‘Fast-paced and gripping’ Hello

‘Gardner has planted clues with expertise’ Daily Telegraph

‘A menacing study of friendship and self-knowledge’ Sunday Mirror

‘Tense, dramatic and surprising, this book plays on your paranoia’ New Woman

‘This is authentic travel writing-cum-action adventure’ Independent on Sunday

‘Fast-paced, this tale grips like a vice, carrying you along until the unexpected twist hits you square between the eyes’ South Wales Evening Post

‘Katy Gardner’s devourable first novel… is about the promises and perils of friendship… A convincing travelogue of the heart’ LA Times

Katy Gardner teaches social anthropology at the University of Sussex. She lives in Brighton with her husband and three children.

Losing Gemma

KATY GARDNER

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to: Graham Alborough, Nina Beachcroft, Mary Bradbury, Clare Conville, Louise Moore and Martin Bryant. Finally, thanks to Karen Khera, with whom I made my first (and very happy!) journey around India.

Preface

After Gemma’s funeral, I returned to my parents’ house, climbed the stairs to my bedroom, and lay down on the floor as if I would never get up again. It was the worst day of my life, and I wanted the walls to cave in, to be crushed under a detritus of bricks, Blu-Taked wallpaper and curling, teenage posters: my whole childhood – the one that we had shared – collapsing over me just as our history had buried her.

So I lay there and waited, but nothing happened. The gentle English sun worked its way across the walls, the late evening light faded and slowly the room became dark. I grew chilled and my bones began to ache; eventually I could hear my mother, tapping on the door.

There was nothing more to say and nothing more to do, that was why I could not move. Even after Gemma’s death I had failed her: I should have read out one of her poems or made some kind of speech, but all I could do was sit at the back of the church next to Steve and my parents, my hands locked so tightly together that my knuckles turned blue. I did not look up for I could not bear to see the curious glances of the old school crowd, the dull despair in her mother’s eyes. I knew what everyone else thought of me, the kind of things they had been saying.

Chapter One

This is the story of Gemma and me: how I lost her, I suppose. I don’t usually tell it to anyone but myself; I save it for the darkest moments: the long hours before dawn or the unexpected panics that creep up silently, mugging me from behind. That’s when I repeat it again and again, revisiting each small detail as if by the telling of it I might change the past. This time though, things are different. This time the past has already been erased.

I’ll start at the place I thought was the beginning but now know was near the end. I was pretty full of myself back in those days; I thought life was a cinch, that everything I did was charmed and charming. I was twenty-three (name: Esther Waring, BA: University of Sussex; passport stamps achieved so far: Morocco, Egypt and Israel), the year was 1989, and I was perched on the edge of my seat, several thousand feet above the shanties of Delhi. I liked to think of myself as a traveller back then, a lover of movement and excitement, but, ironically, I hated planes. As the wheels touched down I was therefore clutching the worn acrylic armrest of the Air India Boeing 747, trying to look nonchalant and secretly praying. For a few anxious moments I had been unable to see the runway, even though we were clearly about to land. I peered horrified at the rapidly approaching ground, relaxing only minimally when I glimpsed the rusting carcasses of abandoned planes and suddenly – coming to meet me – an expanse of tarmac. There was a thump, an agonizing rush of speed and lingering doubt (would the brakes work?) and then the plane finally came to rest outside Indira Gandhi International Airport.

The moment we were on the ground my fears evaporated; in retrospect they seemed ridiculous, slightly shaming even. Fear of flying from a global, backpacking babe like me? It was pathetic, a symptom of my chronic need for control. I unclicked my belt, reaching impatiently for my bags. Gemma was still dithering around, groping under her seat for God knows what, but I was physically unable to wait. Jumping up I pushed my way into the aisle.

The queue shuffled slowly forwards. When I finally reached the exit I paused, momentarily blasted by the hot air and reek of aviation fuel. Then, shielding my eyes against the dazzling afternoon light, I swung my bags around my shoulders and clanked down the metal steps.

Gemma, who never pushed herself anywhere, let alone into a line of impatiently shoving passengers, did not appear for at least another five minutes. I waited in a state of frustrated excitement on the tarmac, blinking up at the white flanks of the jumbo until I finally saw her small rounded frame appearing from its stale-breathed jaws. Her face was screwed up against the light, and she looked dazed, as if unsure of where she was going.

At the sound of her old nickname she started and glanced up, her expression relaxing as she finally located my face in the crowd; when she finally reached the bottom of the steps her voice was breathless, her face flushed.

