Girls' Own Adventure Stories

You develop, after just a short time spent writing on some sort of blog, a particular way of coping with all of the stuff life throws at you. Good or bad, failure or success - everything can be dealt with if you keep in mind those shoulder-shrugging words: 'Well, at least it'll make a good blog post.' Many of you, I'm sure, have experienced for yourself how life can become a little like something you just have to go through in order to write a Good Blog Post every day, and for many of us, the daily process of transforming these events into words really does work the same way as religion in helping to make sense of a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad world.

But what happened to me over the past day or two won't make a Good Blog Post. Because when I say Good Blog Post, what I generally mean is something witty and clever and enormously self-aggrandizing whilst being at the same time charmingly self-deprecating. A Good Blog Post is being there at midnight in New York as the final Harry Potter is being launched across the city and everyone is dressed up and high on an imaginary world. A Good Blog Post is chasing Dave Eggers across the Manhattan Bridge in a cab to deliver his suitcase to him before he boards a flight for San Francisco. A Good Blog Post is trying to describe the horror you felt at watching Spring Awakening on Broadway when it feels like you are the only person with style and taste and subtlety left in the world, because you are almost vomiting at how terrible it is and yet everyone else believes it to be the most original and truthful and hard-hitting thing ever written. I never wrote up any of those blog posts, but they have all the necessary material to be Good Ones.

And goodness me, how I would love to write up my most recent Good Blog Post, which would detail the curious fact that Peter Weir is in Darjeeling shooting a film right now, and every foreign backpacking male over the age of twenty who sports a chin of facial hair has been spotted by a diminutive, blonde casting agent and cajoled into auditioning as a stand-in for Colin Farrell and Jim Sturgess in said film. That post, as I said, might have been a Good One too.

I'm sorry to say that this blog post, however, won't be Good. Because a Good Blog Post doesn't, in my mind, include hundreds dead, homes destroyed, and me still horribly stuck against my will in Darjeeling. But nevertheless, a blog post it must be.

When you last heard from me, we were literally fleeing what I had flippantly called 'the monsoon'. It was Tuesday, and I had a ticket booked on a train to Varanasi that day, leaving from a place called New Jalpaiguri which is about four hours down the mountain from Darjeeling. On Monday, the rain had started, and it continued hard and strong throughout the night. So when we awoke on Tuesday morning, the roads had become waterfalls and we were kind of freaked out. 'Wow! The monsoon is intense! Yeah, it looks like that scene in Romancing the Stone where Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas ...'

We decided to skip breakfast and just get out, but already at 8am we were hearing rumours that the main road out of town had been closed. Drenched and shivering, with water up to our ankles, we wandered around trying to find a ride down the mountains. Most days there are a billion men wanting to get you in their taxi, but that day there was noone.

We heard there might be an alternative route via Mirik, which is close to the Nepalese border, and we eventually found a driver who said he would take us. His name was Nima, and he said that he could do it, but that it would be 'very expensive'. My travelling companion, Mel, and I didn't care. We got in and asked Nima, 'Now, you're sure there's a way out of here?' And he assured us, 'Yes, yes', which tragically, we only found out later, actually means no.

The first landslide hit us just before Ghoom, a few kilometres out of Darjeeling. Well, I should say that we hit it. We could barely see out the windows of the car, the rain was a curtain and the fog embraced us thickly like it was being pumped out by an overenthusiastic stagehand. But sitting there, waiting - for what? For someone to clear the road? - the pervading feeling, as you would know if you've ever sat still and contemplated a massive mudslide for any length of time, is that the little plastic car you're sitting in, red and bulbous, could be buried in seconds like a tulip.

After waiting in front of this mound of mud for half an hour and seeing - no, we must be dreaming - fully-grown trees being ripped out of the ground by the violent wind? - we finally got through that first blockage. Why we didn't turn back instead of pushing through, I don't know. Mel and I have since gone over and over it with each other - Why did we even leave Darjeeling? Why were we told it was even possible when everything was so clearly chaos? It was because Nima was so sure of himself, and we wanted to believe in him.

Suddenly, we seemed to be in the clear though; the road shimmered and tricked us like cheap silver under its many layers of heavy rain, and we were on our way. The sound on our roof was still like small animals being thrown out of heaven, pelting, pelting down, but I felt hopeful again. We had eight hours to get to the train station, and we were going to make it after all. At the front of my mind was the urgent need to get as far away from Darjeeling as possible.

Then, swerving around a corner as Nima is wont to do in his little belly of a car, with us in the backseat feeling swallowed up, gulping in the taste of our own fear, the car suddenly screeches just short of a coffee-coloured ocean which engulfs the road and gnaws away at the hillside trying to break out, hoping it can tear out a few thousand tonne of cliff with it on its escape just for a souvenir.

Jeeps are edging through the water, cautious as crocodiles. Nima waits his turn; he doesn't flinch and wades calmly through. Mel and I don't say a word either, we just watch the water growing. I think that the water should be running down the hill, the same direction we're going, but instead it insists on gathering itself up like an enormous petticoat. It pools like blood. Into my mind a random flash of a thought I've never before considered - something about leaving a good-looking corpse - and so I apply some lipstick with a shaky hand because I don't know what else to do. My hand shaking even more now, because finally we are moving through the river, jolting through water that would, if I was brave enough to abandon ship to find out, reach my mid-calf like school socks.

Now we are in a massive pile-up of vehicles. It's suddenly apparent that everyone else is also trying to escape Darjeeling too. One or two jeeps pass by us in the opposite direction, and I think that as long as they are still getting through from the other direction, we're going to be fine. I still have faith.

