| LIFE STORY OF TERRY DONALDSON CHAPTER 3 To read more of Terry Donaldson's life stories, please visit: www.abctales.com/user/terencedonaldson |
| In Delhi, I checked into my favourite haunt, in an area called Parha Ganj.
It is a compact area with dozens of cheap hotels, all with tiny, rabbit-hutch like rooms. Most of the travellers, freaks and assorted hippies came here. From the balconies, you could look down on everything that was happening in the street below. Cows would wander at will, unmolested by anyone, eating the fruits and vegetables that had dropped or been thrown out after the street markets shut down. Along the road were little booths, offering fruit juices, where they would crush the fruit in front of you using a hand-operated masher. People moved up and down the street selling incense, samples of which smoked away from their bicycles. Others would approach the westerners with offers of heroin. I made a purchase from the first one who found me and went back to my little room. I sat up all night, chasing the little lines of dark-brown liquid up and down the silver foil, and listened to the sounds of the trains from the nearby Old Delhi railway station. For a long time I thought it was ships’ foghorns I was hearing, till I remembered that we were hundreds of miles inland. They sounded almost alive, like great beasts from millions of years ago, calling out to each other through the darkness of the Primordial Night. In the hall, outside my room there was a little washbasin. It was the only source of water I had to cook up with. One morning I bumped into a French girl who introduced herself as Celine. She was really pretty, and she invited me to pop over to the room she shared with a couple of French lads. I took my hit and went visiting. The Frenchies eyed me a bit warily, which is normally a sure sign that they have got something valuable, like a kilo of powder perhaps. They had just come back from Benares, the holy city of the Hindus. It was also one of the best places in India to buy large amounts of stuff. To try to break the ice, I looked around the room for something to chat about. I spotted a statue of the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman. I commented on this, and one of the French guys told me that he had discovered that this god could do things for him. He had started to freak out while he was speeding and tried calling upon Jesus for help, then the Buddha, then every deity or god that he had ever heard of. Eventually, so he said, he called on the name of Hanuman, and that is when the madness stopped, and his sanity was restored. A few days later I realized that something was wrong. I hadn't seen Celine for several days. Then clouds of flies started to appear all over the place. There were hundreds of them, crawling underneath the door to the Frenchies’ room. I realized that I hadn’t seen any of them for days. I called the manager over. He looked really nervous, sweating and gulping a lot. We opened the door with his key. The Frenchies had already paid in advance, he said. It looked as though they had also moved out, because only the girl was still here. She was on the bed, dead and rotting in the heat. The sight of her swollen body hit me like a ton of bricks. I immediately emptied my stomach straight onto the floor, I couldn’t help it. Then, the stench hit us and we fell back out into the corridor. There must have been hundreds of flies, crawling in and out of her mouth, and nostrils, swarming all over her like a hideous black shroud. Sticking out of her arm was the syringe that had killed her, the flies trying to burrow their way into the spot where the needle had penetrated. They were swarming furiously in their desire to get to their food. The police, when they came, wanted to put all of us into jail. This is always their reaction when a dead body turns up, especially when it involves a foreigner. It has something to do with the foreign embassies that are inevitably involved in cases like this. Eventually we convinced them that none of us had anything to do with her death and they let us all go. It was some time before I could close my eyes without seeing Celine's body. A few days later, I was paying a visit to a friend who happened to be staying in a nearby hotel, when, I came across a European girl walking about in the street without any shoes on. Her dress was orange, which in India is associated with monks, and nuns, but the line of track marks all the way along the insides of her arms told me that the only shrines she had been devoting herself to in recent times were the ones associated with H. |
| To read more of Terry Donaldson's life story, please visit: www.abctales.com/user/terencedonaldson |
| To read an extract of Terry's new book "Kings Cross", please click here. |