The Great Railway Bazaar

by Paul Theroux

  ‘The first thing I’m going to do in India is get a haircut; then no one will know.’

  It seemed a cruel fate. He spoke no Indian language, his parents were dead, and he was not quite sure how to get to Bombay, where he had some distant relatives who seldom replied to letters unless he enclosed money. He was one of those colonial anomalies, more English than he cared to admit, but uneasy in the only country he understood.

  ‘In England they ‘were always staring at me. I hated it.’

  ‘I get stared at here,’ I said.

  ‘How do you like it?’ I could see he was reproaching me with my colour; after all, he was almost home.

  I said, ‘I rather enjoy it.’

  ‘Sahib.’ It was Rashid, with my suitcase. ‘We are approaching.’

  ‘He calls you sahib,’ said the Indian. He looked disgusted. ‘He’s afraid of you, that’s why.’

  ‘Sahib,’ said Rashid. But he was speaking to the Indian. ‘Now, please show me your ticket.’

  The Indian was travelling second class. Rashid evicted him from first as the train drew in.

  At Lahore Junction I stepped out (Rashid was at my side apologizing for the train’s being late) into a city that was familiar: it matched a stereotype in my memory. My image of the Indian city derives from Kipling, and it was in Lahore that Kipling came of age as a writer. Exaggerating the mobs, the vicious bazaar, the colour and confusion, the Kipling of the early stories and Kim is really describing Lahore today, that side of it beyond the Mall where processions of rickshaws, pony carts, hawkers, and veiled women fill the narrow lanes and sweep you in their direction. The Anarkali Bazaar and the walled city, with its fort and mosques, have retained the distracted exoticism Kipling mentions, though now, with a hundred years of repetition, it is touched with horror.

  ‘Bad girls here,’ said the tonga driver when he dropped me in a seedy district of the old city; but I saw none, and nothing resembling a Lahore house. The absence of women in Pakistan, all those cruising males, had an odd effect on me. I found myself staring, with other similarly idle men, at garish pictures of film stars, and I began to think that the strictures of Islam would quickly make me a fancier of the margins of anatomy, thrilling at especially trim ankles, seeking a wink behind a veil, or watching for a response in the shoulders of one of those shrouded forms. Islam’s denials seemed capable of turning the most normal soul into a foot fetishist, and as if to combat this the movie posters lampooned the erotic: fat girls in boots struggling helplessly with hairy, leering men; tormented women clutching their breasts, Anglo-Indians (regarded as ‘fast’) swinging their bums and crooning into microphones. The men in Lahore stroll with their eyes upturned to these cartoon fantasies.

  ‘They invite you out to eat,’ an American told me. This was at the spectacular fort, and we were both admiring the small marble pavilion, called Naulakha (Kipling named his house outside Brattleboro, Vermont, after it, because it was so expensive to build: ‘naulakha’ means 900,000). The American was agitated. He said, ‘You finish eating and they start eyeballing your chick. It’s always your chick they’re after. The chick’s strung out. “Gee, Mohammed, why don’t you have any pockets in your dhoti?” “We are not having any pockets, miss” – that kind of crap. One guy – this really pissed me off – he takes me aside and says, “Five minutes! Five minutes! That’s all I want with her!” But would he let me have his chick for five minutes? You’ve gotta be joking.’

  The order in Lahore is in the architecture, the moghul and colonial splendour. All around it are crowds of people and vehicles, and their dereliction makes the grandeur emphatic, as the cooking fat and cow-dung makes the smells of perfume and joss-sticks keener. To get to the Shalimar Gardens I had to pass through miles of congested streets of jostling people with the starved look of predators. I shouldered my way through the venereal township of Begampura; but inside the gardens it is peaceful, and though it has been stripped of its marble, and the reflecting pools are dark brown, the gardens have the order and shade – a sense of delicious refuge – that could not be very different from that imagined by Shah Jahan, when he laid them out in 1637. The pleasures of Lahore are old, and though one sees attempts everywhere, the Pakistanis have not yet succeeded in turning this beautiful city into a ruin.

  Ramadhan continued, and the restaurants were either closed or on emergency rations, eggs and tea. So I was forced into an unwilling fast too, hoping it wouldn’t drive me crazy as it manifestly did the Afghan and Pakistani. Instead of somnolence, hunger produced excitable, glassy-eyed individuals, some of whom quick-marched from alleyways to clutch my sleeve.

