Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993

by Paul Bowles

Tariffs on imported goods have risen steeply, so that the European way of life costs about double what it did two years ago. The Moroccans, however, who subsist principally on Moroccan products, are a little better off than they were, since although the prices of local commodities have also increased, the higher earning capacity of most sections of the population more than compensates for the rise. It is unfortunate that along with the general improvement in living conditions has come the menace of growing unemployment. The danger at present is partially mitigated by military enlistments. The enlargement of an army, be it official or unofficial, is no true solution, obviously, but it can provide a temporary dike against the encroaching discontent, and probably for a longer period than would be thinkable in most other countries. The Sahara is a big place.

  The atmosphere is that of an entr’acte; people are waiting for the spectacle to recommence. “What do you think will happen?” you ask them, but their replies are vague and contradictory. The only clearly expressed, heartfelt wish which emerges is the one that no responsible European wants to hear put into words, the one that highlights, albeit without clarifying, an aspect of the basic cleavage between the contemporary Moslem and “Western” viewpoints: “May there soon be another great war. Then we shall have our chance.”

  Notes Mailed at Nagercoil

  Harpers, July 1957; Their Heads Are Green, 1963

  CAPE COMORIN, SOUTH INDIA, MARCH, 1952

  I have been here in this hotel now for a week. At no time during the night or day has the temperature been low enough for comfort; it fluctuates between ninety-five and one hundred and five degrees, and most of the time there is absolutely no breeze, which is astonishing for the seaside. Each bedroom and public room has the regulation large electric fan in its ceiling, but there is no electricity; we are obliged to use oil lamps for lighting. Today at lunch time a large Cadillac of the latest model drove up to the front door. In the back were three fat little men wearing nothing but the flimsy dhotis they had draped around their loins. One of them handed a bunch of keys to the chauffeur, who then got out and came into the hotel. Near the front door is the switch box. He opened it, turned on the current with one of the keys, and throughout the hotel the fans began to whir. Then the three little men got out and went into the dining room where they had their lunch. I ate quickly, so as to get upstairs and lie naked on my bed under the fan. It was an unforgettable fifteen minutes. Then the fan stopped, and I heard the visitors driving away. The hotel manager told me later that they were government employees of the State of Travancore, and that only they had a key to the switch box.3

  Last night I awoke and opened my eyes. There was no moon; it was still dark, but the light of a star was shining into my face through the open window, from a point high above the Arabian Sea. I sat up, and gazed at it. The light it cast seemed as bright as that of the moon in northern countries; coming through the window, it made its rectangle on the opposite wall, broken by the shadow of my silhouetted head. I held up my hand and moved the fingers, and their shadow too was definite. There were no other stars visible in that part of the sky; this one blinded them all. It was about an hour before daybreak, which comes shortly after six, and there was not a breath of air. On such still nights the waves breaking on the nearby shore sound like great, deep explosions going on at some distant place. There is the boom, which can be felt as well as heard and which ends with a sharp rattle and hiss, then a long period of complete silence, and finally, when it seems that there will be no more sound, another sudden boom. The crows begin to scream and chatter while the darkness is still complete.

  The town, like the others here in the extreme south, gives the impression of being made of dust. Dust and cow dung lie in the streets, and the huge crows hop ahead of you as you walk along. When a gust of hot wind wanders in from the sandy wastes beyond the town, the brown fans of the palmyra trees swish and bang against each other; they sound like giant sheets of heavy wrapping paper. The small black men walk quickly, the diamonds in their earlobes flashing. Because of their jewels and the gold thread woven into their dhotis, they all look not merely prosperous, but fantastically wealthy. When the women have diamonds, they are likely to wear them in a hole pierced through the wall of one nostril.

  The first time I ever saw India I entered it through Dhanush-kodi. An analogous procedure in America would be for a foreigner to get his first glimpse of the United States by crossing the Mexican border illegally and coming out into a remote Arizona village. It was God-forsaken, uncomfortable and a little frightening. Since then I have landed as a bonafide visitor should, in the impressively large and unbeautiful metropolis of Bombay. But I’m glad that my first trip did not bring me in contact with any cities. It is better to go to the villages of a strange land before trying to understand its towns, above all in a complex place like India. Now, after traveling some eight thousand miles around the country, I know approximately as little as I did on my first arrival. However, I’ve seen a lot of people and places, and at least I have a somewhat more detailed and precise idea of my ignorance than I did in the beginning.

  If you have not taken the precaution of reserving a room in advance, you risk having considerable difficulty in finding one when you land in Bombay. There are very few hotels, and the two or three comfortable ones are always full. I hate being committed to a reservation because the element of adventure is thereby destroyed. The only place I was able to get into when I first arrived, therefore, was something less than a first-class establishment. It was all right during the day and the early hours of the evening. At night, however, every square foot of floor space in the dark corridors was occupied by sleepers who had arrived late and brought their own mats with them; the hotel was able in this way to shelter several hundred extra guests each night. Having their hands and feet kicked and trodden on was apparently a familiar enough experience to them for them never to make any audible objection when the inevitable happened. Here in Cape Comorin, on the other hand, there are many rooms and they are vast, and at the moment I am the only one staying in the hotel.

