by Paul Theroux
The drunks were snoring, the lights blazing in their eyes. The women had removed their leather coats and were wrapped in quilts. Soon everyone was asleep, even me.
Samarkand was a jolting stop at two in the morning. I could have gotten out and looked for a man with a jalopy, but I was half asleep and cold. The drunks, still drunk, were dragging themselves out of the compartment. Two more women got on. I glanced at the man in the luggage hole, and he waved an I'm all right signal to me and ducked his head, so I did not have to change places after all.
Nine of us in a four-person compartment, but it was orderly and safe nonetheless. Dirty, though, and smelly too—everyone sleeping in their clothes, the windows shut, wet boots steaming under the seats, stinky luggage, old leather jackets piled in a corner, chicken grease and bread crumbs and grated carrot littering the table. Filthy compartment, gracious people, no hassle: the railway experience of the Eastern Star.
The women were up early making breakfast—boiled eggs, pickled cabbage, chunks of hard bread. Did I want some? Yes, I said, and there we sat, rolling past Chinaz and Yangiyol, still nine of us, friends after a long night, entering the big city.
Shimoly Station—North Station—was one of the largest railway stations I saw on my entire trip, possibly the grandest, lovely even, and swept clean by old women with straw brooms. A ribbon of Uzbek motifs in bright mosaics ran around the top-story façade of this palatial building, which the Soviets had built as a monument to their power and influence in this, the third-largest city in the Soviet Union, now the capital of independent Uzbekistan.
For me it was the end of the line, the first leg of my trip. From here to India or Pakistan, the only overland route crossed the most isolated mountain passes in the world and the antagonistic fastness of the Islamic valleys that produced Al Qaeda recruits and opium growers—perhaps a route to avoid, because it was off the map, beyond the reach of any government or any law but its own, a place of suspicious villages where every woman was veiled and every man armed. It was possibly the most inaccessible area on earth: the Pamir Valley, Waziristan, the NorthWest Frontier, where the Wali of Swat held court. Osama bin Laden was last seen there, but how would any outsider know more than that? There was no road, only a network of mountain footpaths. The nearest railway was the line in Tajikistan that went nowhere except from Dushanbe to Termiz on the border of Afghanistan—nothing helpful to me between Tashkent and Amritsar, though there was a short direct flight.
Spring had come to Tashkent: daffodils in the city gardens, pale sunshine, cherry blossoms, and, as in Georgia and Azerbaijan, people gathered in the parks and gardens, the men to sell the family silver and hawk postcards, the women to prostitute themselves.
"Take me," a young woman said, and pursed her lips to make a kissing sound.
"Tomorrow," I said, so as not to be rude.
On the next corner: "Streep shaw, meester?"
"No, thank you."
"Dreenks?"
"No, thank you."
They were also selling old watches, chewing gum, bathroom fixtures, Soviet memorabilia, candelabra. A man from distant Chukchi offered me a walrus penis and some indigenous ivory carvings. Murat and Zahir specialized in Christian art; it seemed to be a niche market for enterprising Muslims. I bought another icon, for $100.
Rauf, at his stall of pirated videos, was studying English. Like Murat and Zahir and most other Uzbeks I met, he was eager to emigrate to the United States; like them, he hated the war in Iraq. Becoming an American did not interest Rauf much; he seemed to dislike America, but he wanted badly to go to America.
"Business very bad here, but worse in Samarkand," he said.
He was filling in the blanks in an exercise book.
Beside Can you swim? he wrote slowly, No, I cannot swim.
I picked it up. I read the next question: "Do you like to watch TV?"
"Yes, I like."
"Like what?"
"Watch TV."
"Yes, I like to watch TV."
"Yes, I like to watch TV."
I sat down. I read another one: "What did you do last night?"
"With my friends, we listen the music," he said.
"Do you own a car?"
"No, I am not have car?"
I pretended to read a question, saying, "Do you like George Bush?"
"I am not," he said, and stammered with fury, "I am not like Meester Bush President."
Rauf had a sister in Miami who had a green card. He lusted after one himself, and though he was hustling cheap videos and CDs at a stall, he wanted to get out of Uzbekistan and work in America. This eagerness to emigrate to the West seemed to soften people's attitudes towards me—I was never the object of personal hostility, except from the occasional customs official.
