by Paul Theroux
Unable to sleep, I went for a walk. I turned left out of my hotel and walked a hundred yards past the brothels to the sea wall, counting the sleeping figures as I went along. They were stretched out on the sidewalk, lying side by side; some were on pieces of cardboard but most slept flat on the cement, with no bedding and few clothes, their arms crooked under their heads. The children slept on their sides, the others on their backs. There was no sign anywhere of their possessions. I reached seventy-three and turned the corner, where down the road that ran next to the sea wall there were hundreds more – just bodies, no bundles or carts, nothing to distinguish one from another, no evidence of life. It is sometimes thought that these sleepers in the Bombay streets are a recent phenomenon; but Mark Twain saw them. He was on his way to a midnight betrothal ceremony:
We seemed to move through a city of the dead. There was hardly a suggestion of life in those still and vacant streets. Even the crows were silent. But everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives – hundreds and hundreds. They lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, heads and all. Their attitude and rigidity counterfeited death.
That was in 1896. They are more numerous today, and there is another difference. The ones I saw had no blankets. Hunger – pace Pudd’nhead Wilson – is also the handmaid of death.
11. The Delhi Mail from Jaipur
‘WHAT’S this?’ I asked Mr Gopal, the embassy liaison man, pointing to a kind of fortress.
‘That’s a kind of fortress.’
He had ridiculed the handbook I had been carrying around: ‘You have this big book, but I tell you to close it and leave it at hotel because Jaipur is like open book to me.’ Unwisely, I had taken his advice. We were now six miles outside Jaipur, wading ankle-deep through sand drifts towards the wrecked settlement of Galta. Earlier we had passed through a jamboree of some two hundred baboons: ‘Act normal,’ said Mr Gopal, as they hopped and chattered and showed their teeth, clustering on the road with a curiosity that bordered on menace. The landscape was rocky and very dry, and each rugged hill was capped with a cracked fortress.
‘Whose is it?’
‘The Maharajah’s.’
‘No, who built it?’
‘You would not know his name.’
‘Do you?’
Mr Gopal walked on. 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 a courtyard to some ruined buildings, with coloured frescoes of trees and people on their façades. Some had been raked with indecipherable graffiti and painted over; whole panels had been chiselled away.
‘What’s this?’ I asked. I hated him for making me leave my handbook behind.
‘Ah,’ said Mr Gopal. It was a temple enclosure. Some men dozed in the archways, others squatted on their haunches, and just outside the enclosure were some tea and vegetable stalls whose owners leaned against more frescoes, rubbing them away with their backs. I was struck by the solitude of the place – a few people at sundown, no one speaking, and it was so quiet I could hear the hooves of the goats clattering on the cobblestones, the murmuring of the distant monkeys.
‘A temple?’
Mr Gopal thought a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said finally, ‘a kind of temple.’
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 enamed 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. Insects swimming in circles on the pool’s surface made minuscule ripples, and small clouds of vibrant gnats hovered over the water. The temple was an unambitious niche in the rock face, a shallow cave, lighted with oil lamps and tapers. On either side of its portals were seven-foot marble slabs, the shape of those handed down from Sinai but with a weight that would give the most muscular prophet a hernia. These tablets had numbered instructions cut into them in two languages. In the failing light I copied down the English.
The use of soap in the temple and washing clothes is strictly prohibited
Please do not bring shoes near the tank
It does not suit for women to take bath among male members
Spitting while swimming is quite a bad habit
Do not spoil others clothes by splitting water while swimming
Do not enter the temple with wet clothes
Do not spit improperly to make the places dirty
‘Splitting?’ I said to Mr Gopal. ‘What is splitting?’
‘That does not say splitting.’
‘Take a look at number five.’
‘It says splashing.’
‘It says splitting.’
‘It says –’
We walked over to the tablet. The letters, two inches high, were cut deep into the marble.