  It was raining. I was on a bus going from Alleppey to Trivan-drum, on my way down here. There were two little Indian nuns on the seat in front of mine. I wondered how they stood the heat in their heavy robes. Sitting near the driver was a man with a thick, fierce mustache who distinguished himself from the other passengers by the fact that in addition to his dhoti he also wore a European shirt; its scalloped tail hung down nearly to his knees. With him he had a voluminous collection of magazines and newspapers in both Tamil and English, and even from where I sat I could not help noticing that all this reading matter had been printed in the Soviet Union. (After years of practice one gets to recognize it without difficulty.)

  At a certain moment, near one of the myriad villages that lie smothered in the depths of the palm forests, the motor suddenly ceased to function and the bus came to a stop. The driver, not exchanging a single glance with his passengers, let his head fall forward and remain resting on the steering wheel in a posture of despair. Expectantly the people waited a little while, and then they began to get up. One of the first out of the bus was the man with the mustache. He said a hearty good-bye to the occupants in general, although he had not been conversing with any of them, and started up the road carrying his umbrella, but not his armful of printed matter. Then I realized that at some point during the past hour, not foreseeing the failure of the motor and the mass departure which it entailed, he had left a paper or magazine on each empty seat – exactly as our American comrades used to do on subway trains three decades ago.

  Almost at the moment I made this discovery, the two nuns had risen and were hurriedly collecting the “literature.” They climbed down and ran along the road after the man, calling out in English, “Sir, your papers!” He turned, and they handed them to him. Without saying a word, but with an expression of fury on his face, he took the bundle and continued. But it was impossible to tell from the faces of the two nuns when they returned to gather up their b
elongings whether or not they were conscious of what they had done.

  A few minutes later everyone had left the bus and walked to the village – everyone, that is, but the driver and me. I had too much luggage. Then I spoke to him.

  “What’s the matter with the bus?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “How am I going to get to Trivandrum?”

  He did not know that, either.

  “Couldn’t you look into the motor?” I pursued. “It sounded like the fan belt. Maybe you could repair it.”

  This roused him sufficiently from his apathy to make him turn and look at me.

  “We have People’s Government here in Travancore,” he said. “Not allowed touching motor.”

  “But who is going to repair it, then?”

  “Tonight making telephone call to Trivandrum. Making report. Tomorrow or other day they sending inspector to examine.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then inspector making report. Then sending repair crew.” “I see.”

  “People’s Government,” he said again, by way of helping me to understand. “Not like other government.”

  “No,” I said.

  As if to make his meaning clearer, he indicated the seat where the man with the large mustache had sat. “That gentleman Communist.”

  “Oh, really?” (At least it was all in the open and the driver was under no misapprehension as to what the term “People’s Government” meant.)

  “Very powerful man. Member of Parliament from Travancore.”

  “Is he a good man, though? Do the people like him?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Powerful man.”

  “But is he good?” I insisted.

  He laughed, doubtless at my ingenuousness. “Powerful man all rascals,” he said.

  Just before nightfall a local bus came along, and with the help of several villagers I transferred my luggage to it and continued on my way.

  Most of the impressively heavy Communist vote is cast by the Hindus. The Moslems are generally in less dire economic straits, it is true, but in any case, by virtue of their strict religious views, they do not take kindly to any sort of ideological change. (A convert from Islam is unthinkable; apostasy is virtually nonexistent.) If even Christianity has retained too much of its pagan décor to be acceptable to the puritanical Moslem mind, one can imagine the loathing inspired in them by the endless proliferations of Hindu religious art with its gods, demons, metamorphoses and avatars. The two religious systems are antipodal. Fortunately the constant association with the mild and tolerant Hindus has made the Moslems of India far more understanding and tractable than their brothers in Islamic countries further west; there is much less actual friction than one might be led to expect.

  During breakfast one morning at the Connemara Hotel in Madras the Moslem head waiter told me a story. He was traveling in the Province of Orissa where, in a certain town, there was a Hindu temple which was famous for having five hundred cobras on its premises. He decided he would like to see these legendary reptiles. When he had got to the town he hired a carriage and went to the temple. At the door he was met by a priest who offered to show him around. And since the Moslem looked prosperous, the priest suggested a donation of five rupees, to be paid in advance.

  “Why so much?” asked the visitor.

  “To buy eggs for the cobras. You know, we have five hundred of them.”

  The Moslem gave him the money on condition that the priest let him see the snakes. For an hour his guide dallied in the many courtyards and galleries, pointing out bas-reliefs, idols, pillars and bells. Finally the Moslem reminded him of their understanding.

  “Cobras? Ah, yes. But they are dangerous. Perhaps you would rather see them another day?”

  This behavior on the priest’s part had delighted him, he recalled, for it had reinforced his suspicions.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I want to see them now.”

  Reluctantly the priest led him into a small alcove behind a large stone Krishna, and pointed into a very dark corner. “Is this the place?” the visitor asked. “This is the place.” “But where are the snakes?”

