the expat life
i've settled into quite a nice litte routine here in mumbai, doing no more than an hour's productive activity a day. the monsoon has hit pretty hard, so too much exertion is particularly fraught with hazard. rich's stuff was due to arrive on wednesday morning but turned up 12 hours early, which meant that he had the following morning off, and his stereo had just arrived. a few kingfishers and an entire bottle of old monk later we were air guitaring around his living room to a guns n roses medley and generally not covering ourselves with glory.
the next morning was not rosy. rich finally stumbled to work at about midday, looking very sorry for himself. i had big plans to go and achieve things like buying train tickets: i barely made it back into the living room where i draped myself over the sofa all day as rita, rich's maid, looked on disapprovingly.
in the evening i got an idea of the life that young professional expats like darbs lead. everyone is in certain core groups from one of the major centres, usually hong kong. when you get farmed out you regularly have friends of friends, complete strangers, who'll ring you up and pop over when they happen to be in the same country. yesterday's candidate was a girl called fi who works for one of the big banks. she was perfectly lovely, but it really made me realise what rich was talking about when he said that everything had become too transient. we all got on very well but the odds are that fi and rich will probably never speak again, unless they bump into each other in hong kong. that's how this life goes, you meet a myriad of people, all doing fairly interesting things, but it almost always has to be a vast collation of acquaintances you gain, rather than real new friends. strange, especially for someone as affable as rich: it's going to be good to have him back amongst us next year.
no plans for the next few days, other than trying to return to civilized behaviour before me sis arrives: scary times!
brits on tour (aka, hungoaver)
despite the huge scope for disaster and delay that two flights in a day in this part of the world entails, yangon-cal-mumbai was actually relatively painless, and I arrived at rich’s place at about 10pm on thursday feeling in pretty good nick. a quick word about the pad: big, clean, and stunning views of the ocean and marine drive: totally polarised from my recent residences. when I told rich i was going to the toilet clutching the usual bog roll he looked at me with something between confusion and despair to tell me that his bathroom was already equipped with paper. happy, happy days.
i’ve met lots of interesting people recently, but it’s always nice to be with someone that you already know very well, and me and darbs stayed up till about one talking shit and tucking into the kingfishers. it actually got a bit boozy towards the end, an adumbration of the weekend to come.
rich had cunningly taken a half day the following day so, whilst his journey in in the morning seemed like a bit of a struggle, it meant that by 4 we were in goa, by 4.30 we were checked in to a little bungalow by baga beach, and by 5 we were settled in a nice little beach shack, sea lapping the shore right in front of us, kingfishers at the ready.
i don’t think I need to go into too much detail as to what happened next. we drank. a lot. frankly it was all a bit brits on tour, but i’ve just been roughing it in burma, and rich actually lives in mumbai, so I think we were entitled to a dip into cliché. we found ourselves some youthful english types (dave, flic, cat and miriam, lovely peeps all), promptly set up a school of lash, got the drinking games going, and generally disgraced ourselves. this all culminated on the dance floor of mambos., a club cum bar full of rich indians trying to impress. our shapes went down badly. as did we.
it was bit of a struggle getting up the next day, but a few bacon sandwiches (i deserve this! i’ve been living off noodles dammit!) and a cup of tea set us up for a day of lazing in the shade back at out our favourite shack. the staff were a bit surprised to see us alive and many a grin was had as they continually tried to get us back on the beers too early. as we were lazing, a chap rocked up to collect money for some leprosy hospice. i threw him some notes, as did rich, and he wandered off. after a minute, rich turned to me to enquire how one caught leprosy. contact, i replied. this wasn’t the answer rich was looking for, given that the chap had a lot of his hands missing, and rich had apparently rubbed him all over his face (or something like that) instead of just paying him. as such it was obvious that rich had probably got a spot of the leprosy coming, so we would have to indulge in some power lash whilst he still had appendages with which to pick up his glass. we got going again at 5.30 and were going along quite powerfully, when at 8pm we realised that it was saturday, and football was on the cards. as such, we stumbled into town to find that, as it was off-season, most places were closed. in one of the restaurants however, we could make out a fellow in the darkness watching tv. the only option therefore was to bang on the door and get let in, ignore his protests that they were closed and had no booze, send him off to the local off licence to pick up some beers and food, and hijack his remote. as this was the only option it’s what we did, buying him a few beers for the trouble.
