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giggled, forgetting to double-check that Sanita had gone. ‘I thought it was only me who found them more interesting than bloody temples.’
    â€˜Have you seen those guys who go around on the little trolleys?’
    I laughed harder, nodding. ‘Skateboarders from hell. They’re brilliant!’
    We ordered another beer and I told him about the boy I’d seen at the fort that morning, with the huge foot.
    â€˜The best,’ he agreed. ‘Number one in the top ten of deformities.’
    â€˜You haven’t, like, seen Big Balls then?’ asked Dudley.
    â€˜Yeah, Big Balls is number one,’ Zed nodded. ‘He’s a legend. Though only one confirmed sighting of him and that was by a woman we met on the train coming down here. A Welsh woman.’
    â€˜Like, Welsh women don’t lie, right?’
    Rick leaned forward, placing his forearms on the table, and looked into Zed’s eyes. ‘You’re not seriously telling me that there’s a guy walking around carrying two huge testicles?’
    He nodded. ‘Not carrying though; he wheels them around on a little barrow that the hospital made for him. As big as melons.’
    We burst out laughing.
    â€˜I swear it. Dud?’
    â€˜Like, he’s telling the truth. Or that’s what she told us, anyway.’ Dudley took the joint from Rick. ‘Forty-year-old Welsh housewives studying contemporary women’s issues in India don’t, like, lie.’
    â€˜According to her,’ Zed continued, ‘that’s where Viz got the idea of Buster Gonad from.’
    â€˜That’s years old though,’ I said, wiping the tears from my eyes.
    â€˜That’s right. She saw him in Varanasi twenty years ago.’ He leaned back on the chair. ‘There were loads more deformed people back then, before modern medicine really began to have an impact. Her and her friends were working in the hospital that made Big Balls’ barrow and treated all the others. She reckons there are nowhere near as many elephantiasis cases out here as there used to be.’
    â€˜Fooking spoil sports.’ Rick took out his bag of grass and started to roll another joint. ‘Is he still there?’
    â€˜Big Balls?’ Zed shrugged. ‘Probably dead now. But the legend lives on.’
    â€˜Why don’t we start an expedition to find him?’ I said enthusiastically. ‘Our task: to find and photograph Big Balls.’ I took the joint from Dudley, inhaled, held it down, then let out a thick column of blue smoke into the night air. ‘I’ve already spotted Big Foot, so Big Balls should be a doddle.’
    â€˜No can do,’ Dudley said. ‘We’re going north to see the Dalai Lama.’
    â€˜Bombay first, though,’ Zed corrected.
    Dudley shrugged and said, ‘Mm-hmm,’ through the pursed lips. ‘Why don’t you two, like, come with us?’
    I looked at Rick with a ‘why not?’ expression, but he said that he’d already bought his ticket for Thailand and couldn’t afford to waste it. In any case, he’d seen enough of India to last him a lifetime.
    â€˜Don’t you need an appointment or something?’ I asked. ‘The Dalai Lama’s a busy man, right?’
    A second rush of the drug suddenly swept through my head and I found myself asking the same question over and over again. As far as I can remember Dudley reassured me that chilled-out people like the Lama wouldn’t mind other chilled-out people like us knocking on his door at all. Probably invite us in for tea, I kept saying to myself. I think Dudley said that the Welsh woman on the train had met the Tibetan leader before, and she’d had no problems, but I can’t be sure; everything was getting a bit woozy in my head.
    However, I do remember thinking that a lot of incidents in India seemed to occur on trains, or in railway stations, but I was too stoned to talk about it. It was