The other Phnom Penh

The lychee Caipiroska is excellent. The walls are a matte British racing green. The furniture is lightish wood and grainy leather. The music is hipster house, as is the clientele. I, in my glamorous solitude, fit right in. The manager, assuming resident not tourist, comes over to give me her card and express surprise at never having seen me before. I tell her it's because she doesn't have WiFi. Which may have been true if I lived here – we in Asia consider free WiFi our most important birthright. It seems as if the less free the government, the more freely available the Internet access. It’s all part of the complexity that makes it equal parts exhilarating and frustrating.

The next stop is European, in the Hollywood sense of the word. Ceilings vault upwards, walls are bare stone, furniture is sparse. The people are long, lean and effortlessly chic in tiny nondescript t-shirts, minimum make up, barely-there jewellery. Having done this sort of thing a lot in Saigon, I am completely at home, though sporting more shiny things on my person than everyone else here combined.

The one after that is at the other end of the scale, with a bar counter of the poshest concrete, and music of the kind that must have been on the Billboard charts this morning. My body language automatically changes - chin up, shoulders back, sweep in as if that velvet rope is an automatic door, before they bounce you for wearing the wrong shoes. At 9:30pm, I'm too early for a place like this, but there are some other early customers, clouds of perfume and clothes I saw in the Feb issue of Vogue go past me to the VIP area.

As the evening progresses, the crowd is exclusively Khmer, and exclusive by any standard. The “DJ booth" is a whole bank of them spinning as if the Earth's movement depended on it. Sparklers glitter at a surprising number of tables on bottles of Taittinger and Zapaca, making you wonder what on earth could possibly be in the VIP area. The Sambuca shot here is a multi-tier fireshow extravaganza. People are ordering Blue Frogs by the pitcher, absinthe shots by the dozen. It isn't long before I'm gathered into someone's girls' night out. One absinthe shot to Sho Cho’s in Dubai, one Blue Frog to a dive called Jimmy Dix, another drink to real friends, everywhere, and I'm off. Except... Timber comes on, my new companions are fun, and nobody has yet ordered the drink that requires the two-foot straw. When I finally do get out, I'm surprised to find no line of beige Dubai taxis. The tuk-tuks do the job just as efficiently but my confusion is a testimonial to the quality of the club.

My next stop is all brushed steel and silk. If the last club was about money, this one is about power, the patrons not needing sparklers to validate their importance. I end my Saturday Night pilgrimage at a place that can only be described as uber. I have no idea what sort of stuff it’s built of, place and people both, they’re all just… uber. I leave very soon, this kind of thing not being my scene. I like sparklers and fireshows.

This view of Phnom Penh was extended the next morning as I wandered through the designer boutiques on Street 240, sampled handmade chocolates, and discussed the Indian elections with a café owner over Sauvignon Blanc and baguettes.

But when I leave that night, I am – unnervingly – the only flight departing from an international airport. The runway is empty except for a solitary ATR in the distance. And since there are only 12 passengers, it feels a little bit like a secret witness relocation program.

I never did find out what the two-foot straws are for.

Angkor Wat without photographs

Ornate gopurams rising into the sky and thousand-year-old lintels with dancing girls on them are not new to an Indian. Especially not if your school insisted on annual cultural excursions across the length and breadth of South India. I thought of the pretty staggering monuments of India and wondered uneasily whether I’d have to spent the rest of my life lying about how awesome I found Angkor.

I started with the Bayon Temple, and was not disappointed. I automatically went clockwise, in a ritual I have not participated in for at least 15 years, and questioned the faith of even as a child. I also hesitated instinctively when walking through what clearly used to be inner sanctums, though the deities are long gone. I walked up and down many flights of stairs, gave myself vertigo on rooftops. And then walked around the rest of Angkor Thom with growing interest, the laterite damp from humidity, grounds crunchy with fallen baby coconuts, the sun hot as hell.

The sheer scale of it registered slowly, as I explored with much delight many temples with trees growing out of them. Then I set off in the dark pre-dawn for Angkor Wat. Take the feeling of wonder when you first saw the famous Dravidian temples. The delicate, intricate beauty of Belur and Halebid, the awe with which you looked up at Sravanabelagola, the vastness of Hampi, the fastness of Chitradurga, the gloriousness of Tanjore and Madurai, the murals of Mahabalipuram, that tangible feeling of immortality in the dark corridors of many, many coastal temples – and multiply it all by several thousands. That's Angkor Wat. It’s huge.

I discovered along the way that my irreligiousness is fairly well-informed. Apparently, Hinduism is like cricket in India - you pick up the rules and lore anyway, whether you’re a fan or not. I see a random scene in a frame and I know which part of the Mahabharatha it refers to. I overhear a guide talk about the churning of the ocean, and remember my paternal grandmother telling it to me while walking to the ancestral temple through grounds very like these. I've forgotten how the story ended and what happened after the great nectar double-cross. The guide didn't know either, nor did the bas-reliefs. The stone-carvers were having too much fun sculpting crocodiles and sealions to bother with the end of the story. It was a good call. They also gave every elephant, monkey and horse in the battle of Lanka an individual character. Walking along that 600-meter mural is fascinating. The apsaras are Cambodian, but the rishis are Indian. In fact, there's a whole row of them with a distinct resemblance to Guru Nanak.

