I am not used to being regarded as a god - unless you are thinking of Buddha - though apparently he wasn't divine at all. Something about he whose belly hangs over his belt shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Mirror In The Bathroom (Please don't scream), that was my song. I lost the will to face reflective surfaces sometime in the late 1980s. A man has to eat.
Until I went to India, I never knew how it felt to be Sean Connery. True, we have the same haircut and - as you may have noticed - a unique way of mangling the English language, but there the similarities end. No, it was more the film of Kipling's short story about Daniel Dravot, where Connery played the runaway squaddie who became a god king, that I was thinking of.
My Man Who Would Be King moment came the morning a holy man sitting in the shadow of a 3,500-year-old mango tree thumbed a blood-red bindi to my forehead. I did not know it at the time, but for the 10 rupees I dropped on his plate, I was buying divinity.
The first inklings of my new celestial status came when I stepped out of an old bull-nosed Hindustani Ambassador into the monsoon mud of the temple town of Kanchipuram. High on incense, and with my head still swimming after watching 108 granite phallic linga being given their morning bath of aromatic oils and coconut milk - now that's what I call pandering to the male ego - a small roadside shrine stopped me with a thump.
There, outside a TV store, was Ganesh holding a satellite dish. Ganesh is the god of good luck on account of how his father mistakenly lopped off his head and replaced it with an elephant's one. Luck like that, I know all about. Yet he was lucky for me. Here was my first piece of unmissable Indian kitsch. And only a few metres away, as if planted there by Paul Theroux himself, was a sign in front of a jumble of market stalls which warned, "Caution, drive slowly, bizarre area." It was my duty as a tourist from a country that has gone beyond belief to record this with all due sense of irony.
So smug was I in the warm glow of superiority that such ironies bring that it took me a while to notice that the flocks of bicycles skidding through the puddles had all stopped to stare at me. Behind them, portly Indian pilgrims were taking pictures of me from the window of their Easy Go Jolly Boys tour bus. Suddenly I was the freak. One buck with orange teeth was pointing at me and laughing manically, but mostly this was a frighteningly solemn assembly.
Now I knew staring was an Olympic sport in India but this was ridiculous. Westerners were surely not that much of novelty in this part of northern Tamil Nadu. Had I caused some grave offence?
For some unfathomable reason, I said, "It's all right, I'm Irish." A murmur went through the crowd. One very frail old man in a lungi sarong and loose turban moved forward and touched the sleeve of the kurta I had bought back in Brick Lane so I'd look less conspicuous. I put my hands together, and give him my best Ravi Shankar bow and beatific smile, thinking he was probably admiring my Bengali threads straight from the designer sweatshops of Bethnal Green. He mumbled something that ended in "gee" and backed off bowing. Drawing myself up to my full height, I walked back to the car trying to pretend there was no one there, and the multitude parted before me like the Red Sea before Moses.
The crowds thinned and the country grew more rugged as we headed down the coast to the ancient city of Mahabalipuram, whose pagoda-like shore temples are proof of the spread of Buddhism and Hinduism from southern India as far as Vietnam and the Indonesian archipelago. This was the port of the Pallavas, and the home of their greatest masons. Every granite outcrop had been carved with some eye-popping scene from the Hindu epic, the Ramayana - demons, elephants and meditating mystics in medieval 3D - and from behind each of these boulders a small crowd and some scrawny goats would appear and follow me at a respectful distance.
A new god had recently joined the pantheon that stare from the masons' workshops. She was taller and lither than the squat local deities, and the fact that she was carved from black granite made her look, with some poignancy, like a photographic negative. The masons call this new goddess Queen Diana. And even they laid down their chisels to gawk at me.
The silence was equally deafening when I walked into the dining room of the nearby hotel until a plate hit the floor. I checked my fly and disappeared to the bathroom. After smiling as benignly as I could at the toilet attendant who had backed up goggle-eyed against a sink, I checked myself in the mirror. No, nothing unusual but for the bindi on my forehead. Pretty fetching I thought. I might even start wearing it to Millwall matches.
The waiter who brought my biryiani stooped to place the plate in front of me then swivelled his head alarmingly so he could look straight up into my face. After about five seconds I winked at him, just in case he'd had a stroke. He withdrew, still staring, to a gaggle of other waiters who were peering at me from the safety of the kitchen door. A middle-aged woman of some authority then approached and, after some elaborately convoluted pleasantries, told me I looked remarkably like a "great Indian" who was also "very pale and handsome with very little hair like you. We are honoured to have you at our hotel." Meanwhile, my biryiani was being videoed for posterity by an Indian tourist at the next table.
The great patriot in question was Sanjay Gandhi, whose crusade to sterilise his less fortunate countrymen was itself nipped in the bud by a mysterious plane crash.
