India

Last week I bought a dedicated scanner, because some slides had come into my hands from trips made when computing was still reserved for a few and digital cameras were yet to come. Scanning is a bit like travelling... images pass before your eyes that bring back memories you had by now buried and let you retrace a journey much of which you believed you had forgotten. So let's come to the trip: Turin - New Delhi and around Rajasthan 25 years later. My wife and I were 30, we had just finished university, we had got married, our daughter had been born only a year earlier and I was starting a profession, and so, as is easy to imagine, our finances would at most have allowed us a two-week holiday at the “Pensione Ondina” in one of the many little towns on the Ligurian coast. But you only live once, and so off we went.. in search of a super-cheap flight to India.

A few years earlier we had tried to reach that country overland in our heroic Citroën Dyane but had had to give up the venture. This time, down with stinginess, we would take a plane. Departure from Milan (because Turin airport - our beloved city - then offered, almost as today, only the line: Racunis/Levaldis/Paris, which for non-Piedmontese translates as Racconigi, Levaldigi, Paris - even if the Levaldigi/Paris route often was/is not available). First stop Copenhagen, second stop Darham and then finally Delhi. The route was a bit long, but besides being the cheapest it had a further advantage: in Copenhagen we would spend one night at KLM's expense in a splendid 4* hotel and would thus have the chance to visit it, at least for one evening.

On arriving in Copenhagen I was struck down by a raging fever, so much so that of that city I remember only the ceiling of the hotel room (a 4* ceiling, no less), while my friends and my wife enjoyed themselves so much that they had things to talk about for the rest of the journey. The next morning - fully recovered - we boarded a plane for Darham, where we were only supposed to make a technical stop of a few hours, time that our Hosts thought fit to have us spend in a bunker with no windows and no air conditioning, after confiscating all the pornographic magazines we had brought with us (I remember precisely that my wife had a copy of “Grazia”, my friend Nando had “Panorama” and I, the usual transgressor, had nothing less than “L'Espresso”).

My photographic films had no better fate, as they were temporarily held and returned only after two or three hours of negotiation during which I tried to explain that, having not yet departed, I did not even have a single photo yet. I remember that a policeman absolutely wanted to examine the films to make sure they were not exposed.... beyond the technical difficulty the operation would have involved, I thought at that moment that the fever of the previous evening had been truly providential, otherwise who knows what photos I would have taken in the Copenhagen by night of the 1980s.....

Arriving in Delhi, by the cheapest means of transport on the market - a sort of three-wheeler known there as a Bimu - we reached an “Hotel” that my brother-in-law had recommended to us, a well-known globe-trotter who now works as the director of an important tour operator promising no-problem holidays (everyone changes). It was not exactly a hotel in the usual sense of the word; perhaps the Italian term that best conveys the idea would be “fetid hovel”, but after 24 hours of travelling the place seemed fantastic to us. The next morning we had an appointment with our driver, who, aboard an old Fiat 110, would take us around that enchanted country. The driver was called Sigh and was a Sikh, a very handsome one... both my wife and my friend Nando's partner fell in love with him at once, and from that moment he became our “expedition leader”.

He had only one small flaw: he was convinced - and I won't argue whether he was right or wrong - that Sikhs are a superior caste and that therefore everyone owed him homage and respect, even when he came from the left at a crossroads or when the dimensions of the road did not allow two vehicles to pass at the same time. On the fact that he was superior I never argued, but his absolute certainty that, through the window at a distance of a few dozen metres, the others would recognise him, was the main topic of conversation.

But there was no arguing: he was handsome, so handsome that he would always have been right!!! The rest of the trip was fantastic; India is an unforgettable country, and at that time, when Indians were not yet able to build cars and computers and did not control the world's internet communications, contenting themselves with living and believing in man and in a myriad of Gods, it was as fascinating as no other place on the planet. Just one anecdote: one day at lunch we stopped near a canopy where, according to our “expedition leader”, we would have been able to eat superlative Tandoori chicken (N.B. in India at that time one ate nothing but superlative Tandoori chicken).

We lay down on some sun loungers and I asked where I might go for a blessed pee; the innkeeper (sic..) pointed me to a stream nearby where his kind wife, who was washing aluminium plates, courteously pointed me to a secluded spot upstream of the improvised kitchen. I thought it was not exactly hygienic to do my business in the water with which the lady was washing the dishes, but, so as not to contradict her, I set off in that direction, intending to find a little tree far from the stream; after about fifty metres I saw, right in the water of the rivulet, the lifeless body of a cow in the process of putrefaction... I thought of the plates the lady was washing and asked myself whether it would not have been better to eat off healthy dirty plates with the leftovers of the previous guest. That day I ate a banana.

But the journey I am telling you about, in all its beauty, is not the one I made 25 years ago but the one I made with my slides in hand, comfortably seated in the armchair of my study, and it has the merit of being a new journey: the second time I went to India. Giorgioland.