Two gentlemen had occasion to hand me their cards on the drive from New Delhi to Jaipur.

One was called Mr DaUlat RaM (c/O YRaSaD, GaOR, DISt JaIpuR) yet he looked about ten with the handwriting to support that impression. The other was a Sikh who saved us from panthers, adders and goodness knows what other beasties when our hired car chose to reject its differential at dusk in the middle of nowhere.

Mr RaM first appeared in my lens as a head behind a willow tree. I had in fact been trying to capture his little sister, bright sari amid the alien corn, but she fled screaming as from a dervish.

So Mr RaM manfully offered to be her proxy, though his dhoti was much less striking. But having survived the ordeal, he felt encouraged enough to ask for a copy of the photograph, scrawling name and scant address on a notebook page.

I trust the Indian postal authorities are aware of YRaSaD GaOR. There didn’t seem much more to the place than the cornfield and an adobe or two.

The Sikh’s card, by contrast, was as grand as himself. It listed two telephone numbers, a fax and telex. It also identified him as Mr Harbinder Singh. His business lay with the Rajasthan State Business Construction Corporation. We were later to learn that almost all Sikhs are called Singh as most Welshmen are called Jones. Singh, meaning lion, is a religious appellation.

Singh the Bridge encountered us late that evening, 30 kms short of Jaipur, when quiet desperation had set in. Our driver, we interpreted from muttered pidgin, had left on the doorstep of an overcrowded bus for differentials new. The hills were coming alive with all manner of creepy-crawlies, at least in the Occidental mind.

Five other local buses we had thumbed without result. Reasonably. No room in any of them for an extra chicken. Traffic dried up. So did fine expectations of cold beer and a hot bath at the famed Rambagh Palace, our night stop, redolent in its brochures of maharajahs and dancing girls. Until Mr Harbinder Singh happened along.

He arrived, chauffeur-driven, a striking figure in charcoal suit, bearded like the pard, a strip of black tape connecting both ears to hold in place a resplendent scarlet turban. He was, he said formally, bound for Jaipur and at our disposal.

I should explain here that, as Sikhs are called Singh, so most motorcars in India are 1956 Morris Oxfords. The car fits the country’s rugged demands. The same mould has been used for all those years, with cosmetic improvements to grille and dashboard.

Mr Singh’s model was current, ours decidedly not. But even at the point of rescue there was a certain aptness in transferring from one to another of exact dimensions, without the need to contract to the size of chickens on a passing bus.

Chickens, anyway, don’t often travel with luggage and it was this thought that suddenly led me to realise the departed driver had locked ours in the boot of the broken car.

Mr Singh dismissed our concern with mild surprise and a gesture to his chauffeur to retrieve the cases forthwith. One standard Morris Oxford, it seems, one standard key.

We made the Rambagh Palace several hours late to find a five-star reception waiting, as it were, in the warming drawer. Yet smiles were not strained. I slept in a bed that might have been the Maharani’s, the ghost of sentinel eunuchs past more prominent that panthers.

So ended the first full day in an extraordinary country. Culture shocks had abounded, prime among them the absolute mass of humanity. Urban India is more people than you’ve ever seen. They saturate your eyeballs. Yet nicely so, for Indians are above anything colourful and civil.

At Madras airport, we had sat seat-belted for an hour and a half, waiting for a mist to lift. Americans and Europeans would have begun vandalised the plane. Our fellow-passengers seemed to view it all as gratuitous entertainment.

The wait afforded the study of faces. Hundreds of millions of people must throw up clones. Omar Sharif was there, right across the aisle. So was the younger Nehru, forage cap and all. However, there were Western facsimiles too – a pallid Robert De Niro, Peter Ustinov, and the man from our London office, looking ridiculous under a dishcloth.

Crowds meant traffic, and we were to find Jaipur as traumatic in that respect as any other place. The famed Pink City only has a million and a half inhabitants but they all appeared to be concentrated in one central square, going round and round in their Morrises and tri-shaws, on bicycles and camel carts. Pedestrian crossings don’t exist. The trick, we were told, was to walk slowly, keep a high profile and not think too hard of death.

