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They call it a Gap year. But if you ask me, a Gap in your year, or your teeth or your curtains always provokes a question and often leads to trouble. I took a Gap year but not in preparation for the troublesome world of work. I needed to find myself, having lost myself in the green eyes of a fellow History student who talked to me long and hard about Politics with a capital ‘P’ and Women with a capital ‘W.’ We’d sit in the University Library making threatening noises about patriarchal capitalism. History was the soundtrack to our sex life. The Chartist Movement was our Marvin Gaye and feminism was one big turn on. I followed my girl around like a puppy dog, hungry to hear her views on the workings of the world.

And then, she dumped me, for a boy who was big in Troops Out. I was left crushed, like a big fat raspberry. No girl, no job, no future.

There was an advert. ‘Volunteers needed to live and work in leprosy colony in rural India. Madhya Pradesh. Pay own flight.’ This was the perfect job for me. The lepers wouldn’t dump me, surely. Not if I’d paid my own flight.

I arrived in India in May 1983, one week before the British general election. Thatcher had done one term already, it was time to give her the big heave-ho. I flew Syrian Arab, with another volunteer, a social worker called Giselle, whose parents voted Tory. She said she didn’t know what to vote, that she’d have probably followed her parents, that she didn’t really know. I spent the rest of the nine hour flight not speaking to her.

I’ll never forget the drive from the airport. New Delhi at night. The city was teeming. It was a vast, pulsating, kaleidoscope of sensory overload. The pre-monsoon air was so thick you could almost suck it. Hot skin, urine, sandalwood, excreta, jasmine, cow dung, hair oil, Indian people, millions of them, men in turbans, bleached dust, lorry loads of deities, piles of rancid rubbish, cows threading through taxi queues, stick-like sadhus, aromatic smoke, figures squatting next to a railroad track, steam trains, rickshaws, rickshaw wallahs, the call of chai from a vendor, the hockling sound of a dozen throat clearings.

We passed down the narrow streets of the Old Bazaar, and were immediately surrounded by story book characters. Sultans, peasants, bejewelled cattle and Maharajas. We heard a brass band playing an off-key wedding march, a hokey cokey Beethoven infused with the hooting of owls.

I could hardly believe it.

I spent the next few days lumbering around a New Delhi suburb, feeling like a big white lump, towering above the skinny brown people, practising my Hindi ‘Mira naam Mary he,’ I’d point to myself then I’d point to the sun ‘Bortgarmi he.’ ‘My name is Mary and it is very hot,’ opened a lot of doors for me. People loved it, they fell about laughing in the street. ‘Arbga naam kya he?’ I’d ask. And they’d rattle off their own name before collapsing in a heap of giggles.

I was ushered into people’s homes, I was shown photographs of children. They treated me as an honoured guest. Ancient grannies appeared, saris the colour of butterfly wings. London, they nodded as they searched for a wedding ring on my hand. George Best. Fish and chips. What is your qualification? How long are you in India?

It was during that first week I picked up a bug. Something related to dysentery, something that attacked my kidneys. I blamed it on the Taj Mahal, where I ignored every piece of advice and drank from a water fountain because otherwise I would have surely died of thirst. The man at the volunteer centre massaged my head and told me to chew cloves. I vomited, slept for days and spent hours crouched in the toilet.

But whatever the state of my personal plumbing, I couldn’t stay in New Delhi, which was like New York compared to where I ended up. We needed to acclimatise before the leper community, so we travelled to Madhya Pradesh to a farm run by Quakers, principally an old English woman called Marjorie, who was teaching the Indians a thing or two about horticulture. They were very kind to her, almost indulgent of her English arrogance. Perhaps they had no choice. It was a strange place: no one was turned away and misfits, losers, untouchables and heroes rubbed along together and worked on the clover and lentil harvest.

By the time I’d been there a month, I was vomiting big style. I couldn’t keep anything down. It was the intensity of the light. The foreignness of it all. The beauty. Women with capital Ws would not have lasted one minute. And no one gave a sacred cow pat about politics with a capital P.

Weeks later we hit Dhar in Madhya Pradesh. The leper community. A tiny outpost in the middle of rural India, a landscape that was parched and desperately poor. The lepers came out and were paraded before us by Doctor Das who ran the outfit. He explained in perfect English that they’d been turned out of their communities, that there was still much prejudice against lepers, but that with medication their illness could be kept in check.