‘– splitting,’ said Mr Gopal. ‘I’ve never run across that one before. I think it’s a kind of splashing.’
Mr Gopal was doing his best, but he was a hard man to escape from. So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable; I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere; sightseeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
Jaipur was a pink princely city of marvels, but the vandalism and ignorance of those people who herded their goats into the frail ruins, painted over frescoes, and used the palace as a backdrop for filming diminished its attraction. A shouting film crew had occupied the City Palace, and its presence made the place seem a construction of exorbitant fakery. I gave my lecture; I was anxious to catch the train, but the timetable said there would not be a train to Delhi until 12.34 the following morning. It was an awkward time to leave: a day and an entire evening lay before me, and I did not relish the prospect of standing at Jaipur Junction at midnight.
‘Today we go to the museum,’ said Mr Gopal, the day after Galta.
‘Let’s give the museum a miss.’
‘Very interesting place, and you said you wanted to see Moghul paintings. This is home of Moghul paintings!’
Outside the museum I said, ‘When was this built?’
‘About 1550.’
He hadn’t hesitated. But today I had my handbook. The building he had placed in the mid-sixteenth century was the Albert Hall, started in 1878 and finished in 1887. In 1550 Jaipur did not exist, though I didn’t have the heart to tell that to Mr Gopal, who had sulked when I contradicted him the previous day. Anyway, a weakness for exaggeration seemed a chronic affliction of some Indians. Inside the museum, another guide was showing a tentlike red robe to a group of tourists. He said, ‘This belong to famous Maharajah Madho Singh. A big fat man. Seven feet tall, four feet wide, and weighing five hundred pounds.’
At Jai Singh’s observatory, a garden of astronomer’s marble instruments that looks at first glance like a children’s playground, with slides and ladders and fifty-foot chutes splayed out symmetrically against the sun, Mr Gopal said he had visited the place many times. He showed me a great bronze disk that looked as if it might be a map of the night sky. I asked him if that was so. No, he said, it was to tell the time. He showed me a beacon, a submerged truncated hemisphere, a tower with eighty steps, a series of radiating benches: these were also for telling time. All this delicate apparatus, used by Prince Jai Singh (I read in my handbook) for finding altitudes and azimuths and celestial longitudes, Mr G
opal saw as a collection of oversized clocks.
While Mr Gopal was having lunch I sneaked off and bought my ticket to Delhi. The station at Jaipur Junction is modelled after the lovely buildings in the walled city. It is red sandstone, with cupolas, great arches, and substantial pillars that approach the palatial; inside are murals of lemon-faced women and turbaned men, enlargements of the traditional paintings, with borders of posies.
‘I take it I won’t be able to catch the train until after midnight,’ I said.
‘No, no,’ said the clerk. ‘Sooner than that.’
And he explained. The first-class sleeping car was already on the siding, being cleaned up to join the Delhi Mail. I could board in the early evening, and after midnight the Mail would pull in from Ahmadabad and this sleeping car would be hitched to it. He said I should not be alarmed if I boarded a sleeping car detached from a train: the train would arrive on time.
‘Come down here tonight,’ he said, ‘and ask for two-up first-class A.C.C. bogie. We will show you.’
Later in the day I had a long meal with Mr Gopal in a Jaipur restaurant and afterwards announced that I would be going to the station. Mr Gopal said there was no train: ‘You will have hours to wait.’ I said I didn’t mind. I went to the station and climbed aboard the cosily lighted sleeping car that was parked at the far end of the platform. My compartment was large. The conductor showed me the desk, the shower, the lights. I took a shower, and then in my bathrobe wrote a letter to my wife and copied out the commandments from the temple at Galta into my notebook. It was still early. I sent the conductor out for beer and had a talk with the Indian in the next compartment.
He was a professor at Rajasthan University, and he was interested to learn that I had given a lecture for the English Department. He said he rather disliked university students; they littered the grounds with election posters and hired people to clean up after the election. They were silly, short-sighted, and disorderly; they were always posturing. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘it makes my blood boil.’