We never went to Kolkata, yet I’m prepared to believe what they say: that certain streets are uncrossable. To be on the other side one has to be born there.

What else of India? Give me another ten thousand words. Briefly, the surprises. Verdant scenery. Jacarandas and even baobabs. Omnipresent elephants. Skills and invention. The variety of costumes, majesty of architecture. The sheer photogenic qualities. The spectre of abject poverty.

And the Taj Mahal? Magnificent beyond description. A sensual feast.

Did you know, by the way, that it actually derives its name from a restaurant in Soho? I didn’t either but I have it on the best authority from a Londoner I met at the airport pub in Mumbai.

Amazing how travel broadens the mind.

Time Wounds All Heels column

Then, the town had fitted most of its residents like a worn but comfortable shoe.

Two phalanxes of roads marched as Roman legions down either side of a central park to converge a few blocks before they reached the old iron bridge straddling the river that gave the town its name.

Had such Romans continued for another twenty miles beyond that bridge, they would have encountered some of the most fabulous scenery on God’s earth, a vast wilderness where green hills plunged into spectacular valleys.

But Rome never ventured further south in Africa than Egypt. Its sole association with Umtata was, by proxy, a modest Roman Catholic church and convent.

Then, in the time of Daniel O’Brien’s boyhood, high-ceilinged houses pointed gables at the sky. It was a place of trees and shrubs and lawns. Expansive gardens, masked by inscrutable hedges, fronted on wide avenues. Space and quiet were the watchwords.

One exception was Saturday morning, market day, when most of the blacks who lived in their “locations” would come to town to shop.

Town was an understatement, for Umtata, parochial though it had been, could boast an Anglican cathedral. Thus, officially, it was a city, befitting its status as the capital of the Transkei, a territory redolent of British colonialism and the Kaffir Wars.

However, if a small town is a place where most residents know one another, and where some people may feel stifled by that proximity, then Umtata had been such a place.

The cathedral was imposing. An elegant cut-stone basilica dominated a complex adjoining the Rec and two public schools, one junior and one senior, on the road that eventually led past the general hospital to East London and a more structured civilisation a hundred and fifty miles away.

Immediately below the Rec was the Bunga, seat of the United Transkeian Territories General Council, where Daniel’s father had worked as senior agricultural officer in a cold office behind the debating chamber. It was a domed building supported by Doric columns.

The Rec (for recreation ground) and colonial town hall were other focal points of Umtata activity. Sports days, cricket and rugby matches were held at the Rec; concerts, plays and meetings in the town hall; fetes and bazaars at both. The town hall could have been called the city hall but never was.

Two of the main streets, York Road and Owen Street, ran down parallel from the cathedral and the Bunga. Downtown Umtata was concentrated around the eight blocks they comprised.

York Road housed the major shops. Owen Street embraced legal firms, doctors’ surgeries, the magistrates’ courts, public library, a newspaper office, the Metro Theatre and the O’Brien home – right at the river end.

Umtata’s hotels, four licensed and two private, were in side streets off York and Owen. All had names that belied their level of seediness – the Savoy, Royal, Imperial, Windsor, Clarendon and Grosvenor, after a British East Indiaman wrecked on the nearby Pondoland coast in 1782.

Below the house where the O’Brien family lived were the local pound and stock sale pens. This was where the young Danny O’Brien once witnessed birth for the first time, or second if you counted his own. A Friesland cow produced a calf with all the blood and gore the boy would have expected from the termination of life, rather than the start of one.

Opposite the pound was a smallholder called Ewing who grew peaches and vegetables and guarded them with fences of prickly pear and salt guns tripwired at strategic points.

Beyond was a general dealer named Maker, who lathe-turned wooden tops for the community’s youngsters, and a blacksmith shop owned by one of the O’Briens’ neighbours, Bill Langton, where shoes were fitted to police horses.

Just across the river was a “mixed” suburb. Most of its residents proudly acknowledged being coloured, mulatto but not black, descendants of the Khoisan, or Bushmen, who originally inhabited the Transkei.

Now Daniel drove into town trying to reconcile the small community he had grown up in with the third world sprawl it had become.