When you call Angkor Wat awesome, the word has a separate meaning all to itself. There are hundreds of thousands of photos of it - I took many of those myself - but nothing conveys the feeling of seeing it, being there. Stepping in the early morning light into the inner quadrangle of Angkor Wat, I completely forgot about work for the first time in at least three months. I had no chatter in my head.

As for the rest of Siem Reap, well, everything is always dimmed a little when you come from Vietnam, especially the food. The poverty here is abject, defeated, as if the shadow of all the ancient grandeur is too large to step out from under. But the children smile as they sell flutes in woven palm cylinders, and bracelets made of painted seeds. So do their parents, selling juice. Buddhism here is the cynical photo booth that Hinduism is in the historical temples of India: A blessing in an incense stick for a dollar, or the curse of a stranger's god if you choose not to.

But also, like Vietnam, something in the place reaches out and takes your hand. When I left, I wrote this in my notes. It was a Facebook status update that I decided not to post: “Goodbye Cambodia, I really don't want to leave, with my hat, my pirated Harry Potter (that freely mingles two books, the pirates checking page numbers not content), and the largest painting in the world.”

Europe eludes me

I’m in the middle of planning a holiday with childhood friends, brother and sister-in-law. After or before meeting up, we plan to have separate holidays doing different things, so there’s much excitement and argument in the air this weekend. In the course of this, I opened a folder called “Holiday Stuff” to get some Norway information (a holiday minutely planned, but sadly aborted a few years ago) for my sister-in-law and was startled at how much there was in it, and not just about Norway. Looking through the many crowded files, a pattern emerges.

Two-week holiday in Spain. Appointment made and kept at the Spanish Consulate in Abu Dhabi, but visa unused. Tickets, Dubai-Barcelona-Dubai, paid for, then cancelled. Three-week holiday in Denmark and Norway. Flight booking, Dubai-Copenhagen-Oslo-Dubai, confirmed and cancelled. Ticket for the Flam Railway, unused and unrefunded. Email from a fjord cruise saying “Dear Ms Menon, we are pleased to confirm your booking.” Followed by something to the tune of “we don’t normally provide full refunds but as you’ve cancelled well in advance we’re happy to make an exception”. Weekend in Vienna. Another attempt at that one. Eid break in Rome. Another Eid break in Tuscany. New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam, Santorini, Ibiza. The Edinburgh festival. All researched, booked, re-confirmed and cancelled, with military precision. As I said, Europe seems to elude me, for some reason.

Well, not "some reason" - it was always work*. I can list the projects and clients that ruined it last minute. And I’m back in that kind of industry, in that kind of position. So my superstitious misgivings about planning a holiday too much in advance is founded on solid fact. Unfortunately, if you plan to travel in the high season, you have no choice. One must just wait, watch and hope. And maybe comfort oneself with thoughts of lastminute.com to Bangkok or Bali or even Goa for a long weekend, since I don’t need visas in advance for any of them. As you see, I’m a veteran contingency planner. For example, I know with absolute certainty that the contingency I plan for won’t happen. Another one will.

*I'm baffled by the fact that I actually managed to make that four-week US trip! The only unusual factor there was a visit to my cousin on my father’s side. Hmmm. Maybe the contingency plan for the contingency plan should be to burst upon these unknown and unsuspecting cousins from that side. Apparently the three thousand cousins that I already have (as in, those I know and am in touch with) are not enough.

Hello, goodbye

Each time I’m forced to fly Air India, I hope that it will end with me writing something effusive in my blog titled “The Return of the Maharaja”. Sadly, this is still not that day.

My flight involved a six-hour transit through Chennai and they wouldn’t check my luggage through, so I was burdened by a giant suitcase the whole time. Here’s what you do while you wait in Chennai International Airport: nothing. The check-in area, the only place you have access to, is a chaotic game of musical counters, made even more interesting by baffling signage, unhelpful staff and a single stall serving bad coffee. This last should be a federal offence in Chennai.

There were about six and a half seats in the whole place, so I pushed my trolley to a corner, sat on the edge of it and relieved my feelings in aggrieved Facebook status updates. I’d once spent three pre-dawn hours in transit at Chennai Central Station and it was a painless experience. How is the same government not able to fix the damned airport?

Later, I broke off my reading to note that several Gulf flights were leaving and wondered why there didn’t seem to be as many labourers going from here as from other Indian airports. (A few hours earlier, in Bangalore Airport, I’d stood at the glass watching the departure of EK 569 to Dubai, seeing the familiar Emirates tail into the sky in a ceremonial farewell. The last flight of the Concorde was nothing to it.)

