Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

  Weary, dirty, unrecognizable, up toward Delhi rolled the Whom, past the mud walls of villages, which, throughout the land, were alive with frescoes of gods, demons, men, and animals executed in yellows, ochres, and umbers, all ornamented with geometric patterns etched into the dying mud by the artful fingers of a people alive with beauty, but irrevocably faced with death. In the aged flats of the country, Dilip occasionally slept in temples, his ear perked to the croak of crows and hopefully nothing worse; in one he heard a voice: an old sennyasi, in the midst of a long pilgrimage to bathe in the Godavari, had whispered a blessing and given him an old wooden-bound copy of the Ramayana of Tulsi Das, which Dilip read and forthwith memorized, thereafter, passing many a lonely but self-contained night, sitting up cool in the mountain grass, singing softly to himself in sweet notes the “Song of the Adorable One.” And the days went by as over the whole country, shaken with cyclones, earthquakes, and floods, he passed into Karachi, through West Bengal, Orissa, over to Bhopal, way down to Mysore, and up as far as the Punjab.

  The big cities were all alike: Mewar, Patna, Cawnpore. But he was somehow changing with the experience, being led somewhere, though precisely where he could not as yet tell. Dilip always sat in the large open squares, fractured in cracks of slate and pebbles, beating the alms bowl with his bamboo and begging for pice. The square was like a window to the world. He watched the Moslem fakirs or the men in baglike garments called burkas followed by their secluded women, a purdah of dark eyes beneath veils, shawls, and chintzes. Fierce, smouldering marathas, in turbans of rust-red and dust colour, casually puffed hashish and chewed betel and sometimes gave him an anna to go on errands to get one of the disshevelled veschayas from the brothels, where the furniture was upholstered in dirty pink rep with horsehair showing through the corners, and the dying marigolds in clay pots were as faded as the curtains in the windows where sad-eyed ladies and nautch girls, painted in ghaza and hajal mascara, slouched in the shadows of a paraffin lamp like the chromos of half-draped women and fat odalisques which hung on the walls within.

  Violence, too, seemed to run through everyone’s life, like the silver bar through the bank notes the British controlled them by. Indian communists sold copies of the National Front everywhere and shouted headlines like hysterical warnings: “Biplab! Biplab! Biplab!”—predictions of an imminent revolution when the poor would rise up and mercilessly cut the very eyes out of the rich they despised. Little men up from Bangalore or Darjeeling, half-mad, sang in twangs unmelodious tunes that tragicomically rehearsed the fateful stories of their lives, poverty, and crippled brains. And everywhere thousands upon thousands of the fifty million scavenger-eyed “Untouchables,” whom the British raj euphemistically referred to as The Unscheduled Classes, went about filching into garbage cans and licking sewage from their fingers. The duck gongs they wore clanked and warned people of their proximity, for they were said to pollute India even by their shadows, and, occasionally, they were shot by indignant Hindus of high caste for growing their mustaches upwards instead of downwards, according to caste demands. Dilip often saw them chased to the bottom of filthy alleys, where they were kicked and spat upon to the cry of “Harijan! Harijan!” And yet always, as always, even in the midst of violence, whether the culture changed, or the language, in the mountains, along the sea, over the plains, evening still crept in, night hushed its stormy brood, and the interminable dark spread over India once again, while the lonely bhisti, or water-carrier, appeared, sprinkled the streets, and, then sitting alongside his lampion sweating grease and oil, watched patiently as he had done from the beginning of time the last of the orange sun eaten away by the ravenous dusk. The kites sailed circles in the last of golden air and, another day or year or century shadowed over, had passed from the paper-strewn, mephitic earth.

  One night, in his sixteenth year, Dilip found himself standing alone in the inner porch of Tejahpālā’s temple at Dilwārā on Mt. Abu in the district of Rājputānā. It was a rock-cut temple of solid masonry, a stupa in a moat-girdled zone of walls, carved inside and out with the minute detail of a jewel box, a delicacy, like the effect of hoarfrost, all done in deep relief and chase; aisled and apsidal, the entire surface of arches, doors, columns, and gates was fretted, until it looked like repoussé work. It seemed an actual forest of pillars and statues, all heavily carved and painted: sandstone bulls, long elephants’ trunks, stealite seals, monkeys’ tails, and sacred cobras, each one fantastically exaggerated, especially the goddesses with wasp waists, voluptuous hips, and breasts as round as cricket balls.

