Our bus arrives at midday in the hill station of Dharamsala. I’m on my way to McLeod Ganj, the famous Tibetan settlement, and home of the His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Our bus wheezes its way up the steep Dhauladhar mountains, watched meaningfully by monkeys. The road grows steeper and starts to zigzag up the mountainside, forcing our driver to make wobbly hairpin turns at each corner. Oncoming traffic, mostly Tibetans on motorbikes, stops to watch our bus driver adeptly navigate the serpentine roads. The spectacle of the bus lurching forward, rolling back a little, bumping into a tree, spinning the tires, delights all of us; the crowd gapes and laughs with a mix of astonishment and horror, like they’d stopped at the side of the road to watch a doe give birth. We are even treated, after one perilous corner, to joyful applause.

The bus lets us off at the Dharamsala bus station, where we transfer to a more nimble jeep, which takes us up to McLeod Ganj for the almost-free price of seven rupees. I untie my pack from the roof and walk with the British girl I’d met on the bus in search of guest houses.

After two hard weeks in India, I’d decided to come here to boost my spirits a little bit. The place came highly recommended. McLeod Ganj is a little city sitting on the cap of a mountain, overlooking the stunning Kangra valley. It is a major centre for Buddhism, as well as yoga, meditation, etc. It is also the home of the Tibetan government-in-exile, presided over by that lovable “simple monk”, Tenzin Gyatso, aka the Dalai Lama (or HHDL, as he’s called). Monks in maroon and saffron robes walk the streets and bow politely to me as I pass. There are elegant Western ladies in saris, and men wearing skirts. People talk and hold hands and smile and hug. Steam rises from the pots of a small Tibetan lady’s roadside food stand. The air crackles with potential; there is vivacity and excitement, unlike the profoundly Indian cities I’d visited so far. Except for the cows prowling the streets, and the odd rickshaw, it looks like another country. I feel like I have entered the mythical city of Shangri-La, and it’s full of dreadlocked backpackers.

In any case, I’m thrilled to be here. I find a dirt-cheap, clean guest house that has a balcony with a view. On the balcony below, a ponytailed Columbian guy gives a Tai Chi lesson to a group of tourists. Across from me is the Kangra Valley, and to my left, a snow-tipped mountain with a crisp treeline.

I have lunch with the British girl on the balcony of the Kunga Guest House; we agree that it will be tough to leave this place and go back out “into India” again. I eat Tibetan momos, steamed dumplings stuffed with cheese and vegetables, and they are delicious. The customers passing through the restaurant are a varied and eclectic group indeed: a strange German wearing a rainbow vest covered in embroidered peace-and-love platitudes (and his email address), aristocratic English ladies, groups of Indian businessmen, a “New Age Chuck Norris”, Tibetan monks who order nothing but tea, various French people dressed like Indians.

I take a walk down to the temple, where monks debate in the courtyard, finishing off each point with a clap of the hands and stomp of the right foot, as if to cast it off to the higher realms. Around the temple are Buddhist bookshops, Tibetan medicine clinics, Indian touts, Western-style bars that serve pizza and beer. Dharamsala is a strange blend of the exotic, the spiritual, and the banal. A tourist town, it gives Westerners what they want, or more specifically, what Indians and Tibetans think Westerners want (pizza is less popular than thentuk; a nightclub on Jogiwara Rd, X-Cite, seems always to be empty). Under the neon signs and shouting matches, the “local culture” hums along, oblivious to the din of motorbikes and dance music, monks walking in silence to their evening discourses and elderly Tibetan ladies spinning prayer wheels and chanting: om mani padme hung. Both worlds are accessible to everyone. To be a tourist in Dharamsala is to be simultaneously a guest in the home of an ancient civilization of mystics, monastics, and seekers-of-truth, and, a place where you can buy bootleg Led Zeppelin concert DVDs and drink (terrible, Indian) beer under a mountain moon and a blinding canopy of stars. It is absolutely perfect. I’ll stay here for a while.

The bus driver is gone an awfully long time. Lonely Planet gives the population of Pathankot, this bus-transfer outpost, as 140,000. I step outside to buy a drink, which I bring back to the bus, dodging the shawl salesmen. One of the passengers, a young man with a thin moustache, is outside having a smoke. As I approach the bus he seems delighted by me, and his face lights up with excitement.

“Hello friend!” he says. The Indians like to call people “friend”.

“Hello.”

