This Epilogue is written after due consideration, telling a different version of the story a dozen times, recovering from viral infections and labelling up the photos. I was very poorly coming home. We’ve both had doctor’s visits and medication since arriving, and could have done with a week off work to recover. When describing India, I find myself every time a little short of words. Not because it’s hard to describe, but it’s so vast, populated, old and complex that it’s difficult to get a handle on it - you don’t know where to start. It’s a kind of sensory overload. Everything’s an assault or a challenge. We were perhaps more intellectually prepared than many travellers, but like most we were not constitutionally ready. Whoever is? My first flash of insight was talking to Mad Martin: I announced that India is schizophrenic. On the one hand, it’s a technological, industrialised society competing in the international commercial world, with nuclear power and the biggest democracy on the planet. But - the politicians offer devotional gifts to sea gods, teachers preach hygiene whilst cleaning their teeth in the Ganges, electric fans blow air into adobe dung fire stoves, ayurvedic medicine stores rub shoulders with “European” pharmacies. There is a deep and unmoveable reliance on the antiquity of their culture. Perhaps like America vis a vis Europe? This often manifests itself in a sort of timelessness. Despite the hurly burly, people glide along the streets, there is always time to stop and look - look - look. The moghul architecture is solidly, gracefully everywhere, alongside ephemeral shanties. Perhaps it’s all a result of kharma and dharma. This latter concept has been revealed as a result of a reading on Radio 4 of James Cameron’s “Indian Summer”, of which I hear snippets after ‘Today’. Hindus are born to a station in life: if you were a cockroach, and were a good cockroach, you may next time be reborn as a cabinet minister, for example. Or the reverse. ‘Goodness’ as a cockroach is this: to accept your allotted rôle totally, without complaint, envy, pride or question. This is your dharma, and there is no getting away from it. It explained a great deal to me - about the calmness of Indians. It is not apathy, or complacency, or laziness, or inaction motivated by impotence, as some would have it, but simply - acceptance, which must only 'be'. Phew. Hard, but simple and true. Always the hardest. Of course, it means that Hindus are unlikely to try to change their lot in life, or the lot of others, which perhaps explains some of why politics seems to go on in a scurry of ineffectual activity, like ants swarming over the dome of the Taj Mahal, which exists serenely solid like India, insouciant. But unlike the Taj, conceived and built as a whole, India is an unstable fusion of disparate, myriad parts. The inter-ethnic violence in Yugoslavia is symptomatic - a struggle for identity and statement, not against a tyrannical or oppressive regime, but just against ‘others’.

The State of India seems only to exist in the minds of middle class Indians, with a European-style education and thus an international (or Anglo-centric?) perspective on their homeland. And of non-Indians, of course. Ordinary Indians - all 880 million of them, inhabit their state, town or village. Local press, such as the Navindh Times in Goa, reported the Moscow coup for half the front page. By page 2 there was news of the fact that Jaspal Kumar had got 2 Rs off a toilet roll in the bazaar, such is the parochial nature of even the English newspapers. So what is to happen to India? The Gandhi dynasty looks shaky. No-one of comparable stature has emerged. How could they? Creating a mythology takes time. Communal dissent is rife. Schools can choose to ignore Hindi/English and teach only the local language. Indian speaks no longer unto Indian. It is an astonishing, wonderful sequence of places and people, but hard to make any sense of!