  ‘Pot – hashish – LSD.’

  ‘LSD?’ I said. ‘You sell LSD?’

  ‘Yes, why not? You come to my place. Also nice copper, silver, handicraft.’

  ‘I don’t want handicraft.’

  ‘You want hashish? One kilo twenty dollar.’

  It was tempting, but I preferred bottled mango juice, which was sweet and thick, and the curry puffs known as samosas. The samosas were always wrapped in pages from old school copybooks. I sat down, drank my juice, ate my samosa, and read the wrapper: ‘… the shearing force at any [grease mark] on the Beam is represented by the Vertical Distance between that Line and the Line CD.’

  There were forty-seven tables in the dining room of Faletti’s Hotel. I found them easy to count because I was the only diner present on the two evenings I ate there. The five waiters stood at various distances from me, and when I cleared my throat two would rush forward. Not wanting to disappoint them I asked them questions about Lahore, and in one of these conversations I learned that the Punjab Club was not far away. I thought it would be a good idea to have a postprandial snooker game, so on the second evening I was given directions by one of the waiters and set off for the club.

  I lost my way almost immediately in a district adjacent to the hotel where there were no street lights. My footsteps roused the watchdogs and as I walked these barking hounds leaped at fences and hedges. I have not conquered a childhood fear of strange dogs, and, although the trees smelled sweet and the night was cool, I had no idea where I was going. It was ten minutes before a car approached. I flagged it down.

  ‘You are coming from?’

  ‘Faletti’s Hotel.’

  ‘I mean your country.’

  ‘United States.’

  ‘You are most welcome,’ said the driver. ‘My name is Anwar. May I give you a lift?’

  ‘I’m trying to find the Punjab Club.’

  ‘Get in please,’ he said, and when I did, he said, ‘How are you please?’ This is precisely the way the posturing Ivan Turkin greets people in Chekhov’s story ‘Ionych’.

  Mr Anwar drove for another mile, telling me how fortunate it was that we should meet – there were a lot of thieves around at night, he said – and at the Punjab Club he gave me his card and invited me to his daughter’s wedding, which was one week away. I said I would be in India then.

  ‘Well, India is another story altogether,’ he said, and drove off.

  The Punjab Club, a bungalow behind a high hedge, was lighted and looked cosy, but it was completely deserted. I had imagined a crowded bar, a lot of cheerful drinkers, a snooker game in progress, a pair in the corner plotting adultery, waiters with trays of drinks, and chits flying back and forth. This could have been a clinic of some kind; there was not a soul in sight, but it had the atmosphere – and even the magazines – of a dentist’s waiting room. I saw what I wanted a few doors along a corridor: large red letters on the window read WAIT FOR THE STROKE, and in the shadows were two tables, the balls in position, ready for play under a gleaming rack of cues.

  ‘Yes?’ It was an elderly Pakistani, and he had the forlorn abstraction of a man interrupted in his reading. He wore a black bow tie, and the pocket of his shirt sagged with pens. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I just happened to be passing,’ I said. ‘I thought I might stop in. Do you have reciprocal privileges with any clubs in
London?’

  ‘No, not that I know of.’

  ‘Perhaps the manager would know.’

  ‘I am the manager,’ he said. ‘We used to have an arrangement with a club in London – many years ago.’

  ‘What was the name of it?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten, but I know the club is no longer in existence. What was it you wanted?’

  ‘A game of snooker.’

  ‘Who would you play with?’ He smiled. ‘There is no one here.’

  He showed me around, but the lighted empty rooms depressed me. The place was abandoned, like Faletti’s dining room with its forty-seven empty tables, like the district where there were only watchdogs. I said I had to go, and at the front door he said, ‘You might find a taxi over there, in the next road but one. Good night.’

  It was hopeless. I had walked about a hundred yards from the club and could not find the road, though I was going in the direction he had indicated. I could hear a dog growling behind a near-by hedge. Then I heard a car. It moved swiftly towards me and screeched to a halt. The driver got out and opened the back door for me. He said the manager had sent him to take me back to my hotel; he was afraid I’d get lost.