I try to focus on the cross Nima has hanging from the rear-vision mirror, but the Buddha he has on the dashboard confuses me. I pray that we're doubly protected because my emotions during the next three hours start to swing wildly, like the cross, between inexplicable confidence in Nima and downright terror.

I'm not sure if it's fear or hunger making my guts bunch up in pain now. It's close to 2pm and all Mel and I have had to eat is some cashew nuts and some Pringles between us. Such primordial pangs, but I'm surprised to discover that hunger is dominating over fear, that it's actually stronger, and I think that if they were in a paper, scissors, rock contest together, hunger would totally beat fear. But I am shaken out of my dumb little game when I next look out the window and see that rock is soon going to beat everything no matter what - it doesn't matter what game we're talking about.

It's touching how little Nima tells us about the truth of the situation. True, his English isn't great, but if he was a brutal kind of man I'm sure he could have mimed something to do with 'bam bam'. He chooses instead to leave us in the dark the entire time; literally at one stage. It was when we could see, through our fogged-up windows and the descending sheet of night, that people were leaving their vehicles, streaming past us with umbrellas and walking in a long line like something out of Armageddon or Woodstock. The wind was battling with the trees in the forest around us, uprooting the losers, and the embankment we were parked next to sent out warning shots from time to time, pebbles presaging the main event which was sure to come hurtling down within moments to end our short but (now I can see) happy lives. This is when Nima thoughtfully decided that Mel and I could use a little 'alone time', and he abandoned the car for four hours while we shivered in our wet clothes and wondered where we were, what was happening, why everyone else was leaving and whether the hillside was actually going to collapse on us.

Mel, who in the three weeks we've been together, generally prefers the word 'frickin' to its coarser, more effective cousin, suddenly let fly, making me blush, which was quite an achievement because I was trying to save up most of my energy to shiver. But Nima's prolonged absence had broken us good and proper. I was trying to remember whether you're meant to stay with the car in this kind of situation, or whether the car is your coffin and you should get out and stand in the open rain, but it was still pouring so so hard outside, Nima had run off with our only umbrella, and we couldn't move the car forward or backwards because there were empty jeeps in front and behind us. We had sleeping bags, and I was trying to be calm and realistic. I figured we would have to stay there, in the car on the edge of a cliff, until morning. In the back of our minds, Mel and I were both thinking - 'Doesn't the monsoon last for months? Are we stuck in Darjeeling for months?'

Nima didn't reappear until the cars in front of us finally started to move forward again. Out of nowhere he jumped back into the car and started to drive. We yelled at him in unison, screaming out our hurt and anger. But he just gave his standard reply: 'Yes madam', and kept his eyes on the road.

There was so much mystery. We understood absolutely nothing. Mel attacked Nima as Nima attacked the road. It was dark and still raining. 'Nima, we're cold, we're frightened, you left us alone for four hours, and we have no idea what's happening! TELL US WHAT IS GOING ON.' Nima's response implied that we were now heading back to Darjeeling, and thanks for the memories.

But at one point on the return trip, at a precarious bend that outdid all the other precarious bends we had experienced during the day for the sheer bloodcurdling terror of the scene we were about to see, Nima made us get out and held the umbrella over us as he gestured, 'Come, come. Look. See.'

We tentatively stepped out onto the gushing road of a river, the river of a road, and he pointed up ahead where a house had been completely flattened by a major landslide. Sheep or goats - you couldn't tell what they were through the heavy rain - bleated around the wreckage. The entire side of the road had been sliced through by a waterfall of mud. The mountain had had its side carved off like mutton; it threw itself over the edge like a murder-suicide, killing I don't know what in the process.

When we finally made it back into Darjeeling, Nima argued about payment. Although we had spent the last seven hours being driven to nowhere, risking our lives for a white water rapid experience we didn't sign up for, we were too exhausted and distraught to argue too much. We paid him, and miraculously found a hotel, realising only later how lucky we were to get in anywhere - every place in Darjeeling was booked out.

Drying our shoes by the fire in the living room, some Brits showed us the front page of that day's newspaper. That's when it all made sense. It wasn't the start of monsoon after all - that won't come for a month or two. It was Cyclone Alia, which we found out killed twenty people in the Darjeeling hills that day alone. Almost 200 more have died in Kolkata and Bangladesh.

With electricity all out across town for the past two days now, (I am working on a computer powered by a generator right now, typing in the dark) this place is like a ghost town. But the sun was out today, the cyclone has passed, our clothes are drying, and I think we'll find a way out of here with everyone else tomorrow.

Running Down That Hill

The monsoon has hit Darjeeling, and we're fleeing. I don't have time for lengthy, evocative descriptions of this magnificent downpour because we really have to get out of here quick-smart, but I think the scene in Romancing the Stone, when the voluble waterfall of mud carries Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas all the way down the Colombian mountain, captures the current state of the town pretty well. In your mind's eye, just add a few kilos of rubbish being swept along in the tumult in addition to those two venerable movie stars, and you will have it quite perfectly.

Next stop, Varanasi.

The Bookseller of Darjeeling

Photos are still a couple of weeks off, until I get back to Pune, so until then please accept another mindlessly silly and atrociously long anecdote.

Last night, at the Oxford Book and Stationery Company, located in the town square of Darjeeling, the most splendid thing happened to me - I got to fulfill my lifelong fantasy of pretending that I actually worked in a bookshop.

It all happened like this. I was standing there trying to work out which PG Wodehouse to buy next - would it be My Man Jeeves, Very Good, Jeeves, Thank You, Jeeves, Right Ho, Jeeves, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, The Inimitable Jeeves, or Much Obliged, Jeeves? The lashings of variety made things jolly difficult. I had just decided to buy all of them when a timid voice cleared its throat and whispered, 'Excuse me, Miss? Could you help me find a book for my friend?'

