To the Ends of the Earth Page 5

  I wondered whether any of these people had tried to take revenge on him.

  “Yes, there was one. He got himself drunk one night and came to my house with a knife. ‘Come outside and I will kill you!’ That sort of thing. My wife was upset. But I was angry. I couldn’t control myself. I dashed outside and fetched the blighter a blooming kick. He dropped his knife and began to cry. ‘Don’t call the police,’ he said. ‘I have a wife and children.’ He was a complete coward, you see. I let him go and everyone criticized me—they said I should have brought charges. But I told them he’ll never bother anyone again.

  “And there was another time. I was working for Heavy Electricals, doing an audit for some cheaters in Bengal. Faulty construction, double entries, and estimates that were five times what they should have been. There was also immorality. One bloke—son of the contractor, very wealthy—kept four harlots. He gave them whisky and made them take their clothes off and run naked into a group of women and children doing puja. Disgraceful! Well, they didn’t like me at all and the day I left there were four dacoits with knives waiting for me on the station road. But I expected that, so I took a different road, and the blighters never caught me. A month later two auditors were murdered by dacoits.”

  The railcar tottered around a cliffside, and on the opposite slope, across a deep valley, was Simla. Most of the town fits the ridge like a saddle made entirely of rusty roofs, but as we drew closer the fringes seemed to be sliding into the valley. Simla is unmistakable, for as Murray’s Handbook indicates, “its skyline is incongruously dominated by a Gothic Church, a baronial castle and a Victorian country mansion.” Above these brick piles is the sharply pointed peak of Jakhu (eight thousand feet); below are the clinging house fronts. The southerly aspect of Simla is so steep that flights of cement stairs take the place of roads. From the railcar it looked an attractive place, a town of rusting splendor with snowy mountains in the background.

  “My office is in that castle,” said the civil servant.

  “Gorton Castle,” I said, referring to my handbook. “Do you work for the Accountant General of the Punjab?”

  “Well, I am the A.G.,” he said. But he was giving information, not boasting. At Simla Station the porter strapped my suitcase to his back (he was a Kashmiri, up for the season). The civil servant introduced himself as Vishnu Bhardwaj and invited me for tea that afternoon.

  The Mall was filled with Indian vacationers taking their morning stroll, warmly dressed children, women with cardigans over their saris, and men in tweed suits, clasping the green Simla guidebook in one hand and a cane in the other. The promenading has strict hours, nine to twelve in the morning and four to eight in the evening, determined by mealtimes and shop openings. These hours were fixed a hundred years ago, when Simla was the summer capital of the Indian empire, and they have not varied. The architecture is similarly unchanged—it is all high Victorian, with the vulgarly grandiose touches colonial labor allowed, extravagant gutters and porticoes, buttressed by pillars and steelwork to prevent its slipping down the hill. The Gaiety Theatre (1887) is still the Gaiety Theatre (though when I was there it was the venue of a “Spiritual Exhibition” I was not privileged to see); pettifogging continues in Gorton Castle, as praying does in Christ Church (1857), the Anglican cathedral; the viceroy’s lodge (Rastrapati Nivas), a baronial mansion, is now the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, but the visiting scholars creep about with the diffidence of caretakers maintaining the sepulchral stateliness of the place. Scattered among these large Simla buildings are the bungalows—Holly Lodge, Romney Castle, The Bricks, Forest View, Sevenoaks, Femside—but the inhabitants now are Indians, or rather that inheriting breed of Indian that insists on the guidebook, the walking stick, the cravat, tea at four, and an evening stroll to Scandal Point. It is the Empire with a dark complexion, an imperial outpost that the mimicking vacationers have preserved from change, though not the place of highly colored intrigues described in Kim, and certainly tamer than it was a century ago. After all, Lola Montez, the grande horizontale, began her whoring in Simla, and the only single women I saw were short red-cheeked Tibetan laborers in quilted coats, who walked along the Mall with heavy stones in slings on their backs.