When they started with the flights going east, there seemed to be about 7000 flights a minute to Singapore. Most airlines had the normal mix of passenger types, but Singapore Airlines was wall-to-wall elderly parents. It’s a telling customer testimonial – when your children or parents are travelling unaccompanied, you choose the best not the cheapest. Their counter was properly sign-posted, luggage was screened efficiently and their lines moved quickly. Somehow they’d managed to build a little outpost of Changi Airport with the same resources available to everyone else. I was entertained by the old folks for a while, here a dad demanding to know where a mom has kept the tickets, there a mom tightening a piece of ridiculous ribbon on a suitcase, everywhere a couple of parents arguing over who was wrong last year about something unimportant. In between, I felt sad that I was leaving my own behind.

The Air India queues were full of people fearing they’d traded comfort, convenience, efficiency and politeness for a much cheaper ticket. In the event, we did them a disservice. The food was good, seats were comfortable, the plane seemed new and the service was above average. It’s still an apology for the airline that JRD Tata ran and the maharaja flew, but it’s not bad.

The execrable flight from Bangalore to Chennai that set my low expectations was the old Indian Airlines. They were always the worst airline outside of domestic USA and haven’t changed. One of the stewardesses was actively rude. The snack trays were thrust in our faces. The snacks themselves seemed to have been made by the same person who makes the coffee in Chennai airport. They boarded well before the time printed on the boarding pass from a different gate to the one we were told, with little notice and no apology. I asked why and I was told snottily: “Oh the captain decided to leave early”. The plane seemed like the oldest flying ATR in the world, but the flight was mostly empty so I could sit where I could see the propellers, my preferred position in this kind of plane. I don’t know what I think I can do if the engines suddenly stop or catch fire, or why I believe they should do so at all, but that’s the way the nutty cookie crumbles.

Time from Bangalore to Singapore on Air India: 15 hours
Time from aerobridge to exit in Changi Airport, including immigration and baggage claim: 30 minutes
Walking out of the airport with an employment visa in my passport and a job waiting for me: Priceless

Joy to the world

The Songtsen Library, 11km outside Dehradun, turned out to be exactly what I had had in mind when I started planning this holiday, which is something that almost never happens. I could do a lot of tedious description, but I think the pictures will be do a better job.

Surrounded by academics and travellers, and others who belong in a Leonard Cohen song, it felt like living on a small campus, my first-floor suite like my own flat. At times, when Joan Baez was singing Diamonds and Rust and I glanced casually up from my writing, it felt as if I was back in my flat in Muscat. In fact, since it was oriented similarly with the windows facing the sun rising over the hills, it always took a few minutes after waking to reorient myself to the present.

The gardens fell away to the thickly wooded Sahastradhara River Valley. The flowers were profuse, the people quietly welcoming and the unnumbered Lhasa Apsos frolicking about were friendly (these could have been three or four or just an optical illusion. It was hard to tell in the mist, compounded by the fact that most of them didn't have names).

My first evening here, I went down to the fence to enjoy the sunset, feeling a deep relief at the quiet beauty. I watched the darkness and mist fill the valley, until the outline of the hills faded out, and only the sky was left, clear and cold. The stars switched themselves on, one by one (coinciding with the half-hour load shedding on the ground), and the waxing moon showed up shortly after, way too bright for a mere crescent. It deepened the dark, intensified the cold, and sharpened the outline of the hills once again. And along with them, the dark shapes of bushes, trees and sundry undergrowth. Then, having been reading Jim Corbett and being possessed of an unreasonable imagination, I retreated hastily to where there were lights and tea, and humans. It was only six-thirty in the evening, but it felt like ten, so I prowled around the kitchens until dinnertime at seven. In yet another of those reminders that the Earth is round, the chef here turned out to have worked at Rice Bowl, the old Bangalorean institution on Brigade Road. Apparently, the restaurant belongs to the Dalai Lama's sister; I'd always assumed it was Chinese-owned, and rather tactlessly said so.

Once I'd gotten into a rhythm, I would only stop working in time to watch the mist and star show from my balcony. In any case I wouldn't have returned alone to the rather lonely viewpoint unless I could have got one of the dogs to accompany me. But small dogs have a lot of cat-like qualities and won't go anywhere inconvenient or uncomfortable unless there's something in it for them. I did manage to buy some man's-best-friend-ness with a chocolate biscuit, but it clearly didn't run to wandering outside in the cold.

Looking at my photographs now, there's still a sense of unreality to the whole thing, not least the fact that this perfect place was came my way because of a perfect stranger. There, cushioned within the blessed diversity of many nationalities and the anonymity of being just one among many, I got a lot of work done. Mealtimes were enlivened by cameo conversations, nearly always with someone new. These ranged from being silly with the merriest Germans I've ever met over the ways of fictional murderers and the possibility of any such making it to the Nobel list, to satisfying the bloodless curiosity of a librarian about a book in the making. It occasioned no awe or wonder or any singularity whatsoever, that I counted my holiday well-spent sitting at a laptop in a library all day; or that two hours of walking did not need to lead anywhere.
The Dalai Lama's vintage-ish Mercedes displayed on the Library lawns.