The speaker, a petite Indian girl with the kind of faltering, nervous English that makes you feel like you're being asked out on a date, had picked me, out of all the foreigners in the bookshop, to help her choose a book. But why?

And then I saw it from her perspective and the answer was strikingly clear - my dangly earrings and my scarf, flung carelessly over my shoulder and fluttering academically in the musty, cool air of the bookshop had given me away immediately. Obviously, she had taken one look at me and said to herself - 'That bohemian bookish flair can only belong to someone who works in the Australian Book Publishing Industry in some capacity.'

I puffed myself up with pride, pleased that the National Book Industry Costume, generally reserved for its highly-esteemed middle-aged members (although you will often see the more ambitious and determined twenty-something specimens trying the uniform out prematurely to make sure it suits them) had worked its magic again, and, fully ignoring the fact that if it was true that dangly earrings and scarves were the sole requirement for someone to get a job in the Australian Book Publishing Industry then each and every female backpacker throughout Southeast Asia could also pass themselves off as an editor or at the very least, a publicist, I clocked in for work. (Important note to wannabe Australian Book Industry Professionals: You do actually need to possess more than dangly earrings and a scarf. The Australian Publishers Association careers page has more reliable advice on such matters.)

I flashed the girl my most dazzlingly literary smile. 'Why, I'd be ever so charmed!' I exuberated breathily, instantly becoming Marilyn Monroe for some peculiar reason.

I racked my brains for how to proceed. Here was a young local girl, perhaps in her late teenage years, huddling up to another friend who was bravely bolstering her up for support, and relying on me, little ol' me, to recommend a book for her other friend.

Of course, although the actual role of bookseller has been cruelly denied me over and over throughout my life, I've nevertheless seen it done a thousand times. My own mum, who worked for a decade in a school library, was a consummate in matters such as these. She only needed to glance at a kid and she would know straight away whether to start them on the Tomorrow series, hand them over to the heartbreaking clutches of Anne Frank or Sadako and her thousand paper cranes, or very discreetly, and only in a small number of very special cases, pull out the school's only copy of Tandia, which was kept safely behind the counter, and say, peering over her pince-nez at the student in a most serious manner, 'Listen, you know we only let our most mature students borrow this one, but I think you're ready for it,' instantly making the student feel noticed and special while single-handedly and needlessly increasing Bryce Courtenay's already significant Educational and Public Lending Rights by a dollar or two per year.

She always chose the exact right book for each person, representing the very best of the hand-selling librarian or bookseller - the kind that publishers rely on because they know these people can, through the subtle and elegant power they have over readers, either make or break authors. (My mum was later shanghaied into leaving her job by a dude with a piece of paper, who knew nothing about books but a lot about computers and hair mousse, to the detrimental effect that an entire generation of high school students grew up learning countless more ways to make fun of their teacher-librarians' perms and significantly less about who they are and how the world might open up to them through books and reading.)

More recently, last year, as a waitress at a popular independent bookshop cafe in Brisbane, I was once again in an excellent position to learn from watching the way that professional booksellers work their magic. Sprightly and well-read geniuses, with unassumingly girlish names such as Susy and Emily and Jessica and Kate and Jacqui, wielded their heavy influence over the publishing industry like veritable Masters of the Universe. The power they held in their scholasticly soft and frequently-moisturised hands was one I envied. I have only ever worked at the beginning of the publishing chain, where you do your best to predict what the people want and balance it with what you know deserves to be out in the world and read by millions, but you actually have no chance of getting a proper idea of what happens to the book after you sign off on it until a few months' later, when some figures might come in from the Sales Department if you're lucky. But booksellers are actually there, they're posted at the battlefront - they get to watch and overhear and sense why people are buying what they are buying, and for this I bow down to their wisdom and experience.

Anyway, excited to finally be this close to almost being an actual bookseller, I began asking a few necessary questions.

'So is your friend a boy or a girl?' I asked, being mindful to use the Indian-English words for 'man' and 'woman'.
'Girl.'
'And what sort of books does she normally read?'
'I don't know.'

So I had nothing to go on, but I refused to be disheartened, well aware that booksellers across the globe are faced with this quandary every single working day of their lives and are nevertheless still somehow able to sell books to people.

So, falling back on the age-old sales adage that you can best sell that which you yourself believe in passionately, I looked around for my own personal adolescent favourite, Franny and Zooey. But the only Salinger they had was, typically, The Catcher in the Rye, a book which I would on no account recommend to anyone, ever.

So then I remembered how, as a full-time candy bar employee at a cinema chain in Melbourne, I once won the top sales award for the month of June 2003 (which was a $30 Myer gift voucher) even though I clearly had no conviction or passion for what I was selling (which was popcorn and Coke). My lack of belief in my customers' genuine need to buy a Super-Mega of anything was apparently cancelled out by my idiotic and puppy-like exuberance while on the job, making it impossible (hence my sales award) for anyone to refuse me my generous and playful offers (read: an ingrained personality flaw of needing to please others) to upgrade them for just an extra twenty cents, even though I think Coke is the devil incarnate and that popcorn which has been sitting there for a few days is really the last thing that most people need on a nice night out at the movies.

So then I started trying to recommend some things I didn't believe in, like Danielle Steele and Barbara Taylor Bradford, but I quickly realised that I can't get away with that sort of thing anymore, because as I listened to myself I could hear the pathetic empty conviction of someone who doesn't know what she's talking about.

I confess, I was flailing. I hadn't even made one appropriate suggestion. I anxiously hovered in front of the twenty shelves dedicated exclusively to Shantaram and Holy Cow, but, novice bookseller that I was, I still know enough about demographics to see that these two young Indian girls would not go in for either of these books, despite the fact the entire foreign population of Darjeeling, nay, the entire foreign population of India itself, is currently reading those two books and has in fact been reading them for a good five or ten years straight now.

