Thanks guys, I appreciate your comments. That was the hardest piece to write so far.

Interesting you mention Shanturam, Chicago Heather. On my last two trips to India I've carried that great brick of a book in my bag and never once read it. I'm always too engrossed in life itself. I still haven't read any more than the first chapter. I had to put it down. It was too good. Once I've finished this writing jag I'm on I'll do it. But then I'll feel bad. I know. That first chapter was bloody good.

As for the Booker, moremiles - I'm only doing this to get the Golden Toaster award from the Boston GTG. I want that toaster. As for my imminent flight - ahhh, I wish gpanda - but the GTG is YOUR night. I'm just helping with the hors d'oevres.

Thank you so much again. I'm amazed that anyone has stuck with me. I've just finished the last instalments. Don't be too scared Pauline.

I'll bung the first one in tomorrow some time.

By the way, I liked Melbourne. Are you writing from one of the many cafes spilling out from all of those alleyways? I kept an eye out for men of a certain age and carriage on their laptops at those cafes.

lol nope. But you were close. I'm in an apartment block in the middle of the city. About a block from where those alleys are - and up, up, up in the air.

Shanturam was so engrossing - I certainly couldn't read it while traveling. But when you feel "stuck" in Melbourne, take it out and you'll be back in India!

Just so long as your not waiting to escape that apartment in the same way Mr Roberts left Melbourne!

We can't have a dog on the run indefinitely.

where to next and when??

it better be soon as we are starved for good reading

Why - back to India, of course, rhkk. There's a little place in Maheshwar... I'll tell you about it one day. It's already written. It's just that the story has so much ganja smoking, I thought it best not to put it in here.

By the time I've finished with India my trip report will be as thick as Shanturam. Speaking of which: I see the waiter coming over - here's today's installment.

The first of three bits that go together. Then this trip report is over. My work will be done...

Everything in these three segments happened between 8 and 9 a.m. on August 20th.

One crowded hour.

Someone had killed Kolkata. I knew it as soon as I woke up. This city has a hum, a distant roar of car horns, tram cars, a million voices – it’s a constant, the white noise of this place. Today there was none. I must have been hallucinating. I could hear birds.

I got up, opened the windows and stepped out on to my balcony. Everything looked the same - but in the courtyard of the Oberoi everything always looks the same. The phone rang. This was Ifte cancelling our appointment. He was pleading bad weather but I knew different. I knew the end of the world had come.

The grandest part of the Oberoi Grand is the moment you walk out the door. Bam! Kolkata hits you with a force and vigour that quite takes you by surprise. Slam! The blast of Kolkata, the punch and whack and grind of Kolkata, the wondrous boof and bash when it thumps you right between the eyes - there will be your Grand Kolkata moment; right there in front of you, around you, above you - and trust me, beyond you. It’s all people, people, people - just millions of millions of people - and you.

Today there was not a car on the streets, not a shop left unbolted, not a cup of chai to be had. Everywhere silence - that strange, unsettling silence, like a ghost had laid its hand over the city and squeezed.

I was the only survivor. The great stretch of Chowringhee Road lay deserted in front of me. I walked straight into the centre of the road, something it would be impossible to do on a normal day - and stay alive. Here I stood, slap bang in the middle of Kolkata’s most famous boulevard and there was not a moving object to be seen, not a pedestrian, not a taxi – not a sound.

I looked left, I looked right, stopped alone in the great expanse of that celebrated street, amazed at the force that had stopped this mighty city dead in its tracks. So that’s what all those speeches were about yesterday. That’s what those all red flags meant. This is what a ‘bandh’ is; it’s a general strike – and by ‘general’ they mean ‘general’ - as in all-encompassing, common to many; widely spread; prevalent; extensive - this strike was about as ‘general’ as it could get.

I saw movement far, far in the distance. Roaring along Chowringhee towards me came a hundred men on a hundred motorbikes, blaring their horns, brandishing Indian flags with red fists stencilled on - a solid stream of power making sure that the ‘general’ part of general strike was, indeed, observed. They flashed past me honking their defiance; kings of the castle now, unafraid, powerful and out of control. I’ve never much cared for young men like that. Clearly, I was the only rational adult left alive. Dogster, Dogster, mighty Dogster, time to step up and save the day.

Fearlessly, I rushed back to the Oberoi for breakfast, stuffed scrambled eggs and the newspaper into my face and enquired politely as to whether there might be, just possibly, something unusual going on.

Today was my last day in Kolkata. I was sad. Since that first day at the Bengal Club I’d been back half a dozen times. I’d learnt to embrace the contrasts in Kolkata – either that or just stay inside. Now the Oberoi Grand was my hotel of preference. The Oberoi was a nice place to stay inside.

I couldn’t seem to find any grey area in between the two. Either I was out in it – or I was inside out of it – but it was like a switch. Out. In. Out. In. There were no smooth edges. But not today; Dogster ventured forth into a new city - of empty streets and invisible crowds; a swathe of silence, a full stop. This was a day to walk and walk, to see Kolkata stripped bare of its people, to see walls and sights and detail always covered up before; to walk and not be noticed, to stop and stand and stare.

I turned into Humayan Place and stopped in my tracks. Not a soul. This great little street between Chowringhee and New Market, normally thronged with people, was deserted, each shop boarded up, each doorway closed. Ahead of me the market lay shuttered, iron grilles pulled down tight. All the stalls that covered Bertram Street were gone, their contents piled up, covered in blue plastic tarpaulins, roped off, tied.