A hill station that's flat

After the hill-surrounded, green-valley-overlooking Songtsen Library, Dehradun town was horrible. A lucky conversation with my friend in town gave me the local name for the iconic clock tower, which was where I was headed. When I got off the bus, I was told it was round the corner. I unerringly went around the wrong corner, but decided to keep walking anyway to see where I would fetch up, and Dirk-Gently-style, ended up where I most needed to be – in front of a Barista. I hailed the sight of it with immense relief, exhausted by the blaring traffic (noticeably chaotic even to someone from Bangalore), open drains, ugly buildings and non-existent footpaths. In more than an hour of walking, I hadn't taken my camera out once.

The day before I left, my sister-in-law had warned me that Dehradun was entirely flat, saving me the added trauma of having to find out the hard way that the nip in the air was all there was to remind you that you were at the feet of some the greatest mountain ranges in the world. I had kept telling people that Dehradun would be like Ooty, doing the charming Nilgiri town a major disservice in the process.

Once, this place must have been like all the other colonial hill stations. The guidebooks and columnists are trying to pretend it still is, just like people keep calling Whitefield a picturesque suburb of Bangalore when all that's left of it is a cottage or three that hasn't yet been sold to a developer. (Important lesson learnt: If you want to know about a place, never ask someone who went to school there: the good old alma mater nostalgia cancels out all sense of perspective)

There's a cantonment area somewhere, which must have been nice, as all of them are. There must also have been Anglo-Indian and affluent pockets (I fervently hope), with roses climbing over cottage walls and the kitchen gardens that the girl on the train was talking about. But as with everywhere else in India, perhaps the world, gated communities called LA City and Greenview are working hard at removing the green from the view. There was a mall-like object far out of the city and I puzzled over its existence so close to a centre for Tibetan monks, until I explored a road beside it and came upon an "IT Park", of all things. I threw some garlic at it and ran away.

This, I suppose, is Progress and, indeed, why should the people who live here be left out of the consumerist orgy just because visitors want an "unspoilt getaway"? It's what's wrong with the times, not just Dehradun. Soon the only real holidays will be in the resorts enthusiastically creating debugged versions of the originals.

Once I'd seen the Barista, I was properly oriented to the instructions in the guidebook I'd deliberately left behind in Bangalore (since this was not supposed to be a tourist visit). So I kept walking until I reached the historic Ellora Bakery, where I bought several jam rolls, an old favourite that the even older bakery in Whitefield has stopped making in favour of ill-conceived croissant-like confections. Refreshed by the fact that I had high-sugar, fatty foods for future reference, I walked some more, noted the strange profusion of jewellery stores and dismaying lack of a restaurant that sold something other than butter chicken, and returned to the Barista for the rest of the afternoon. The friend for whose sake I'd come into town was mysteriously missing, but I'd found the me-shaped hole in a café and was very pleased with the day's work.

In the days that followed I made several short trips into town – I was situated outside a little village that lit dung fires at night, so, while their shop sold cream biscuits and bread, I had to commute a bit for anything else I wanted – and noticed calmer, more civilized parts of Dehradun from the bus window. Still, it's not really anywhere anybody would want to go on holiday. If you don't live there, it's just a transit or refuelling stop.

The bus was a smallish blue thing that you flagged down at the end of the village road. A few days of commuting later, I was negotiating with an orangemonger at Dehradun bus stand when the bus arrived, and I expected philosophically to have to catch the next one. But when I turned around with my bargain fruit, I found the bus waiting patiently for me. I remembered dimly that that's what rural bus services were about, and, in return, dug up the skills required to make space for a third person on a seat that was hardly big enough for two.

Barista, Rajpur Road, Dehradun

I visited this coffee shop quite a bit, mostly because it had a bookshop attached. Also, since I was surrounded by chai, I was automatically craving coffee, in spite of the fact that I'd long stopped drinking either.

Most of my fellow patrons seemed to be yuppie couples visiting from the capital or well-heeled parents of boarding-school-going children with said sufferers in tow. Now and then, there were people more difficult to place and some who were technically foreigners, but, I realized sadly, less foreign to me than the Indian peers around me there. There was a group of young men in the corner one day who had that certain something about them that said "motorcycle expedition". It was nearly an hour before I registered that the certain something was a pile of helmets. A lone cyclist consulted a map over a cappuccino. A few extremely well-dressed women settled their embroidered shawls delicately at a table near me – this must have been the 'Dun elite out for coffee; no tourist is ever that elegant. By about four in the evening the teenagers would arrive with their soothing, non-life-threatening problems. At least, it seemed like four. People kept looking at my new phone, so I stopped taking it out and therefore hardly ever knew the time. I woke when the sun rose, lunched when it was high in the sky and, if out, started for home when the shadows started to lengthen. It was very restful.

Railroad crossing?

A friend forwarded a video of a train-related thing, which led, as YouTube videos do to an hour of watching others in the category. All that has led to one burning question - how can you be accidentally hit by a train?

They are loud: hundreds of metal wheels scrape on metal rails. They're heavy: you can feel the earth shake before you see them. Apart from that, there are bells, lights and a horn that you can literally hear for miles. (I can hear one right now, sitting in my room. The railway line is one and a half miles away). So, how?