'Maybe she would like a love story?' I expressed hopefully, trying to buy time.
'Yes,' she agreed amiably. 'She'd probably like a love story or a horror story.'

'A love story or a horror story, hey?' I felt a little of my strength coming back and confidently handed her Twilight, but the sheer weight of the tome threw her to the ground. As I helped her up, I pointed to the three porters I've hired to follow me around India, employed solely to carry the six volumes of Proust I intend on reading here. 'This is why I pay them $2 a day, honey,' I confided. 'Some books are total killers.' But, seeing that Darjeeling locals are way too diminutive to handle either Stephenie Meyer or, regrettably, Proust, without hiring a porter of their own, at long last I saw a book that caught my eye. Stephen King's Carrie! 'How about this?' I ventured. 'It's light! And it's both a love story and a horror story!'

But even as she was inspecting the blood-spattered cover, I was weighing up my moral responsibilities as bookseller - could I really recommend a book which contains a distressing tampon scene to a girl who lives in a town where I don't even think they sell tampons? I felt torn in half over the ethics of it.

Luckily, I was rescued by her genius of a friend, who had thankfully wandered into Cecilia Ahern country. 'What about this?' she said, holding up what appeared to be a square-shaped piece of fluffy pink and blue fairy floss, but which was in fact a book.

I was so grateful that I almost went up and kissed her. 'Oh, yes! Yes! Do take Cecilia Ahern! Daughter of the former Irish prime-minister, or whatever the Irish call their heads of government these days, you know! She'll be perfect for your friend! She even competed in Eurovision one year! And, her sister is married to someone or other from an Irish boy band! Oh, she's a delight! Nothing wrong with her! Pure as the driven snow!'

The book she finally decided on, if you're interested, was called The Gift, and I like to believe it was total success.

Daughters of the Train Station Queue

I always thought that female competition - that is, women fighting against women for jobs, for men, for minor roles in community theatre - was absurd and embarrassing for everyone involved. Sure, I've fought against women before - for jobs, for men, for the role of 'Chava' in Fiddler on the Roof - but losing out every single time has taught me that life isn't a competition.

I mention it because I thought I had given up this noxious habit of female competition when I outgrew other adolescent hobbies such as netball and the seduction of other women's boyfriends. But yesterday, at the Darjeeling Train Station, it all came back to me as easy as pie - as easy as a pie you might see at a bake-off where the rivalry for supremacy is particularly ingrained across generations of pie-baking females, and wafting amidst the smell of blueberries and pumpkins and pastry crust is that unmistakable scent of violence, hanging like a dagger or a stainless steel pie server in the air.

I was only half expecting the Darjeeling Train Station to have a Ladies Only queue, so when I discovered there wasn't one, I switched unflappably to Plan B. Plan B, as stated by the Lonely Planet India, 2004 edition, says that a lady should: 'Simply proceed to the front of the queue next to the first male at the window.' With the calm confidence that comes from one who holds even an outdated Lonely Planet in her hands, I sauntered up to the window. And despite the sudden frenzy of jostling elbows whipped up by my debut appearance in the line, I had no doubt that chivalry would win out and I would be served next, just as soon as the painfully slow transaction occurring in front of me had come to its inevitable conclusion.

Half an hour later, I was still waiting, and that was when the one thing happened that I hadn't counted on happening - another woman entered the queue.

Only an unsuccessful 1997 bid to win the the minor role of 'Chava' in Fiddler on the Roof has ever upset me as visibly as this skilled entrance from upstage right. A consummate professional, and with the wholly unfair advantage of being able to speak the native tongue, she shoved right in front of me, making her intentions ruthlessly clear. I was in a state of flummox unmatched since another outdated Lonely Planet I was relying on claimed that Istanbul was Constantinople. I weakly pulled out the guidebook and pored through it, damning to hell that if only I didn't have the 2004 edition I wouldn't be in this perplexing situation (the latest 2009 edition would surely have done research into recent developments of Darjeeling feminism, and altered their advice accordingly). Slamming the book shut, bereft of guidance in this worst-nightmare-scenario for solo female travellers, I did the only thing I felt I could do - I pushed her lovely and gentle Nepalese figure out of the way with the efficient bump-and-grind movement I learnt as an anonymous chorus girl (where else does a failed 'Chava' go?) in Fiddler on the Roof. The beautiful woman bounced against the counter and there are only two words to describe the expression that registered on her face as I hummed the accompanying lines to that particular dance move -

And who does Mamma teach
To mend and tend and fix?
Preparing me to marry
Whoever Papa picks?

Mockful. Intimidation.

But it was perhaps the bellowing, threatening answer I gave to that particular cryptic Yiddish riddle - 'The DAUGHT-ERRRS!!!" that most struck her kind, gentle face with terror and fear. She scurried back to wait for her turn behind me. And that was how I found myself finally at the counter, facing the appalled expression of the train ticket guy and the antipathy of the entire ticket queue.

I sweetly proceeded to explain to the guy exactly what I needed in the way of train tickets, and that was when I discovered that you can be the most ardently chauvinistic fighter for your own mannish cause and still be refused what you want simply because you are asking for something they do not have. In short, they did not, do not, and will not have any train tickets to Kolkata for next week. This was ascertained only after a nail-biting twenty-minute conversation, interrupted only four times by my need to holler at the guy standing behind me: 'Dude! I waited! They're waiting! You can wait!'

