cinema. Coming down the hill behind the church, I looked in through stained glass windows and watched as distorted images of the film jumped about weirdly within, like whirling dervishes.
But the Indian placename that perhaps reverberates more than any other upon Western ears is that of Calcutta. Although the city by no means possesses the monopoly on poverty, the name of Calcutta has become synonymous with deprivation. In Calcutta you realise the rarest luxury in India is privacy. 800 or 850 million people: it doesn't matter. The twitchy statistics come brutally alive; the inhuman scale of the population and its accompanying problems is an inescapable fact. There are simply too many people. The slums extend everywhere and the streets are home to those who cannot find a home in a slum.
In the back streets, buildings lean against each other like badly-shelved books. I walked for hours looking for one complete structure and found none. This one had no roof, that one lacked a gable wall and over there was the crosssection of one, its floors layered open to the world like a doll's house. The scaffolding was everywhere, made of bamboo and tied together with bits of rope, unsubstantial as cobwebs. In places, the scaffolding appeared to be the only frail thing holding the frail buildings together. This, then, is why Asian houses tumble like cards in earthquakes.
In Calcutta, I horrified myself by understanding how little a life can be worth. The currency of poverty is cheap life, and death in India is unremarkable because it happens all the time. On my last night there, I consulted my guidebook and made a deliberate decision to eat in the Amber; the city's best restaurant. I was lucky, and in Calcutta, I knew it as never before.
The guidebook was right: the place was packed and there were queues out the door. I was the only Westerner there. At the end of that meal in the Amber, I looked around the restaurant while I was waiting for the coffee to arrive. There was something peculiar about the place but I couldn't quite puzzle out what it was. Realisation struck me on the second coffee. I was the only thin diner in the Amber. Every Indian man, woman and child there was overweight. They were all ample. Some were portly. A few verged on obese.
I fairly stared around me. Every man had jowls and a paunch, every woman plump arms and large breasts, every child a rotund face and chubby legs. The wealth in the Amber was literally on display; rolls of fat proudly displayed like jewels. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life.
In India, nothing is wasted. Everything is recycled or mended and even the rubbish dumps have a population who spend their lives picking through the filth in the hope of finding something that has been overlooked.
In Madras, I had to catch an early train and wandered down the street outside my hotel until I found a cycle rickshaw-wallah. He had just woken up, still curled in the bottom of his rickshaw. We set off and I registered that the rickshaw was more than unusually uncomfortable but I thought nothing of it until we turned down a side alley, away from the station. The rickshaw-wallah jumped down and woke an elderly woman sleeping on the pavement. She rose groggily to her feet, handed over a couple of rupees and then the red padded rickshaw seat, on which she had been sleeping. She had obviously rented it as a bed for the night. I felt simultaneously wretched for unwittingly depriving an old woman of a couple of hours sleep and amazed anew at the ingenuity for survival in India.
You do not leave India quite the same person you were on arrival. I will not easily forget that evening in Calcutta at the Amber nor the mutilated children without arms or legs who were lying face downwards on the pavement outside: left there all day to beg and collected like parcels each evening. Nor will I forget seeing the white marble minarets of the Taj Mahal slowly emerge from the ethereal white mist of a colourless dawn. Or sliding through the backwaters of Kerala in a boat, where people live on verdant slices of land overhung by palms and banana trees. Or staying so long talking at a beachside cafe in Goa that the tide came in and the table floated off into the moonlight. Or being mesmerised by the silk merchants of Varanasi, who moved like magicians, flicking out scarves one by one, the silk flying up like quick kites and every colour in the world snapping across the room. Or having an unexpected audience with the Dalai Lama in the mountain village of Dharamsala, where the Tibetan community in exile is based. I still have the knotted red thread I was given at that audience. It's supposed to protect you from all obstacles, but I can report that it definitely has its off days.
Before I went to India, I was given a piece of advice that resounded in my head throughout my time there. "If you go to India," the man who sold me my sleeping bag in London said, "you'll know when it's time to leave. It might be two days, two months or two years, but if you stay after feeling you want to leave, then you'll end up hating it." After four months, my internal alarm clock went off. I crossed the Pakistani border three days later, my head crammed with treasure.