LESS THAN 50 BPM

For some reason every time I log onto my preferred computer in the internet cafe at the eastern end of the seedy backpacker strip of Grand Bazaar the default language of the machine has changed. Today it is Japanese. Yesterday it was Polish. The day before that is was German. It hasn't been English yet. I'm starting to smell a conspiracy.

So let me tell you a little bit about my hotel here in Delhi. It sits about halfway along Grand Bazaar, a turbulent stretch of road bordered on both sides by restaurants, tat shops, hard sell merchants, touts, hustlers, urchins, beggars and a poorly concealed drainage system. Negotiating this stretch is made precarious by the street merchants, fresh-juice sellers and the fryers of sweet things to eat, who have claimed all the claimable fringes of the road, which means that in order to make your way from the metro station to your digs you're obliged to launch yourself into the unpredictable flow of the cycle rickshaws, tuk tuks, touts and tourists, motorbikes, mopeds, bongo vans and cows for whom this seemingly uninhabitable stretch of road seems home.

From the road the Hotel Shelton is a blue sign and a double glass door. From the inside it's a four story building with an atrium which runs from the ground floor reception to the rooftop restaurant. The shaft of the atrium acts as a central pivot around which the rooms, which only occupy the first, second and third floors, are arranged.

The rooftop restaurant is run by a Nepalese family who have perfected the art of making everything they cook taste roughly the same. In the last three days I have had the banana pancake, a chicken burrito from their Mexican Fiesta menu, a fish curry and the lasagna and aside from texture and colour I'm not sure any serious differences existed between any of them. What the roof top restaurant does afford you however is a slightly higher vantage point from which to inhale the filthy air.

My room was on the third floor, a cell with a double bed below a window with an exhaust fan which opens out onto the atrium. The exhaust fan, the useful purpose of which I was never completely able to ascertain, meant that any noise which was made in or around the central atrium, on any level and at any time, would be allowed unfettered entry into my lodgings. Last night I was woken at about three o'clock in the morning by the unmistakable bellowing of a cow.

When I wasn't being woken by livestock I was frequently being disturbed by the proprietor of the establishment, a shifty looking little man with a moustache and calculating eyes, who would knock on my door as soon as he was aware I'd returned to the hotel to ask if I had any washing that needed doing. His eyes would slowly scan the room as I answered, taking in my backpack, which sat on the floor beside the bed, and the things I'd laid out on the bedside table. When I assured him that my clothes were fine his eyes would suddenly snap back to mine. "Do you want some beer then?" he would say. I would tell him I did not. He would look at me with something approaching spite, take a long, cool look at the water bottles beside my bed and grunt before walking off. I got used to the ritual. It became the point at which I would turn off the light and go to sleep.

I was staring up the ceiling last night shortly after the little ritual, chasing sleep and thinking about the trip through India. I was trying to nail down one incident where I'd been shocked or confronted or horrified. The poverty, the desperation, the destitution, all the things that are supposed to touch something raw in you when you travel to the third-world don't seem to have left a mark on me these past four weeks. And I wondered why that was. Shouldn't your first reaction to a grubby child asleep in the gutter be compassion? Or grief? Or anger? Or revulsion? Why did I feel nothing? Why did I find it so easy to walk past? Where's my humanity?

I am proud of the strength of my heart. It works well. I've worked hard to make sure it does. I know that at rest it circulates the seven litres of blood in my arteries and veins at a rate of less than fifty compressions a minute. I'm so proud of this that sometimes I like to drop it into conversations. I also know that my heart is strong enough to let me run 14 kilometres in an hour and probably further if I pushed it. During the 14 kilometres my heart rate will never get over 165 beats-per-minute because it doesn't need to. The red-blood cells in my blood stream so efficiently distribute oxygen around my body that there's no need for my heart rate to rise further or for my breathing to become puffing. Physically my heart is stronger and more reliable and better than most.

But for all its physical efficiency something's rattled loose in there because the essential element of human compassion seems to have stopped working. The grubby little urchins wrapping at my taxi window get no change and no sympathy. The crippled beggars who drag themselves behind me on callused hands give me no sense of shame at my own wealth and robust good health. The old man, lying in a pool of his own shit, doesn't make me feel anything at all. And I wonder why that is?

Two days ago I assaulted a child. He can't have been more than eight. He was in a group of about six boys of various ages who surrounded me shortly after I left the hotel. I was walking down a road which would take me to the shopping district in Connaught Place. Normally when children approach you in India they do it with a sweet sort of shy reverence. They will smile, ask you your name, ask you where you are from, maybe shake your hand and then, their English exhausted, they will generally run away. These kids were not like that. The eldest, who must have been about 14, immediately demanded a drink, placing his hand on the strap of my backpack. I brushed his hand away and kept walking. I told him there would be no drink. He insisted. I insisted back. I kept walking. He kept following. One by one his friends would hustle up and pat me down while the old boy chattered incessantly, his hand continually drifting to my shoulder. I tried to remember if I'd left anything valuable in my backpack. I hadn't. I shoved my hands in my pockets to protect my wallet and my reading glasses. The only thing left exposed was my camera which was in a zip-up pocked on the outside of my shorts. The eight year old found it and grabbed it with both hands. I did the same to him, grabbing each of his scrawny arms just above the elbows. I spun around and shoved him into the ringleader. I pushed them both back and stepped into a rickshaw which had stopped on the off chance I wanted a ride. It turned out I did.

How did I feel about that? Laying hands on a child? Laying hands on an uneducated child who survives from day to day by taking valuable things from wealthy western tourists whose travel insurance covers the loss? Did I feel bad that I'd had to put the kid in his place? Did I feel bad that the kid had so few options available to him that he was forced to steal to survive? Was I angry that the Indian Government allowed this situation to persist amid its growing affluence? None of the above. I felt pissed off that I had to pay a rickshaw driver 20 rupee to get me where I'd planned to walk.

I was thinking about all this last night and wondering if my heart had become like a fully furnished but unoccupied home. Inhabitable but uninhabited. Everything about the house is great; the furniture, the white goods, the kitchen benches, the bathroom tiles, the duvets on the beds, the rugs in the hall, the throw cushions on the couch. Everything's exactly as it should be except there's no sign of life in there at all. There's no takeout menus on the fridge, no toothbrushes in the bathroom, the Sunday supplements aren't smothering the coffee table in the lounge. There are no six day old bananas in the bowl over the sink and there are no half-read books in the bedroom and no photographs on the walls.

What element is missing here? I don't know.

Anyway, I fly out tonight for home. I'm not nearly as melancholy as all of that self indulgent rubbish makes me sound, I've just spent too much time over the past three days wallowing in self-pity and struggling to sleep. The cold's on the mend now.

I'm just praying that my Spice Air flight from Delhi to Mumbai is not delayed tonight and I don't miss my flight to Singapore. I think I'd create a scene.

That's it for now. More from South East Asia.

Dale Atkinson