She stuck out her tongue and we touched hands, a fleeting gesture that seemed to sum everything up: partners in crime, old mates through thick and thin. Then, linking arms, we climbed on to the airline bus.

The arrivals lounge was a vast hangar of a building which echoed to the sporadic stamping of passports and the squawk of malnourished sparrows. We waited at the end of a long line to be processed by the sour-faced immigration official perching humourlessly at his desk ahead of us. Besides the Indian families, with their kohl-eyed, frilly dressed toddlers and endless luggage, and various sharp-suited businessmen, the flight had been filled with disappointingly suburban types. A quick inspection of the logo on the nylon holdalls of the middle-aged women in the queue informed me that they were part of a Sunnyworld Spectacles of India Tour. Watching them, my heart – which since landing had been soaring – momentarily drooped. I craved travel, not tourism, you see, and back then the distinction seemed terribly important. For everything I had planned and everything I believed myself to be, I wanted for us to be in a place for the adventurous minority, not some soft option for people like my parents. Catching Gemma’s eye, I glanced at the women and pulled a face. Gemma opened her mouth, her tongue lolling like an idiot, and crossed her eyes.

More promisingly, the guys behind us were chatting loudly about ‘Asia’. I kept glancing covertly over my shoulder, checking them out. I knew the sort well: travel bores who’ll regale one with tales of hardship and daring for hour after hour, labouring under the illusion that it made them ‘interesting’. Both were vying to be The Best Travelled: one was talking authoritatively about how he planned to cross the Himalayas into Ladakh; the other had an interest in temples. After a while I grew irritated by the competitive tone of their conversation. Turning around, I eyed up a young studenty type reading Herman Hesse behind us, more out of habit and boredom than any real desire to flirt.

He remained buried in the book. Gemma too had dropped to the floor and was picking at her nails and glancing anxiously around. She would be thinking that the latrines opposite the queue smelt disgusting and worrying about where we were going to spend the night, I thought as I watched her sigh heavily and flick a morsel of dirt from her nails. Dear, muddle-headed Gemma, with whom I was about to embark on the journey of my dreams: she so often got unnerved and discouraged by situations which I relished with glee. Now that we were finally here I would have to help her cope.

Two hours later we dragged our rucksacks from the luggage carousel and walked through the smeared glass of Arrival’s doors. For a moment we were overtaken, British flotsam bobbing in an unstoppable torrent of bodies and luggage and grasping hands. Drivers waved signs in our faces and touts pushed hotel cards at us while at least three porters attempted to pull our rucksacks from our backs. All around us families were being reunited, the long gone British exiles falling weeping into their relatives’ arms as garlands of golden tinsel were placed over their heads. Beyond the sweep of airport concrete the sky was gashed red, the last rays of sun reflecting from the glistening, expectant faces of the crowd. Crows hopped around our feet, pecking at the remnants of a spilt bag of chancchuri. The air was suffocatingly hot.

My plan had been to find a taxi, haggle the driver down to ten dollars – a rip-off according to the Lonely Planet guide, but considering that it was our first night I was prepared to compromise – and ride into Connaught Circus. Back at the main entrance to the airport I had dismissed what felt like an endless supply of drivers, but now the place was suddenly deserted. The Sunnyworld drones had climbed on to their shining tour buses, the returned migrants ushered reverentially on to the minibuses hired to return them in splendour to their villages, and the backpackers gone God knows where. Gemma and I stood alone by the side of the road, unsure what to do next.

Isn’t it incredible how those apparently minute, split-second decisions can change the course of a life? If we had gone with one of the touts, or asked the backpackers how best to get into the city centre, or even done the unthinkable and visited the Tourist Information Office, everything might have been different. But in those days I would never have taken such diminutive action. I was too proud, too keen to prove my credentials as a Traveller: to take the cheapest and most authentic route to everywhere and everything. That was how I had backpacked around Europe the summer before, how I had visited North Africa with Luke, the guy I went out with briefly in my second year, and how now, in this year off that I had dreamt of for so long, I was planning to ‘do’ India. Gemma, whose foreign adventures consisted of a holiday to Majorca with her dad and his new wife and an aborted three months au-pairing in Belgium – neither of which experiences I could honestly count as ‘travel’ – had little say. Perhaps I was naive; I was certainly bossy.

And so, rather than following the other passengers on to an air-conditioned bus or hailing a taxi we suddenly found ourselves alone at the side of the road. And what I realize now is that this was the first of my many mistakes, for it was then that we were noticed.