the upshot of all this japery was that we were in a fair spot of disarray. the place to be that night was titos, but it was operating a strict couples only policy to keep out hormonal indian types. i said we go in as a gay couple, but darbs thought it might be less controversial to procure some ladies as props instead. having first got our sights all wrong and getting instead a rather random trance loving german called rainer, we finally found ourselves three lovely swiss lasses (nuff love mirka, lorissa, and schimo) with whom we duped the doorman.
ugly scenes all round when it turned out that an old monk (rum) and coke was only 50r (about 80p). i’m not fully sure what happened next. all I remember are fragments, including come baby come by k7, rich trying to pull off a particularly extravagant dance move that culminated in him staggering backwards about 50m then performing a memorable stack onto his arse, and ending up on the beach at 4am wondering quite what i was doing with my life.
checkout the next morning was at 9am. when raj, our lackey, rather apologetically turned up at 9.45 to remind us of this, rich was incapable of movement and I wasn’t too keen on it either. raj went to ask madam if we could stay a bit longer and came back talking about half day fees and other such nonsense. unacceptable, so i went off to speak to madam.
i’ve lost a bit of weight recently, so the sight that confronted the patron was a brown man, his shorts near his ankles displaying some bright pink boxies, a good bud hairy chest, and sunglasses still just about revealing bloodshot eyes, trying to negotiate a couple of extra hours. it wasn’t really a negotiation: sheer sympathy and a desire to get this aberration out of her sight meant I got my way.
the flight back was no fun. darbs couldn’t get a ticket and ended up having to fly business class and my plane was delayed by three hours. in fact not really plane so much as a car with wheels: it actually had propellers. a bumpy ride, and not what was called for after a weekend of powerlash. still we finally made it back, thought about a few g&ts, and realised that the lash was off for a while. lots of jolly japes all round though and frankly remarkably welcome after the rigours of myanmar.
rich flies in fairly high circles, so over the course of the week i may be having drinks with the french ambasador, and going to the chinese ambassador’s reception (hopefully with ferrero rocher in tow). bit posh for me, but this may be darbs’s last chance before his limbs fall off, so small talk and free booze will have to be done.
myanmar: epilogue
safely ensconced in mumbai , I thought I’d just summarise some of my feelings towards visiting burma, and the situation therein. I think my views on the ethical angle of going have actually been reinforced by having been there: you can avoid using government enterprises fairly easily, and without travellers the guys who run the guesthouses and suchlike would be absolutely shafted. they have a hard time of it as it is, without our minimal contributions it would be absolutely desperate.
i also think that it’s pretty crucial that people have the chance to access sources of information about the outside world without restriction by the junta. it’s all a bit of an orwellian nightmare: the state run paper looks like it’s been churned out by the ministry of truth, and billboards pepper the streets filled with very dubious aphorisms warning against external influences and stooges. one of the few english books allowed to be sold is ‘burmese days’: ‘1984’ would have been a much more appropriate title. it’s astounding that the rules and tenets of authoritarian rule set down decades ago are still so effective. it just goes to show that the efficacy of fear is timeless. whenever you travel by road there are regular checkpoints, most displaying a disquietingly dark sign: ‘all respect, all suspect’. the plan appears to be to create a atmosphere of constant suspicion and fear, and it seems to be working.
the upshot for me, and other foreigners, however was actually bizarrely positive. The burmese can’t talk freely about their situation to anyone, friends or even family, apart from us. as such, if you ever get talking to someone alone, they are incredibly open: it’s a cathartic opportunity that only someone from abroad can provide. people in most south east asian countries normally only talk to you to try and get to your cash: for the burmese, we have something much greater to give, and it really allows you both to get a feeling for the hardship being suffered, and to truly interact with the locals. whatever stoners in goa or bangkok might think, this level of genuine conversation when abroad is actually remarkably rare.
as for the junta themselves, they are pretty much scum to the highest degree. life won’t suddenly become idyllic when they disappear: burma is very much a colonial construction, and there are various individual ethnicities looking for greater autonomy that could easily lead to it disintegrating. the chinese, as with everywhere in the region, are also constantly in the background, sending in thousands of migrants, and there is a genuine fear that the junta will go only to be replaced by beijing. there is however still no excuse for extorting and repressing some of the friendliest and beautiful people you can ever hope to meet, and the sooner the ruling elite fuck off and die the better.
the people in burma look at the situation in iraq and plaintively hope that bush will come and free them next: the lack of oil means it’s not going to happen. this isn’t so much an indictment of the yanks, however, as of an international community that is far more concerned with conferences and lunches then actually helping people around the world. sad times: that’s the thing about visiting burma, the lasting impressions it leaves are far beyond temples and beaches.
