Because many Indian visitors to the UK don’t go home at the end of their holiday, the British are now insisting on a £3000 deposit to be put down by Indian passport holders entering the country, the money returned when they do. In retaliation, the Indians are making it difficult for UK citizens to visit India and therefore hampering my plans to spend a winter holiday in Bombay and Goa.
Godamn war! Can’t we all just live in peace?
On the subject of India, the town where I live is split into two – the northern, American designed residential area (deliberately located upwind of the petrochemical plants) described by some as pseudo-California (TGI Fridays and Starbucks are recent arrivals on the palm lined sea-front, not a bikini in sight) while to the south is the old town, known as Little India (deliberately located downwind of the petrochemical plants) where the lowly Asian labourers/slaves live. These are the guys - from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Sri Lanka - who make the nation tick and just about survive on $100/$200 a month. It’s run-down, cheap and not at all cheerful, teeming with subjugated humanity, and I’m sure if a satellite heat-seeking device was passed over it a shimmering, creeping mass of cockroaches would show up. I was once browsing in a Levi’s store and a roach the size of a toy car scuttled out from under a pair of jeans. I passed on the sales assistant’s offer to try them on.
It might be filthy but it does have atmosphere and vitality, in stark contrast to the languid shopping for spending money’s sake and junk food gluttony of the swanky northern area where the better-off pass their evenings. The old town ghetto is reality for the mass majority of foreign workers in the sand, living on a diet of flat breads baked in huge kilns and eaten with fool, lines of men snaking out into the street after a 12 hour shift under a blazing sun on construction sites or garbage trucks or road gangs. They live in cramped rooms alongside the ubiquitous cockroaches and a dozen or so other men with a shower and toilet between them, allowed home every five years if they’re lucky, dependent on the contractor handing over their passports. So I can’t really feel sorry for myself because India won’t give me a visa when a lot of these guys come from there or thereabouts and are deliberately prevented from going home while I just want a holiday to escape from the sand.