‘Look, you stay here, and I’ll have a recce and see if there are any buses or anything.’

Unhooking my rucksack from my back and dropping it at Gemma’s feet, I began to walk swiftly away, swivelling my head around as I searched for suitably ‘local’ looking buses. With the exception of a silver four-wheel-drive vehicle parked immediately opposite, the car park was deserted. It was almost dark now, and I could feel a line of sweat trickling down the small of my back. Although it tickled, I was pleased it was there: it was right that I should be slightly dirty and sticky with the heat, I thought as I stepped across the tarmac; it showed that I was well and truly in the South.

I crossed the road, peering through the gloom at a solitary bus on the other side of the concourse. I’m ashamed to admit that despite my total ignorance of Hindi, I made a pretence of examining the sign on the front, as if by staring at it for long enough its destination would seep osmotically into my consciousness. With the unpromising exception of the driver, who was wrapped in a shawl and lying asleep at the wheel, the bus was empty.

Perhaps I should not have left Gemma alone like that, I thought with a jolt: it was, after all, the first time she had been outside Europe. I remembered her expression of fleeting panic as I had set off and imagined her perched on top of the rucksacks, such easy prey for the men who hovered outside the airport in the hope of sex or an easy scam. By now they would be circling for the kill, asking ‘What country?’ and ‘Please, madam, where is your husband?’

I looked back, hoping to reassure her with a wave and saw to my surprise that she was no longer alone. Squatting in the dust next to her was another traveller: a tall guy, with long, dirty yellow hair, bright orange draw-string pantaloons in the style of German hippies, and a tasselled leather bag which he had placed on the floor by his feet. Leaning on the railings opposite, apparently overlooking the scene, were two girls. Both had their backs turned towards me, but one was notably skinny, with a long black plait appearing from a beaded headscarf and a red dress, its hem trailing in the dust. The other was broader, with a large behind and lumpy looking legs. She kept turning her head away and shaking her head with what could only be irritation. I remember looking at them, and thinking vaguely that something was wrong. Perhaps it was the way they were watching the hippie, as if they knew him but for some reason were not permitted to join him, or perhaps it was just that they were having an argument. Whatever, I only glanced at them for a second or so.

I raised my hand and was just about to shout: ‘Gemma!’ when a taxi swerved into my path, its horn blaring in triumph at having found the remaining two passengers from the London flight.

Twenty minutes later we had reached the outskirts of the city, the initially deserted airport road becoming increasingly crowded with scooter-rickshaws and motorbikes and over-laden Tata trucks. I gazed awestruck from the taxi window. We were travelling through the blasted hinterland of outer Delhi but the landscape seemed gloriously exotic to me, the smoky evening light heavier and hotter than anything I had ever experienced, the air fragrant and filled with promise. About ten minutes into the journey we had passed a flock of vultures picking at something dead on the tarmac; a few miles later we nearly hit a mangy cow idling in the middle of the road. The driver braked hard, then slowly circled around the animal, humming to himself. Gemma and I gawped at each other then burst out laughing. It was too dark now to see what lay beyond the dull orange glow of the carriageway lights, but outside the cab I could hear cicadas and the distant yowl of jackals.

We sat in silence, our rucksacks on our laps. All I could think was that finally I had made it. I wanted to wind the window down, push my head out and take it in with great greedy gulps but despite my love of excessive gestures something held me back. Perhaps it was Gemma, whose stolid presence always restrained me from my wilder moments. Even when we were kids and I was about to do something stupid, like pocket sweets from the newsagents, or ring up a teacher and do heavy breathing down the phone, she would look at me and frown and for just a moment I would hesitate. Glancing at her across the back seat I realized that in the fuggy warmth of the night air she was on the brink of sleep; her eyes kept flickering closed, her mouth unloosening as her face relaxed. When the taxi bumped over a particularly large hole she opened her eyes and sat up straight, shaking her head.

‘Didn’t you read about it? It’s a special gas they use to drug the foreigners so they can rip them off.’

‘A hippie? With orange trousers and all that hair? He was sitting next to you? Jesus, Pol? What planet are you on?’

We were passing a mosque now, its pillars hung with sparkling lights like the fairy castles we used to dream of when we were seven. Gemma stared at it for a moment, her eyes widening.