Anyway, there's not much else I can say. I walked away feeling pretty disgusted that I had allowed myself to tread into what felt like the vulgar female-hating territory normally populated by the mothers of teenage cheerleaders and women's magazine editors. The only thing I could think of doing to make up for my shameful display of misogyny was to go and buy fourteen shawls, eight pashminas, three scarves and an electric blue beret knitted by local Tibetan refugee women, and which is meant to assist them in becoming self-supportive. You'll be pleased to know that this helped alleviate my conscience greatly, and I promise I will never again fall for that old trap of female competitiveness, preferring instead to wrap myself back up in the warm, familiar and comforting emotions associated with man-hating instead.

The Mountains

When I was a kid, I saw Manon de Sources and made up my mind that there was nothing I would rather do with my life than become a goatherd like Emmanuelle Béart in that film. With just a little sheepdog for company, I would roam hill and dale with my agile charges, occasionally yodelling. I would be known throughout the countryside for my striking goatherd-ish beauty, my well-kept tresses, and the haunting melody I would wield on my harmonica. (I think it's worth noting that these visions of future career success precociously predated that of another harmonica-playing yodeller, Alanis Morisette, by at least a couple of years.)

Needless to say, I'm relieved I didn't follow through on the goatherd dream. For a start, I don't even like goats - they remind me of touring rock musicians, with their beards, their constant moving to newer pastures, their lanky-legged don't-you-remember-you-told-me-you-loved-me-baby insouciance, and the general rock rock rocky style of those artfully shy but confidently nimble creatures, whose herders prefer to go by the title 'tour manager' these days, but who nonetheless require just as much patience and energy and endless ingenuity to be able to keep their dependents fed and happy as your average goatherd has ever needed to have; maybe even more, as who ever heard of a goat requiring a gram of cocaine just to get them to the next town.

But the main reason is because, if there's one thing that Darjeeling has taught me, it's that living in the mountains is tough on the knees, and becoming a goatherd for life would be roughly equivalent to signing up to the Australian Netball Diamonds on a two-year contract, the remuneration of which I have heard is similar to that of a book editor in India except at least book editors get to keep their knees for later genuflection to whichever god got them through all the lean, hard years of starvation and misery - netball players don't even get that to help them through, because you generally need knees for religion.

Anyway, there's not actually any goats in Darjeeling, at least, not that I've seen, it's all dogs and roosters and birds of the air, so I don't know why I'm even talking about it, except that obviously my narrative GPS, even when I set the destination as 'Get to the point', always manages to find a sneaky detour through rural France even when we're nowhere near it to start with. Sorry about that.

So the mountains of Darjeeling then. Whenever I see them written down, I want to make a little mark with my editor's pen, a query - 'Himalayas? Consider revising for political correctness?' The Theyalayas, or Him-or-Her-alayas if you insist, are absolutely magical. It's never been a dream of mine to come anywhere near Everest, and apart from giggling immaturely in grade four Soc Ed when we were told that the first white man to scale Everest had a girl's name, I never gave the place two seconds' thought until now, because now I'm here.

Discarded openings to my essay on Darjeeling

The Maquarie Dictionary defines a mountain as 'a large

If Joni Mitchell had come to Darjeeling and looked at clouds from both sides now, i.e., from up and down, I daresay she really would know clouds

With local food such as Tibetan bread (relax folks, it's just like bushman's damper!) to the crumbling evidence of former British colonial rule wherever you look, Darjeeling offers Australians in particular a familiarity and comfort that they would normally only find on a camping trip to Canber

While to the general backpacker who is travelling throughout the region, Pakistan, broadly speaking, might seem Sunni and Shiite, and India, if you can't stand the heat, is sunny and shit, the city of Darjeeling is noteworthy for being neither sunny nor shite and thus is a refreshing break for those who are fed up with

Darjeeling Darling

You know how people talk about how they 'just knew' when they met the person they are meant to be with forever? As you follow the rapid butterfly movement of their eyelashes, dewey of course with emotion, you recall and envy that beat of certainty they have, those up-down spidery bats of confidence. You feel a vague familiarity with their air of assurance because maybe you used to have it too, but failure and disappointment have had their wicked way and so now you would never dare to be so coquettish with your own lashes because, frankly, (having seen what you've seen and learnt what you know), it would make you feel like a disingenuous fraud. So you sit there, unblinkingly, and you nod encouragingly as their eyes glisten and sparkle and they recall that splendid day when they launched themselves forth into the dangerous world - just like any other day - but this time, instead of meeting with a mugger or a murderer or a misanthrope, they clamoured headfirst into the waiting arms of the person they were in love with before they were even born. And straight away they just knew it.

Well, this actually happened to me the other day, but not with a person, a place. Darjeeling is like a feeling I have never felt before. I don't know how other people arrive at this particular place; I don't actually know how I even got here. In practical terms, a jeep was the main instrument and then, once hazardously installed with thirteen other passengers, I endured four or five hours of steady climbing, with a large rock pushed skillfully behind the back tyre whenever we stopped to drop someone off so we wouldn't roll backwards. But emotionally, I think you need only go back over two years of this blog to see how I got here. I had been in a rather dulled and haughtily disgruntled place for a fair while, so perhaps this is why Darjeeling has opened itself up to me in the role of saviour, soul mate, and, I think it's safe to say, life partner. (I have spent the last two days alternating between looking out at mountains and looking into real estate).

I am wary of becoming so poetical and sentimental that you think I'm putting it on, so I'd better stop there. But because I am stopping here ('stopping' is the word my grandma uses for 'staying') - stopping in Darjeeling for two weeks in fact - there will be more time to try to explain a couple of things about this place, in what I'm sure will be (I feel compelled to declare outright) the embarrasingly eyelash-fluttering language of someone who has fallen hopelessly and convincingly in love.