Like many middle-class Indians, my host was convinced Sanjay the Snipper had the right idea. I was not so sure about a man who brought vasectomy to the masses whether they liked it or not. And I was not all that happy about being his ghost either. This was one apparition which did not want to rely on India's fabled capacity for forgiveness. The bindi would have to go, and I resolved to wear my silly Australian bush hat, in bed if need be. Some indignities were worth suffering for the sake of securing the family line.
On the road back to Chennai, we passed a dusty village dominated by a sprawling, half-built memorial. It marked the spot where Rajiv Gandhi, Sanjay's younger brother who was brow-beaten into taking on the family business, was blown to bits by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber who ran from the crowd at an election rally to embrace him. It all began to make sense. Many things in India are not as strange as they first seem.
Reincarnation is certainly the only way to explain Indian driving. After a short hop to Bangalore, a twee Raj town of botanical gardens and bungalows now bursting under the strain of south India's digital revolution, we drove in the dying light through eternal village India, where centuries slip away with every mile. Women scenically slaving in the glinting paddy fields, toothless toddy sellers beneath the banyan and tamarind trees.
I might have drifted off into bucolic nirvana if I was not so convinced I was about to die. It's hard to keep your karma when a 10-ton lorry with a head of a demon on the bonnet is bearing down on you. They give you shots against everything else, but nothing can save you from Indian truckers, except possibly the amulets my saintly driver Mr Kumar hung from the bumper of his Ambassador to ward off the evil eye.
Eventually you do as the Indians do - you stop worrying and start looking forward to your next incarnation. But southern India is worth every little risk, and don't kid yourself - the only danger you are likely to encounter in an Indian five-star hotel is the edge of the crease on your sheets. It is not like other places. The clocks keep time and the policemen get allowances for the upkeep of their moustaches.
As we neared Mysore, my chatty guide Mr Baskir grew more and more lyrical about the city, its people and its food. The famous underwear factory, "better even than your mighty Marks and Spencer drawers", the magnificence of Maharaja's palaces and Sabu the elephant boy who was plucked from the nearby forest by the film director Robert Flaherty. "Mysore is also the most beautiful smelling city in all India," Mr Baskir declared. And it was true, through the rickshaw fumes you could just catch the sweet warm whiff of jasmine. Mr Baskir, you'll be shocked to hear, is from Mysore.
We bumped into the city as darkness fell behind the bouncing buttocks of a vast woman balanced on tiny moped. The mosques were lit up like Christmas trees for Ramadan and cattle garlanded in jasmine wandered through the narrow alleys of its bazaar. You would never have guessed from these sedate scenes that the forests around the city hid the lair of Veerappan, the most notorious bandit, poacher and sandalwood smuggler in all India. Poolan Devi, the Bandit Queen, and Robin Hood himself was nothing on the bold Veerappan, who had eluded the police and the army for 15 years, disappearing into thin air on more than five occasions when they thought they had cornered him. Even a retired police officer I met confessed that he had a sneaking admiration for him, and admitted that Veerappan, heavily disguised, once bought him breakfast before he set off into the hills to hunt him down.
"He is a demon," he smiled, "but he is as brave and as clever as Hanuman [the monkey god]." It is telling how often in the Hindu holy books the gods and heroic mortals are rewarded for circumventing the divine rules rather than sticking to them - they're not so much about doctrine as business strategies.
I was deep into an exposé in the Star of Mysore about fake beedies (cheroots) when a knock at the door of my hotel room stirred me from my Commander Champion throne. It was the valet with my "goodnight rose". It came with a little packet of mints and a few lines of Keats " . . . and sleep/ full of sweet dreams and health/and quiet breathing." I hadn't the heart to tell him he died gasping of consumption.
The one great treasure that Veerappan has not tried to strip from the neighbouring countryside is the amazing carved panels of the soapstone temple in the tiny village of Somanathapor. I'd like to think that he's an aficionado of the finer motifs of late ninth-century carving, but I see him more as a devotee of its wild, reeling depictions of the kama sutra. The playboy in Sanjay Gandhi - who had a politician's knack of never practising what he preached - was also a fan of the panels. It's not hard to think of him taking his paramours there in the moonlight to admire them. Now that I think of it, a few of the village unfortunates did look eerily familiar.
The practicals
Fiachra Gibbons travelled to southern India on a tailor-made tour with Bales (01306 732718, or www.balesworldwide.com Prices for 10-day tours cost from £1,575 per person, valid for travel between August 15 and September 30. Includes flights, airport taxes, accommodation in a twin room, private transfers and road excursions by air-conditioned car, private local guides and entrance fees.