In one video, a truck was halfway across the tracks and you could hear the brakes of the train screeching for ages before it hit it anyway. Another one is a hushed report of a guy driving across the tracks right in front of an oncoming train. This time the bad train was especially culpable, as far as I can tell, because he was "a father on his way to his son's birthday party." It doesn't matter if he was a drug dealer on his way to kill an old lady - the fact is he didn't look both ways. When I stopped watching, the newscaster was talking of an investigation into how many times the horn was sounded. Maybe they'll also check if the headlight was in fact on. And if the insects in the shrubs were breathing too loudly and drowning out the sound of a 10,000 ton diesel engine.

I leave you with this. For pure wholesome entertainment you can't beat provincial American news:

Sigh

Why would an introvert who's also shy go out of her way to travel for seven days with a group of strangers guaranteed to make her feel even more out of place than usual?

As TFN approaches, I can hear the familiar whoosh of the excitement being overtaken by fear. What will I talk about? What if nobody wants to talk to me? Should I go up and talk to them? How? What if I look foolish? (God, what if I am foolish?) What if I get forgotten at a rest stop and they have to come back for me? Oh the horror of that.

It hasn't even begun yet, and I'm already comforting myself with the thought that it has to end sometime, it will pass.

On the other hand, some important person said something to the effect that if you're not a little bit scared all the time you're not really living. Actually, I may have read it on the back of a beer can. But still. It's something.

I seek stuff like this out all the time and then go through intense anticipatory suffering. Standing on the edge, paralysed by the fear of falling, all those questions used to end very often in "What if I just don't go?"

But cowardice is not an option anymore, having grown up and all that. At least I can separate imaginary dangers from real ones now (most of the time). And anyway, my best shell is a highly sociable one - it prevents any beautiful friendships from forming because it works by converting people into an audience, but it certainly keeps me from turning around and making straight for the burrow. The problem is I have no way of controlling which shell will be used when.

I just had a truly happy thought - after two days, they won't be strangers, though of course they may still be scary. That should pass too in another day or two. That's an interesting, mature view - I may really have grown.

Or maybe not. Also as usual, I may be scared but I'm not sorry.

Overcoming commitment phobia

I had to wait almost two hours for my parents to pick me up because my flight landed at a small hour that they couldn't quite do. (There's never a question of making my own way, I save my breath for the important battles.)

So I had time to look around me and felt much proprietary pride and pleasure in the shiny new airport until I encountered the petty bureaucracy of the free WiFi. One, it's not really free if you have to send text messages over international roaming for a one-hour password. Two, the password came four hours after I had reached home so it's not only unfree, it's also unusable.

But apart from this weirdness – I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt since it was just the one time for me – it's great. After all these years of no-strings camping in someone else's airfield, saying "but we're doing fine, why change things now", Bangalore has finally taken the plunge.

The airport is... well, a real airport. Swank too. They'd even opened up all the immigration counters instead of just one and a half as per usual government procedure. There are seven baggage carousels in place of the one rugby scrum that collecting luggage used to be. The trolleys work. All wheels. At the same time, in the same direction.

There are shops, cafes, bars, restaurants, a spa, more than one telephone, things to do. (I was once stuck in the old airport for seven hours because of a "suspicious flight" with nothing to eat, drink or do once I'd finished my book. It got so bad I risked arrest – unpleasantness, anyway - to sneak into the domestic terminal where the party was at. I bought a book, a sandwich and a coffee and got busted on the way back. I traded the coffee for my freedom.)

Standing in the immigration queue reading, I was briefly disoriented when I looked up, compounded by the fact that there was a giant ad on one wall for Damac properties, with Dubai phone numbers. For a moment I forgot where I was – Bengaluru International Airport did not know it, but that was a huge compliment.

Of cabbages and kings

I recently came across a Sultan Qaboos fan club of sorts and promptly enrolled as a supporter. In the process I found that a large number of the fans are not Omani, or indeed living in Oman.

People in Dubai tend to be derisive about its gentler neighbour (and it must be admitted that a lot of the things they say are true). But of all the people I met in my three years in Muscat, not one was able to leave without a backward glance. In contrast, more than half the acquaintances who've left Dubai have shaken its dust from their feet in disgust or weariness.

It is hard to convey to those who worship the gleaming towers and swank nightclubs, the sense of time and substance that Oman offers. I worked as hard and the same long hours that I do in Dubai (in fact I had a six-day week), but somehow I always had time to do it all and more. Everyone should live there once, though perhaps not more than three years – more than that, I agree with the detractors, will probably make you catatonic.

I want to beg the tourists wandering through Bastakiya clutching leaflets to visit Oman. Because that is where it is, the Arabia they've come to see. Living, breathing Arabia at its most honourable, in its element. The boat-builders in Sur do it for a living, not as museum workers guarded by a visitors' centre. The frankincense harvested in Dhofar is piled high in the souqs for Omanis to buy as part of their monthly shopping, not just for tourists. These are working souqs. As of a year ago, the Muscat-Dubai bus still had its kahwa-maker handing out free cups of spiced coffee before the six-hour journey to the border – in that gesture lies the spirit of the country, the "essence of Arabia", as their tourism department chose to call it.

