A Higher State

I have finally reached a higher state: Himachal Pradesh. That doesn't mean that I have stopped laughing at the rent-a-hippies in grubby dhotis practicing “Mystical Belly Dancing” - but it does mean that I am physically, if not spiritually, higher than I was before.
But if you want to get high in India you have to start extremely low.
Low is arriving at Delhi Airport in stinking 42 degree heat when the breeze through the taxi window feels like someone blowing a hot hairdryer of smelly crotch and rotting vegetables in your face at 60km per hour. Low is a sleazy hotel room with a round bed, red light bulbs and a fan like a Messerschmidt keeping you awake all night while you wonder what is causing that itching between the sticky brown polyester sheets and whether the little red bumps on your arms and legs are serious. Low is 18 hours in a taxi with a creepy driver called “Ravi” who stops every 30 minutes to have a nap, a cup of chai, scratch his balls or buy inflatable toys by the side of the road and spills Lemon Fanta on the backseat and smiles while you desperately try not to blame him for his lack of essential chromosomes. Low is stopping at a dirty highway restaurant with coach loads of fat Indian tourists aggressively trying to make you the star of their home videos and bedragled roosters in display cages outside with labels like “White Silkie Cock” and “Dutch Booted Bantam Cock”. These lows were not pleasant, but necessary steps on my way to a higher state – something like the firey uncomfortable bit in purgatory before the angels playing harps and the pearly gates.
But now that I am finally here in a higher state, I am also trying to become a Much Better Person so that I don't stand out too much against everyone else. They are the people who do ten days of silent meditation for fun (not drinking beer) and take local buses (not taxis) and pay 50 Rupees per night for their guesthouse (not 300) and take Indian cooking lessons (rather than go to restaurants) and only have one pair of sandals (not four) and stopped washing their hair with chemicals in 1998 (never going to happen). But I have managed to make a couple of concessions to life up here in the mountains. I stopped looking in the mirror ten days ago (because there isn't one). I have also become much less scared of slugs (because there are about 60 enormous orange ones the size of my forearm sitting on the lawn every time I wake up). But the most disturbing change to date has been my purchase of a pair of immitation “Crocs” - those natty brightly coloured plastic clogs with holes in that make you look like you work as a cleaner in a swimming pool, or a morgue. Everyone here wears them because they are Practical. Predictably, the concept of “Practical Footwear” didn't really resonate with me until I slipped down a mountain and broke my pretty gold (highly Impractical) sandals, tried on a pair of Crocs “as a joke” and discovered the wonder of skipping down a mountain in pink rubber. And haven't looked back.
Crocs are also a great conversation point. I've noticed that Wearers exchange secret knowing glances when they see another Wearer trotting past, and sometimes we stop to chat to eachother about how comfortable our feet are, despite how ridiculous we may or may not look to other Non Wearers. I have even started teaming them with a pair of fluroescent handknitted Tibetan socks. They feel great, and I'm pretty sure they look great - although I haven't checked a mirror for the past ten days, so I couldn't tell you for certain.
But as with so many great love affairs, the infatuation was fleeting and tomorrow my fake Crocs and I are going our separate ways. They will remain here, while I will begin my descent from the mountains in a night bus, across the winding roads of Himachal and Uttar Pradesh and back down to the steaming crotch of New Delhi, until finally I arrive back in London on Saturday – where I am entirely sure that my Crocs will not be welcome.
So it is with a mixture of high and low that I come home this weekend. High because I get to have a hot bath, eat beef burgers and drink red wine with all my friends for the first time in six months (not all at the same time), and low because this is the end of the most incredible journey. From the Worst City in Either Hemisphere, to the yupppies in Bangalore, the volunteers in Mysore, the crusties in Goa, the Keralan backwaters, the windy valleys of the Nepalese Himalayas – and finally to the foothills of the Indian ones. But it's not just geographical. Over the past six months India has lifted me up with the contagious spirituality of its ancient temples, monasteries and mountain peaks and the kindness of strangers on trains with newspaper bags of greasy snacks and steaming cups of chai – and just as quickly it has slammed me back down like a gutful of bad curry in a gutter of rotting vegetable matter, festering leppers and feral dogs. But at least it really has been an awfully big adventure.