This is a true story. You may have heard it before:
In 1990 I was travelling through India with my sister. We had hooked up with two Australian teachers called Doug and Brett.
Doug told us of the mysterious disappearance of his brother who had gone missing after contracting malaria and being admitted to a hospital in Calcutta. The day after he was admitted, Doug went to see him and there was no record of him ever being there and no one remembered ever seeing him. This was about two months before we met Doug and neither he nor his parents had heard anything from him. He had disappeared without a trace and we agreed that it was, in fact, mysterious.
We travelled with Doug and Brett and the shadow that was over them for about three weeks, until we lost them after taking separate tuk-tuks from a railway station to a guest house in Udaipur at 3am.
We had asked to be taken to a hotel recommended in ‘The Bible’, the ever reliable ‘Lonely Planet Guide to India’ but got taken to a different, four room guest house, as often happens. We argued with the driver for 15 minutes who said that:
a) This IS the guest house we asked for and it just has a sign that is wrong.
b) The guest house that we wanted had burned down and his brother Sanjay owns this one, which is better and cheaper and better anyway.
c) I don’t speak English.
So we got back into the tuk-tuk and asked to be taken to another hotel which was not what we had asked for either and in fact turned out to be the back entrance to Sanjay’s guest house. By now it was 4:30am and my stoic resolve had been worn away, so we checked in with the tuk-tuk driver hovering and babbling at high speed to ensure his commission.
The next day we went to the hotel we had been trying to get to which of course had not burned down and was not worse or more expensive than the tuk-tuk driver’s brother Sanjay’s guest house. Doug and Brett were not there as they had apparently also been taken to the ‘wrong’ guest house.
We never saw them again.
About a month later we were in Kerala on the South West coast talking to a French couple and we told them the story of the mysterious disappearance of Doug’s brother in a hospital in Calcutta and they agreed that it was, in fact, mysterious.
We lost them on a train platform when they refused to pay for a meal and started a riot. We had been eating with them, so were becoming involved in their dispute in the eyes of the café owner and staff, all of whom suddenly could not speak English. During a break in the shouting, Caroline and I jumped onto a train leaving the station for somewhere else, which sounded like exactly where we wanted to be.
As the train pulled out, there were locals running after us.
We never saw the French couple again either.
We then spent another month in India, then two months in Egypt and then some more time in Greece, Italy and France before we finally arrived in Plymouth where my uncle Christopher lived.
We had been there for about fifteen minutes when the phone rang. It was Doug, who was staying with his aunt in Callington, which is a little village in Cornwall where we used to live.
Doug related the story of how he and Brett had been taken to the wrong guest house and when they asked their driver to take them to the correct one, they were told:
a) This IS the guest house that they had asked for and it just has a sign that is wrong.
b) The guest house that they wanted had burned down and his brother Sanjay owns this one, which is better and cheaper and better anyway.
c) He didn’t speak English.
They had been in the same four room guest house that we had been in, but because we had argued and been taken to the rear entrance, we had missed them being taken to the front entrance.
So about two months later, Doug had met a French couple in Sri Lanka who told them the story of the Australian brother & sister who they had met and had started a riot which had involved them in the eyes of the café owner and staff, all of whom suddenly could not speak English and then escaped on a train bound for somewhere else, which is where they had wished they were and of the mysterious disappearance of the brother and sister’s friend’s brother in a hospital in Calcutta. Doug agreed that it was, in fact, mysterious as well as strangely familiar.
Doug never saw them again, but his brother turned up on an ashram in Puna with a girl named Meena and a distain for materialism.
So about 10 years later I am sitting on a beach in Bali talking to some Australian guy called Jarrah. I said “ah, like the wood” and he said “no, like the TREE”.
I told him the story of the mysterious disappearance of Doug’s brother in a hospital in Calcutta and he agreed that it was, in fact, mysterious as well as strangely familiar.
About three years before meeting me, he had heard the story at a party at a little shack in the middle of no-where about 50km inland from Grafton.
He was sitting on a couch and there was another couch back-to-back with it. On the other couch there was a guy trying to get a girl to sleep with him and telling her a story about the mysterious disappearance of Doug’s brother in a hospital in Calcutta and she had agreed that it was, in fact, mysterious.
The guy on the other couch was me and the girl next to me did not end up sleeping with me.
Jarrah knew all the people that I knew although I had never met or heard of him and he had never met or heard of me. All of my friends knew him (ah yes, Jarrah, like the tree) and were amazed that I hadn’t met him, since it was his party and his shack.
I never saw 'Jarrah-like-the-tree' again.
This illustrates what many travellers know: When you are off in the middle of nowhere, you will encounter one co-incident after another.
