A Pea In My Ear

By Alan Rousham

Join educator Alan as he experiences volunteer holidays living among the Santal people in traditional West Bengal villages, visits Varanasi and falls under the spell of Tagore's adherents to raise funds for schools.

A Pea In My Ear is the memoir of an untraditional traveller enthralled by those he meets off the beaten track.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Rousham
• Release date: Jan 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201804862

Book preview

HOW IT STARTED

THE UPGRADE ON FLIGHT RJ112 was my last luxury for nine weeks. The overbooked crowd of UK pilgrims bound for the Haj, via a stopover in Amman, gave me an upgrade and entrée to Crown class, with its wild salmon and Chablis, aboard the Royal Jordanian flight from London to Calcutta.

The year was 2003. I was bound for a small university town four hours northwest of Calcutta by train. I was in my mid-sixties and familiar with 'retirement' but uneasy with the word. 1 had spent a working lifetime in secondary schools, enjoying the latter years as deputy head in a Cheshire high school. Impatient with inactivity, I enjoyed most sports and, once the family had crown up, trekked with my wife to mountainous regions like the Andes and Himalayas. But even these exciting adventures began to pale. Trekkers, it increasingly seemed to me, were driven people moving through stages of their journey like athletes in a marathon with eyes fixed on a distant finish. My eyes, on occasions, glazed over with exhaustion.

My final trek had been to the Kauri Pass in the Garhwal Himalayas. We left our tents in the middle of one memorable night to reach the pass in time to watch the sun rise over the high snow peaks. Perspiring up the tortuous, bouldered track, we made it in time to see a blanket of mist blot out the blinding vista. It was not missing the view that peeved us — over the years there had thankfully been many wonderful mountain scenes — it was the sense of rush and not stopping long enough to meet people we only ever nodded to. There must be some other way to enjoy an adventure.

About this time, my family-minded daughter, Jenni, became concerned her father might become a golf and slippers addict so she sent me a publication on 'volunteering overseas.' From someone who, during adolescence, had once turned to me and 'I'll stay out of your life, if you stay out of mine’ I thought that was a bit rich. But my daughter is more perceptive about me than I care to admit. Without knowing it, this is what I had been looking for. The same afternoon I went on to the internet and bought into a community development assignment in India with i-to-i, a youthful and dynamic Leeds based company promoting volunteer work around the world. It was as easy as that.

As I scanned through the 'once in a lifetime opportunities' that volunteer organisations offered, I was affected by memories of a previous visit to India. I had trekked to Sikkim to see the distant Kanchenjunga range. On the way back, the group reached Darjeeling and took the narrow gauge 'Toy Train' part way to the railhead of New Jalpaiguri. This mini steam locomotive puffed its way down the mountains giving distant glimpses of tea plantations and dramatic views of dwellings clinging to the rocks amidst forests of teak and flowering magnolia. The connecting express train from Assam was hours late so our enterprising guide requisitioned a coach and so began the unforgettable journey that led me to my overseas assignment. A case of bottled water, some piping hot chapatti and a box of samosas were hurriedly loaded. The only time we stopped was to relieve ourselves: women in a maize field, men behind a stand of bamboos.

As the recklessly driven coach, with its often agitated passengers, sped south to be in time for our flight out of Calcutta, we passed through villages looking like the illustrations out of a geography book: hemp piled high on rickety carts, elephants dragging timber, water buffalo wallowing in cooling water, teeming crowds in open markets shopping for rice, maize, fruit and vegetables, produce piled high along with every other necessity from beds to big ends, jewellery to fresh fish, all displayed at the road side. The whole of rural life was on display that day and years later, as I tapped the keys of my computer, it was this journey that settled it for me.

A stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature, that's what I read as I cosseted myself for a last time in Crown Class on flight RJ 112. Yes, thank you, I'll have a Drambuie on the rocks before we land.

ARRIVAL IN CALCUTTA

I WAS MET AT THE AIRPORT by Mrs. Sucharita Seal, i-to-i's in-country coordinator, dressed elegantly in a cream and crimson sari. We got into a battered yellow taxi and without any of the usual bartering careered towards Calcutta driven by a wild looking taxi man bent on overtaking everyone on the same stretch of road. The city seemed a vast, over-populated slum with main roads pot-holed, men sleeping on rickshaws, in doorways and on pavements, while every other able-bodied man and