CHAPTER TWO
The Rim of the Sanctuary
22nd August-7th September
The humidity and crowds of monsoon August in Delhi sap your will to think and move. Joe and I were lying sweltering on grubby bunk beds in a doss house down Janpath Lane. Above us, a large fan hung from the cracked ceiling, swinging limply like a wounded bird. The manager of the place was unctuous and creepy – he didn’t seem to trust us, so we didn’t feel we could trust him. We wanted to move out as soon as possible.
Joe had stayed in a similar place on his way to and from Dunagiri the year before. The previous time I had been in Delhi had been with the Everest expedition, when we had stopped there for two days on the way back from Nepal. Joe and I were trying to climb Changabang on a budget of about £1,400, whereas the Everest Expedition had been sponsored by Barclays Bank International to a sum of £113,000. Then we had stayed in a five-star hotel, which cost 150 rupees each person per night. This time our accommodation was costing us seven rupees a night.
A girl came in wearing Indian clothes, talking in a London accent and scratching her backside. She had been living in a leaf hut in Malari with her boyfriend, surviving by rolling marihuana and selling it to westerners. She had come to Delhi for a gamma globulin injection against hepatitis.
‘I’ve brought my own needle,’ she said. She had a slight figure and coughed heavily. Occasionally, during conversation, she would pause and rush to the toilet. ‘It’s O.K.,’ she said, ‘I’m just being sick. I took too much opium in Old Delhi last night.’ She must have been about eighteen years old.
We walked through the streets. It was hot and muggy and sweat poured off us. A deep breath gave no ventilation. Everywhere were great placards and slogans, for India was at the height of the Emergency.
Their English language tricked us into half-familiarity and emphasised our remoteness from the problems of the sub-continent. ‘Plant a tree’, ‘Only two children’, ‘Root out corruption’, ‘There is no substitute for hard work’, ‘Savings will help you’. Across the back of one crowded bus was written ‘Talk less, work more’. Yes, I longed for action. For weeks now, in the preparation of our expedition, we’d had to tell people what we were planning to do and explain how we were going to do it. But deep inside, this had all felt hollow. I did not really believe that we were going to do the route at all. I wanted to stop talking and start some action.
Joe had some friends, Tony and Rosemary Beaumont, who lived near London. Tony Beaumont was one of the directors of an international company, Guest Keen& Nettlefolds, which had a sister company, Guest Keen Williams, with an office in New Delhi. This branch had helped Joe the previous year, and it had been friends of the Beaumonts in India who had presented our request for permission to climb Changabang to the Indian Mountaineering Foundation in person. Having raced in the Monte Carlo Rally, and taken part in ocean races themselves, the Beaumonts were in sympathy with the spirit of our project and we were indebted to them. So we went in to the office in Parliament Street, to renew acquaintances. J. D. Kapoor was there, beaming a welcome. Walking off the teeming monsoon streets into an air-conditioned office was like walking back into western reality, from the foreign into the familiar. J. D. accepted us immediately. He pressed a buzzer and refreshing drinks appeared.
‘How can I help you?’ he said.
It was a happy, friendly office and they helped us a lot, since there was a great deal of expertise there to assist us short circuit the bureaucratic networks of the Indian customs and excise. However, it still took us two days of trailing around long, impotent corridors of Kafkaesque bureaucracy to obtain the final papers that would release our air-freighted equipment from the airport. Everyone was always very polite and friendly, and presented us with cups of tea, but everywhere they would patiently explain away delays by saying that they were ‘just adhering to the system’. If we complained they would just turn their eyes upwards helplessly and explain, ‘But it was you British who taught us these procedures.’ Perhaps my long hair and Joe’s curly mop, and our denim jeans and plimsolls, did not give us the best appearance for obtaining co-operation from officialdom. One day we waited for two hours in the Customs office for a document to receive interminable counter-signatures. Above our heads hung a framed quote by Jawaharlal Nehru: ‘I am not interested in excuses for delay, I am inter