  Alarmed with beauty, Dilip stood spellbound under the hemispherical dome which mounted to a small pavilion on the summit and, rising from this, a mast bearing a symbolic umbrella. Though he had never seen them closely, he had often heard of the pacific Jains, mostly from Gujarat and Bombay, who prayed here: the stark-naked Digambaras, and the white-robed Shwetambaras—who, according to their ancient gachchha, never killed a single thing, always wore filtering masks, and travelled everywhere with long brooms strapped to their backs to sweep away from their path anything that might be hurt. Dilip’s “perception” dated from that night, a lay co-partnership in spirituality, in which he took vows, that began in learning contemplation, purity of thought, and repentance, and ended with a sacred gift of twelve flawless Magok rubies that he might go abroad to learn, in full, the key to the Modern Birth Cycle: electricity—the lifestream of the New Universe—for that was the God-drenched will of holy Menu, the shaggy saint with eyes like anthrax, who stepped into the temple porch that very night and, with raised arms beckoning him, spoke through his respirator: “Your body and your spirit will be nourished by my moonlight.” Dilip was converted on the spot. He had at last come home.

  “Where’s your home? You know, where you belong and all that.”

  “India.”

  “No, I knew that,” said Roland, lighting another cigarette. “India. But what I mean is, where abouts from? The capitol, right?”

  “Formerly, Dum Dum,” Dilip smiled.

  “What the hell kind of a farking name is that, Chinee?”

  “This was the habitat of my parents. A go-ahead willage once, truly, sir. To date, I have confessedly been hither-thither, at one time reaching even unto Chicago.”

  “Now that ain’t in India.”

  “That is in United States.”

  “That’s absolutely correct,” said Roland, standing up and saluting. He sat down. “Say there’s money over there, in dollars; I don’t know, never got around to making it over there. Say there’s money over there, though. New York, Texas, Chicago. Oh, I know.” Roland hooked his thumbs into his belt. “Pahdon me, ma’am, Ahm lookin’ for Big Bad John Wayne.” He leaped from the bench and squatted behind an armrest, holding his hand out as a revolver. “Blam, blam, blam!” Then Roland stood up, smiling and blowing on the barrel of his finger. “Texas. All them cowboys and—” he paused—“Indians. Only they’re red, you’re ...” Two replies followed simultaneously: “black” “brown.” The latter was not Roland’s. His was the former.

  Dilip would not allow himself to be mured in by a wall constructed, and perfectly acceptable, by someone whose opinions were clearly, if different from his own, just as honest and possibly even wiser.

  “Distant cousin of mine is technician in Chicago. He takes care of—”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” Roland interrupted. “A technician. He works with those ... ah, laboratories. Oh I know, I got you, I know.” He picked up the newspaper harshly.

  “You go to university?”

  “Sorry?” Roland’s eyes peered just over the paper.

  “You go to university, my friend?”

  Roland did not reflect. He deliberated.

  “No time,” he shrugged. “No, I don’t really go, in the sense that you mean. I just have no time to go. You see what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  The cigarette was tossed into the drain. Roland smoked with a nervous energy, des
troying his cigarettes as soon as possible, as if it were a duty to be finished with it in the shortest possible time.

  “Funny, you know?” replied Roland. “You need time to go to university, if you get me.” It seemed a marshmallow disguised as food for thought. “Look, I’ll ask you if you got time to go, then you ask me. Me first. Hey, mate, you got time to go to university? Huh?” Roland waited. “Go on, answer. Have a shy at it.”

  Dilip, if bewildered a bit, was always a good sport. “Yes,” he smiled.

  “Now you ask me.”

  “Excuse me, my dear fellow,” Dilip laughed good-naturedly, “do you have time to go to university?”

  “Not. On. Your. Farking. Nelly,” snarled Roland, his face showing a marked feral strain. The words were ice-covered. The sentence, broken up, was delivered slowly and clipped with precise fury, the more horrible for its control. There was not even the trace of a smile. “It’s as bloody simple as that, you.”

  Have I just now detected the hubble-bubble of anger in a voice, Dilip asked himself, a sorrowing discord in a dear spirit? But shall I then condemn only a voice? Consult the Menu: “Learn how to separate the duck from its quack?” Dilip felt he would try to do better.

  “Fag?” Roland had a pack of cigarettes aimed at the Indian.

  “Thank you, no.”

  “Take one.”

  “I do not use them.”

  “Do you smoke them?”

  “Neither am I doing, to this age.” Dilip began to read his book.

  “I’m going to have one. You have one.”