Me and Poly Styrene – that juvenile nickname she had never truly shaken off – had been best friends since our first day at school and that was the way we still were. We might have grown up, moving on by many years from our pubescent skirmish with bin- and eyeliners, progressing through Ska and New Romantics and Dexys up through school until I went off to university, and she moved out of her mum’s and into her flat over the Alliance and Leicester, but as far as I was concerned, the sisterhood we had found as little girls was going to last for ever. It was part of my badly digested undergraduate feminism, plastered over my consciousness with a capital F. Men weren’t important, or at least, they shouldn’t be. What mattered – I convinced myself – was the solidarity of women. Sure, we might have had our tense moments, our times of unspoken conflict, but was that not just part of the intricate fabric of friendship, weaving us ever closer and more colourfully together? The mosque disappeared and the taxi came up to and then blatantly skipped a set of flashing traffic lights. When I next looked at Gemma she was asleep, her head bumping the taxi door, a silver thread of drool trickling from her mouth.

As I gazed at her, I was overtaken by a rush of affection. There was something so sweet and trusting in the way she fell asleep at every available opportunity. When we were at school she had a habit of dozing off in the middle of lessons and later, in the days of pubs and all-night parties, she was always the first to succumb, curling up in the corner under her coat as we cavorted around her inert body. I was the opposite: too awake, my mind always buzzing. Sometimes I would lie with my eyes wide open all night, waiting for the sky outside my curtains to lighten, for another day to bring me closer to what I thought of as my ‘real’, adult life.

And now, finally, I was here. After all those months of planning and saving, I had escaped the tedium of Britain. Unlike my college friends with their deathly city jobs and sad, hemmed-in plans, I was, I told myself with the triumphant optimism of the very young, a career-path refusenik. Not for me the daily trudge to the office. No, I was different. I was going to hurl myself at the world and see what happened.

Chapter Two

The taxi dropped us at the end of what I know now to be Janpath. Temporarily dazed by the rushing traffic we stood by the side of the road clutching our backpacks and trying to get our bearings. We were standing on a large arterial road, which led into a wide circle of smart shops, restaurants and airline offices. It was after nine now and the pavement was littered with sleeping bodies.

I gazed around in excitement. Behind me a boy was squatting in front of a tray heaped with silver-foiled leaves, aniseed seeds and betel nuts. Further down the pavement a group of ragged children were tugging at the arms of passersby. As I stared across the road I suddenly noticed a turbaned man squat down in front of a wicker basket. Pulling off its lid, he waved his hand over the top like a puppeteer until the jerking body of a long brown snake poked its way over the top.

Gemma blinked at me. She looked stunned, her mouth hanging slightly open, her arms folded nervously around her waist.

Tossing her head, she pulled the Lonely Planet from her bag and starting to thumb through it.

‘We really need to work out where we’re going,’ she was muttering. ‘It says here there’s a youth hostel somewhere near…’ She frowned, concentrating hard on the book.

Glancing to the right, where the stream of 1950s-style Ambassador cars and scooters had stopped at the lights, I grabbed her hand and began to pull her across the road. For a second or so it remained empty. Then from the opposite direction a tidal wave of vehicles suddenly poured around us. For a moment we stood paralysed in the middle of the maelstrom, clutching each other in horror.

I stared into Gemma’s small startled eyes. In the traffic roaring towards us, there was just about to be a sudden lull.

Gripping each other’s hands tightly and yelling at the top of our voices, we ran for our lives. By the time we reached the pavement we were shaking with terror and laughter. Perhaps it was too much for Gemma, who was now gasping by the side of the road, her hands on her knees, but I felt as if I had jumped out of a plane and landed on my feet.

‘Within an inch of their lives, the intrepid explorers breasted the raging torrent.’

There was a pause, then Gemma said quietly, ‘Perhaps we should have just let that taxi driver take us to his cousin’s hotel.’

I glanced sharply at her face, but from its benign gaze I decided that this was intended as a question rather than a criticism. Since I was the more experienced traveller, I had naturally assumed that she was going to leave the practicalities to me.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said dismissively. ‘They’re all on a percentage, these guys. Come on, let’s try this one.’

We turned down a side road which intersected the main arc of buildings and immediately saw a series of neon hotel signs and, sitting on the pavement, a group of backpackers. I smiled at Gemma reassuringly.

We started to cross again, this time peering in every direction before leaving the pavement. As we reached the other side I nodded at the group, a couple of men and a thin, tanned woman with bare feet and anklets. They looked as if they had been on the road a long time I remember thinking enviously, long enough to shed their old Western selves entirely. I wanted to be like that, too, with dusty feet and slim brown wrists encased in lines of sparkly bazaar bangles. I wanted to be an old hand, someone ‘with experience’, who had done and seen it all, not a fresh arrival, straight off the London flight and clutching her guidebook. Most of all, I wanted to be different from everyone at home.