  In a tiny enclosure were two sad old cobras, “almost dead from hunger,” he assured me. But when his eyes had grown used to the dimness he saw that there were hundreds of eggshells scattered around the floor outside the pen.

  “You eat a lot of eggs,” he told the priest.

  The priest merely said, “Here. Take back your five rupees. But if you are asked about our cobras, please be so kind as to say that you saw five hundred of them here in our temple. Is that all right?”

  The episode was meant to illustrate the head waiter’s thesis, which was that the Hindus are abject in the practice of their religion; this is the opinion held by the Moslems. On the other hand, it must be remembered that the Hindu considers Islam an incomplete doctrine, far from satisfying. He finds its austerity singularly comfortless and deplores its lack of mystico-philosophical content, an element in which his own creed is so rich.

  I was invited to lunch at one of the cinema studios in the suburbs north of Bombay. We ate our curry outdoors; our hostess was the star of the film then in production. She spoke only Marathi; her husband, who was directing the picture, spoke excellent English. During the meal he told how, as a Hindu, he had been forced to leave his job, his home, his car and his bank account in Karachi at the time of partition – when Pakistan came into existence – and emigrate empty-handed to India, where he had managed to remake his life. Another visitor to the studio, an Egyptian, was intensely interested in his story. Presently he interrupted to say, “It is unjust, of course.”

  “Yes,” smiled our host.

  “What retaliatory measures does your government plan to take against the Moslems left here in India?”

  “None whatever, as far as I know.”

  The Egyptian was genuinely indignant. “But why not?” he demanded. “It is only right that you apply the same principle. You have plenty of Moslems here still to take action against. And I say that even though I am a Moslem.”

  The film director looked at him closely. “You say that because you are a Moslem,” he told him. “But we cannot put ourselves on that level.”

  The conversation ended on this not entirely friendly note. A moment later packets of betel were passed around. I promptly broke a tooth, withdrew from the company and went some distance away into the garden. While I, in the interests of science, was examining the mouthful of partially chewed betel leaves and areca nut, trying to find the pieces of bicuspid, the Egyptian came up to me, his face a study in scorn.

  “They are afraid of the Moslems. That’s the real reason,” he whispered. Whether he was right or wrong I was neither qualified nor momentarily disposed to say, but it was a classical exposition of the two opposing moral viewpoints – two concepts of behavior which cannot quickly be reconciled.

  Obviously it is a gigantic task to make a nation out of a place like India, what with Hindus, Moslems, Parsees, Jainists, Jews, Catholics and Protestants, some of whom may speak the arbitrarily imposed national idiom of Hindi, but most of whom are more likely to know Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Urdu, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam or some other tongue. One wonders whether any sort of unifying project can ever be undertaken, or, indeed, whether it is even desirable.

  When you come to the border between two provinces you often find bars across the road, and you are obliged to undergo a thorough inspection of your luggage. As in the United States, there is a strict control of the passage of liquor between wet and dry districts, but that is not the extent of the examination.

  Sample of conversation at the border on the Mercara-Cannanore highway:

  Customs officer: “What is in there?”

  Bowles: “Clothing.”

  “And in that?”

  “Clothing.”

  “And in all those?”

  “Clothing.”

  “Open all, please.”

  After eighteen suitcases
have been gone through carefully: “My God, man! Close them all. I could charge duty for all of these goods, but you will never be able to do business with these things here anyway. The Moslem men are too clever.”

  “But I’m not intending to sell my clothes.”

  “Shut the luggage. It is duty-free, I tell you.”

  A professor from Raniket in North India arrived at the hotel here the other day, and we spent a good part of the night sitting on the window seat in my room that overlooks the sea, talking about what one always talks about here: India. Among the many questions I put to him was one concerning the reason why so many of the Hindu temples in South India prohibit entry to nonHindus, and why they have military guards at the entrances. I imagined I knew the answer in advance: fear of Moslem disturbances. Not at all, he said. The principal purpose was to keep out certain Christian missionaries. I expressed disbelief.

  “Of course,” he insisted. “They come and jeer during our rituals, ridicule our sacred images.”

  “But even if they were stupid enough to want to do such things,” I objected, “their sense of decorum would keep them from behaving like that.”

  He merely laughed. “Obviously you don’t know them.”

  The post office here is a small stifling room over a shop, and it is full of boys seated on straw mats. The postmaster, a tiny old man who wears large diamond earrings and gold-rimmed spectacles, and is always naked to the waist, is also a professor; he interrupts his academic work to sell an occasional stamp. At first contact his English sounds fluent enough, but soon one discovers that it is not adapted to conversation, and that one can scarcely talk to him. Since the boys are listening, he must pre- tend to be omniscient; therefore he answers promptly with more or less whatever phrase comes into his head.

  Yesterday I went to post a letter by airmail to Tangier. “Tanjore,” he said, adjusting his spectacles. “That will be four annas.” (Tanjore is in South India, near Trichinopoly.) I explained that I hoped my letter would be going to Tangier, Morocco.