It seemed I was the only foreign traveler in Tashkent. I was the only guest in my huge hotel. I never saw another tourist in this vast city. And when at last I went to Tashkent Airport for the flight to the Punjab, I was the only person checking in, the only passenger boarding the plane. It was the plane's one stop, the Uzbek Airways flight from Birmingham to Amritsar, every male passenger a turbaned Sikh, every woman in a sari.
I left Tashkent feeling lucky that I had gotten here unscathed from London, that my close encounters had been with good people. The hassles and delays were part of all travel. The revelation was that the old world still existed. The airport had been empty; but the marshaling yards of Shimoly Station were busy with shunting trains, and the station itself was crowded with people going all over the country, and they were taking the train because they were poor.
As for me, here as elsewhere, I felt I was the fortunate traveler.
THE SHAN-E-PUNJAB EXPRESS TO DELHI
BECAUSE IT WAS A SACRED CITY, a howling but deaf and discontinuous mob, mostly pilgrims, kicked along the streets and lanes of Amritsar. These sun-baked streets were thick with stinging dust and smelly traffic, and the traffic included sacred cows, three-legged dogs, old cars, twisted bikes, scooter rickshaws, pedicabs, the usual trotting two-wheeled pony carts—tongas and gharries—and rusted buses. There were heaps of sorted and pawed-through garbage; the sidewalk overspill of fix-it men and their antique tools—spoke-shaves, chisels, cobbling awls, soldering irons, treadle-powered sewing machines; blue exhaust fumes, oily dirt, fresh dung, the fountain in the middle of the miserable road with its sign, Amritsar Improvement Trust, the temples so attractive to beggars because holy precincts encouraged the giving of alms; and loud noise trumpeting the simple but firmly held Indian delusion that honking horns sped the flow of traffic.
The point about the crowds of excited pilgrims in a sacred place is that they are giddy just from physically being there. Or more than giddy—chattering, skipping, giggling, goggle-eyed with rapture in this, the center of Sikhdom, all of these turbaned men and fluttering women hurrying to the Golden Temple...
Welcome to India and the proof that, as Borges once wrote, "India is larger than the world." On the surface, nothing had changed in Amritsar. From what I could gather, the country was no different from what I had seen three decades before. This prospect delighted me. It was a relief, the mildly orchestrated free-for-all of India—something of a madhouse with a touch of anarchy, yes, but an asylum in which strangers are wel come, even inquisitorial ones like me; where anything is possible, the weather is often pleasant, and the spicy food clears your sinuses. Most of India embodies Blake's dictum that "energy is eternal delight." All you need is a strong stomach, a little money, and a tolerance for crowds. And a way of lifting your gaze upward and moving on, so that you don't see the foreground—in India the foreground is generally horrific. The reality was that Amritsar, like all Indian cities, looked as though it had been made by human hands, skinny ones, and so the result had a look of improvisation, faulty and fragile and somehow incomplete.
The horror is possibly true, or perhaps all illusion, as some Indians believe, smiling and saying, "True and not true, sar. Anekantavada, sar. The many-sidedness of rea
lity, sar."
The austere torpor of the Stans had been wearing me down—the humorlessness and paranoia of a police state, no outward indication of struggle, a kind of beaten-down acceptance. Acceptance is not an Indian trait. In India, no one takes no for an answer: policemen are jeered at, authority exists to be defied, walls are erected to be defaced, and everyone is talking, often in English. Shoeshine boys, rickshaw wallahs, taxi drivers, beggars, businessmen, shopkeepers, and Surinder ("I am agent, sar") Singh with his gimpy leg and his practiced patter, all of them demanding attention. Surinder had assured me of a ticket to Delhi, though the train was full. He had connections, though his ragged clothes did not inspire confidence.
When I remarked that Amritsar hadn't changed, Indians clicked their tongues or sucked their teeth in annoyance. They insisted it had been modernized. I never saw where or how. It is a border city, only a few miles from the Pakistan frontier, and consequently not a place for investment. Besides, being a holy city in India is plenty, since Indians are instinctive pilgrims, liking the ritual, the spiritual boost, and the companionship of a pilgrimage, which always involves a great number of people, a long train ride, loud music, and platters of food.