  “Please, sir?”

  “I’m offering you one,” Roland said darkly. “Take.”

  Dilip hesitated; he thought he detected a sharp edge on the word, an unspoken arrière-pensée, buried somewhere, that showed his new friend not as yet fully delivered of himself. Shall I then be so uncharitable? he asked himself, taking advantage in a small pause to consult the Menu: “A gibbous moon is no less a moon.” Dilip felt better—and took the cigarette.

  “Thank you, wery.”

  “Don’t thank me. I get them half-price where I live. There’s more where that come from. That’s the thing about England, I mean. You can always have a fag when you want one. Not like some countries where they ration the fags, like Warsaw in Poland. Guess that’s one reason why I like it here, and stay here, too. You want a fag, take one. No beating around the bloody bush. Just take one.” Roland cupped a light for both cigarettes. “You speakee the English, right? Am I talking too fast?”

  “No, sir,” coughed Dilip, blinded by his own billowing gas of tobacco.

  “It’s the greatest country in the world,” concluded Roland. “Just look at a map, where it’s in the middle. It has the exact same shape it had when Henry the Eighth was the king, not sandwiched in with all the others like Shepherd’s Pie or gone out of circulation. That’s because we’re an island. You look sometime. The greatest.”

  Noises, whistles, voices, the racking of satchels and valises, and the sounds of people running, cars hitching and coupling brought the morning to consciousness; the train station, after the long night, had now disintegrated into the full of the day and the vigourous flux of business.

  “You taking the 9:07, then?”

  “The half-nine, sir.”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “Yes,” Dilip nodded. “I will board momentarily.”

  “Don’t like trains much. See, I’m not waiting for a train. I’m just off the shift, the job, the shift. Well, I had some time to kill so I thought I’d pop into the waiting room here, get up on the news.”

  Dilip pulled his cuffs straight, secured the buckles on his valise, and smiled; he was ready to be off and away, anxious.

  “I have taken trains, though,” Roland continued. “Chrissakes, we’ve all taken trains, right? It’s just that I don’t like to take them. I took the two-pound ride from The Wash to Henchy once, and for the whole trip this little bugger, a little bugger, only three feet and a kick, was sitting near my back with one plastic toy, playing, ah, playing, what’s that song”—Roland, puzzled, drew back his fist and squinted down to the floor, exploring it for the answer—“yes! ‘Mother Redcap Wants to Know,’ I think it was. Anyway, it was driving me up the bloomin’ wall, he wouldn’t belt up, see? So I told the little cod to shut it off. ‘Shut it off,’ I said. ‘Shut it off, you little bastard!” Roland paused. He looked up and beamed. “You know, he did?”

  Goodness gracious me, Dilip reflected, this poor keen chap has his spleen on fire; full of bobbery and griefs must be his heart, thus making mine.

  “The little bread-snapper was probably off to Brighton, as well. Don’t like the place myself. Course, some do. You’re going down. You should know,” Roland said. He knew he could detect in the Indian’s eyes a lingering trace of corruption, for he had often seen taken that dangerous and retrograde step where proprietary blacks, Indos, and Pakis, better whipped by slavers, recruited to their chaperonage and harems all those unsuspecting English girls with long eyelashes and beautiful names and bombed them to a rubble in seaside bedsitters with their whale-sized, extra-terrestrial devices reputed to be the length of yardarms. This was a rapid recognition: Brighton was the rendezvous, the girl had to be English, and Roland would find out, he would—then collar him, nail him to a flaming post, and have the stones off of him before Jack Dashed.

  “I hope I should go. The rail train appears to be late.”

  “You taking the Express To?”

  “Exactly so.”

  “The Express To’s late today. No one told you?” Dilip tumbled over his valise. “Delay somewhere on the track. She’s leaving at, what?, eleven-ought-two, or, no, no, she’s leaving at eleven-fifteen. You thought she was leaving at half-nine. I thought you knew.”

  “I have dozed past it?” asked Dilip from the floor.

  “It’s late,” Roland said. “Thought you knew.”

  “It has gone pish-pash into a tree?”

  “Laaaaaate, is all.”

  “Capsized unwillfully?”

  “Late, goddamit, late!” Roland bounced to his feet and looked down: the ball sat, still; it was only a short run, moving left, in with a kick, then to ram it high with a stabbing foot and wind it away—thud! Point!

