Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  Feeling that I had shocked him (I was simplifying something that Leonard Woolf had once written), I said, "And I sometimes notice that when a man is looking at you and telling a lie, he touches his eye or his face."

  "That is so!" Kapoorchand said. "There is so much untruth in the world. That is another reason I will become a sadhu. My brothers did so. My father became a saint." He fumbled with his wallet and drew out a small faded photograph. "Here is his picture."

  Even faded and in black and white, the photo showed a man with a kindly face, gray-bearded, a white turban on his head.

  "First he waited for some years. When he saw that I was settled, he said that he would become a saint. He lived for fifteen years as a saint."

  "How did he go about this?"

  "He came to me. He said, 'Look after your mother.' I did so. I do so still. He then renounced all worldly things. He gave up shoes, going barefoot only. Sleeping on floor. Owning nothing. He became a sadhu, a holy man. He went about by walking in bare feet. Simple clothes, living in ashrams, going from place to place, sometimes walking fifteen kilometers a day. He could not visit me, but I could visit him, if he allowed it."

  "Was he happy?"

  "Very happy."

  And Kapoorchand explained that another branch of the Jains, the Digambara sect, renounced clothes, too. They kept to the forests, living naked, appearing in public only every dozen years or so for the great spiritual gathering, with ritual bathing in the Ganges and other rivers, called Kumbh Mela.

  "You mentioned that you meditate."

  "Three hours daily, in morning time. I recite Jain scriptures. I say prayers."

  "Tell me one. I want to write it down."

  He said, or rather intoned,

  I forgive all beings.

  May all beings forgive me.

  I have friendship with all,

  And vengeance with none.

  He went to sleep soon after that, while I scribbled, thinking: This man is the perfect traveling companion.

  ***

  JAIPUR JUNCTION STATION in the middle of the night was crowded with people, though in India it was hard to tell the travelers from the squatters. Even in the dark hours of the morning there were chatterers and tea drinkers under the glaring lights, family groups huddled over pots of food, some people sleeping in heaps, stretched out like mummies, or like corpses in body bags. Others were haggling over tickets, and dawn was far off.

  "Get a coolie" were Kapoorchand's parting words.

  I left him to his arduous pursuit of virtue. I didn't need a coolie. I needed a taxi. A group of touts and drivers, tugging my sleeves, followed me outside, and I chose the oldest of them, on the assumption that he would be the most reliable, and we settled on the fare before I got into his old car. He drove me into the darkness, but kept his word. And even at that hour I found a welcome at the hotel, and a glass of juice, and a cozy room; I slept soundly.

  I had stayed in this hotel before, the Rambagh Palace, but it had been barer then, a big echoey place of marble halls. In the morning I saw it was now luxurious.

  "I did not see the inside of a train station, I did not take a train or board a bus, until I was in my late teens," an Indian woman told me at the Rambagh Palace.

  She was in her early forties, a well-brought-up woman from a good family who had always gone to school in a chauffeur-driven car. "I never saw a poor person. I never saw a slum. I never took public transport. I didn't know how to buy a ticket. Home to school, school to home—that was the routine. But one day I rebelled. I was about seventeen or eighteen. I told the driver, 'I'm walking home.' He followed me in the car. He was afraid for me, and afraid of what my father would say. But walking home, and then taking trains later, I finally saw what India was really like. And I was so shocked. I had no idea such poor people existed in India."

  In the market and antique shops of Jodhpur I had seen a number of reverse-glass paintings that had attracted me, and one had bewitched me. This was a painting of an Indian Nautch girl—a dancing girl—caught in a sinuous move, intentionally teasing, probably painted in the middle or late nineteenth century, with Chinese characters in black brushstrokes on the wood-slatted back, and set in a decaying frame. I wasn't sizing it up. I was teased, indeed falling in love. It was an old feeling.