I was at the main railway station with Surinder.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Guess."
"Please tell me, sar."
"Go ahead, guess. What do you think?"
"No, this is very serious, sar," he said, snapping at me for my facetiousness. "You must tell me now."
I told him.
"You are lucky," he said, sounding resentful. "Very lucky today."
"Why would that be?"
"You qualify for Old Age Exception."
This meant 100 rupees off the 400-rupee fare to Delhi, $7.50 instead of $10, because I was over sixty. And a 25-rupee supplement for a seat, which required a large form to be filled out in triplicate—sticky blue copies and perforations. In the age of computers, which Indians excelled at—so I was told—many government forms were still filled out by hand in triplicate, on thick sewn-together pads, with flimsy sheets separated by carbon paper, using blunt pencils, following the printed direction Press Hard.
I searched for social changes. Joginder's greasy café and pastry shop was now Joginder's greasy Internet café and pastry shop and looked two hundred years old. And the brick prewar railway station, which I'd last seen in 1973, was seriously defaced by foot-high graffiti in Hindi and English. I recognized the word Zindabad—strike, a commonly heard term in India—and was told the entire building had been scribbled on during the strike that had taken place a month before, but painted so professionally the angry slogans looked like advertising—which they were, promoting a mass sit-down. That had passed.
"But they will repeat it. So the writing will stay."
***
IN A WORLD OF CHANGE, India is exceptional. Everyone talks about India's great leap, Indian modernity, Indian millionaires, and "You must see the transformation of Bangalore." "The Indian miracle" was a boasting rant in every Western newspaper and magazine, but on the evidence of Amritsar this assertion was a crock, not just a joke in bad taste but the cruelest satire. It seemed to me that little had changed except the size of the population, an unfeedable, unhousable, uncontainable 1.3 billion people, not many of them saying "We are modern now" because more than a third of them were working for a dollar a day. Indians boast of the miracle, but when I mentioned to entrepreneurs the 400 million people living below the poverty line, they just bobbled their heads and hummed or else went silent, darkening in resentment that I raised the question and refusing to tell me what they paid their employees.
Yet the country still ran, in its clunky fashion, all its mends and patches showing, and what looked like chaos in India was actually a kind of order, like furious atoms spinning. Surinder Singh merely appeared to be a tout and an opportunist. In fact he was part of the complex system of Indian ticket buying. As I was congratulating myself on having secured a $10 seat on the express to Delhi, he showed up again, demanding the equivalent of an additional $10.
"What's that for?"
"Baksheesh, sar." A bribe.
But he had kept his word.
No one succeeds in India without exploiting someone else, defrauding him, sitting on his head, twisting his arm, getting him to work for 12 cents an hour. The news is all about the winners—big business, call centers, manufacturing, textiles, all the rest of it. But for there to be big winners in India, there have to be bigger losers. It is the system.
Who shares in the wealth? In the Punjab, I heard of a powerful Indian lawyer who earned $1.5 million a year and still paid his driver $20 a week and got his shoes shined for 25 cents. Later in my trip I met a lawyer, a woman, who had been offered, by an American firm, a guaranteed $1 million a year plus profits on contracts, but she held out for more and eventually joined a rival firm that offered her almost $2 million. Nothing wrong with that, Indians say; it is an example of market forces, and the conventional Indian response is to say how such tycoons are great philanthropists. It is the Indian paradox: driving hard bargains, underpaying people, becoming a corporate slave driver, and later these same desperate employees will qualify for handouts.
The losers in India have their revenge, always, as I saw all over Amritsar: not just the strikes and sit-downs and go-slows to torment employers, but the visible fact that the biggest, fastest limousine is forced to travel at a crawl behind the pony carts and the skinny men on their bicycle rickshaws. That is the other truth about India, that so much of it is a moral lesson, a set of simple visuals; so much of it is vivid symbolism, the cows and the rickshaws and men pulling wagons, slowing the progress of limos and delivery trucks. The truck might be delivering computers, God knows, but the computers won't get through any quicker than the man with ten sacks of beans in his wheelbarrow.