On the Road

Posts are a little intermittent right now due to my hectic travel schedule, which has lately gone a little like this:

THURSDAY
Flew to Delhi and met up with my friend, Mel.

FRIDAY
Spent the day touring around Delhi with a driver called Sonu. Our instructions were, 'Oh, just take us around town, show us, like, the Red Fort and stuff.' And so he picked us up at 10am and took us first to a big Hindu temple, then to Qutb Minar, then to the India Gate and the Lotus Temple, and finally, at around 1.30pm, with the sun at its zenith, we arrived at the Red Fort. I was almost faint by this time, and the sight of a 2km long fort (oh, it's very red) which cost another Rs 250 to get in, and all the attendant bureaucracy that goes with these tourist attractions (locker rooms, frisk searches) made me almost die from sheer effort, hunger and heat stroke. As we got to the ticket booth, and the Indian nationals filed in to the fort for RS 10 ahead of us, I turned to Mel and, leaning on a crumbled ruin to help me stay up, I weakly gasped, 'Go in if you like; I can't do it.' Even though the whole point of our excursion was to come to see the Red Fort, I was burnt out. We both left. Next time I will request that the driver goes to where we want to go first, at the start of the day, which was a good lesson to learn, I suppose.

SUNDAY
After resting on Saturday (we slept most of the day just to recover) we boarded a train to Agra on Sunday at 6am. Agra is where the Taj Mahal is. When we arrived, we booked a driver in for a three-hour 'tour'. His name was Kissen, we think, and he talked A LOT. By the end we were so sick of him that we got rid of him early. But at least he got us to the Taj Mahal, where we had to pay RS 750 for the privilege of entering the grounds.

You're really unlucky that I have a time limit at this internet cafe, because I could really go on for ever about the Taj Mahal. It was splendid. It was romantic. It was MAGNIFICENT. I didn't think I would feel this way, but I truly did. There was something magical about it. You're also really unlucky that I can't put any photos up, as I have SO MANY of myself in front of the Taj Mahal, it's truly breathtaking to see them all; the sheer stamina I discovered I had within myself to hold the camera out in front of me and just snap, snap, snap, for almost two hours straight. It's a real shame you won't get to see those thousand photographs, each unique and fascinating in subtle and delicate ways.

Anyway, as it happened, there we were at the Taj Mahal, and it started raining. Beautiful, wondrous rain. THE MONSOON! I think. It only went for about ten minutes but, astonishingly, the weather then remained beautifully cool for the rest of the day. I loved it.

But the rest of Agra bored us to death. We weren't interested in any of the other attractions it allegedly offers, so we went and bought some books (books here are cheaper than anywhere else I have ever been) and sat at a cafe for, oh, about six hours, until it was time to go back to the train station. We had second-class tickets, and it was pretty horrible, and once again, it's a shame I don't have more time because then I could totally whinge to you about how terrible it was and it would be a lesson in patience for you and totally cathartic for me, so win-win all round.

Tomorrow, we go to Darjeeling, and I really think I can't wait to get out of Delhi.

My Comic Life Story

Over the past few days, I've been working on getting my life story down on paper for you. As it turns out, my life story only takes up seven pages, including pictures, which was a bit of a shock to realise. But, as a result, it made me truly see how small and humbling my life actually is, which I assure you has made me a better person all round. Thank you, India.

It started out because I wanted to tell you more about my brother, Lachy, who has unwittingly become a major character in my life and thus, my blog, because now we are living together again for the first time in about twelve years. But as I worked on the project, it became clear that the story of my brother is also the story of my family, which is, as it turns out, actually The Story of Me.

So here it is, in amateurish Comic Life glory. Do I need to tell you to click on the pictures to enlarge them? I was really hoping you would know me well enough to realise that by now.

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Sweatshop editing

I’ve spent the better part of two years researching working rates for editors in three different English-speaking markets – the US, the UK and Australia. And I’ve spent the worst part of those same two years coming to terms with the fact that the career I’ve chosen is quite simply one that pays really shit in all three of those countries.

So, when I was contacted out of the blue by an Indian publisher about an editing opportunity this week, I was curious to check it out and add another country, as well as (as I supposed) more bitterness and vitriol to the melting pot of My Own Private Global Publishing Industry Salary Dissatisfaction. The funny thing is that, despite my low expectations of the industry, I was still completely unprepared for what I found out about India.

From the beginning I realised that there is no way that a local Indian publisher would be able to pay Australian rates, let alone UK or US ones. So before I went to the interview I thought about it quite intently, and after doing some sums, I tried to work out a general hourly rate that might be considered reasonable here. And of course it would depend on the level of editing the books required, and the pay rate I would be happy to accept would also take into account the interesting experience I would be getting and, to be frank, any extra income at all would be a blessing right now. And at the very least, working in an Indian office would surely make for at least one hilarious and charming blog post, which usually makes almost anything worthwhile. In short, I didn't think I had any delusions about the situation.

I hopped onto Lachy’s bicycle (the rickshaws are still on strike) and, with a scarf muffled across my face and my sunglasses placed over the top so that I looked like one of Michael Jackson’s children out on Neverland Penitentiary day release, I rode across the bridge and arrived at the office ten minutes early; so professional that anyone who saw me would have thought, Wow, that girl seems like someone who has spent the better part of two years going to job interviews and arriving exactly ten minutes early every time! Which is absolutely true.

I’m not going to go on about the almost three hours I spent doing the interview, including the hour I spent doing an editing test, but needless to say I could pretty quickly see that the work they required would be what I would call heavy editing – it wasn’t proofreading or 'light' copyediting. The books were textbooks, and the main problem was that they were written in Hinglish, so before they could whack a sixty to eighty pound price tag on these books in the UK, the publishers desperately needed someone to go through the text and translate each sentence into English. To give you an idea of what sorts of sentences I am talking about here:

‘Mr Victor is conducting his business since 2000 and she have been doing many worrying about the hierarchical structure of the organization functional team building work.’