  I set off in search of a drink as soon as I got back to the hotel. It was still early, about ten o’clock, but I had not gone fifty yards when a thin man in striped pyjamas stepped from behind a tree. His eyes were prominent and lighted in the dusky triangle of his face.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘A drink.’

  ‘I get you a nice girl. Two hundred rupees. Good fucking.’ He said this with no more emotion than a man hawking razor blades.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Very young. You come with me. Good fucking.’

  ‘And good fucking to you,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for a drink.’

  He tagged along behind me, mumbling his refrain, and then at an intersection, by a park, he said. ‘Come with me – in here.’

  ‘In there?’

  ‘Yes, she is waiting.’

  ‘In those trees?’ It was black, unlighted and humming with crickets.

  ‘It is a park.’

  ‘You mean I’m supposed to do it there, under a tree?’

  ‘It is a good park, sahib!’

  A little farther on I was accosted again, this time by a young man who was smoking nervously. He caught my eye. ‘Anything you want?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A girl?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Boy?’

  ‘No, go away.’

  He hesitated, but kept after me. At last he said softly, ‘Take me.’

  A twenty-minute walk did not take me any closer to a bar. I turned, and, giving the pimps a wide berth, went back to the hotel. Under a tree in front three old men were hunched around a pressure lamp, playing cards. One saw me pass and called out, ‘Wait, sahib!’ He turned his cards face down and trotted over to me.

  ‘No,’ I said before he opened his mouth.

  ‘She’s very nice,’ he said.

  I kept walking.

  ‘All right, only two hundred and fifty rupees.’

  ‘I know where I can get one for two hundred.’

  ‘But this is in your room! I will bring her. She will stay until morning.’

  ‘Too much money. Sorry.’

  ‘Sahib! There are expenses! Ten rupees for your sweeper, ten also for your chowkidar, ten for your bearer, baksheesh here and there. If not, they will make trouble. Take her! She will be very nice. My girls are experienced in every way.’

  ‘Thin or fat?’

  ‘As you like. I have one, neither thin nor fat, but like this.’ He sketched a torso in the air with his fingers, suggesting plumpness. ‘About twenty-two or twenty-three. Speaks very good English. You will like her so much. Sahib, she is a trained nurse!’

  He was still calling out to me as I mounted the steps to the hotel’s verandah. It turned out that the only bar in Lahore was the Polo Room in my hotel. I had an expensive beer and fell into conversation with a young Englishman. He had been in Lahore for two months. I asked him what he did for amusement. He said there wasn’t very much to do, but he was planning to visit Peshawar. I told him Peshawar was quieter than Lahore. He said he was sorry to hear that because he found Lahore intolerable. He was bored, he said, but there was hope. ‘I’ve got an application pending at the club,’ he said. He was a tall plain fellow, who blew his nose at the end of every sentence. ‘If they let me in I think I’ll be all right. I can go there in the evenings – it’s a pretty lively place.’

  ‘What club are you talking about?’

  ‘The Punjab Club,’ he said.

  8. The Frontier Mail

  AMRITSAR, two taxi rides from Lahore (the connecting train hasn’t run since 1947), is on the Indian side of the frontier. It is to the Sikh what Benares is to the Hindu, a religious capital, a holy city. The object of the Sikh’s pilgrimage is the Golden Temple, a copper-gilt gazebo in the centre of a tank. The tank’s sanctity has not kept it from stagnation. You can smell it a mile away. It is the dearest wish of every Sikh to see this temple before he dies and to bring a souvenir back from Amritsar. One of the favourite souvenirs is a large multicoloured poster of a headless man. Blood spurts from the stump of his neck; he wears the uniform of a warrior. In one hand he carries a sword, in the other he holds his dripping head. I asked nine Sikhs what this man’s name was. None could tell me, but all knew his story. In one of the Punjab wars he was decapitated. But he was very determined. He picked up his head, and, holding it in his hand so that he could see what he was doing (the eyes of the severed head blaze with resolution), he continued to fight. He did this so that he could get back to Amritsar and have a proper cremation. This story exemplifies the Sikh virtues of piety, ferocity, and strength. But Sikhs are also very kind and friendly, and an enormous number are members of Lions Club International. This is partly a cultural misunderstanding, since all Sikhs bear the surname Singh, which means lion; they feel obliged to join. Special underpants are required by the Sikh religion, along with uncut hair, a silver bangle, a wooden comb, and an iron dagger. And as shoes are prohibited at the Golden Temple, I hopped down the hot marble causeway, doing a kind of firewalker’s tango, watching these leonine figures stripped to their holy drawers bathing themselves in the tank and gulping the green water, swallowing grace and dysentery in the same mouthful. The Sikhs are great soldiers and throughout the temple enclosure there are marble tablets stating the fact that the Poona Horse Regiment and the Bengal Sappers contributed so many thousand rupees. For the rest of the Indians, Gujaratis in particular, Sikhs are yokels, and jokes are told to illustrate the simplicity of the Sikh mind. There is the one about the Sikh who, on emigrating to Canada, is told that he must prove himself a true Canadian by going into the forest and wrestling a bear and raping a squaw. He sets out and returns a month later, with his turban in tatters and his face covered with scratches, saying, ‘Now I must wrestle the squaw.’ Another concerns a Sikh who misses his bus. He chases the bus, trying to board, and soon realizes he has run all the way home. ‘I’ve just chased my bus and saved fifty paisas,’ he tells his wife, who replies, ‘If you had chased a taxi you could have saved a rupee.’

