The morning we were to drive back to Delhi I woke with a case of travellers' diarrhoea. I didn't discover this, unfortunately, until after I'd consumed everything in sight at the hotel's buffet breakfast. I was not looking forward to the five-hour drive to Delhi.
Thankfully, modern medicine really is marvellous and after a couple of Imodium I was ready for the drive. However, I was so worried about this particular problem that I forgot about the need to limit my intake of liquids that morning (so as to avoid needing to use a bathroom on the drive). The inevitable happened, and about half an hour into the drive, I found myself tapping Mr S on the shoulder and asking in a pathetically desperate voice, "bathroom?".
Bathrooms along the highway from Jaipur to Delhi are hard to come by. The only bathroom anywhere close to where we were was, Mr S told me, one at a nearby tea house. Mr S pulled the car into the driveway of this tea house. I think the name "house" in that description may be is overstating it. The tea house was a building that had three walls instead of four: two at the sides and one at the front. There was no back wall, meaning the odd chicken or goat could (and did) come in freely and wander around inside.
I went into the tea house, with G close behind me for moral support, waving a 10IR note and pleading with the toothless old man behind the counter "toilet"? He pointed me to somewhere at the side of the tea house. "No water, no light" he said. Sure enough, I wandered into a tiny pitch-black cubical, inside of which was a fetid, drop squat toilet. There was no working light in the cubical and there were also no windows. I stood at the door to the cubical for a few moments, trying to decide just how I was to use this toilet in the absence of light. Leaving the door to the cubical open when using it would mean I had just enough light to make out the fetid toilet. However, on the downside, it would also mean the proprietor of the store, the goats and chickens and anyone else who might stop by would see me going to the toilet. On the other hand, if I shut the door, no one would see me but I would also not be able to see anything and so would run the risk of putting my foot inside the fetid toilet. Neither seemed a very dignified option. Nonetheless, nature was calling (or rather screaming) and demanding I make a decision. I decided to shut the door, and held G's mobile phone in my mouth, using it as a torch to make out the shadowy outline of the squat toilet. I thereby managed to avoid stepping into the toilet which is just as well given the old man was not lying about there being no running water in the place.
Toilet disaster avoided, we wandered back to the car, with me peering into Mr S's face, in the hope of being able to determine whether dropping me off at this toilet was a joke he played on all foreigners or whether, indeed, this was the only toilet around. Mr S's poker face was too good for me to tell.
We continued on our way to Delhi.
F had very kindly organised or us to stay in a room at a guest house in an upmarket residential area of Delhi. In Delhi it seems most of the middle class live in these enormous, sprawling gated housing blocks. The blocks are alphabetically named and each house within them is given a number. There is no rhyme or reason to the naming or numbering of these blocks. For example, we found ourselves staying in S block. Across the road was E block. The numbering also did not follow the usual order. And, to make matters worse, there seemed to be no street names. This meant that this first journey to find the guesthouse with Mr S (and, indeed, every subsequent journey with taxi drivers) took some time. It seems that in the absence of a coherent lettering and numbering system, and given the lack of street names, the usual way to find a place is to stop as many people in the street as possible and ask for directions. All this was done in Hindi, of course, but even without a knowledge of the language, G and I could see that every person stopped would agree they knew where our guesthouse was but would then point in a different direction from the last person. F later explained to us that this is because many people want to seem helpful, and don't want to say "no", even if they don't know an answer. The result was that seemingly for hours Mr S, G and I drove around in circles trying to find the guesthouse. Eventually, Mr S parked the car on a street that we thought must be close and we all got out, looking at the house numbers and trying to work out where we were. Thankfully, at that precise moment, a small chubby child came bounding along. He would have been no more than 11 years old, and was literally bouncing up and down, with the energy that only small children seem to have. He must have been used to confused looking foreigners in the neighbourhood, because the second he saw us, he simply asked if we were looking at the guesthouse and pointed us in the right direction.
We said goodbye to Mr S and dragged our luggage into the guesthouse, ready for the Delhi leg of our trip.
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