A warm welcome back to India

A visit to this spellbinding country will leave you enchanted, enthralled and exhilarated, says Mick Brown

Forget Barbados or the vertigoinducing majesty of Machu Picchu. The best news about travel is that India – magical, blessed, crazy, endlessly fascinating, if occasionally infuriating – is finally opening up once more.

Many first-time visitors will head for its famous attractions – the “Golden Triangle” of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, with the Taj Mahal as its gleaming centrepiece, or the beaches and waterways of Kerala and Goa. But it is India’s capacity to take you by surprise that is magical.

Travelling in a bus to Puducherry, through the verdant and peaceful countryside, I saw farmers emptying sacks of grain into the road, to be rolled over by trucks and cars, sorting the wheat from the chaff. Another indelible memory was exploring the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai, a fantastical edifice with four great towers, encrusted on every tier with carvings of gods, goddesses and mythological creatures, painted in vivid oranges, pinks and blues. You can lose yourself in the labyrinth of the interior, with what seems like miles of corridors, arcades and chambers, crammed with shrines and thronged with pilgrims, to emerge blinking into a courtyard where a line of women moves methodically back and forth, brushing the ground with bundles of twigs, as sunlight streams through a wicker canopy.

In India the most prosaic scenes and moments become spellbinding. On another journey to Puducherry, overnight from Bangalore, my bus lurched to a halt at a railway crossing. A sliver of moon hung in the sky like a stage prop. A bell sounded faintly in the distance, like a buoy on a dark sea, and the rails began to hum as the train drew nearer, then rattled slowly past, the windows’ squares of light framing the faces of passengers staring out into the darkness.

Dislocated from the moorings of comfort and familiarity, I felt suffused with happiness and wellbeing, as if everything – the level-crossing, the sultry, Bible-black night, the train – was as it should be, and that all was well. India does this to you. You will be enchanted, enthralled and exhilarated, sometimes hot and bothered and occasionally terrified – the driving! (Just close your eyes.) But you will never have felt more alive, and you will never forget it.