I hadn’t heard of Noida before hearing that I’d be staying there for a week in November. The overnight from London to Delhi was enough to let me sleep most of the way from the airport to Noida’s YMCA, so it was a surprise to wake up on arriving at a new, empty facility–both the city and the Y, as it’s affectionately known.

Greater Noida has a five-year plan to fulfil the dream of a former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a woman whose village home was Noida. The greater city rises from a dusty plain of sandy soil, is linked to Delhi by a fine highway, is growing, but has acres of empty plots and dozens of empty high-rise buildings. Crossing the road was hazardous, not for the volume of traffic, but for the locals’ habit of using both sides of the dual carriageway as single carriage roads; there are rules for roundabouts (circles), I expect, but it was hard to predict how any one vehicle would move round the large roundabout that lay between the Y, the pizza house and the Internet cafe. Lorry drivers apart, most did attempt to steer round pedestrians, though some motor cyclists thought it fun to buzz the feckless, just like WWII fighter pilots or modern-day Israeli jets over Beirut. 

The Internet cafe was three floors up and provided an hour’s access to the world for Rupees15, US$0.30 or £0.17. The pizza house was bright, loud, hot and sold good value, piping hot food. At the end of this stretch of road, to the right, lies a village of labourers; no electricity that we could see, but the road was lit to highest standards with high-pressure sodium lamps. Just before 10 PM, walking back along this road I tried (and failed) to compute and compare the nightly cost of lighting the road with the daily hire of the truck-load of labourers returning to their temporary village. Their main fuel is the hand-crafted, pizza-shaped cowpats neatly laid in lines to dry. The air left one smelling of the smoke; the street lights shone on, oblivious to emptiness or global warming.

4 December 2006

What a year! Busy isn’t the word. I hope to write some more very soon! See you.

4 November 2006

So, here I am with six weeks of the seven nearly done. Tomorrow, Friday, is the last for this week. Then, six more trips to the far side of Brighton; six more greetings for the team of radiologists; six more goodbyes. And the rest? Rest, I think. Yes, sleep and being able to get up in the morning feeling refreshed. Maybe my brain will hurry up, the right words come out first time. “Follow what your body tells you,” they said. In contrast with the worst possibilities detailed in the cancer centre’s introductory green pamphlet, it’s only creeping tiredness that marks this out as my course of radiotherapy. And I’m grateful. Other people I’ve seen have told their stories of fatigue, discomfort, hourly awakenings through endless nights. I’m grateful. Yesterday was my birthday. Faced with a couple of business sessions over the weekend, I took a day off to conserve some energy. In Brighton I bought a couple of pairs of shoes that fit my broad feet. Bought some CDs: Emma Johnson for my wife, Jimi Hendrix and Radio Tarifa for me. For family reasons there’s a huge hole in my knowledge of popular music in the 1970s and 80s. Only Hendrix’s bouffant hair was familiar before I listened to the first CD. By evening, the summer warmth and light breeze granted the wife and me dinner alfresco in the walled garden of a Sussex pub a few miles from where youngest son and new daughter-in-law married a month before. A great evening and a refreshing day of energy conservation.

Week two of this seven-week routine of daily radiotherapy. Between my home and the centre there’s just a little green space, then multiple villages, now bloated to become a connurbation. Brighton and Hove have separate railway stations, but now are one recently-appointed city. This week the schools are empty, children and teachers enjoying a break after the Spring Bank Holiday, which used to be the gently wandering Whitsun break, until the rigours of modernisation nailed it to the last-Monday-in-May slot. That means traffic is light and I get to the centre early. Given the chance the crew irradiate me early and send me off into the early summer morning with a bit more time for the work awaiting me at the office. The X-ray machine is massive. I lie on a hard table, head and feet on half-stocks to keep them steady. Using gentle green lasers that delineate the cross-point around which this massive device rotates, the team adjust, poke, stroke and ensure my three tatoos line up with the laser lines. Then a series of numbers relating to where the table is, I guess. They work to a tolerance of 5mm. For a brain tumour it would be 1mm. “Everything’s OK!” Out they go, closing a wooden gate across the entrance corridor. Then a short series of whistling alarms, a brief tense silence, and a medium-strength buzz as the X-rays flow out of the machine’s head and into my body. Twelve seconds, as measured by my pulse; a second twelve into the right side of the pelvis. The machine rotates until the head is over my stomach. Twelve more into my front. More rotation. Then a couple of twelves into my left side. Silence. Then one of the team returns, switches on the lights and moves the hard, healing table into open space, so I can get up, dress myself and get out. No sensation at all, but clenching muscles as the buzzes begin. No side effects, yet. Just a daily prayer that this machine will do its job, be owned by God and used to heal. Five more weeks to go.