I glanced back at Gemma. Embarrassingly, she still had the Lonely Planet out and was frowning and waving it around in front of her, like a tourist at the Taj Mahal. Ignoring her I gestured towards the first hotel, a grimy looking place advertising rooms for fifty rupees a night.

I turned on my heels and was just about to proceed purposefully up the steps of the hotel when a figure who had suddenly come out of the swing doors lurched down the steps and blundered into me, knocking me backwards. With the weight of the rucksack on my back, I fell hard on to my backside.

I felt a sharp stab of pain in my elbow and for a moment was disorientated. It seems stupid now, but my immediate concern was that the other backpackers might have seen and all attempts at traveller cool would be ruined.

For a moment I saw Gemma’s face peering down at me. Then her eyes flicked away, focusing on something to her left.

Looking past her I glimpsed the fast disappearing back of my assailant: a thin woman weaving almost drunkenly along the pavement. She kept starting to run and then checking herself and slowing down, as if aware that she was being watched. Something about the way she moved, perhaps her uneven gait, or the slumped, almost crushed shape of her back, made her appear either very stoned or very scared. She was wearing a long cotton petticoat, the sort worn by Indian women under their saris, and a skimpy top.

I pulled myself up shakily. It had been a harder fall than I had first thought and my arm was stinging. Looking down I saw that my elbow was bleeding and the side of my hand badly grazed.

We stared at the woman’s back for a little while longer. After about thirty seconds she reached the end of the road and turned into Connaught Circus.

‘Perhaps she just had too much of that Indian gas you were telling me about.’

I gazed into the late evening haze, watching as the crowd closed around the woman. There was something bothering me.

Pulling my rucksack higher on to my back, I turned and walked wobblily up the steps.

We were given a room on the third floor: a small cubicle with two string charpoy-beds and a shuttered window overlooking the bricks and pipes of the opposite building. It was just what I had imagined: as far from the floral, en suite suburban horrors of the package hotel as possible. There was virtually no furniture: on the wall above the beds was a narrow ledge, containing a guttered candle stub and an empty cigarette packet; opposite the window, a bare wooden table, its soft wood indented with graffiti. On the ceiling a fan clattered noisily. Gemma had turned it to ‘full’ the moment the proprietor had left and now it was working itself into a frenzy, the heavy metal hub shaking so violently that the fan seemed in danger of spinning off the ceiling and decapitating us. The ‘bathroom’ was across the corridor, a rusty shower and a filthy hole which, after a cursory inspection, even I, with all my half-baked bravado, had decided was best avoided.

Gemma threw her rucksack on to the floor next to the farthest bed – an unstable looking construction of wood and ropes – and flopped down.

I perched on the edge of the bed and started to fiddle uncomfortably with the top of my bag. My hand was still throbbing. Lying opposite me, Gemma was staring across the room. She was brooding, I could tell from the glum shape of her mouth, the pensive glaze of her eyes. Determined to snap her out of it, I stood up and waved my hand jauntily in front of her eyes.

‘As you can see, our luxurious suite of rooms caters to the modern tourist’s every need.’

‘If this is a super-deluxe room I dread to think what “budget” involves,’ she said slowly.

Glancing at me, she suddenly closed her eyes and fell backwards, her body hitting the taut rope base of the bed with a soft thud.

She lay there for a few minutes, her eyes closed, her breathing deep and regular. For a moment I thought she had fallen asleep again, but then she sat up, opening her eyes wide and yawning as she looked across the room.

We stared at each other. Suddenly her mouth started to twitch, as if she was desperately trying to repress a huge bubble of mirth. Just looking at her made me smile. Thank God, I was thinking; she’s not sulking after all.

She glanced at me again and the laughter escaped with a great spluttering raspberry.

‘And so, our brave lady explorers face their first night in the wilds of India…’

She collapsed with the onslaught of another explosion. I pursed my lips and fluttered my eyelashes in my famous impersonation of Mrs Crewe, our A-level English teacher; an old, infantile joke we still found funny.

‘All mod-cons, including, for your own convenience, a delightfully designed communal cess pit!’

After we had recovered we sat on our beds, chuckling and wiping our faces. I gazed across the room at Gemma: her cheeks pink with heat and laughter, her damp hair flopping in her eyes. Her features were as familiar to me as my own. I had grown up with them and knew every contour and expression by heart; she just had to jerk her head or bite her lip and I knew exactly what she was thinking. It was true that she was never going to make it as a Hollywood nymphet: her face was too round, her nose too knobbly and her legs too short, but I liked how she looked. It reminded me of my childhood, of bicycle rides down country lanes and camping out on cool summer nights.