  I had tea with the Bhardwaj family. It was not the simple meal I had expected. There were eight or nine dishes: pakora, vegetables fried in batter; poha, a rice mixture with peas, coriander, and turmeric; khira, a creamy pudding of rice, milk, and sugar; a kind of fruit salad, with cucumber and lemon added to it, called chaat; murak, a Tamil savory, like large nutty pretzels; tikkiya, potato cakes; malai chops, sweet sugary balls topped with cream; and almond-scented pinnis. I ate what I could, and the next day I saw Mr. Bhardwaj’s office in Gorton Castle. It was as sparsely furnished as he had said on the railcar, and over his desk was this sign:

  I AM NOT INTERESTED IN EXCUSES FOR DELAY;

  I AM INTERESTED ONLY IN A THING DONE.

  —Jawaharlal Nehru

  In Jaipur with Mr. Gopal

  “WHAT’S THIS?” I ASKED MR. GOPAL, THE EMBASSY LIAISON man, pointing to a kind of fortress.

  “That’s a kind of fortress.”

  He had ridiculed the handbook I had been carrying around: “You have this big book, but I tell you to close it and leave it at hotel because Jaipur is like open book to me.” Unwisely, I had taken his advice. We were now six miles outside Jaipur, wading ankle-deep through sand drifts toward the wrecked settlement of Galta. Earlier we had passed through a jamboree of some two hundred baboons: “Act normal,” said Mr. Gopal, as they hopped and chattered and showed their teeth, clustering on the road with a curiosity that bordered on menace. The landscape was rocky and very dry, and each rugged hill was capped with a cracked fortress.

  “Whose is it?”

  “The Maharajah’s.”

  “No, who built it?”

  “You would not know his name.”

  “Do you?”

  Mr. Gopal walked on. It was dusk, and the buildings crammed into the Galta gorge were darkening. A monkey chattered and leaped to a branch in a banyan tree above Mr. Gopal’s head, yanking the branch down and making a punkah’s whoosh. We entered the gate and crossed a courtyard to some ruined buildings, with colored frescoes of trees and people on their façades. Some had been raked with indecipherable graffiti and painted over; whole panels had been chiseled away.

  “What’s this?” I asked. I hated him for making me leave my handbook behind.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Gopal. It was a temple enclosure. Some men dozed in the archways, others squatted on their haunches, and just outside the enclosure were some tea and vegetable stalls whose owners leaned against more frescoes, rubbing them away with their backs. I was struck by the solitude of the place—a few people at sundown, no one speaking, and it was so quiet I could hear the hooves of the goats clattering on the cobblestones, the murmuring of the distant monkeys.

  “A temple?”

  Mr. Gopal thought a moment. “Yes,” he said finally, “a kind of temple.”

  On the ornate temple walls, stuck with posters, defaced with chisels, pissed on, and scrawled over with huge Devanagri script advertising Jaipur businesses, there was a blue enamel sign, warning visitors in Hindi and English that it was “forbidden to desecrate, deface, mark or otherwise abuse the walls.” The sign itself had been defaced: the enamel was chipped—it looked partly eaten.

  Farther along, the cobblestone road became a narrow path and then a steep staircase cut into the rock walls of the gorge. At the top of this was a temple facing a still, black pool. Insects swimming in circles on the pool’s surface made minuscule ripples, and small clouds of vibrant gnats hovered over the water. The temple was an unambitious niche in the rock face, a shallow cave, lighted with oil lamps and tapers. On either side of its portals were seven-foot marble slabs, the shape of those handed down from Sinai but with a weight that would give the most muscular prophet a hernia. These tablets had numbered instructions cut into them in two languages. In the failing light
I copied down the English.

  The use of soap in the temple and washing clothes is strictly prohibited

  Please do not bring shoes near the tank

  It does not suit for women to take bath among male members

  Spitting while swimming is quite a bad habit

  Do not spoil others’ clothes by splitting water while swimming

  Do not enter the temple with wet clothes

  Do not spit improperly to make the places dirty

  “Splitting?” I said to Mr. Gopal. “What is splitting?”

  “That does not say splitting.”

  “Take a look at number five.”

  “It says splashing.”

  “It says splitting.”

  “It says—”

  We walked over to the tablet. The letters, two inches high, were cut deep into the marble.