  I had a meal at a Sikh restaurant after wandering around the city and then went to the railway station to buy my ticket on the Frontier Mail to Delhi. The man at Reservations put me on the waiting list and told me there was ‘a 98 per cent chance’ that I would get a berth, but that I would have to wait until half-past four for a confirmation. Indian railway stations are wonderful places for killing time in, and they are like scale models of Indian society, with its divisions of caste, class, and sex: SECOND-CLASS LADIES’ WAITING ROOM, BEARERS’ ENTRANCE, THIRD-CLASS EXIT, FIRST-CLASS TOILET, VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT, NON-VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT, RETIRING ROOMS, CLOAKROOM, and the whole range of occupations on office signboards, from the tiny one saying SWEEPER, to the neatest of all, STATIONMASTER.

  A steam
locomotive was belching smoke at one of the platforms. I crossed over and as I snapped a picture a Sikh appeared on the footplate and asked me to send him a print. I said I would. He asked me where I was going, and when I told him I was taking the Frontier Mail he said, ‘You have so many hours to wait. Come with me. Get in this bogie’ – he pointed to the first car – ‘and at the first station you can come in here and ride with me.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll miss my train.’

  ‘You will not,’ he said. ‘Without fail.’ He said this precisely, as if remembering an English lesson.

  ‘I don’t have a ticket.’

  ‘No one is having a ticket. They are all cheating!’

  So I climbed aboard and at the first station joined him in the cab. The train was going to Atari, on the Pakistan border, sixteen miles away. I had always wanted to ride in the engine of a steam locomotive, but this trip was badly timed. We left just at sunset and as I was wearing my prescription sunglasses – my other pair was in my suitcase in the station cloakroom – I could not see a thing. I held on, blind as a bat, sweating in the heat from the firebox. The Sikh shouted explanations of what he was doing, pulling levers, bringing up the pressure, spinning knobs, and dodging the coal shoveller. The noise and the heat prevented me from taking any pleasure in this two-hour jaunt, and I suppose I must have looked dispirited because the Sikh was anxious to amuse me by blowing the whistle. Every time he did it the train seemed to slow down.

  My face and arms were flecked with soot from the ride to Atari. On the Frontier Mail this was no problem, and I had the enjoyable experience that humid evening of taking a cold shower, squatting on my heels under the burbling pipe, as the train tore through the Punjab to Delhi.

  I returned to my compartment to find a young man sitting on my berth. He greeted me in an accent I could not quite place, partly because he lisped and also because his appearance was somewhat bizarre. His hair, parted in the middle, reached below his shoulders; his thin arms were sheathed in tight sleeves and he wore three rings with large orange stones on each hand, bracelets of various kinds and a necklace of white shells. His face frightened me: it was that corpselike face of lunacy or a fatal illness, with sunken eyes and cheeks, deeply lined, bloodless, narrow, and white. He had a cowering stare, and as he watched me – I was still dripping from my shower – he played with a small leather purse. He said his name was Hermann; he was going to Delhi. He had bribed the conductor so that he could travel with a European. He didn’t want to be in a compartment with an Indian – there might be trouble. He hoped I understood.