She, however, was never satisfied. Her hair and her weight were the two great enemies, and ever since I could remember she had been waging campaigns against them. Over the last few years she had been experimenting with the former, cropping it into the spiky post-punk style of the moment, and dying her fringe unlikely colours: pink and orange and most recently, bright purple. She had also taken to painting black eyeliner around her eyes, a procedure, which – as I had tried to point out – had the unfortunate effect of making them appear smaller rather than more alluring. Yet despite these attempts she looked the same to me: her round, podgy face stubbornly shrugging off the slightest overtures of sophistication.

Then there was her figure. Her body was the traditional English shape: thick legs and hips, a slimmer waist and small round tits. And, as she was always complaining, her legs were too short. The long pencil skirts everyone wore in the mid eighties made her look as if she was swathed in cheap curtain material whilst drainpipe jeans were, to be honest, a dumpy disaster. So she was constantly on a diet. But however much she starved herself on low-calorie yoghurts and apples or, for a really terrible month or so, a diet consisting solely of bran and orange juice, her frame remained the same. Her legs were still too short and her hips too wide; rather than transforming her into a svelte imp, the weight loss made her face sunken and her knees bony.

At this point I should probably come clean. It’s not the sort of thing one is supposed to say, but I think we both knew that one of Gemma’s main problems was the way I looked. It’s faded now: I’m too thin and my face is grey and drawn, but as Gem and I used to joke at school, if we put her brains and my bod together we’d have the ideal combo. I don’t think it mattered when we were kids, but later, when the school discos and parties and boyfriends started, it somehow became important. I remember one time in particular; we were getting ready to go to some stupid youth club disco, aged about fourteen. Standing together in front of the long mirror in my parents’ bedroom, I suddenly perceived myself as a stranger might. I looked almost like a model, I realized with shock and an unfamiliar pride. Virtually overnight, my long legs had turned shapely and my waist had tucked in sharply below my new, blossoming bust. I piled my curly hair on to the top of my head, stuck out my chest and pouted, like a page three girl.

Jerking round, I saw that Gemma was standing behind me, watching my performance. Despite the outrageous clothes, lipstick and mascara she still looked like a podgy little girl. I think I must have laughed, or said something back, but from then on there was a perceptible shift between us. Something neither of us fully understood had changed.

Of course we were just little girls dressing up, but we took it so seriously. Suddenly our appearances had become vital and we would spend long afternoons trailing around Top Shop and Miss Selfridge trying on clothes we had no money to buy. I could chart our history from what we wore: a genealogy of fashion statements – mistakes and triumphs – taken on and discarded as the years ticked past. When we were thirteen we had pretended to be punks in hastily improvised miniskirts and ripped tops, pink satin winklepickers and black kohl, painted wobblily around our eyes. I tottered around in stilettos; Gemma had a pin which gave the appearance of going through her nose. It was around then that I started to call her ‘Poly Styrene’, after we saw the real thing, plump and punkily clad on Top of the Pops. I, in contrast, was named ‘Siouxsie Sioux’, but it was a token gesture, for despite Gemma’s attempts to shake off the image, her name somehow stuck; it summed up a nervous, neurotic quality that even the ripped miniskirts and black lipstick could not fully mask. ‘Clean my teeth ten times a day,’ I used to sing at her. ‘Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away.’

Later, of course, we moved on from punk. I had my beloved black ra-ra skirt and my Madonna-style lacy gloves, stained brown at the tips from the cigarettes I had learnt to smoke. While I donned dangly earrings and New Romantic frilly shirts, Gemma veered towards Student Goth, with black ankle boots and leggings, her army surplus greatcoat and long violet tasselled dress.

But I am jumping ahead: her grungey phase came later, around the time she started smoking too much dope and dropped out of school. Before that, we’d both tart ourselves up to the nines. We spent hours getting ready, experimenting with make-up and hairspray and fishnet tights. Then, pretending we always dressed in such a way, we would set off for the sad discos and youth clubs we frequented, with that frightened, fluttery feeling in our tummies. We’d spend the rest of the evening pretending to ignore the boys in the fifth form, while all the time waiting desperately to see if they were going to ask us for a dance: all that giggly, nerve-racking, competitive crap. In retrospect I can see that Gemma found it really hard. She’d spend hours getting ready, then sit miserably in the corner all evening chewing her hair while I got the snogs. ‘My sex life is carried out vicariously!’ she announced after one event. Not fully understanding, I just winked at her and smiled.

