She came from Greece, the land of Socrates, sun-kissed islands, the blue Mediterranean, the Olympics and much, much more. She was a middle-aged woman who worked for a non-governmental organisation. But she sought an appointment without indicating any specific purpose, and talked of this and that - the problems of illiteracy in Greece and in India and efforts to combat it. I wondered where all this talk, clearly a preamble to more meaningful things, was leading to. I did not have to wait long. She soon began to narrate a curious incident that happened to her.She believed in travelling light, she said, and when she arrived at the airport at Delhi, she had disembarked with just one piece of hand baggage and gone out looking for a tourist bus. Predictably, there wasn't one in sight. So she took a `pre-paid taxi' to the `tourist' office. A suspiciously disreputable-looking `tourist officer' guided her to a `suitable hotel'.She travelled for what seemed like hours and ended up in an extremely unsuitablehotel set amidst squalor, not the splendour she had been expecting. The Delhi she saw that night did not exist in the pages of her travel guide. She paid a princely sum for a room in a hotel which contained just the bare necessities. The next day the manager charged her some more for amenities which she was not even aware she had enjoyed! She then disclosed, rather inadvisedly, that she had to leave for Jaipur. ``No problem,'' said the manager, ``our man will escort you to the bus station.'' To reach the bus-station, her guide changed buses three times. The bus to Jaipur looked perfectly ordinary to her, although she was assured that it was a `deluxe' bus. ``The price was a big steep, wasn't it?'' she asked a fellow foreign tourist during the journey, but he did not agree. ``How much did you pay?'' she asked. ``Rs 300,'' he said. She, on the contrary, had parted with a full Rs 1,000. The rest of the story ran in a similar vein. She confessed that in the course of a week, she had spent what she had budgetedfor a month. Even before she came to the end of her story I had figured out the purpose of her visit. She needed my help to get subsidized accommodation in the districts during her travels.I did not find it hard to believe her story, for it had a familiar ring to it. One keeps reading about innocent tourists who fall victims to touts. While I tried to find ways to help her out, she said that she could quite forgive the people who had cheated her. She had seen the appalling poverty amidst which many people lived; she could empathise with their feeling of deprivation and understand their attempts to cheat a white tourist to fulfil some of their unrealised aspirations.As she spoke, an old memory resurfaced in my mind. Of my first trip abroad, to France. Of travelling by taxi in Paris. Of the taxi driver taking me round and round the streets of the city despite my having clearly written down the address for her. Of her pretending that she didn't understand English and then bursting into English when I askedher to stop halfway after I found that the meter had climbed to 360 Francs, although my hosts had assured me that the fare to their house would be only 150 Francs or so. The tourist, in this case, was not white but brown, not a rich European but from India. And the taxi driver? Well, she was French! ``This,'' I told my Greek acquaintance, ``has nothing to do with poverty or wealth. This seems to be universal. All tourists are considered suckers; they are meant to be taken for a ride. ``I consider it a learning experience,'' I told her, a trifle sanctimoniously. ``Well, ``she said, having the last word on the subject, ``I wish all lessons in life didn't come so expensive!''