  Dilip picked himself up, a motion which, unwittingly, saved him from the singular experience of having a sharp, wing-tip shoe driven summarily halfway through his rib-cage. The train would be late, now; he felt disappointed that he felt sad, sad that he felt disappointed. He consulted the Menu: “Consider, always, to what degree is pattern arbitrary.” Poop, he thought, I should have known this.

  Roland swung away and sat down. “Though it’d be hard to know,” he said, pulling up his socks and gesturing to the schedule board, “since they didn’t put the card up.”

  “Well,” replied Dilip, with a low resigned laugh, “in India they sometimes forget the card as well.”

  “You have trains in India?”

  “Oh yes, fine trains.”

  “Didn’t know that.”

  “Bless me, yes.”

  “Didn’t know that.”

  “You did not know that?”

  “Well, I knew it, yes,” answered Roland, “but I thought they were old. Old trains.”

  “They are old.”

  “That’s what I said, wasn’t it?” Roland stared hard at him. “Wasn’t that just what I farking said?”

  But Dilip was driven past the question in an old Indian railroad; it chugged into his memory: whistling steam up the brain stem, it rolled to the fornix, screeched to a halt in the hippocampus, and stood, hissing, spitting water, at the frontal lobes of his mind. The hot dust-powdered cars overflowed with thousands of people squatting on the roofs and hanging from the windows, all chattering in a macaronic babble of Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit, Malayalam and many of the other 845 languages and dialects spoken throughout the country. Under the beating sun and in the unbearable heat, the cars steamed almost red-hot, while widge
ons and snipes walked over the roofs, their tracks making question marks in the dust; and, throughout the trains, young Indians waved their arms wildly and cheerfully during a stopover, while the toothless old sat within, bowbent in their dhotis, sharing their corn from screws of newspaper and squatting into their soft laughter.

  The train stations reproduced a carnival atmosphere, or, better, a kind of tableau like Bosch’s terrifying “Last Judgement,” or, best, something of both: lepers; tertiary syphilitics; St. Vitus dancers, real and bogus, spinning into the wind-sprits of a clonus; lunatics, with spittle on their chins, fluttering to a ghostly music within their own brains; others twitching for profit, while blind, maimed, and deformed children, pinched with hunger, snaffled pieces of food from the stalls of karibat, in front of which run-down peddlers barked: “Cups of Leepdon’s dee, hot, hot! Hot Leepdon’s dee!” The quavering singsong of the vendor’s chant came from everywhere, selling burfi, ice cream, the syrupy sweet mitahis, and various Indian savories. Tradesmen haggled through the open car windows, bargaining, flipping long fingers, and tossing from small wicker baskets all kinds of fruits: peppery, puckery, bitter. The Parsee merchants hopped along the cars: the Screwwallah with his cheap hardware and odd, little mongery, and the Sodawaterwallah with his bottles, shaped like begging dogs, filled with bright pink and green soda water. Bells clanged, and tin loudspeakers, announcing arrivals and departures, blared out the schedule list of towns in a chain of loose, booming squawnks. It was a network of constrictions, contractions, constructions. The platforms were a vortex of pushing, struggling shapes, especially during the times of conventions, and melas: the religious festivals that shifted all humanity toward the sacred Ganges in a wild, calamitous din, a barrikin in which pilgrims gurgled, lamented, spat, and trooped shoeless over the tracks, into the waiting rooms, eating papadom, fruit, tobacco, and glugging glasses of a murky rack that tasted like tractor fuel. Women hawked baskets of painted toys, wooden models of Hindu gods, and pottery bowls of curds, while, framed in their booths, the merchants or Vaisyas jingled their wares from trays of jewelry, anklet bells, bracelets, nose rings and pointed proudly to their endless displays of khadi and homespun. High-caste ladies, wearing white and silver saris, rattled into the stations in gaily painted tongas, one- or two-horse vehicles with covered tops, pulled by bullocks with brass-tipped horns and sky-blue beads around their necks, and, occasionally, a Highness elephant might be seen, covered with a cloth of gold and a network of brilliant mesh strung over its back, bright shiny rosettes of gold like tiny inverted bowls. But the poor were clearly the majority, and all the whining beggars and children, with sore eyes and pleading voices, bleating, “No papa, no mama!” and offering to perform acrobatic tricks and somersaults in the dust for a hoon, or a dahm, seemed of little consequence to the officious, high-stepping babus—their social position designated by the furled umbrella—who stepped over them with disdain and who, if buttonholed while waiting to catch one of the dilapidated victorias which infrequently passed, turned on them swiftly with an indignant bark of “jao, jao!”