The problem for me was that once I’d got them the boys at school embarrassed me with their fumbling attempts at seduction and clumsy protestations of love. University was largely the same. I don’t know why, really, but I’d pile up these pathetic, hangdog admirers in the same way that Gemma accumulated books. I always enjoyed the first phase: the being chased, the first kiss or first few weeks of passion, but then I’d grow dispirited and somehow impatient with the whole endeavour. Nobody ever seemed right, and I certainly did not relish becoming part of a clingy, predictable coupling. What I wanted, you see, was excitement and change. Aged nineteen or twenty there seemed simply too much of life to experience to spend it with some gauche youth. Besides, I told myself, I was not looking for a man. As was the fashion back then at Sussex, I declared myself a feminist.

I stared into Gemma’s face, smiling at her with affection. Of course I would never have told her, but I preferred her with her old, mousy hair and bulging tummy. I wanted her to stay just the same as always: my cuddly, constant bestest ever best friend. Whenever I returned home for the holidays and discovered yet another attempt at self-transformation – her hair colour changed again, or some new health food fad – I always felt secretly irked. It’s childish, I know, but it made me feel left out.

‘I was reading about Goa and Kerala on the plane,’ she said. ‘They sound amazing.’

I had planned it all, long before the trip included Gemma. I would travel according to chance, a real adventurer, journeying to wherever fate decreed.

Plucking the guide from her fingers, I stood ceremoniously in the middle of the room, then tossed it high above my head. It flew upwards through the fan-stirred air, its pages fluttering wildly as a myriad of possibilities flicked past. At the zenith of its flight it paused. Then suddenly it came crashing down on to the bare stone floor, our fate decided.

I could have stopped it, of course I could. I could have caught the book, turned the pages with my own hands and changed it all. But innocent of everything that was to come, I let it fall.

The book landed at Gemma’s feet; its pages splayed and bent back like the wings of a squashed beetle.

She picked it up and laid it on her lap. For a moment she was silent, her forehead furrowed in concentration as I hopped at her side.

‘OK, here we go… Agun Mazir, Orissa. “This little visited town situated in the heart of the forests of eastern Orissa is best known as the site of the shrine of Pir Saheb Nirulla, a Sufi mystic who is said to have burnt to death there in 1947…” ’

‘“The town has been a centre of pilgrimage for the last forty years…” God, this is really weird…’

‘This guy, this Pir Saheb blokey… he burst into flames when he was meditating or praying or something, and now all these pilgrims come to the shrine thinking it’s going to heal them or get them a job or whatever…’

I had had enough of listening. I leant over and plucked the book from her hands.

‘It was a miracle. Look, read that bit at the bottom. He was a hermit, living in the jungle and he spontaneously combusted…’

‘“The truth behind the myth,”’ I read out, ‘“is hotly contested by local historians… while devotees to the shrine insist in the miraculous nature of Pir Saheb Nirulla’s combustion, others have a more prosaic and grim explanation, citing the partition of India and violence between Hindus and Muslims as the real cause of his burning.”’

There was a pause. From the look in Gemma’s eyes, I thought she was about to demur.

‘Let’s see…’ I scanned the book hastily for information. ‘ “The town has only one hotel, catering solely for devotees who travel from all over India to visit the shrine”… “There is also a tourist bungalow, which is reached by a path leading into the forest to the north. Cost… forty rupees… single, air-conditioning…” blah, blah… sounds fine. Let’s do it.’

I put the book down and stood up. I guess I should have told Gemma about this part of the trip before we left Stevenage, but somehow, in all the rush to get our visas and jabs and everything packed, I had forgotten. Glancing at her face I sensed that she was still not wholly persuaded.

‘Train to Calcutta, then another train to Orissa, then bus it. Go on, Gem. It’ll be really fun. It sounds like it’s totally off the beaten track and we don’t just want to go to all the usual predictable places, do we? We can do Goa afterwards.’

I glanced at her doubtful face. It was so much part of my fantasy that I hadn’t considered she might want to do things differently.

‘We don’t have to always ask the book,’ I said patiently. ‘But since we did I think we should go where it says. Perhaps there’s a reason why it opened there.’

She stared at me. She looked hot and unhappy, an expression she often assumed at clubs and parties when she was supposed to be having fun. I would spot her sometimes, dancing half-heartedly on the other side of the room, and just for a moment, when she thought no one was watching, she would stare down at her feet, her mouth drooping as if close to tears. Now she paused, as if making up her mind. Then pushing her hair out of her eyes, she shook her head and laughed.