This was the first time I’d seen Bertram Street, I realised. I’d walked down it a hundred times but never seen it - always covered with people, shops, cars, rickshaws, chai-sellers, market-men, beggars, thieves – just the normal day-to-day flood of Kolkata, a wall of life. I loved jumping into the middle of it, being carried along; fending off the hustlers, zooming round the block.

But today, my last day, Kolkata left me, before I left it. I was walking in a surreal Kolkata dream.

Dogster travels solo. He is a self-contained man. In a large, plush hotel, just like the Oberoi Grand, Mr. Dogster plays it cool. He sweeps into the foyer with his customary style, with a nod and a salute for the staff.

‘How are yo-o-o-o-o, Mr. Dogster,’ they twitter.

‘Good morning, Mr. Dogster!’ they cry.

Mr. Dogster glides across the marble floor, gently acknowledging the cheers and applause of the throng. Or should that be Prince Dogster? No matter. The Maharaja of Dog passes by. Two front doors are flung open by Oberoi maidens in the whitest of white uniforms. The dazzle on Dogster’s smile is reflected in their shiny gold buttons.

‘La-a-a-dies,’ he oozes in the deepest, most masculine voice he can muster. ‘Good morning...’

Then the lascivious old sod is gone.

Such is the nature of my interaction. All actual information comes from a different source – from a mish-mash of internet and CNN, a glance at the morning papers, a phrase, a sight, a clue. The reality of Dogster’s travelling life is not about news; that’s a whole other topic. Dogster is in India. Everything is news – but not necessarily the NEWS news.

Current events can pass the dazed fool completely by. He can be oblivious to the most obvious things; national holidays; parades; bombings; plague - Dogster glides through it all, living in his mongrel moment; most of the time he doesn’t know what month it is; what day of that month, which day of the week - or what time. There have been many moments in his travelling life where he didn’t know where he was.

So it was not particularly unusual that the poor old thing had no idea what was happening. The staff at the Oberoi was much too polite to tell him that death awaited him outside. He was paying them much too much money for that. They smiled and saluted and grovelled and did everything an Oberoi employee is trained to do – but nobody stopped him as he sailed out the door.

Now, I don’t know if there was a curfew called or the threat of imminent violence, but something kept Central Kolkata very quiet indeed that morning - even the street people seemed to have disappeared. Dogster, in a fit of what I now think of as terminal stupidity, pottered off down the road.

Did he stop for a second and think ‘Hm-m-m-m, there aren’t any people anywhere. Gosh, how strange, I wonder why that is?’

No.

Did he think ‘Hm-m-m-m, maybe if everybody else thinks it’s a good idea to stay off the streets, maybe I should be off them too?

No.

Dogster didn’t think at all.

There’s an old movie called ‘On the Beach’, about a nuclear cloud that floats across the world. Eventually only Melbourne is left – then the streets empty, the city grinds to a halt – just Fred Astaire is left alive. Something like that. It’s the film that allegedly inspired Ava Gardner to remark that Melbourne was a perfect place to make a movie about the end of the world. I’m sitting in Melbourne right now. I think she was right.

But I digress. This was what Kolkata was like. Spooky.

Mr. Dogster walked a while, not quite knowing where to go, amazed by the absence of sights and sounds; street after shuttered street. He mooched brainlessly along Bertram Street, past Charlie Chaplin Square to Hogg Street; a few local squatters sat in the rubbish, some kids played makeshift cricket with a makeshift bat, makeshift wicket, makeshift ball – but that was all. Then even those few souls disappeared. A cat stared out of an empty lane. Ahead of him, just half a block away was a T-junction. Surendra Nath Banerjee Road splayed out on either side. Dogster could hear a distant roar.

He walked to the intersection, turned left and walked slap-bang into a thud of police. There were a great many of them, a million policemen, at least. Well, maybe not a million, but they blocked the road. Barriers, barbed wire, pointy iron poles – the lot. Mr. Dogster, the most idiot of idiots, wandered blithely in front of the barricades and stopped, like a retarded rabbit in the headlights.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said grandly and saluted, thinking he was at the Oberoi.

After all, they had uniforms on. He assumed that his room key at the Oberoi gave him special access to the hotel and the streets around it. He was, after all, a white man. He was Tasmanian.

Strangely, the Kolkata Police Force didn’t give agree. They were clearly all deployed waiting for something to happen, something that Dogster, in his few lucid moments, thought had already happened.

I was wrong.

‘Get. Off. The. Road!’

A voice on a loudspeaker. Dogster looked up. He looked around.

‘Wha...? Who? Me?’

‘Get. Off. The. Road!’

Dogster turned around. There, marching determinedly towards him was a wide, waving wall of demonstrators.

Heh. Will Dogster die? More tomorrow.

Did you write serials in a past life? You do have the knack of breaking a story right at the critical point.

The Maharaja of Dog... indeed!

" Will Dogster die?" Are you a ghost?

or a "ghost writer"?

lol, happycheesehead!

Dogster, you bring a refreshing reinvigoration to the English language. It's a pleasure to read. :)

Thank you Jaya. I like 're-invogating' a lot.

But you know - this is how I talk. So I'm trying to teach myself how to tell stories, just as if you and I were sitting down with a fine pouilly fume, with nothing else to do. It's a 'Dog-ologue'.

thursday: I'm glad my subtle irony hasn't escaped you. Dogster may scrape through - it's impossible to know.

By now the stupid old fool just does what he wants to. I watch and wonder. How can any man be so dumb and still alive?

What did you do in the years before you became the prolific teller of travel stories?

I've quite forgotten, Jaya. It's another life. But it's nice of you to be interested, just the same.