India’s enormity is only physical and economical. Culturally, it is vast, but surprisingly uniform. And there is no greater evidence of this fact than what I will call the Indian Friendly Five, which are the five questions that you, a tourist, will be asked by every random Indian you meet, without exception, no matter where you are in the country, from Kashmir to Karnataka, from Pondicherry to Punjab. The Indian Friendly Five are as follows:

1. “First time [city name]?” or “First time India?”
2. “Where you come from?” (or “Your country?)”
3. “How long India?” ([sic] - this could mean “How long have you been in India?” or “How long will you stay in India?”)
4. “What’s your occupation?”
5. “You married unmarried?” ([sic] - or “You have girlfriend wife?”)

The order of the IFF varies (some Indians want to know the last two before all else), but the delivery is always as given. If I were to try to read meaning into these questions, I would start by mentioning that Indians love to practice their English, whether amongst themselves or with tourists. But the nationwide ubiquity of the IFF is the real riddle. I assure you I’m not making this up; most tourists I’ve asked about this have laughed reassuringly, and a Dutch guy I met in Bulgaria told me about these same five questions before I’d experienced them myself. For whatever reason these are the data that Indians are most curious about. An explanation of the IFF would require proper methods of scientific inquiry, perhaps by dispatching a fleet of garrulous and clandestine European pollsters across the Indian countryside. But I suspect that, as the saying goes, there are no answers, only more questions.

The immensity of India doesn’t strike you right away. A visitor landing in Delhi or Bombay might comment sourly on the congestion, waste entire days in cross-town transit, or wince at the startling cacophony of car horns and Bollywood dance music, but he is unlikely to conclude that these places are too big. They look like any other big city, with buzzing business centers and markets encased by endless suburbia. While they are dustier and have higher cow and ox populations than most, Delhi and Bombay do not look otherwise like places unique to India, at least not in scale. The received wisdom of India as a violent crush of humanity, one big stampede between ticket windows, train entrances, and taxi cabs, is true to a point. But while the hum of daily Indian life is noisier and more bacteria-laden than perhaps it ought to be, there are always quiet corners to tuck away into, especially so in the cities. Yes they are enormous—13.7 million and 13.3 million people—but their enormity is neither oppressive nor confounding. We expect big Indian cities to look this way.

India’s size reveals itself when one drifts out into the regions. A typical Indian bus ride between here and there will take five hours, and will pass any number of towns and settlements on the way. Some are proper towns, with all the cows, choking traffic, bazaars, beggars, and dogs that don’t look half as sickly as they should. Others are little more than collections of squat tin-roofed shops, leaning on each other for structural support. Usually a family lives inside. The placard is painted with English text, and a Coca-Cola or Airtel billboard looms overhead. Underneath, racks of Kurkure chips dangle from the wall, and rows of bottled water for sale sit on display. The men of the family toil around the dirt lot, fixing motorbikes, hosing things down, or just waiting for customers to show up. From the bus window, you can see the white eyes of the women inside, who sit cross-legged on the floor, immersed in some chore or another.

We make a rest stop at a bus transfer station called Pathankot. It is little more than a dirt parking lot. The driver takes a walk. Tens of vendors board the bus, shouting their wares: snacks and drinks, garam chai, lentils, chocolate, blessings from a sadhu. And stranger things: cricket bats, noise-maker toys, electric razors. One kid is selling steel zippers (?). And there are beggars, usually children, who perform some menial task like sweeping the floor under your feet, or they just tug on your pantleg until you give in. Outside, other buses at Pathankot are enduring a similar siege. Salesmen prowl between the buses and jeeps with stacks of folded Kashmiri shawls balanced on their heads, hoping to sell to people changing buses or going inside for a leak. It is startlingly well-organized.

At every bus station in the country, at bus stops outside Chennai and Ahmedabad and Mangalore, and even at our next three rest stops, there will be tens (if not hundreds) of these men, whose sole means of subsistence is by walking onto hundreds of buses trying to sell a cup of chai or a cricket bat. And that they will sell to the affluent and the destitute of India alike, to the entrepreneurs and university students, the farmhands and the little old ladies, for everyone takes the same cramped buses.

Everyone in India seems to have a job. The sight of Indians labouring is the definitive image of the country (Salman Rushdie, in Midnight’s Children, defined the true religion of India as “Businessism”, which is hard to argue with). No matter how mundane, how trivial, how gratuitous, or how vile the job, there is always an Indian to do it, or usually hundreds of Indians who will do it. The division of labour is divided and subdivided again, and most are left with one small task to do, for eleven hours a day, to win a few rupees. And this economic ladder starts with the lowest beggar, climbs over the labourer and peasant, the street vendor and rickshaw man, the chai-wallahs on the bus, and up it goes, to the call-centres and mechanical engineers and property speculators, all the way to the moguls of Infosys and Tata, all rungs of this vast ladder visible from anywhere in the country, omnipresent in India. And that’s when you realize how big this country is.