  The collector's instinct, which is also a powerful appetite, begins with a glimpse of something singular, and a smile of recognition. The technique of painting on the back of a pane of glass, building up effects that were visible when viewed from the front, was European in origin (a cheaper and quicker version of stained glass); but the style of this piece was Chinese, the subject secular and unusually sensual. Europeans in the eighteenth century introduced this technique to India, where it flourished. The Chinese had learned reverse-glass painting from early Jesuits in China at about the same time or earlier, and some itinerant Chinese artists eventually reached India, where they produced many of these secular pictures. Portraits of royals and dancing girls and scenes from the Ramayana had been painted, and Indian artists had begun creating their own reverse-glass paintings—theirs were of Krishna and Shiva, Ganesh and Hanuman—in brighter colors, with highlights of gold and silver.

  What entranced me was that, though these paintings were superb, they were not treasures in the classic sense, not yet very popular with the big-money buyers. They were beloved objects from a simple household, created by an individual hand, someone with enthusiasm and vision.

  I bought the painting of the Nautch girl (probably done by a Chinese painter in Gujarat) and looked for more. It was not easy to find others, but I was delighted by the variety I encountered—religious, mythical, erotic—and by the out-of-the-way places where I found them.

  Traveling with, say, something like glass painting in mind (it could also be lime pots, weavings, tribal earrings, Deccan daggers, or the bestiary of molded brass handles from palanquins), it is possible to make an amateur study merely by wandering in the bazaars. Yet another pleasure of traveling in India is the dawdling in antique shops, in markets and museums, talking to dealers and collectors and connoisseurs. After you've seen hundreds of the paintings, some dusty, some cracked, taken out of drawers and attics and cupboards, you begin to develop an eye, to distinguish the real from the fake, the good from the hastily contrived ones.

  In the stifling attic of a shop in the Jaipur bazaar, near the pink façade of the Hawa Mahal, bristling with windows—the Palace of the Winds—Mr. Kailash was showing me some glass paintings. They were too crusted and cracked and neglected-looking not to be genuine, but when I mentioned the cracks, the man began to hector me.

  "Like human body, sar! You have feet and ankles and knees and elbows, all attached, but also all separate. Not true, sar?"

  "True," I said.

  "God made us this way," Kailash Sahib said, holding the painting in my face. "The painting is like body. It requires—what? Yes, operation! It is normal, sar. And it is rare image. Without crack it would be lakhs of rupees, but this is small money."

  After some haggling I bought it, and Kailash Sahib said he would send it to me in a few months.

  "You are lucky to find such beautiful painting piece. Please write in visitors' book."

  I wrote my name and, We bargained. We both won.

  "You are also lucky that today is the first day of Gangaur festival. As you leave here you can see the procession. Go to City Palace, it will be wonderful."

  The Gangaur festival celebrates the union of Shiva and Parvati, whose marital bliss is an inspiration to Indian couples and who are also noted for "lovemaking so intense that it shakes the cosmos, and the gods become frightened." This celebration would unfold over eighteen days in this month of Chaitra (March-April). Most Indian festivals were no less noisy and disruptive than any other aspect of Indian life, so it was hard for an alien like me to tell when the pageant actually started or finished. The wonderful part of this one was that cars and trucks had been diverted from the route of the procession, so that
the parade flowed uninterrupted past the Palace of the Winds, the ancient observatory, and the lanes and boulevards of the gated city.

  Forty elephants, painted with flowers and Hindu symbols in colored chalk, were draped in red banners, silk scarves fluttering from their tusks. There were dancers whose sensual movements and hip thrusts could be seen even through their billowing skirts; a boy on stilts fifteen feet in the air; a band playing Indian oompah music in syncopation with blatting brass; yoked bullocks pulling gun carriages mounted with cannons; and four camels with large-bore guns mounted on their humps. And landaus and painted carriages with flute players inside, and prancing horses, and more elephants and dancers and bands, and at last a palanquin with an image of Parvati ("she who dwells in the mountains") on top.

