Mahabalipuram, the ninety-third day,

I left Madras with six new suits and my mood found itself excellent all over the day. I took a room for a week and I regret it already. It is noisy and uncomfortable; the opposite of Madras, but at least it's very cheap. Otherwise the village is quite nice but without this intimacy of Puri where it was so good to do nothing. There is plenty of organized tourism and a bus of retired people may land in your restaurant at any minute if you had the misfortune to choose a western one.

Madras, the ninety-second day

To stay at the hotel is nice, and much of the occupants do not move. An army of staff is there to offer you drinks, massage or a haircut. The patio offers the opportunity to read some Western magazines and especially to discuss among travelers. You take a copy of the "Time" or the "Spiegel" and soon abandon it at the first opportunity of a conversation. It's like a "Grand Hotel" for twenty francs a day. So I talked at length with the Germans in a language mixed with French, English and German about everything. Among them was one that my sexually frustrated mind figured offering himself passively. He announced later that "The research" was the favorite book of his “friend”. I imagined then him offering himself to me. I think I have reached a stage of erotic obsession where my affair with Sven was only the premises; nothing really emotional, just the need to feel a sweaty skin against oneself, a shift in the privacy of another and the pleasant self-reflection in his eyes. I tried to analyze the reasons of my desire for someone, actually quite ordinary and wondered if the satisfaction of certain sadism on willing masochism was not the height of my excitement. If Von Masoch and Sade were respectively French and Austrian was perhaps no coincidence, it could reflect a fundamental cultural basis.

The Germanic race with a natural feeling of power (physical, economic) most developed, the enjoyment is in the sense of being lowered, like those company managers tyrannizing their employees and getting whipped in brothels. On the opposite, the French, too puny, find their enjoyment in the overvaluation of their ego. The bad treatment of the partner brings the satisfaction of the feeling of superiority which is generally insufficient. I shall not escape this pattern except that the enjoyment is in the satisfaction of the perversity of the other, giving him the role of the master in the game. I'll find an opportunity to invite this German in my room.

Madras, the ninety-first day

Mitterrand seems to have died yesterday, I want to dress in black, that I will do less later, I am having made six new suits, to which only one is black!
The visit of a new museum in the same concept as the "Indian Museum": educational colonialism nostalgia. An impressive collection of stamps, especially the German stamps of the Third Reich with the shining swastika on planet Earth.

It seems that there is a category of "old queens" travelers. This is the third time I encounter a specimen of it. After Robert in Kathmandu, Michel in Puri, there is Peter from Düsseldorf with whom I sympathized. That said, there were some embarrassment in my behavior when his conversation, interfered with the exciting one that I had with Hervé, about drugs in Goa.

Madras, the ninetieth day,

             It  seems that my ability to adapt has again been demonstrated. The only vision of "second class sleepers" was previously unbearable when I now consider myself fortunate to be admitted into the train even without seat!
             I got a room in the most popular hotel which is like a village, populated by stateless people, and has its own rules of hygiene and service that I can deal with. I have a table, chairs, and ultimate luxury, a mirror. I have not seen my face for weeks. I look different, tan makes you always a little older,  I have perhaps lost a little weight. I find myself expressions of a retired model that do not displease me.

Bubhaneswar, the eighty-ninth day,

           There is always this anxiety from leaving a place with its habits, but also a new way to approach it, improvisation. A train derailed on the line from Puri, I will take a bus, there is no bed, I will put myself on the "waiting list", there is no seat for me, I’ll sleep sitting on the edge of the bed of someone else.

           The day brought the visit of temples inhabited by many deities haloed with cobra heads and some carved phallus emerging of stylized lotus flowers and also the meeting of a new traffic cop, English this time.

 I tried to explain the possible relationship between ethnic fashion "couture" for which I worked and this trip but it seemed difficult to find one with his work. Anyway, the solitude he enjoyed in the middle of the street, away from his colleagues, seemed valuable.

Puri, the eighty-eighth day

I hope for a setback delaying my leaving but in the same time I feel a kind of guilty indulging to habits. I let Michel Benoît, the author of "Prisonier de Dieu", read my journal. I think he liked it even though he found the style a bit pompous. Reading Proust in parallel does not help, for sure, but I really find difficult to express simply, things which are not. I also liked the term naive for my emotional behavior. I am always afraid of running out of spontaneity and act upon reflection, and I found myself suddenly young and happy to be. Sven, close to me, overheard our conversation in French without understanding it and waited for the departure of Michel to hug me and tell me that he hoped to see me again. I struggled to interpret his words. The problem with northern Europeans is their ability to remove the sexual side of things. An act synonymous of desire from us could be only a mark of affection for them; it is difficult to cope with it. I will see almost certainly Sven in Goa, the situation may become clearer. I am not against a little holiday love affair, even if a little more is out of question.