So the editing work would require rewriting and restructuring every sentence, followed by restructuring every paragraph and then restructuring every chapter, sculpting the shape of sentences and paragraphs and chapters by going back and forth and reworking each and every word so that the meaning is retained and the text, in skilled hands, would hopefully be moulded to the point where it might eventually read like vaguely literate English. (By the way, if you are unfamiliar with the skills and knowledge and training required by a professional editor, to give you an idea, they are sort of equivalent to those that a proper mechanic might be expected to have if you were paying them to work out what was wrong with your car, where they would have to take apart the engine and look at it closely and then rebuild it again piece by piece until it was running properly. The only difference is that you would pay a mechanic more than you would pay an editor, and mechanics are way more respected in our society for the good work they do than editors are.)

So now that I knew the level of work that was required, when the director took me aside to discuss salary, I had a good idea of what an hourly rate for this sort of work would be in my country. And then, like a proper, open-minded foreigner, I checked myself again and said to myself, 'Lorelei, you're in India, you can't expect the same as in Australia or the US or the UK'. So, working out loosely that this sort work should be charged at more than RS 2000 per hour in Australia, I slashed that rate by half, preparing to accept Rs 1000 per hour, although knowing I could creep down to Rs 800 perhaps if they let me work from home. And, to be honest, I was actually thinking that a worst-case scenario of about Rs 500 per hour was something I might even be prepared to do, despite the fact that the Australian Societies of Editors would want to kill me if I did that for dragging down the profession as a whole.

Now, just to bring you up to speed with the cost of living in this country, I want you to imagine a few grocery items in your head:

In India, a 1 litre bottle of water is around Rs 12.
A small bottle of shampoo is around Rs 125.
A 750ml bottle of gin is Rs 240.
And a jar of imported Vegemite is around Rs 400.

And now, just to give you an idea of a standard professional office-worker wage in India:

A western editor, whose position description requires her to not only edit telephone-book-sized textbooks but also, I discovered at the interview, to train the Indian workers in English (by giving them English classes, and thereby single-handedly trying to raise the level of written English in an office of twelve Indian authors and editors), and who is also expected to help organise development and training in the company, was yesterday offered the same rate as the Indian authors in that office get paid. Which is, so I don't leave you hanging any longer, Rs 148 an hour.

That’s about AUD$4 an hour, or about $30 for a full eight-hour day. But because I would only do it part-time, I was looking at $15 a day – less than $100 a week for a full, six-day Indian working week, doing some of the heaviest and in-depth editing work you can possibly imagine.

I’m not really a rude and bitchy person in real life (only on my blog) and so I didn’t laugh in the director's face, but I honestly thought it was a joke. I had to double-check – you don't mean 148 dollars or pounds or something else? No, I mean 148 rupees per hour. Meaning that a day's work would buy me a jar of Vegemite, or one and a half bottles of gin (the gin obviously being of far more use to me than the Vegemite).

I knew that the western teachers at Lachy’s international school get paid more than the Indian teachers, and when I first arrived this concept seemed pretty deplorable. But as I was going over that figure again – Rs 148 per hour – I realised how unreasonable it is to pay a westerner the same wage as you pay a local, at least in an industry such as publishing, where the necessary level of an employee's English goes way beyond just knowing how to speak it - if you want to sell your books to the English-speaking world, you need to expect you will have to pay more for a professional editor.

And to ask a westerner to live in India on the same wage as a local - at first you feel a wave of snobbishness when you say it, but it is an indubitable fact that the wage will actually be applied really differently on a day-to-day basis for a westerner as compared to a local. For example, there’s the vital matter of rickshaws – a ride charged at Rs 10 for an Indian is automatically hiked up to Rs 150 for someone who has white skin, and you sometimes have to basically fistfight the drivers to get them to put the meter on to get a fair Indian rate.

But there are also so many other reasons why being paid $4 an hour for intense, artful, structural and line editing is completely offensive. I felt like a mother whose beautifully and expensively-brought-up daughter had decided to run off with a tattooed, motorbike-riding junkie – all that hard work you put into something (in my case, five years at university plus five years’ professional experience and skill-refining) feels like it's being thrown away; defenestrated.

At first I felt kind of grief-stricken and shocked, but as I got on my bike and cycled away from the offices, wrapped in my Michael Jackson-style balaclava, I could actually appreciate, and almost enjoy, the bathos. Just thinking again about Rs 148 per hour, I started laughing and laughing, with smog getting into my lungs, and trucks and elephants staggering along beside me, and potholes and beggars plotting to trip me up, and scooters honking me, and I just kept laughing and laughing all the way home because there was nothing else I could think to do about it.

The May Day weekend

I’ve been here a week now and I have to admit that I’m finding it quite a struggle. Not a struggle like some people have to struggle when they have nowhere to live and barely any food to eat so they’re forced to drown their daughters and cripple their sons, but still, I am finding it a quite a struggle.

Lachy and I had planned to spend the May long weekend in Mumbai, which I am from now on going to call Bombay for two reasons: One, because everyone who lives in India calls it Bombay, and two, because Mumbai sounds like Woombye, which is a country town on the Sunshine Coast near where I grew up which is a really boring place to remind yourself of every time you need to say ‘Mumbai’.

