A roadside hawker... though not of wares

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

From the British Residency it is only a couple of miles back to the heart of the city and my guesthouse. I set off there on foot. I have been in India now for over a week, have spent countless hours in streets such as these, breathing in noxious emissions from cars, trucks, autorickshaws and buses. My postcards home are a catalogue of complaints about the heavy traffic (... it's as if I'm passively smoking exhaust fumes twenty four hours a day). I am now beginning to suffer for my time out on those roads. My hours relaxing in the pacific surroundings of the British Residency of Lucknow have been discomforted by a constant snuffling, my nose increasingly bunged up. I wonder what can be wrong. Some sort of allergy? Now I am in the thick of things again, walking along the unpaved sides of roads choked with vehicles and their choking exhausts, I understand why. My reaction suddenly intensifies. My eyes start to sting, my sinuses burn. For several days now I have been coughing up increasingly unwholesome-looking wads of phlegm; it is now a case of total systems collapse, the insidious emissions of India's traffic, silting up my innards, finally overwhelming my body's defences and defeating me.

I stop to watch a man across the street, standing by the kerbside, hawking up phlegm. In every city I have visited I have seen men such as he, kneading their stomachs rhythmically and making harsh yet controlled noises in their throats as they clear their lung tracts of fluid. For many, it is a routine to start and end each and every day. I have never appreciated their efforts before, not quite understanding what is wrong with them. Are they ill? Some kind of disease? The answer is yes; but the illness is the city, and its contagion is inescapable.

This particular hawker is really making a meal of it, kneading, expectorating with excruciating care. I try to pick up pointers. It is almost an art form: the precise way the emission is nurtured, gathered, held in the throat until every last strand of phlegm has been drawn up. No two hawkers seem to go about it in precisely the same way. There must be hundreds if not thousands of different schools of thought as to how best to do it. Books could be written on the subject. Titles swim to mind: Hack Beauty; Great Expectorations.

As the man goes through his motions and round of guttural noises, as he gathers the wad of phlegm and finally releases it, flobbing it expertly into the gutter, he draws not the least bit of attention from any of the people passing him by. And why should he? In the cities of India, it is as natural a bodily function as urinating - and in every Indian city, men urinate in the gutters without drawing any notice. My infatuation for the secluded spots, the backwater towns I see and long after on every train journey (a cluster of small simple dwellings, a well, a handful of people, a mere pinprick in a vast undeveloped landscape)... that infatuation swells in me now, all of India's unknown far-off places enticing me in absentia like the remembered face of a beautiful stranger.

I drag my ailing body back to my guesthouse and con train timetables, plotting my escape from the city.