The first time I went snorkelling in Fujeirah, I secretly howled with laughter at the raptures of my fellow visitors. This elaborate trip to see coloured fish yielded almost nothing compared to any random beach in Muscat. At Bandar Jissa there were whole schools of them swimming around my ankles in water a foot deep. On a casual swim at PDO beach, sea turtles could come right up to you. Glancing out of a cafe window on a desultory evening, there could be phosphorescence flashing like lightning in the water. I've seen dolphins cavorting far out at sea on a mundane weekday, while driving to a meeting.

The refreshing flash of blue as the road wound between hills was a feature of my daily life. And every day the sun floated up ceremoniously from behind ranges upon ranges of mountains – right outside my bedroom window. Bored winter afternoons could be enlivened by climbing old hill trails that rose almost from your backyard, until you reached a place where there was nothing but orange, pink and grey stone in every direction and were subsumed into a monumental calm that was there before you and will remain after.

The only thing I am subsumed into here is a colossal lethargy, broken occasionally by impotent anger at injustice. (The races mingled benignly in Oman, so the septic, jagged edge of racism was unfelt until I got here. It was in Dubai that, for the first time in my life, my writing encountered the thick brick wall formed by a concept called "native English speaker".)

When I leave here I don't think I will take anything but the friendships I made. It is unlikely that I will feel the kind of affection for the place that moves me, six years and many leagues later, to pay my respects to the head of the Sultanate. These things are reciprocal, you see.

The great Indian railway journey

It began at 3:35pm on April 16th, 1853. 14 coaches carrying 400 passengers steamed out of Bombay's Bori Bunder to a 21-gun salute. They were hauled by three engines picturesquely called Sindh, Sultan and Sahib. It was an hour and fifteen minutes to the destination, Thane.

Of course two freight trains were already operating somewhere a few years before this, but they weren't nice enough for the memsahibs to sit in and didn't get any dress-uniform recognition. So the glamour date (as one might see in a Merchant-Ivory movie) is the Bori Bunder-Thane passenger.

In the first 25 years of Indian Railways, more than 6500 kilometers of track were laid. They moved from narrow gauge to meter gauge, built the Darjeeling Hill Railway, upgraded the coaches at least five times, published a railway timetable, laid emergency lines for famine relief and started construction of the Victoria Terminus. Routes emerged almost simultaneously to the North, East and South. Bombay, Ahmedabad, Ajmer, Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore, Chennai, Salem and Hyderabad were just a few of the places connected rapidly, without the benefit of sixteen-wheeler trucks, cranes or telephones.

The Bangalore Metro, on the other hand, has been 25 years in the making and is still three years from completion (at the last estimate).

But in spite of that (and others like it), Indian Railways remains an awe-inspiring phenomenon, noticeably so even in a country where you're likely to find one around any random corner. 108,805 kilometres of track connect the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, the Arabian sea to the Bay of Bengal. Across the vast spaces, signals rise and fall, points click and move, the little piece of paper with your name on it appears by magic on the reserved coach.

For me, like for many others, the life and times of the railways are caught up in my own, from a child who kept falling off the top berth to a lawless adult hanging out the doorway of a speeding express. Like everyone else I’ve resisted the temptation to pull that chain just once, just to see if it works. Cut dangerously across the rails from one platform to another, rather than climb the stairs. Still believe that even the most questionable food tastes great in the train.

In the first 25 years of my life, my local station went from a single-rail ghost stop to a seven-platform junction. The railways form India's only living, breathing, evolving historical monument. The Bangalore-Chennai Mail that I know so well has been running for 145 years.

I've stopped looking bewildered by choice when would-be tourists ask me where they can see the "real India". Now I tell them: just ride the trains. (One of them took my advice and so I discovered that there's an Indrail pass, modeled on the Eurail one.)

Perhaps one day the Shatabdi will be a bullet train and the commuter trains will run on elevated rail. Meanwhile, Indian Railways functions, through flood, famine, fire, riots, strikes, accidents, budget cuts – all the hazards of being the national carrier to a large and unwieldy democracy – almost always against the odds. If the trains stopped, so would the country.

Coffee, tea or watermelon juice

If your greatest pleasure is to sit in a coffee shop and read, are you dull and boring? If your most important goal when you're in a new place is to find that cafe, does it make you a loser? The problem with both those questions is that the answer is probably yes.

All I can say is, once I find the cafe, a stranger's city suddenly becomes mine. And 90% of the time I prefer my own company to 90% of the rest of the world's. Give or take 10. So there.

There's no rule to choose them by – I just know when I walk in whether it's the one I want. But I know it is never, ever a Starbucks. Or rather, hasn't been so far. I have lately become a seeker of wireless internet, so Starbucks might enter the lists.