Actually, they didn’t look too bad. I’d seen The Nun’s Story and was expecting the worst. But many were smiling. There were children, the children were playing with a ball. Someone made a joke. They spoke. Arbga naam kya he? They lived together in families, and provided that Mum and Dad continued to take the medication the children would not be affected. Because many of the parents were disabled – they’d lost fingers, or toes or the definition of their noses – they couldn’t easily use tools. There were Tamarind trees to plant. And that’s where we came in, the volunteers. We were given special Indian shovels. I took one look at the shovels, the rock hard ground, the blinding sun and felt the need to vomit. But luckily I’d made a friend, Amy, who spoke with a sexy East Coast accent and had long black hair like a Native American. She had a laugh so deep it could have stopped a train. We would look at each other with our shovels and snort. ‘What the fuck...’ It was such bloody hard work. Half the time I was laid up sweating on a bed, vomiting or losing weight by the hour and Amy was nearly as bad, except she started off a few stones heavier than me.

Dr. Das organised a party for us, the lepers, the tribal people, the big local cheeses and their wives. We would learn each others native songs he said. I balked at singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory,’ and ‘God Save the Queen’ was anathema to an anti-royalist like myself, so I taught them ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby?’ by the Human League and the lepers sang along phonetically. We got very drunk on locally brewed liquor.

One night we toured the huts where the families lives. We said hello, greetings, ‘Namaste’ to a couple who were about to sit down to a dinner of rice and mango, their main meal of the day. They welcomed us inside as if we were kings and queens, we the huge tall white people, come to help them with their digging. Come all the way from Europe and the USA. Dr. Das translated. All the way from Europe. They were so grateful. They offered to share their meal with us and embarrassed, we turned away. Oh no, we said, thank you, we’ve already eaten.

They knew nothing of women with a capital W or politics with a capital P. They were two of the most graceful people I have ever met. Their daughter was called Nolly and her brother, Buddha Singh. I have a photograph of the two of them that I keep in a frame. The photo follows me to every house I live in. Nolly is about eight, her baby brother on her hip. He has white patches on his face from malnutrition and his belly is swelled with kwashiorkor. He is frowning at the camera and she looks tentative. While we dug our holes, attacking the bone dry earth with our special shovels, she sang to us, Indian folk songs, lullabies for her brother. I remember her cheeky smile, her lovely singing voice, her brother who was always frowning.

I stayed in India for another four months, I extended my air ticket. I didn’t want to come back. I had a recurrent nightmare that I had to return but I waited until September when I was due to return to start yet another university course. I had many more adventures. Every day brought something fantastical, something other worldly. I saw the Himalayas, I had my head shaved, my weight dropped to six stone. I thought at one point I was going to die and was nursed back to health by a Buddhist monk in Dharmasala, home of the Tibetan-Government-in-Exile. The Monk through a translator said I had kidney stones. Over the next few days, I swallowed a course of huge brown Ayervedic horse pills. Amy booked me into the Om Guest House which was slightly more comfortable than our own quarters which I sharing with a friendly brown rat. I was over the worse after a week but continued to vomit through most of July and August. I loved India despite being ill. I lived for days on trains. I travelled alone sometimes but also met others and made swift and intimate friendships. I journeyed from Kashmir in the north to Kerala in the south, from Rajasthan in the west to Nepal in the east. I made a lifelong friend in Amy and we had an audience with the Dalai Lama. Despite my vomiting disease, I had a romantic collision with an English aristocrat, and a Nepalese waiter (not at the same time).

By the time I opened an envelope picked up at the Post Restante in Patna and recognised Her familiar handwriting I was healed from my heartbreak. I remember reading the letter slowly and thanking God, Krishna, Buddha, Shiva and the whole kit and caboodle that I was healed. At last I could write the word woman without the feeling that my heart was squeezed in a vice.

They say that travel broadens the mind, that it’s good to take a Gap year and looks impressive on your CV. I don’t know about that. It’s never brought me a job. All I can say is that as far as emotional healing is concerned it’s more exciting than taking Bach Flower Remedies and cheaper than years of therapy.

Namaste.

MARY LOWE is a History graduate from the University of York (1979-82). She writes fiction and plays and has been widely published in anthologies and journals. In 2006 she was Writer-in-Residence at Age Concern Newcastle and, as a result, has written a book for children, The Magic Patchwork, illustrated by the painter Emma Holliday.

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