  Onlookers began tossing coins at the image and the bearers of the palanquin, which was a litter ten feet long, two men supporting each of its four enormous handles. The men tried to shield their heads from the shower of coins, and as soon as they moved on there was a scramble for the coins that had bounced off Parvati and the heads of the bearers—another mob scene, adults shoving children aside to snatch at the coins in the road.

  That was when I slipped away and began walking with the rest of the dispersing crowd on streets that were free of traffic. It was a pleasant and productive walk. I stopped and drank a Kingfisher beer as the evening coolness descended. And down one wide street I saw a pharmacy and bought vitamins and a bottle of sleeping pills and some more capsules for the gout that occasionally plagued me—total cost, 170 rupees, $4.20. A prescription is seldom necessary in India, where drugs are cheaper than candy.

  And after a mile or so a scooter rickshaw swept next to me and said, "Get on, sar. I will take you home."

  ***

  "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 the 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 ... 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..."

  This paragraph, copied verbatim from The Great Railway Bazaar, doesn't need quotation marks around it because not much at the monkey temple in Galta Gorge had changed in the thirty-three years since I d last seen it. It was larger but just as ruinous, looking ancient: that was the Indian way. Instead of Mr. Gopal, I had Mohan with me. Mohan wanted to show me a miraculous image somehow imprinted in the rock face on a cliffside temple, high above.

  A new pool had been dug, and now there were two, one for men and boys, the newer one a zenana, strictly for women wearing saris, for modesty's sake, but they were drenched and clingy, so the effect was the opposite. They splashed among naked girls of six or seven. Both tanks brimmed with foul-looking water in which the pilgrims thrashed, dousing themselves and drinking—more like a hot evening at a public swimming pool than a day at a holy shrine, all the boys laughing and splashing, jumping, diving, some of them swimming and gargling under a spout of water issuing from the mouth of a carved marble cow.

  Seeing me writing in my notebook, one of the small boys hauled himself out of the tank and said, "Please, sar. Give me pen."

  "Why do you want it?"

  "I am schoolboy, sar."

  I gave him my cheap extra pen from the hotel and ascended the stairs, following Mohan.

  "Monkeys," I said. "I hate monkeys."

  "Sacred monkeys," Mohan said, as though this made a difference when they bared their teeth at me. Decades ago I had taken them to be baboons, but these were rhesus monkeys, big and small, with mangy fur and wicked eyes. Once, seeing monkeys like this, Paul Bowles had written that "their posteriors looked like sunset on a grocer's calendar."

  The monkey god temple was a cave-like shelter at the top of the gorge. I climbed up, as I had all those years ago, and seeing a priest squatting nearby, I left my notebook and pen outside—it seemed sacrilegious to bring writing implements into the inner sanctum.

  But no sooner had I gone inside than I heard, "Sahib! Sahib!"

  The biggest monkey had stolen my small notebook and pen. I shouted and the creature dropped the notebook, but he skittered about ten feet away and began gnawing the rubber plunger off the top of my pen.

  I threw some peanuts at him. He flung the pen aside and went for them.

  "Good karma," Mohan said of my feeding the monkey. And he showed me a stain on the temple wall. "Image of Hanuman is miracle. You see it is natural in rock."

  The lumpy rock wall, identified as a monkey's head and shoulders, had been outlined in orange.

  "Six hundred years old," Mohan said. "Not less."

  From this height I could see that Galta was much bigger than it had been before; what had seemed to me a dusty shrine in a ravine was now a large complex of temples. Far above it on the ridge was a sun temple, for the Surya devotees. The spitting and splashing—explicitly forbidden before on a comical sign—was now tolerated, as was the screeching and swimming in the tanks, and the sight of women with wet clinging saris, and small naked girls laughing at the edge of the pool and poised like water sprites.

