How I found myself in India

There were six of us in the room: an Englishman called Ian, from Braintree in Essex, who believed that his body had become translucent and who asked us to watch him drink a glass of lassi so that we could observe the liquid passing through his digestive tract; an American Vietnam war deserter, who had shaved his head, burned his passport and dispensed with all his clothes, except for a pair of baggy khaki shorts; a French junkie, who went through other people's belongings while they were asleep; an Australian couple - both Capricorns, I think - who had quite serious dysentery; and me.

It was December 1971 in Calcutta (Kolkata)and I was staying in what you might call, but we did not, a hippy hotel. The day I arrived, India had declared war on Pakistan - a war that would shortly lead to the independence of Bangladesh - and Calcutta, like all major cities, was subjected to a black-out. Millions of refugees had fled the fighting and hundreds of thousands of them were sleeping in the streets. What happened to half a dozen little people in a room off Chowringhee did not really amount to a hill of lentils, but that did not stop the residents of our hotel being in a constant state of real or imagined turmoil.

I had given up my job as an advertising copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather in London a few months earlier to head for India. I was propelled by a mixture of motives - wrong job/wrong woman - and running away from trouble is one of the earliest human instincts. India was the inevitable destination. I had grown up with photos on the wall of a dashing grandfather who worked on archeological sites in Agra so there was a pilgrimage element to it, but much of the attraction was not really knowing what awaited.

"Aren't you a little old for that?" said Dan, the creative director at the O&M offices in Waterloo when I told him I was off. I was already 26 and had been working, I think, on a campaign to increase the sale of bread. I never came up with a memorable slogan, but someone else had thought of "Six Slices a Day is the Well-balanced Way".