A few differences I somehow forgot.
Open sewers in all towns and cities, often half covered with stone or concrete slabs, but never truly seperated from you as you tread the streets, following that wonderfully sensitive olfactory protruberance on the front uh yerr face.
There are a great many more beggars about for the tourist season, and the ones you see live hundreds of miles away and come here, specifically to beg. In teams, no less - yes, the organisation gehind it all is pretty impresive, and it seems that each beach of decent size is controlled by one man who hangs around there all day, or more of them if it's a big beach like Palolem was, and hundreds of bggars and sellers of drums, stallholders, ear cleaners and the like descend upon a town on one day, and stay for the best part of the tourist seasons.
The controllers are kind of like pimps, and often probably are a well, managing other girls doing other things in other parts of the town.
In Bombay, by all accounts, this is seriously well organised and comes frighteningly close to something like the Beggars Guild mentioned in detail in few Discworld books; from Men at Arms and later. Rea 'em! They are so very entertaining.
Pavements, like sewers, are a kind of optional extra not taken up anyone (least of all the government or civil engineering depertments) and you have one on one side a busy road or you may have none. You can always walk in the open sewers of course.... but it is unadvisable, especially in larger cities. I wouldn't and couldn't bring myself to drawing you a picture even if you asked really nicely.
Many of the have been largely covered over and a full route is provide by means of a continuous stone-slab bridge, but basically it still smells terrible and they leak in places, not least of them into the water supply.
The cars and drivers! You know about the cars and drivers. They are all a few plates of sandwiches, a quiche,, at least 6 bottle wine and all the fruit short of a picnic basket.
They are also sometimes very good and gracious, even unaggressive and reasonably priced. Some other people are not so sympathetic.
Jon has a peanut allergy; if he ate one whole peanut he would, without immediate hospital treatment, die. He could go into anaphylactic shock and his heart would stop if the dose (one fully ingested peanut) was high enough. So when we passed a stall at the bottom of those big stepped ghats just off the boat, and around the valley floor area, we got some street food, which is in fact perfectly safe in terms of hygiene as all the locals eat from them and it is all cooked as you literally watch.
He did ask if if there were any nuts in it and being told `no no, no problems` would seem to be an indication that all was good, so unthinkingly he munched some and then went a sort of ghastly white/green colour and announced the problem; his tongue and throat were starting to swell and he needed something with enzymes in that slow the process down; the only two available within a thousand miles from here being either milk or beer. Problem 1]. Milk here isn't milk, it comes almost always from powdered milk or (over-diluted) condensed milk, or it's buffalo milk which doesn't really work. Condensed milk is the only thing that does the job and is the thing that survives storage at Indian temperatures.
Aliah and John, now unable to much speak and kind of exhausted at running up the 40-foot steps, found the first litle chai stall above the steps and Aliah told them what was happening, that he need milk, chai, chai milk, whatever, immediately, a serious life-threatening thing was going on if we didn't start dealing with stuff quickly, so, they sat there, snickering and laughing.
Aliah was speaking t them in perfect Hindi and Telugu and they perfectly understood what was going on, they just weren't going to be disturbed, these laid back chai peddlars with their little stoves and kitchens and tins of condensed milk sat there doing nothing; eventually they ambled about the proces of opening a can and pouring it out for Aliah to pass to Jon but they would pass it to Aliah, this tiny cup of condensed milk that could help save a man's life, until they had been paid for it = 2 Rupees. Two fucking rupees, and they weren't going to see anywhere outside of their blinkered little box where money has o be paid before aything is offered, and this foreigner wearing no t-shirt and doesn't even belong to our caste system, on any level, simply doesn't deserve anything from us or even anything but to die, if that's what the gods want. That is the impresion in part, the caste system thing I mean, that I am forming about this hindu society.
Anyway while they were climbing the steps I did my valiant deed of the hour and dashed up the slope in the middle of the steps with a scream of "I'll get you a beer Jon!!!" feeling all herioc and like I had something to actually do for once, spare wheel syndrome having begun to nudge at my mind that morning. Halfway t the nearest bar I remembered: Hampi is a dry town; that's why we live across that bloomin' river!
So milk was needed, and I ran in and found after asking 2 strangers someone who actually worked there, and asked fro 3 glasses of milk, quickly quickly, please.
They were not quick, and took at least 2 and a half minutes to get this - in the kitchen, which was tiny and open to see, I would have had 3 glasses of milk and be out of the door within about 40 seconds, so I explained in careful, slow English that my friend has an allergic reaction (try that one in sign language - very very ill! was what I used in the end) and that he might collapse, and if he had had too much "poison" he could die within 10 minutes.
This did not speed things up at all, however.
After realising I wanted to take it away they said to 'you want it in a bottle?' so they decanted it into a bottle and, oh yess most definitely, put maybe one and a half glass into the bottle instead and topped the rest up with tap water, which isn't especially different than river water and often comes out brown and makes your sink smell of sewage.
What a prize for humanitaianism they shall one day receive, eh?
So if he got over the allergy shock he'll
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