  As I passed them again, the women were floating small waterborne dishes, each one bearing a candle flame—in Hindu belief, a deepak, or holy flame—as a white and brown heron stalked along a low shelf, from time to time dipping its beak in the water.

  "Hanuman is my god," Mohan said. "I do puja every day at my temple before I go on duty. Also my wife. Also my daughter."

  Indians boasted of how much had changed in their country. It was modern, it was wealthier, "even rickshaw wallahs have mobile phones"—all that. But in Galta Gorge I realized that nothing had changed. The place was bigger but just as dirty; more people, more monkeys, the same pieties.

  And then, after lunch one day in Jaipur, I decided to leave. Thanks to the train, it was easy to do. I went to the station, where the train was waiting. I got on. The train left. I simply evaporated.

  NIGHT TRAIN TO MUMBAI

  THE "SUPERFAST"EXPRESS

  THE LOVELY HEART of Jaipur is what the tourist sees, a pink princely city of temples and palaces—painted elephants, the marvelous fort, all of it dusty but beautiful, like Rajasthani women in their gorgeous silks and gold-trimmed veils. But the train traveler sees a different Jaipur and begins to understand the city's true size. It sprawls to the horizon, a city of three million, mostly living in one- and two-story houses. Thirty minutes after leaving the station, and way past the airport, we were still passing the outer suburb of distant Sanganer—decrepit, but even so, a town full of temples that was entered through a triple gateway. A few hours later, the train moved through a yellow plain, flat and dry as far as I could see, with a scattering of trees. Some of it was plowed, awaiting planting, and flocks of goats browsed in the grass. But really it was a great expanse of wide-open country. In this nation of more than a billion people—utter emptiness.

  "Superfast" might have been a misnomer for this train—eighteen hours of travel, a two o clock departure from Jaipur, arriving in Mumbai at eight the next morning—but the euphemism was consoling. I had to catch up on note taking, and I was becoming absorbed in The Great Mutiny. It was a trip of 720 miles.

  Mr. Gupta, my compartment mate, was being transferred by his employer, a telecom company, to Mumbai.

  "The transfer was unexpected and very stressful. I m taking the train
because I need a rest," Mr. Gupta said. "Planes are a problem. You hurry and then you wait. Sometimes the plane is circling for half an hour. Ridiculous."

  "You have a place to stay in Mumbai?"

  "I will stay in a hotel for one month. Then I'll find a place and my wife and children will follow." He was making a call to his wife as he spoke, and when he hung up he said, "So how do you find India? Mostly friendly?"

  "Oh, yes. No problems."

  "This is Sawai Madhopur. There's a tiger sanctuary near here, at Ranthambore."

  "Sanctuary" might have been stretching it, I found out later: only about twenty tigers, a dwindling number because of persistent poaching. The area had once been the private game reserve of the Jaipur royals, and many of the animals had ended up stuffed and peering from the ornate walls of the Rambagh Palace and the Amber Fort.

  We plunged into a landscape of long lumpy hills, brown and dry and treeless, at the edge of farmed valleys. Women in beautiful yellow and orange saris hacked at gardens with heavy hoes and carried water jars on their heads, as in the old aquatints, walking with stately grace down narrow paths, past goats and chickens.

  Later in the afternoon groups of people were gathered in wheat fields for harvesting, some bent double to slash at the stalks, others tying them into bundles—not a single sign of mechanized intervention. It all looked ancient. And that was only a matter of miles from Kota Junction, for though the surrounding villages were among the simplest I d seen in India, Kota itself was an industrial city, with an atomic plant not far away, and so modern as to be intensely polluted (guidebook: in 1992 "levels of radioactivity were way above 'safe' levels"). That was part of the panorama: a long hot afternoon in rural India that included ancient plowshares, wheat harvested by hand, water jars carried from the village well, and nearby an atomic energy plant leaking radioactivity.

  We were soon among the plowshares and the harvesters, and in the twilight a group of laborers in puja postures, an Indian version of Millet's The Angelus.