The Backpacker by John Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

half-sleep/half-dead, zombie-like shuffle that reminded me of a wind-up toy. If the door was open he’d waddle out and down the corridor to the toilet, but that’s all.
    To be fair there was little else to do. The rain and sleet hadn’t stopped since we had arrived, and it didn’t look like it would clear over the coming week. In any case, we knew it would continue because Dudley had said so.
    In one of his rare appearances outside the guest house, he had befriended an old Indian man who claimed to be able to forecast the weather by looking at the marijuana leaves on the bushes in the hills. According to him, when they hung down limply it meant that there was no end in sight to the bad weather. That, combined with the taste of this year’s harvested and pressed grass, was as good as looking at a barometer. A bit like wine tasting Dudley supposed. Most connoisseurs can tell the year a grape was harvested just by tasting the wine, so why should marijuana be any different?
    Dudley believed the old man’s prediction, and I believed my own eyes. None of us believed that the weather would let up, and, having grown tired of our wet surroundings, decided to head back south before the week was out.
    â€˜Shimla,’ I suggested, lying on the damp bed opposite Dudley, trying to think of a possible next destination for us. ‘Cliff Richard was born there you know.’
    He leaned up on one elbow. ‘Cliff Richard is not a good reason to go to Shimla, John.’
    We hung around for the rest of the day to watch the hustle and bustle before catching the evening bus south, arriving in Shimla early the next morning. The difference between the two towns was so striking that we might well have taken a bus to another country altogether.
    As usual, where the ‘right-on’ travellers were raving about Dharamsala, and telling us to avoid Shimla like the plague, the opposite was true. In Shimla there were no pretentious backpackers walking around quoting from The Tibetan Book of the Dead , and not a ‘Free Tibet’ T-shirt in sight. The town seemed to have gone in reverse: from being one of India’s colonial hill stations, where stiff-upper-lip British officers went during the summer to escape from the heat of the plains, to being the weekend retreat of Delhi’s yuppies; Delhi being only half a day’s ride away in daddy’s car.
    Shimla must be the most Westernised place in India, too. Or, at least, a place where Indians can behave Westernised. School kids in maroon blazers skip along the main street on their way to class, while, in the evening, Indian gents wearing natty tweeds sit around taking in the cool air, puffing away thoughtfully on briar pipes. The town has a town hall, a Scandal Corner, mock Tudor houses, a theatre and a Christ Church. It also has a YMCA that’s situated at one end of the main road. Housed in a rambling old colonial house, the Shimla YMCA is like a cross between Colditz and Fawlty Towers. With a fireplace in every room, a billiards hall, table tennis tables, a bed and breakfast-style dining room where one gets ‘gonged’ for breakfast (tea, toast and marmalade) at eight o’clock sharp, and a ruthless lights-out policy that the governor of Alcatraz would have been proud of, it was, ‘Like, far out,’ as Dudley put it.
    One night, about a week after we’d arrived in Shimla, as the three of us walked through the freezing streets, I started to think about Rick. I hadn’t thought about him since we’d left Goa, but I needed to provide myself with a distraction and he proved to be just the thing.
    I wondered what he was up to. Was he really still in Thailand? What was he doing there right at this minute, right now? While I was walking down a snowy street in a quaint hilltop town in northern India, was he sitting in a beach bar in Thailand sweating freely in the tropical heat? I especially wanted to know whether or not he was