There were two in Bangkok. One, all battered wood, catatonic junkies and heavy-eyed backpackers. The other, full of stylishly chunky furniture and arty types with trust funds. My Chicago one was gleaming chrome and steel, full of people from Ally McBeal. In Izmir, it was a low table on a pavement in a crowded souk. Pasadena's Kaldi had the soul of an old English coffee house and the face of a lady who lunches in LA. The one in Ithaca was a pretentiously unpretentious "family place". Providence provided an entertaining hole in the wall, full of students being pretentiously unpretentious. Beirut contributed two as well – another students’ hang-out near a university and a trucker’s cafe halfway to Nabatieh, where the scent of fresh manakish mingled with that of lemon groves and nobody spoke English.

I never got a chance to find the ones in Boston and Cape Town, but their presence throbbed around me like the memory of caffeine in my veins.

In Mauritius, a cool, shaded sanctuary, with questionable pictures on the walls and an unquestioning acceptance of generations of foibles, was a lot like the one that started it all for me. Like most of Bangalore, my secrets too have been absorbed into the air of Koshy’s – long afternoons reading a book, when I was supposed to be in class earning a degree, long mornings writing my own instead of what I was being paid to write. Warm, theatrical evenings eating mince on toast with an excitable cast of characters. The occasional breakfast or lunch with the family. New friends. Old friends. Ex-friends. If you sat long enough in Koshy’s you would meet everyone you knew. You still do – though now they often turn out to be the baby siblings of those you thought they were.

With every wave of change that sweeps Bangalore, we hold our collective breath from afar. And then sigh with relief that Koshy’s survived. Beautiful, colonial Victoria Hotel became a mall. Premier Bookshop became an office tower. Nobody negotiates Gangarams’ eccentric shelving now that Landmark displays books like CDs, so maybe that’ll go next. To make way, perhaps, for a Starbucks.

But I’ve forfeited my right to take a lofty stance about Starbucks since I was delighted to find a Dome cafe in Singapore, and chose it for the sheer familiarity – it looked exactly like mine in Dubai, down to the posters on the walls and the etching on the mirrors. In my defence, the menu is entirely different, even between the two in the same city. It seems their only “signature offering” is the service. When you’re absorbed in your book, they don’t bother you. And if you’re writing, they treat you as a sort of sacred trust. When the fifth Harry Potter came out, I went to Dome to start it over brunch. And ended up sitting there, reading, until eight in the night. I was left severely alone, and the waiter who badly wanted to talk about the book waited all day, until I asked for the bill, to do so.

The one I’m sitting in now is not bad either, but it’s no Dome.

Surprising Singapore

First, I was brought up short by the serious machine guns worn casually by the security guards at the airport. I had a brief, disorienting flashback to my little run-in with them in Beirut. Then, Singapore turned out to be astonishingly green. Any 12-year-old could have told me it was tropical but I hadn’t given it much thought – perhaps I was just subconsciously expecting blindingly swank towers rising into dehydrated skies.

There was much to be surprised at. The unexpectedness of Tamil announcements in the subway stations, which did not wane even after a whole week. (I often took the train simply to hear “mind the gap” in Tamil and chortle silently.) The improbability of a sit-down dinner in a cable car. One bewildering street of giant malls connected by a calmly logical series of underpasses. A startlingly familiar Dome cafe in a very alien Chinatown. Sudden thunderstorms. Equally sudden changes of ambience with every turning you take.

The famous Underwater World was surprisingly small. The iconic merlion made a surprisingly small impression. But the dolphins were astounding, incredible, extraordinary, fantastic. So was the chilli crab. The zoo came a close second.

There’s an amazing expanse of rainforest in the middle of the city. And it hasn’t been imported. There’s a stunning reservoir running through the zoo and it isn’t artificial. All the people who said “sterile” while describing Singapore to me have clearly never lived in Dubai.

The road is calling - again

In 10 days it will be eight years since I left home.

It seems like last month that I landed at Seeb International Airport in the middle of the night, enthusiastic and curious. Looking back, my blitheness looks like extreme ditziness: my flight was eight hours late, I had just 30 rials to my name and not one address or phone number, not even my employer’s. I think I just assumed I would be met because I’d never not been met in my life. Sure enough, I was met – a little late – by my boss and his girlfriend. (I remember thinking in the car that there were problems between them. As we now know, they had just picked up another one.)

But it also feels like eras have passed. The world turned, so much happened and I’m somebody else entirely now.

Well, a little bit anyway. I can still see myself arriving somewhere unprepared, Shanghai perhaps, with 200 yuan to my name and not a word of Mandarin, enthusiastic and curious, smoking a leisurely cigarette in the nearest coffee shop, miming “carrot cake” to the waitress, instead of “Yellow Pages”.

I wish I was.

Don't cry for me Beirut

Lebanon is burning again, but my client is going ahead with his promotional parties, complete with gifts and games, for the crowds in the ski resorts. I’m told there are crowds in the ski resorts – sporting freshly styled hair to match designer winter gear and having the kind of good time previously only achieved by frat parties and the carnival in Rio.

They tell me there are other crowds in the small bars, the large coffee shops, houses and classrooms, and they’re all having a good time too. The country has apparently gone into default mode and is once again fighting abuse with arak, shelling with shisha. Perhaps it’s the supreme victory, to just not acknowledge adversity.