  “—splitting,” said Mr. Gopal. “I’ve never run across that one before. I think it’s a kind of splashing.”

  The Grand Trunk Express to the Real India

  THE LUMBERING EXPRESS THAT BISECTS INDIA, A 1,400-mile slash from Delhi south to Madras, gets its name from the route. It might easily have derived it from the kind of luggage the porters were heaving on board. There were grand trunks all over the platform. I had never seen such heaps of belongings in my life, or so many laden people; they were like evacuees who had been given time to pack, lazily fleeing an ambiguous catastrophe. In the best of times there is nothing simple about an Indian boarding a train, but these people climbing into the Grand Trunk Express looked as if they were setting up house—they had the air, and the merchandise, of people moving in. Within minutes the compartments were colonized, the trunks were emptied, the hampers, food baskets, water bottles, bedrolls, and Gladstones put in place; and before the train started up its character changed, for while we were still standing at Delhi Station the men stripped off their baggy trousers and twill jackets and got into traditional South Indian dress: the sleeveless gym-class undershirt and the sarong they call a lungi. These were scored with packing creases. It was as if, at once—in expectation of the train whistle—they all dropped the disguise they had adopted for Delhi, the Madras-bound express allowing them to assume their true identity. The train was full of Tamils; and they had moved in so completely, I felt like a stranger among residents, which was odd, since I had arrived earlier than anyone else.

  Tamils are black and bony; they have thick straight hair and their teeth are prominent and glister from repeated scrubbings with peeled green twigs. Watch a Tamil going over his teeth with an eight-inch twig and you begin to wonder if he isn’t trying to yank a branch out of his stomach. One of the attractions of the Grand Trunk Express is that its route takes in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, where the best toothbrush twigs are found; they are sold in bundles, bound like cheroots, at the stations in the province. Tamils are also modest. Before they change their clothes each makes a toga of his bedsheet, and, hopping up and down and working his elbows, he kicks his shoes and trousers off, all the while babbling in that rippling speech that resembles the sputtering of a man singing in the shower. Tamils seem to talk constantly—only toothbrushing silences them. Pleasure for a Tamil is discussing a large matter (life, truth, beauty, “walues”) over a large meal (very wet vegetables studded with chilies and capsicums, and served with damp poori and two mounds of glutinous rice). The Tamils were happy on the Grand Trunk Express: their language was spoken; their food was served; their belongings were dumped helter-skelter, giving the train the customary clutter of a Tamil home.

  I started out with three Tamils in my compartment. After they changed, unstrapped their suitcases, unbuckled bedrolls, and had a meal (one gently scoffed at my spoon: “Food taken with hand tastes different from food taken with spoon—sort of metal taste”), they spent an immense amount of time introducing themselves to one another. In bursts of Tamil speech were English words like “reposting,” “casual leave,” “annual audit.” As soon as I joined the conversation they began, with what I thought was a high degree of tact and courage, to speak to one another in English. They were in agreement on one point: Delhi was barbarous.

  “I am staying at Lodi Hotel. I am booked months ahead. Everyone in Trich tells me it is a good hotel. Hah! I cannot use telephone. You have used telephone?”

  “I cannot use telephone at all.”

  “It is not Lodi Hotel,” said the third Tamil. “It is Delhi.”

  “Yes, my friend, you are right,” said the second.

  “I say to receptionist, ‘Kindly stop speaking to me in Hindi. Does no one speak English around this place? Speak to me in English if you please!’ ”

  “It is really atrocious situation.”

  “Hindi, Hindi, Hindi. Tcha!”

  I said I’d had similar experiences. They shook their heads and added more stories of distress. We sat like four fugitives from savagery, bemoaning the general ignorance of English, and it was one of the Tamils—not I—who pointed out that the Hindi speaker would be lost in London.

  I said, “Would he be lost in Madras?”

  “English is widely spoken in Madras. We also use Tamil, but seldom Hindi. It is not our language.”

  “In the south everyone has matric.” They had a knowing ease with abbreviations, “matric” for matriculation, “Trich” for the town of Tiruchchirappalli.

