Blue in the throat

Excitement. Glamour. Scintillating nights in exotic locales. That&rsquos what a book tour conjures up. My publishers, Penguin, warned me otherwise. &ldquoIn India, it can be quite exhausting.&rdquo They suggested limiting the tour for The Age of Shiva to four cities, but I pressed for five.

As it turned out, Penguin was right. The tour almost felled me. I blame it on the mosquitoes swarming around when I checked into my hotel in Mumbai. The staff, in a show of efficaciousness, went after them with a spray gun, filling the room with enormous billows of pesticide. Not a single mosquito succumbed, but by morning my throat was raw and I was wheezing. By the day of the book launch, I had such a violent cough that it was difficult to speak.

&ldquoAntibiotics,&rdquo everyone around me advised. &ldquoIt&rsquos the only cure once your throat gets that bad.&rdquo Except that this was probably due to allergies, or maybe even a virus, but certainly not bacteria. My family doctor had frequently warned me against taking antibiotics unnecessarily &mdash I resolved to stick to his advice.

To get through the interviews that day, I kept sipping tea. Reporters tried not to shake my hand, appraising my contagiousness from a safe distance. What epidemic might they carry back to their offices, I could see them wondering &mdash was I going to unleash a true Age of Shiva upon the city Somehow, I got through my evening reading. If anything, my hoarse and throaty voice only made the erotic passages I read sound even more racy.

By Kolkata, the next stop, my coughing was so incessant that I was only able to get through two-thirds of my reading. Nabaneeta Dev Sen had graciously come to introduce me, even though battling a raging fever herself &mdash together, we could have starred in TV ads for an entire pharmacy&rsquos worth of medicine. Just as I was preparing to return to my hotel to collapse, something bizarre occurred &mdash I got accused of stealing my own book Someone must have accidentally exchanged a bookstore copy with the personal one I had brought in, with the result that the guard wouldn&rsquot let me leave. He grew only more excited at my explanation, positioning himself bodily in front of the exit to tackle me in case I made a break for it. Even the bookstore owner wasn&rsquot quite convinced &mdash I was allowed to leave with the book, provided the Penguin salesperson replaced it the next day.

On to Chennai, a city I&rsquod never seen. And perhaps wasn&rsquot destined to see, since all engagements were at my hotel, the Taj Connemara. The day before, at the snazzy Park Hotel in Kolkata, I had been rudely awakened at 4am by the alarm going off &mdash probably set by the previous guest. So I made sure the clock radio was turned off &mdash if I was to fight this cough, I needed my rest. At 5am, the phone rang &mdash it was the front desk. &ldquoYour wake up call, Mr Suri.&rdquo Could the same guest from the Park have preceded me here as well

There was a truly lavish spread that the Taj put out for my event that evening &mdash everything from sushi to tandoori prawns to fresh oysters on the half shell, not to mention an open bar. I&rsquod been to one such extravaganza with a writer friend in Mumbai &mdash who boasted he could find an event almost every night to mooch on complimentary five-star food. Now that it was my own party though, I was tempted to chase down the guests who gorged and guzzled for free, but then didn&rsquot buy a book. It&rsquos fortunate I didn&rsquot, or I&rsquod have done a lot of chasing.

That night, I decided I simply had to do some sightseeing. All I&rsquod explored of Chennai was the shopping mall next door, where I&rsquod bought an assortment of cough syrups (a ghastly pineapple-flavoured concoction had given me some relief). I took a three-wheeler to Marina Beach &mdash at the very least, I wanted to say I had made it to the Indian Ocean. I walked through throngs of mostly shuttered shops, and then across an endless expanse of sand yawning into the dark, but there was no sign of the water. Finally, I gave up and returned to the hotel, where a brochure informed me I had attempted, unsuccessfully, to cross the second widest beach in the world.

In Delhi, I found that the bottle of pineapple syrup had opened in my luggage and stained all my underclothes a brilliant (not to mention embarrassing) yellow. Fortunately, I could dump them all into a hotel laundry bag instead of dealing with the quizzical looks of a dhobi. I was staying at another Park hotel, this one so ultramodern that the glass door to the toilet was almost transparent. (Glad I was alone.) Their restaurant Fire, where I dined with my publishers from Penguin, had some innovative Indian dishes, including an ethereal paan-flavoured ras malai. On the other hand, the &lsquoexotic fruit platter&rsquo turned out to be composed only of guava and apple chunks. When we asked the waiter what was so exotic about guavas and apples, he informed us that they were imported. Proving that the phoren craze is still alive and well in India, even in a boutique hotel catering mostly to foreigners

Compared to Chennai, the comestibles at my Delhi reading at the Habitat Centre were quite a step down. On the positive side, we sold more books. Perhaps there&rsquos a theorem there, about people being more moved to buy if the fare is simpler. (&ldquoHe could only afford to serve pakoras, the bechara &mdash let&rsquos at least buy his book to help him out.&rdquo)

With the loss of the pineapple medicine, my wheezing for breath resumed in full force. Bets were being wagered by the Penguin folks on whether or not I&rsquod be able to complete my tour. I finally broke down and decided to consult the hotel physician, who told me I needed strong antibiotics for a week. Except he never examined me in person, just asked about my symptoms over the phone. Naturally, the warning from my doctor back home about misusing antibiotics flared up again in my mind. Two Ceftum capsules later, I did the worst possible thing discontinued the course I&rsquod been prescribed.