By chance I met Amar Singh. He owned a car. He had functioned for years as a go-between for journalists. He said, "We're a big power now."
"In what sense?" I asked.
"Better than before. Much stronger."
"Give me an example."
"We're like America now," he said.
In Amritsar this statement was debatable, but I was impressed by his confidence. No one would have said that thirty years ago. Yet in order to say such things you have to ignore the mangy cows, the stalled traffic, the squatters, the beggars, the crowds, the dirt, the squalor.
It was a relief to me that Amritsar was not very different. I liked it as it was—progressing, obviously, but so immersed in its past and its pieties that it could not change much. Because it was a holy city, its visitors put up with more inconvenience: dirt and distance and noise were the price of sanctity and blessings.
I had walked for quite a while, but then hailed a taxi, and it was Amar Singh who drove me slowly through the crowds. We passed a sign saying Service to Humanity Is True Service to God.
I wrote it down in my notebook.
Amar Singh said, "You're a journalist?"
"Sort of."
We went to the Golden Temple, but the crowd was so large there was no way a car could get near. I left Amar Singh and walked the last half mile with all the skipping pilgrims—good-humored and frisky yatris, because they were near the object of their long yatra. Some were stepping out of their shoes and sandals and tiptoeing on the scalded bricks this hot day at the entrance to the temple; others were flinging scarves into a big barrel, or selecting scarves from it to put on their heads.
"What is this?" I asked.
"It is the system," a man said.
"What is the system?"
"Cloth on head for temple."
"No open head," another man elaborated. "No exceptions."
He meant: No exceptions for ferringhis—foreigners. But I was wearing a hat.
A Punjabi woman interrupted to say, "Your hat is acceptabubble."
The label of my hat, a style called the Traveler, said Locke's The Hatter, St James, London W1—surely
suitable headgear for the Holy of Holies?
I walked with a tramping crowd through a trough of water meant to purify our feet, but because it had been walked through by thousands of pilgrims, the water was foul—green and viscous, like swamp water. This was the usual thing—if a pool or a tank or a trough was considered sacred, it didn't matter whether it was stagnant. The holier the pool, the more foul-smelling it was.
Never mind. This was the India I remembered, and I was grateful to be here. The Golden Temple looked golder, brighter, more effulgent. I walked down the hot marble causeway with the happy pilgrims, but because I didn't have the faith, it was just a glittering palace of roistering Sikhs, a feature, a sight to see—the crowds interesting me more than the gold domes and chanting priests.
"Get over here!" and "This is so neat, Ma!"
Sikhs with American accents, Sikhs with the west London whine, Sikhs from California, Sikhs from Scotland and Canada. I glided around the hot walkways for a while, made a circuit of the sacred pool, found my way back to the entrance and my shoes, and then hiked to the car.
"Do you know Mark Tully?" the driver Amar Singh asked.
Mark Tully, known in India as Tully Sahib, was for many years the BBC correspondent in India—a much-loved man for his sympathetic but scrupulous reporting, his truthfulness, his love for the country.
"I met him once," I said. "He's a great journalist and a friend of India."
"I took him around here during the Blue Star action," Amar Singh said.
So this taxi driver whom I had met by chance at the railway station turned out to have been one of the resourceful operatives during Amritsar's crisis in 1984.
Operation Blue Star was a military assault by the Indian army on the Golden Temple—an unspeakable, unjustified defilement of the holiest shrine in Sikhdom, Sikhs said. It was disastrous: heavy artillery in a small overcrowded town. It came about because Sikh militants had occupied the towers and cellars and kiosks of the temple. They were part of a revivalist movement that had also called for a separate Sikh state, to be named Khalistan ("Land of the Pure"). Led by a Sikh preacher named Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, this action was watched closely by Sikhs worldwide. Bhindranwale (a prophet to some Sikhs, a pest to nearly everyone else) was disruptive; he called for the murder of Hindus and moderate Sikhs. His beard reached to his waist, he was said to be charismatic, he was well armed, and he wouldn't budge from the temple he occupied with many of his followers and an arsenal of weapons in May 1984.