Patrick Moon - What Else is there for a Boy Like Me?

I wonder, am I the only passenger in this first class cabin who has abandoned his means of paying for such extravagances?

Until three weeks ago, I was a solicitor. I had been a solicitor for twenty years. And then I stopped. People keep telling me Im brave but, as Air Indias senior hostess serves me caviar, I know that brave is simply code for crazy. The week when youve said goodbye to your income is hardly the moment for acquiring a taste for Sevruga. Glancing round the half-empty cabin, I count just seven fellow passengers: two indulging these gastronomic treats, the rest sleeping through them. I used to be part of all this, affording significant sums for trivial comforts. I was a well-rewarded partner in a large London law firm. Then I stopped. And now I feel guiltily out of place, a fraud, an imposter awake on a long journey.

I knew youd do this soon, said my secretary, when I told her I was resigning. Youve been a different person since you first went to India. It wasnt that I hated my life as a lawyer. It would have been easier to do this if Id seen it all as a mistake; but I didnt. I was good at it. I found it stimulating. Yet I didnt want to wake up one day, aged sixty, having done only one thing. So I have to keep saying it to get used to the idea I stopped.

That makes resigning sound like a snap decision an impulsive, even whimsical severing from my past but it wasnt. I hadnt stepped that far out of character. Id been flirting with the idea for a few years but I needed more time to plan, more savings to cushion me. Then events made me act sooner than I intended.

First time coming to India, sir? asks a second sareed hostess, topping up my champagne.

Third, I boast, thinking how incredible that my first, just two years ago, was the only time I had ventured outside Europe. I came all this way for a week. With everyone saying Id either love it or loathe it, I didnt want to waste too much treasured holiday finding out which. Yet I returned a lost cause.

The wrench of leaving India is no ordinary end-of-holiday sadness, I wrote to my father at the end of that first visit. The rest of the world will no longer be the same, London miserably monochrome after the colours of Rajasthan Yesterday we rose before dawn for an early flight, only to find the check-ins dark and deserted, thanks to a schedule change, which everyone except Mr Sharma, our guide, seemed to know about. I am being very surprised, was all he could say. And how well that continuous present tense sums up these eight precious days. A state of constant amazement and wonder...

You are coming for maybe three, four weeks? asks the final member of the trio pampering the eight of us.

Three or four months, I correct her, wondering whether, if circumstances had been different, Id have acted at all. I was too timid, too reluctant to let go, too afraid of casting aside my well-defined place in the world, too frightened of failure.

So we are not seeing you again until March, April? she calculates, as if genuinely saddened by the wait.

You wont see me at all, I laugh ruefully. Ill be back there in economy. I should be in economy now, but I persuaded myself I deserved a last luxury. That was part of my problem working hard to pay for the treats that consoled me for working hard a vicious spiral that Ill be glad to break. And yet I wonder how much economic simplification I shall really welcome. Or be able to live with.

You are coming to Delhi for holidays? my inquisitor persists, apparently determined to locate me in her scheme of things.

I smile as if to say yes because how can I explain why Im coming? Im not even sure myself. Yet as soon as I knew that I could escape by the end of the year, there was never any doubt where Id be spending my winter. Ive never felt more compelled about anything in my life.

*

Even the business class passengers are held back behind a cordon of cabin staff while we, the select eight, make an unruffled exit. The others strain impatiently for release, tensing themselves for a hectic dash down the long, half-lit corridors. I myself am about to break into a sprint, remembering how the smallest delay could cost hours in the immigration queue. Yet tonight the passages are eerily empty, as if all human life has been banished to ease our unhurried progress.

Turning the corner, we find the hall of the passport control desks equally deserted except, that is, for a single figure holding a signboard on a pole, as if he were stationed there to protest at our arrival. His handwritten text is a short list of names and I notice that one of them is mine. My seven companions show similar signs of recognition. Immediately, the demonstrator gives a blast on a whistle, confirming his opposition to our entry, while running footsteps suggest guards about to bar our way. However, the others know better. It is only the sound of eight breathless clerks, scurrying out from their tea break to open a dedicated counter for each of the favoured few and, in little more than a minute, I am standing beside eight sets of suitcases, set neatly apart from the chaos of the baggage carousels.

*

Of course, its not just my relationship with India that I need to examine. Theres also what my friend, Elektra, calls my relationship with myself. Elektra thinks this is the only issue, but then shes a psychotherapist. She thinks I did hate my life as a lawyer, when I wasnt busy hating myself. She says I need every minute of my time away, just to get twenty years of denial out of my system.

I certainly need time to consider what comes next a question that Im trying to keep as open as possible. I need to put some distance between the past and the future. Too many old patterns of thought need purging before new ones can safely be let in. For the moment, there are just two things Im sure about: one, I had to stop being a solicitor; the other, I had to return to India.

*

The airport is just as I remember: grey, grim and utterly unromantic but that doesnt stop an odd surge of emotion as I savour what, for me, will always be Indias special smell. More evocative than the aromas of cumin and coriander from pavement kitchens or the stench of squalor in the gutter, it will be the smell of bed-linen through the coming weeks, the perfume of Indian laundries on shirts taken home to England. It is simply the comfortable, lived-in smell of warm dust. And it tells me: Im back.