But our plans got totally snookered. First of all, the travel agent phoned us late the night before we were meant to leave and told us that the train tickets we had booked and paid for earlier in the week actually somehow didn’t exist anymore. And so it ended up that we had no seats on the by-now totally-sold-out train. Secondly, our back-up plan of trying to find a bus that could take us to Bombay instead was defeated because the rickshaw drivers were on strike and so we couldn’t even get anywhere to check out alternatives.

So we went for a walk down the street instead, and bought a blow-up wading pool for the apartment and many bottles of tonic water, which has the dual purpose of helping me to build up my resistance (to malaria, because, as each individual Schweppes bottle proudly advertises, ‘tonic water contains quinine!’) and, when paired with gin, also helps to break down my resistance (to fighting against this culture – some aspects of which are, you might sense at this juncture, starting to grate a little.)

We headed back to the apartment and tried to recover from the disappointment of having our plans totally dashed. About eight hours and several litres of malaria vaccination later, we felt sufficiently calm and ready to go outside again, and I said to Lachy, Wouldn’t it be nice to go and see a movie, dear brother? And he said, Why yes, sweet sister, let’s go to the movies! And so we headed out for what promised to be a lovely evening of dinner and a movie.

It was an absolutely horrific evening of dinner and a movie. We went to a bad place to eat where the dinner was greasy and got us into a very bad mood. But we soldiered on despite this, and continued on to the cinema to have, what would be for both of us, our very first Indian cinema experience. The only film showing at the right time was one starring Meg Ryan but, equipped the open-minded attitude that comes with living in a foreign culture and, with my memory wiped clean of all of Ms Ryan’s previous romantic comedies (I chose to focus instead on the spectacular career anachronism of The Doors movie) we went into the cinema optimistically thinking that a movie titled My Mom’s New Boyfriend might have the same level of complexity and intensity and dramatic interest as that entertaining rock biopic from 1991.

If I had seen the name ‘Hanks’ on the poster, I would have turned and walked away immediately, but gin and tonics have a way of inoculating you against not just malaria but also common sense, and thus we spent the next two hours (excluding intermission) watching not Tom Hanks, which would have been bad enough, but some kind of offspring he and Rita Wilson have begotten instead, a simple wingnut of a fellow named Colin. I don’t mean to be really mean or anything, but with the inherited features of a father like Tom and the brainwork of a mother who produced a film like My Big Fat Greek Wedding I don't really know what we were expecting, but our standards should never have been particularly high.

But I jump ahead. Remember, Lachy and I were both in quite bad moods already, owing to the fact we couldn’t get to Bombay because our tickets got messed up, we’d just eaten a terrible dinner, the heat was killing us, the rickshaw drivers of Pune had shown a total lack of consideration for our travel plans, the hangovers were starting to pulse behind our temples, and then the begging children outside the cinema, for the first time, actually grabbed me and clung on to my clothes to get my attention, which I found a little unbalancing, because several hours straight of inoculating yourself against malaria whilst splashing around in a kids’ wading pool and singing along to Bruce Springsteen at full volume can make you a little unsteady on your feet when you do eventually dare to emerge back into the real world. It’s also perhaps worth noting that, being members of the same family, Lachy and I have a very similar biological make-up, so, while one bad mood is just something to be tolerated by the other, when both of us are in bad moods at the same time, it’s like two magnets made of the same metal which repulse each other at every turn. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to claim that, even before the previews had finished, we were steadily and confidently hating one another’s guts.

He refused to stand up for the Indian national anthem which boomed out in Dolby Digital Sound before the film started, and I found this rude and arrogant. Meanwhile, I had insisted on paying approximately AUD$5 for each individually wrapped lemon sherbet lollie from the candy bar (I got four of them) because, as I explained to Lachy, you can’t get them in Australia anymore and $20 I think is a fair price for four boiled sweets that are so rare, a rationalisation he found idiotic and puerile.

Imagine two earthquakes of the exact same magnitude, trembling underground and ready to strike at the exact same time and in the exact same unsuspecting city, set off firstly by the unmistakable faultline of Meg Ryan’s botoxed lips, and then pulsing out across the city with each irritating squeak uttered by Hanks Jr’s barely-broken voice. Then, further magnified by Antonio Banderas’s cheesy dialogue, which was undoing all the good work he had created in Evita with each and every scene, and all the while Selma Blair just insisted on adding even more shudder to the shake – she is way too good for this type of thing. Not to mention the sex scenes which were cut out completely, rendering the film even more moronic than it already was, and the guffaws of the Indian audience who were laughing at the corniest and worst of jokes, making Lachy and I cringe at their every twitter, and the ushers who moved along each row to sell popcorn and Pepsi so you had to move your feet to let them pass, and the strange Indian custom of answering your mobile phone and talking on it during the film, and the mere fact that it was necessary to have signs stuck up everywhere that said ‘Please do not spit in the cinema’ brought seismic unbalance to our formerly happy and peaceful rapport, and the long walk home (remember, the rickshaw strike), in fuming rage and dark, dangerous silence, reminded me that even the most reliable and solid of family ties can be killed by a bad Meg Ryan film. And I know, we shouldn’t have let the sun set on our anger, but good luck trying to even work out if the sun has actually set in Pune as it seems to beat down for 24 hours straight, and the homemade fireworks light up the sky all night, so if you really put your mind to it you can actually stay angry forever, which I think is a pretty surprising concept in a country which is so heavily advertised as being spiritually enlightening like India is, but there you go.

So, I now have the choice of whether to stay angry for the rest of my stay, which is quite an appealing and satisfying prospect because, apart from the Meg Ryan film, there really are a ton of additional things I could get angry at if I really tried. (My upbringing! My ex-boyfriend!) Or I could try to take the advice of those who have been living here for longer than me and simply lower the bar and try to become unflappable, which is, I am advised, a more sustainable tactic.