But I remember my Lebanese colleagues in Dubai during the recent battering from Israel. The TV in the lounge was on all day, turned to the news, punctuated by phone calls from home. Someone's grandparents evacuated just in time. Yet another shelter hit, a brother still on the road. Someone's mother is in a stranger’s car because hers is buried in rubble. A wife and child are nearly at the Syrian border but the bridge has just gone so they're taking a detour. A sister has reached the French embassy in Achrafieh. And then 5 minutes later, on the news, they've just bombed Achrafieh.

On the TV, they saw places they recognised and used to live in being destroyed. Bus stops, schools, friends’ houses, cafes, shops. And they desperately cared. But they just carried on – wrote briefs, sent out artworks, designed logos, met clients, raised invoices, sported freshly styled hair to match the designer fall collections. It was not a dramatic show of bravery, it just was.

Visiting almost exactly a year before this, my first impression of the country was a stoic silence that enveloped me when I stepped out of the airport, bubbly Lebanese friend notwithstanding. It rose from the streets, the mountains, even the sea, and sat there impassively behind the chaos of Beirut’s roads, the high drama that is any Lebanese interaction. The people were going to great lengths to forget, but the land remembered.

But these are fanciful conclusions by someone whose besetting sin is seeing pathos where there is none. What do I know of war, civil or otherwise? I’ve never been woken by an air raid siren or heard a gun shot in the night (or day). No tanks rolled down the streets of my town and the only curfew that marred my impressionable years was of the parental variety.

The Lebanese probably have it right. When they’re ringing your curtain down, demand to be buried like Eva Peron. Make your exit like a star, dancing out across the tables under sparkling chandeliers, singing at the top of your voice: “You can’t take my spirit, it’s my dreams you take”.

It's raining again

"Nonadaptation"

I was not made to live anywhere except in Paradise.
Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.

Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.
whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
I pretended to work like others from morning to evening,
but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries.

For solace I escaped to city parks, there to observe
and faithfully describe flowers and trees, but they changed,
under my hand, into the gardens of Paradise.
....
-- Czeslaw Milosz

It seemed to have been written for me. I found it scribbled on a piece of paper in a battered book picked out of a big basket in a crowded shop run by an old hippie who was painting postcards at the cash register. Outside, a tough old Thai with tattooed arms was playing a guitar. As I was leaving the shop, an aggressive woman stopped me for a long discussion about writers from the Industrial Revolution because she was looking for translations of these into Thai as a present for a Thai boxer. When I came out of the shop, the monsoon had begun and the guitarist had been joined by several other Thais, all singing. Some of them had ties on, they seemed to be on their way home from work... during my first few days at the dodgy end of Bangkok, I felt like I was actually in a book.

Planes, trains and automobiles

Writing a blog is like peeing outdoors in the dark. You know you’re doing it and it’s a (slightly nervous) relief, but you can’t see where it’s going or if anyone can see you doing it. It’s distinctly unsettling and if you didn’t really, really have to, you wouldn’t.

Long-distance bus rides long ago come to mind. Up mountains, down them, up them again, round and round the hell-born hairpin bends. When we finally stopped for a bit, the respite from nausea was overshadowed by needing to pee, and especially by knowing that it would have to be done behind a giant tyre in a place where trucks went to die. Of course it helped that there was usually a mother or an aunt to orchestrate this expedition. They never got it wrong.

In speeding trains, the shuddering, thundering loo seemed always to be on the point of wrenching itself away, but there was a door to keep out evil truck goblins. Unfortunately it also kept out mothers, fathers, aunts etc, so when you came out you might have found yourself marooned in an orphan cubicle, trundling along an empty track in bear country.

As for planes, if you were not maimed by one or the other silly device in the noisy can, there would be a hijacking while you were in there and you would have had the terrible burden of being the hero because you were the one who wasn't spotted.

Truck goblins and bears were upgraded to serial killers and creatures from The Descent, but hero-hood has since been recognised as optional, so progress has clearly been made.

Those far away places, with strange sounding names

It’s that time of the year again. It starts small. There’s a poster in the window of the travel agent you pass every day on the way to work. Then a photograph of a wood as your screen saver. One morning, a sudden flashback of a landscape you may have seen through a train window sometime. Your shower starts to sound like a waterfall. Maps start to become 3D. Suddenly, the internet is buzzing with anticipation, the emails are full of plans, the travel sites are full of advice.

The travelling world seems to be divided between Lonely Planet enthusiasts and Everyone Else. What inspires this “love it or hate it, but you can’t ignore it” reaction? The price? I used to be one of those who took the price as a personal insult to my ancestors, descendants, hometown and myself, until I had to plan a budget holiday in Scandinavia. After exhaustively researching Norway on the Internet and exhaustingly sifting through folklore for a month, I began to see why a Lonely Planet is worth its weight in gold.

But browsing through a row of Lonely Planets in a bookshop is as bad as looking at an atlas. You change your mind every 30 seconds. It could be Rotterdam or anywhere, Liverpool or Rome, cause Rotterdam is anywhere, anywhere but here.