It was a four-hour car journey to my final stop, the Jaipur Literature Festival. Between paroxysms of coughing, I kept reassuring my travelling companion Moni Mohsin, a writer from Pakistan, that I was not contagious. Charming to the core, she pre-tended not to notice, or not care. One of the biggest triumphs of the festival was the opportunity it afforded writers like us, with a common culture and shared historical origin (my parents migrated from Rawalpindi) to bridge geopolitical boundaries. It was delightful to have Moni tell me &ldquoThat&rsquos so Pakistani&rdquo &mdash just like I might remark &ldquoThat&rsquos so Indian&rdquo &mdash or &ldquoI didn&rsquot know you spoke Urdu&rdquo when I thought I was actually speaking Hindi.

The festival was a big hit, even if the biggest draws (Dev Anand and Aamir Khan) were from Bollywood, not the literary world. My favourite event was the open-air Italian lunch, hosted by Count Francesco da Mosto, an actual count from Venice With grand yet congenial flamboyance, he explained that the chef, Ritu Dalmia (of Diva restaurant in Delhi) had made all the traditional Venetian dishes using only local ingredients (the pasta verdure and torta di limone were particularly tantalising). One evening, Moni received an invitation from the Count to join his group for dinner at the Rambagh Palace. I&rsquom embarrassed to say I wrangled an invitation through her and tagged along &mdash the food was truly amazing, with recipes culled from various Indian royal kitchens of yore. 

The Count was not the only royal presence at the festival. The events were held at Diggi Palace, and for one of the festival dinners, we were all guests of the royal family. A young American lady startled Moni and myself by introducing herself as the Princess. Sure enough, the splendidly dressed fellow strutting around, who looked like he&rsquod been playing polo all his life, turned out to be the Prince. (Even the way he held his cigarette, at such a perfectly elegant angle to his fingers, was so deliciously prince-like that Moni and I both wished we had a camera.) The Friday dinner at another palace was an even more extravagant affair, with elephants greeting guests at the gate, roving magicians and qawwali players and a show-stopping fireworks display, where the walls of the courtyard around us came alive with showers of flame. Surely the visiting foreign dignitaries must have had their most exotic fantasies of India fulfilled

The only problem was that all the events were held outdoors, in the coldest January Jaipur had experienced in many years. The phlegm I&rsquod been trying to cough up all these days from my lungs felt like it was solidifying in place. It got so bad on the night of the fireworks that I decided to return early to the hotel &mdash a hair-raising mistake.

The first inkling of something awry came when I noticed all the windows of the cab were open &mdash wasn&rsquot the driver bothered by the bracing wind Then, as he started looping around cars and bicycles and pedestrians, I realised he was rip-roaring drunk. Each entreaty to slow down or stop only increased his determination to impress me. In a final burst of recklessness, he tried following a motorcycle through the side arch of an ancient gate in the middle of a roundabout. With a horrible scraping sound, we came to a standstill &mdash the gate was too narrow for a car to go through, and we were wedged in place.

I sat there, unable to escape because the doors were pinned shut by the walls. Each time the driver tried to reverse, he seemed to get even more securely jammed in. It took him forty minutes of going back and forth before he could free us. Miraculously, we found at the hotel that the car was undented &mdash the plastic door guards had borne all the scratches and scrapes. In his inebriated state, the driver decided that it was my benign presence that had protected the car. &ldquoMy saviour, my protector,&rdquo he declared, &ldquoit is all due to your kripa.&rdquo He tried to touch my feet, but I whisked them out of the way and fled to my room.

I left Jaipur without any sightseeing, surely a cardinal sin. All I wanted to do by now was get home (and besides, I&rsquod taken in all the sights on a previous visit). My memory blurs about the journey back &mdash I&rsquom sure I wheezed and coughed all the way. A day after reaching, I sat in my doctor&rsquos office and proudly related how I had resisted all the antibiotics, all the calls to self-medicate.

It turned out I had bronchitis. &ldquoIt&rsquos too bad you didn&rsquot take the antibiotics,&rdquo my doctor sighed. &ldquoLet&rsquos try Ceftum again &mdash take it for twelve days this time and see if your cough goes away.&rdquo By that weekend, I was fine.