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non-European temperaments, and so had followed the porter submissively.
    The large room in which we found ourselves contained half a dozen single beds. It would do for a night. Supper consisted of omelettes with bread, butter and tea at a table in the hallway, and we ate gratefully but without talking. Don’t know what the time would have been. But in our dormitory, slumped across the beds, which were all out of alignment and arranged in no purposeful manner, we smoked grass, finished off the Indian whisky, and crashed out. In those days marijuana was easily available every-where for a nod and a wink and a few rupees, and usually came in twiggy clumps wrapped in newspaper, much like fish & chips in the United Kingdom.
    In the middle of the night Rita woke me with a scream. She said something had touched her. I said she’d imagined it and we went back to sleep. Some time later she screamed again and said she wasn’t imagining it and she could hear something as well – couldn’t I hear something, a scraping noise, a crunching noise? Our attention was riveted to the black silence.
    â€˜I can hear Sarah snoring,’ I said at last.
    Next, with an awful yell, Rita propelled herself across the room and into my bed. ‘I’ve been bitten, you sod!’
    Dutifully I slid out of bed, and went across to the door, and fumbled around on the wall for the light-switch. Before I’d found it, something with claws ran over my bare instep. I froze. Moving the switch frantically up and down and sideways, I managed to get the striplight to flicker into cold life and shot back to bed too. From above the parapet of our blanket, we looked and saw nothing, nothing at all, and so cautiously I crept across the room again and flung Rita’s mattress into the air and on to the floor. Holes had been ripped in its underside and tufts of flock stuck out. I lit a cigarette, watched and waited. Before long a black snout, followed by a pair of sharp black eyes, pushed outwards from a hole in the floor near the door and after twitching about a bit the eyes were followed at a squeeze by a plump body. Soon four rats were slithering over the mattress, pulling at the stuff and eating it with prayerlike movements of their paws.
    â€˜Why aren’t they afraid of the light?’ wondered Rita.
    I threw my unfinished cigarette at them. They didn’t flinch. I lit matches from a box and threw them too. Our accommodation these past weeks had run the gamut from beach-shack to palace, and there would be rats again, but never a group so bold as these on our first night in Ooty. They weren’t hostile but were utterly indifferent to us and their indifference and self-possession were mesmerising. Rita fell asleep again, pushing an assortment of protruberances into my back. In many ways she was much more adaptable than I. It took me three more cigarettes before I could even think of settling down. Sarah had been sleeping loglike throughout, presumably on the Mandrax substitutes we’d found in a Trivandrum chemist.
    Sarah Moffett had an American father and an English mother and I was her flatmate in London. We were doing our own wonky version of the hippy trail, following on from some crazy experiences at the first ever Delhi Film Festival. When we turned up at the Ashoka Hotel in Delhi the organisers were kindness itself. They gave Sarah full accreditation as my secretary for the whole fortnight, along with all the perks and allowances which that entailed. Couldn’t have been sweeter, and I must attempt to write about it one day because it turned into the most outrageous freebie of our lives. Afterwards the arts editor at the Spectator, Kenneth Hurren, said ‘But aren’t you coming back to attend to your career?’, a view put to me more forcefully by my father six months later. But I thought that’s what I was doing. I’ve always been free-lance. And they knew it was my intention to move on through