  The conductor put his head into the compartment. He was a harassed man with the badges and equipment of Indian authority, a gunmetal puncher, a vindictive pencil, a clipboard thick with damp passenger lists, a bronze conductor’s pin, and a khaki pith helmet. He tapped my shoulder.

  “Bring your case.”

  Earlier I had asked for the two-berth compartment I had paid for. He had said they were overbooked. I demanded a refund. He said I’d have to file an application at the place of issue. I accused him of inefficiency. He withdrew. Now he had found a coupé in the next carriage.

  “Does this cost extra?” I asked, sliding my suitcase in. I didn’t like the extortionate overtones of the word baksheesh.

  “What you want,” he said.

  “Then it doesn’t.”

  “I am not saying it does or doesn’t. I am not asking.”

  I liked the approach. I said, “What should I do?”

  “To give or not to give.” He frowned at his passenger lists. “That is entirely your lookout.”

  I gave him five rupees.

  The compartment was gritty. There was no sink; the drop-leaf table was unhinged; and the rattling at the window, rising to a scream when another train passed, jarred my ears. Sometimes it was an old locomotive that sped by in the night, its kettle boiling, its whistle going, and its pistons leaking a hiss with the warning pitch of a blown valve that precedes an explosion. At about six A.M., near Bhopal, there was a rap on the door—not morning tea, but a candidate for the upper berth. He said, “Excuse me,” and crept in.

  The forests of Madhya Pradesh, where all the toothbrushes grow, looked like the woods of New Hampshire with the last faint blue range of mountains removed. It was green, uncultivated, and full of leafy bluffs and shady brooks, but as the second day wore on it grew dustier, and New Hampshire gave way to Indian heat and Indian air. Dust collected at the window and sifted in, covering my map, my pipe, my glasses and notebook, my new stock of paperbacks (Joyce’s Exiles, Browning’s poems, The Narrow Corner by Somerset Maugham). I had a fine layer of dust on my face; dust furred the mirror, made the plastic seat abrasive and the floor crunchy. The window had to be kept open a crack because of the heat, but the penalty for this breeze was a stream of choking dust from the Central Indian plains.

  At Nagpur in the afternoon, my traveling companion (an engineer with an extraordinary scar on his chest), said, “There are primitive people here called Gondis. They are quite strange. One woman may have four to five husbands and vicey-versy.”

  I bought four oranges at the station, made a note of a sign advertising horoscopes that read MARRY YOUR DAUGHTERS BY SPENDING RS. 12
ONLY, shouted at a little man who was bullying a beggar, and read my handbook’s entry for Nagpur (so-called because it is on the River Nag):

  Among the inhabitants are many aborigines known as Gonds. Of these the hill-tribes have black skins, flat noses and thick lips. A cloth round the waist is their chief garment. The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship.

  To my relief, the whistle blew and we were on our way. The engineer read the Nagpur paper, I ate my Nagpur oranges and then had a siesta. I awoke to an odd sight, the first rain clouds I’d seen since leaving England. At dusk, near the border of the South Indian province of Andhra Pradesh, broad blue-gray clouds, dark at the edges, hung on the horizon. We were headed for them in a landscape where it had recently rained: now the little stations were splashed with mud, brown puddles had collected at level crossings, and the earth was reddened by the late monsoon. But we were not under the clouds until we reached Chandrapur, a station so small and sooty it is not on the map. There, the rain fell in torrents, and signalmen skipped along the line waving their sodden flags. The people on the platform stood watching from under large black umbrellas that shone with wetness. Some hawkers rushed into the downpour to sell bananas to the train passengers.

  A woman crawled into the rain from the shelter of the platform. She appeared to be injured: she was on all fours, moving slowly toward the train—toward me. Her spine, I saw, was twisted with meningitis; she had rags tied to her knees and woodblocks in her hands. She toiled across the tracks with painful slowness, and when she was near the door she looked up. She had a lovely smile—a girl’s beaming face on that broken body. She propped herself up and lifted her free hand at me, and waited, her face streaming with rain, her clothes soaked. While I was fishing in my pockets for money the train started up, and my futile gesture was to throw a handful of rupees onto the flooded line.