Later that night we climbed the hotel’s wide stone stairway to the top floor, and following the sound of laughter and a guitar opened a fire door to the roof. The view was stunning. From the eighth floor we could see across Connaught Place to the wide thoroughfare of Janpath, its steady traffic melted to a single, molten line of light. Beyond this was a sparkling mass of streets and houses, interspersed by sudden patches of blackness – the bustees where the electricity did not reach. Above us the violet sky was encrusted with a million stars.

I took a deep breath of the warm night air, and stepped through the door. The roof was scattered with sleeping bags. Immediately opposite the door a small group of travellers were sitting with their legs hanging over the edge of the building as they talked and smoked. A little further on a young Western guy with a shaved head and a lunghi was playing the guitar. The air smelt of coconut oil and marijuana.

As the door opened a couple of heads turned. I smiled ingratiatingly as if gatecrashing a private party. I was hoping no one would guess how recently we had arrived.

‘Looks like you were right about the budget rooms,’ Gemma muttered. ‘The place is crammed with crusties.’

We made our way to the other side of the roof and sat on the edge, peering down at the street below. The vendors and beggars had gone now, the pavement covered by the dark shapes of sleeping bodies. Despite Gemma’s remarks, my entire being pulsed with excitement. This was exactly what I wanted: the romantic hippie squalor of a flophouse roof under an Indian sky.

I sighed ecstatically. Pulling a face, Gemma produced two cigarettes and a packet of matches from her shirt pocket.

She took out a match and struck it against the side of the box. It flared brilliantly for a brief second then went out. When she struck a second the sizzling head flew off the end of the match and into my lap.

Finally she produced a flame, lit both cigarettes and passed one to me, our own little ritual.

‘You know something?’ I said. ‘This is what I’ve dreamed about doing for years.’

‘What? Sitting in the dust and listening to a bunch of hippies croon Bob Dylan?’

‘Nah. You know – this.’ I gestured at the scene below. I suddenly really wanted her to understand, to share my enthusiasm. ‘It’s fantastic, isn’t it?’

She did not even look down, just sniffed and said, ‘Hmph.’ She’s just scared of it, I told myself; she’s not used to this kind of scene, she finds it intimidating.

‘Gem,’ I said gently, laying my hand on her arm. ‘We’re going to have a real ball here.’

‘Yeah, yeah. I know. Just so long as you don’t start singing “Blowing in the Wind” at me.’

‘So what do you think Steve would think of it?’ Gemma suddenly said. ‘You know, I’m already really missing him.’

I shrugged uncomfortably. Steve’s views on India, or indeed anything else, were not something I wished to discuss. To deflect her attention I turned and stared into her face, raising my eyebrows meaningfully.

She clamped her hand over her mouth in mock horror. For a moment we stared at each other, then, at exactly the same time, we started to laugh.

It was the summer before secondary school, just before Gemma’s dad left and she moved with her brother and mum into the semi in Stevenage. We were still little girls: our chests flat and our skin smooth, but something within us had started to stir. It wasn’t as if we didn’t know about sex; we did, in graphic detail – Gemma’s brother’s subscription to Fiesta had taken care of that. No, it was more that we had never connected this embarrassing, exciting and slightly nasty knowledge with ourselves. It was true I had experienced vague longings, a sense of desire I channelled into unfocused fantasies involving Roger Daltry, whose tight-trousered photo spreads adorned my sister’s room. I had also enjoyed a long and arduous correspondence with a French schoolboy which stopped only when he arrived for the exchange programme and I discovered that he was a foot smaller than me and picked his nose. In a spirit of adventurous competition Gemma had snogged a twelve-year-old boy who lived down her road, but all she reported back was that it had made her lips sore.

So I guess it must have been to do with sex, in a warped, pre-pubescent way. It was certainly not something we would have dreamt of doing a year later. It involved us taking off our knickers – why, I have totally forgotten – and then climbing out on to the flat roof opposite Gemma’s parents’ bedroom. All summer we had been using the roof as an urban tree house, a place to regroup and discuss strategy in the small war which had blown up with a group of local boys. Today, however, we pulled down our pants, and leaving them tucked down the side of the radiator, climbed solemnly on to the roof. It was a hot day in August; even now I can remember the warmth of the asphalt on my bum as we sat on the edge, our legs overhanging the hot plastic drainpipe, pulling our skirts higher and higher over our thighs as we exposed ourselves to the elements.