‘After travelling solo in India, I was no longer that timid boy’

IMARCEL THEROUX

n 1985, when I was 17, I spent four months volunteering at an orphanage outside Chennai, or, as it was then, Madras. I wince slightly in retrospect at my arrogance and naivety: I was a boy with no skills beyond expensively honed exam technique who thought he could somehow play a part in lifting India out of poverty. The director of the orphanage, Mr Menon, was an avuncular, genial and occasionally strict scholar of English literature. He gently led me to understand the limits of my competence. I ended up helping some of the children with their homework and teaching classes in conversational English.

I found the heat bewildering and there was an overwhelming and repeated shock at being confronted with my ignorance and insularity. But I also made friends who I’m still in touch with, 35 years later.

At the end of four months, Mr Menon and a whole crowd of my new friends put me on the train at Madras Central to begin a six-week journey around India.

Being the son of a famous traveller, I had a fantasy that some sort of intrepid journey was a rite of passage. I’d been planning the route for ages: Madras, Kerala, Goa, Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta (now Kolkata), Darjeeling, Rajasthan, Delhi. I look at that itinerary and do a double-take.

As I waved goodbye to those familiar faces, my heart began to sink. I’d started to feel at home in Tambaram, my suburb of Madras. I’d got used to having idlis for breakfast and even picked up a few Tamil phrases. Now on the train from Madras Central to Quilon, I was sharing a compartment with a Malayalam-speaking family and we couldn’t communicate. I wanted to go back, but it was too late.

It was the start of monsoon. I spent my 18th birthday under grey skies in Cochin and travelled up the coast by bus. Some friends of the Menons put me up in Bombay, but otherwise I was figuring things out as I went along, staying at cheap hotels, and relying on the Lonely Planet guidebook. I worried a lot about money, as there was no easy way to get more. I see from my diary that my accommodation averaged about 20 rupees (£1) a night. Those were the years of poste restante, travellers cheques, and telegrams. I had all my cash in one of those sweaty money belts, whose distinctive sharp edges poking through a shapeless T-shirt were the Masonic handshake by which you recognised other budget travellers.

I’m always surprised when I look back at the diary I kept. A lot of it is what you’d expect: embarrassing teenage poems, moping over a girlfriend who’d chucked me months earlier, corny observations about India. But it’s also full of enthusiasm for the journey. It was thrilling to be there, travelling solo. I managed to be pretty resilient in the face of illness, thefts, loneliness and assorted setbacks, and to retain a sense of curiosity and excitement to the end. The writer Tahir Shah is fond of quoting a proverb that goes “much travel is needed before a raw man is ripened.” I was far from ripe at the end of that trip, but I was transformed from the very timid and naive boy I’d been at the beginning.

RITE OF PASSAGE The teenage Marcel Theroux in India, above; Kerala, below, was one of his ports of call