The central business district teemed with humanity. Informal commerce had replaced the stiffly regulated norms of yesteryear. Hawkers plied their trade from sinking pavements, selling all manner of merchandise – clothing, shoes, vegetables, fresh meat, curios, cheap plastic toys, kitchen utensils, patent medicines and the purportedly life-saving tinctures of sangomas.

Pedestrians were forced to spill over into the traffic lanes, adding to the congestion of buses and taxis, shabby cars and bicycles.

Now, Daniel’s old house advertised itself as the Nursing Council. However, it seemed even more dilapidated than under the previous owner who had been a backyard mechanic. The lawn behind the house, which once served as a sports field for the little boys in Owen Street, was clotted with weeds.

He parked his Toyota Land Cruiser at the bottom of the street, crossed to the traffic islands and walked slowly up the block, drawing on his memory as he passed every house.

Miss Kay Bell, who had taught the young Danny and his brother Patrick piano, would have been bemused to discover that her tiny cottage had become the headquarters of Lucky’s Guns. She rented the cottage from spinster sisters, the Misses Hill, who had a larger house on the property. They were a fragile couple who seemed to leave no imprint on life as they moved through it. For years, Danny believed the phrase, as old as the hills, referred to Doreen and Irene Hill. Where they had lived was now a transport company.

Jack Dewes, the district surgeon, had had a surgery two doors away from the O’Brien home. Young male tribal initiates, the Abhakweta, would queue up in his front yard to be circumcised, then surround the part with leaves and hop away in agony. Aptly, according to a sign, the surgery belonged to a herbalist.

The Langton residence, diagonally opposite, had become the branch office of the East London Daily Dispatch, the newspaper on which Daniel had begun his career. Three properties beyond the Langtons had been the home of Fritz and Margaret Buhl. Daniel counted to three, looked, then looked again.

And was taken aback at the sight of a modern structure, jerry-built of unplastered blocks.

The Buhls’s old house was gone. So was the garden cottage, rebuilt after that traumatic night, although both had been there when last he had passed through the town.

Strangely, the wrought-iron gate had been retained, although now rusted and broken. Daniel remembered the bent figure with a grey crew-cut who so often had leaned on that gate, looking out wistfully at a hostile world beyond. Fritz Buhl in his later years.

The changes to Owen Street were part of a process Daniel had begun to see on earlier visits. In York Road, many of the old shops had been torn down and or left to degenerate.

Urban blight was pandemic. The town hall was almost derelict, its gardens the haunt of “portrait” photographers and vendors of cheap watches.

These changes to the town Daniel knew were severe but he had witnessed the first of them.The biggest happened in the early Sixties when the apartheid government began to put in place its silly plan of balkanising South Africa to counter the threat of what was unavoidable ­- eventual rule by a black majority.

The idea was to create separate, autonomous states where blacks could be confined away from cities and white urban areas. Self-government was the carrot offered to those prepared to be leaders of these homelands. Because the Transkei already possessed a self-governing system, it became the initial Bantustan guinea pig and Umtata for a while was the fastest-growing centre in the country.

Meanwhile, another process began: the dispossession of hundreds of white traders whose stores had served to open up the hinterland. The process failed to recognise that the new Transkei budget would not run to financing enough black traders to replace these rugged frontiersmen.

Thus began a rapid decline in services and standards and many locals found themselves with no ready outlet for their maize harvests and wool clips.

And with the resultant impact on agriculture, the towns and villages themselves began to suffer. Corruption was heaped on mismanagement, as one crooked regime after another sought the utmost personal gain from the money the central government was throwing at its bastard step-child.

Now, sanity had begun to return with the release from jail of Nelson Mandela who was born not a hundred miles away. The Transkei and other Bantustans would achieve the dubious distinction of being the first states in the history of Africa to have their independent status revoked.

Still, Daniel’s trip from Durban had confirmed that the wounds of the apartheid exercise would take a long while to heal. And, he thought sadly, while the changes were inevitable, the process never should have been allowed to happen at the expense of a whole culture.

Soon, phantoms of that culture were to accost him at almost every turn. Daniel’s quest was to find out what had happened to two of them – the friend who had died in that fire and the German spy who killed him.

.