EXCLUSIVE: THE INDIAN VOYAGE OF MICHAEL FIELD <<4>>

Its possible Indians invented the concept of urban legends, as a kind of extension of their own rich religious traditions and an ability to spin fantastic yarns. A quite extraordinary range of people retail the stories too, seemingly believing them, or, at least, hoping to get on over the poor credible foreigner. Expect that in pulling the stunt they also make themselves paranoid.
The trains, of course, offer rich material for urban legends, with tales of robbers and rapists and various ruses. People chain their suitcases to their seats and presumably sleep lightly in the hope that they catch anybody up to no good. Frankly my own collection of less than exotic shirts and underwear can go to roaming thieves if they are so inclined, although it would be inconvenient. Somewhat akin to an airline losing your bag.
But even out in the streets its dangerous. I bought a Fanta - not my usual drink of choice but the fierce heat gives it a flavour it doesn't normally have - and a woman told me with horror that this was a favourite way of getting at foreigners. It was drugged, no less. How my assailant was to know that I would stop an an entirely obscure stall and buy this particular bottle was not explained. And of course in the wider Hindu mythology no explanation is needed: in a city of 10 million it would be my fate to get the one poisoned bottle of Fanta. So why worry? There is a variation on the theme around India's airport duty free shops which sell mostly whiskey (the Indian fascination with whiskey has me totally beat - it is not the drink for the heat, I would have thought). That bottle of Johnny Walker Red is not what you think, it seems. Clever operators are said to have drilled into the bottom, drained out the real whiskey and replaced it with something that looks like whiskey. Frankly it seems a big effort for not very great return - and a whole heap of potential problems along the way.
Another new danger are people who offer you biscuits. This is yet to happen to me, but on advice received so far, the idea is not to take the biscuits but to run. They either want to rape me or rob me and the drug laced biscuit is their tool-of-choice. Perhaps it happened sometime. Although some where in the back streets of Chennai today a man offered me marijuana. It seemed very 1960s.
On the train a Tamil told me that hundreds of Bengalis were coming south to Chennai for cheap eye surgery. They needed it, she said, because Bengalis ate lots of sweets and as a result (and no, it didn't especially make sense to me) their eyes fail and they need surgery.
This Urban Legend factory spills over into the mainstream in other ways too. Television and newspapers were today running stories that the Pakistan Air Force now has supremacy over the Indian Air Force. It seems that of late rather too many of India's MiGs have been crashing in assorted landscapes across the land and the subcontinent may now lie defenceless; to raging Pakistanis and their poisoned biscuits.
Pakistan occupies a curious place in the Indian consciousness; they are mostly dismissive of it as a failed democracy run by raving religious mullahs, and equally they seem outraged that anybody would want to live that way and not share in the joys of India's democracy. Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf's book, In the Line of Fire, hit the shelves this week and promoted a torrent of dismissive commentary from the Indian media. I picked up a copy at Higginbotham's and have managed only the first chapter or so. The man certainly has a vast ego.
The story of the moment though has been the conviction and sentencing of a rather elegant looking actor, Monica Bedi. She was given five years "rigorous imprisonment" on charges of cheating, criminal conspiracy and impersonation in a fake passport case. The Hindu reported that she asked newspapers not to refer to her as anybody's girlfriend: "Please do not link me with anyone. I am not having relationship with anyone, I am single." Given that she has already been in jail 10 months, that is hardly surprising and the Hindu doesn't make the connections obvious to us out of towners. The Indian Express helpfully points out she is the girlfriend of underworld don Abu Salem who is in custody in Mumbai over his role in the 1993 serial bomb blasts in that city.
Cannot say I have ever seen Indians publicly fight - they are, as the beach suggests, a very discrete people mostly. Thus my surprise when a walk took me into a sector of town, rather down on its luck, given to repairing motor bike spare parts. Very grimy and industrial and around the corner was a group of around 10 women, furiously yelling at each other and waving their hands about. And a further 20 metres along, a similar sized group in apparently further conference in such a fashion. A tall, thin woman, probably in her 50s, was doing in a dismissive fashion a kind of hula dance. I took this to be a kind of accusation that the other accused woman - who ever it was - had seduced somebody else with her dancing.
I fled across the Line of Control; white man with camera was definitely not needed here. I wanted a biscuit and Fanta.