Udaipur day 1 pt2 – Life’s a Pineapple

Carol lay in bed nursing her headache. I decide to wander around, be nice to everybody, & see what happens. One aim was to pick up an Ethernet cable so I could plug in my lappie at the hotel as there's no wifi. After 20mins of having to say "Namaste!, Australian!, Sydney!, Cricket!, Ricky Ponting!, Adam Gilchrist!, 1^st time India!, 49!, married!, no children!" to everybody my niceness policy was backfiring badly. C reckons we should get T shirts made up with all those responses printed front & back so we can just point at our chests when asked…

I retreated to an apparently deserted bookshop/net café. A 50 something American woman was out back on a PC & said she'd been here alone for half an hour or so. "Help yourself honey! Eat all the chocolate & take all the books you want". I decided against & checked the street outside. A strikingly handsome Indian chap sauntered over, might have been his shop or he might have been minding the whole row of shops, that was never established. No cables here but he immediately offered to run me over to where he bought his computers on his motorbike.

Dev had perfect Uni-educated English & as we careered through the traffic we chatted about the MBA he wants to do & the current spate of bashings of Indian students in Australian cities. He'd wanted to go to Adelaide or Sydney but his father has now forbidden this & he's probably off to the US instead. Not for the first time I apologised on behalf of a nation.

I got a cable made up & as we journeyed back to his area he started the familiar spiel about how he works with a painting cooperative where all the profits get divided between the artists & the shopowner. Would I like to visit the 'school' & learn about the painting & maybe have a look in the shop, no expectation to buy. I did all the above & got away without a purchase. Beautiful though the work was I didn't want or need it & used getting back to my sick wife as an excuse to extricate myself.

I mention all this because it sounds initially very much like our Delhi kidnapping but the difference here was that I genuinely like this guy & I was engaged in an exchange. He'll get me the cable I need & I'll look at his paintings, I'll act my role of innocent abroad & he'll be pleasant to be with, maybe he'll sell something. A subtle dance.

I was reminded of my friend Kenny O'Clair from some Boeing town in the US. I met Kenny in Burundi in 1988 & he was on a woefully under researched wander around Africa. He had long blond hair, big teeth, no chin & bottle bottom glasses with a rose tint (I kid you not); he was straight from Scooby Doo central casting. He'd get in to awful scrapes in the weirdest of places & always get away with it because he genuinely didn't know what was going on. He just kept on smiling & shaking hands. One night over dinner he came out with "Hey! Everything's better than everything else!" which pretty much summed up his approach.

His other phrase was "life's a pineapple", but he never explained what that meant.