I told him about Mr Gopal.
‘You see?’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you something. The average Indian knows very little about his religion, or India, or anything else. Some are ignorant of the most simple things, such as Hindu concepts or history. I agree with Naipaul one hundred per cent. They don’t like to appear ignorant before a Westerner, but most Indians don’t know any more about their temples and writing and what-not than the tourists – many know a lot less.’
‘Aren’t you exaggerating?’
‘I am saying what I know. Of course, when a man gets older he begins to take an interest. So some old men know about Hinduism. They get a bit worried about what is going to happen to them.’
I offered the professor a beer, but he said he had some paperwork to do. He said good night and went into his compartment, and I withdrew into mine. We were still at the siding at Jaipur Junction. I poured myself a beer and lay in my berth reading Forster’s The Longest Journey. I had been misled: this was no travel book; it was the story of a bad short-story writer and his callow wife and sniping friends. I threw it aside and read a few pages of The Autobiography of a Yogi, then fell asleep. I was awakened at half-past twelve by a bump: my bogie’s being coupled to the Delhi Mail. All night the train rocked and clicked towards Delhi, while I slumbered in my cool room, and I was so refreshed on arriving that I decided to leave that same evening for Madras to see if, as my map said – though everyone claimed it was impossible – I could take a train to Ceylon.
12. The Grand Trunk Express
THE lumbering express that bisects India, a 1400-mile slash from Delhi south to Madras, gets its name from the route. It might easily have derived it from the kind of luggage the porters were heaving on board. There were grand trunks all over the platform. I had never seen such heaps of belongings in my life, or so many laden people: they were like evacuees who had been given time to pack, lazily fleeing an ambiguous catastrophe. In the best of times there is nothing simple about an Indian boarding a train, but these people climbing into the Grand Trunk Express looked as if they were setting up house – they had the air, and the merchandise, of people moving in. Within minutes the compartments were colonized, the trunks were emptied, the hampers, food baskets, water bottles, bed-rolls, and Gladstones put in place; and before the train started up its character changed, for while we were still standing at Delhi Station the men stripped off their baggy trousers and twill jackets and got into traditional South Indian dress: the sleeveless gym-class undershirt and the sarong they call a lungi. These were scored with packing creases. It was as if, at once – in expectation of the train whistle – they all dropped the disguise they had adopted for Delhi, the Madras-bound express allowing them to assume their true identity. The train was Tamil; and they had moved in so completely, I felt like a stranger among residents, which was odd, since I had arrived earlier than anyone else.
Tamils are black and bony; they have thick straight hair and their teeth are prominent and glisten from repeated scrubbings with peeled green twigs. Watch a Tamil going over his teeth with an eight-inch twig and you begin to wonder if he isn’t trying to yank a branch out of his stomach. One of the attractions of the Grand Trunk Express is that its route takes in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, where the best toothbrush twigs are found; they are sold in bundles, bound like cheroots, at the stations in the province. Tamils are also modest. Before they change their clothes each makes a toga of his bedsheet, and, hopping up and down and working his elbows, he kicks his shoes and trousers off, all the while babbling in that rippling speech that resembles the sputtering of a man singing in the shower. Tamils seem to talk constantly – only toothbrushing silences them. Pleasure for a Tamil is discussing a large matter (life, truth, beauty, ‘walues’) over a large meal (very wet vegetables studded with chillies and capsicums, and served with damp puris and two mounds of glutinous rice). The Tamils were happy on the Grand Trunk Express: their language was spoken; their food was served; their belongings were dumped helter-skelter, giving the train the customary clutter of a Tamil home.
I started out with three Tamils in my compartment. After they changed, unstrapped their suitcases, unbuckled bedrolls, and had a meal (one gently scoffed at my spoon: ‘Food taken with hand tastes different from food taken with spoon – sort of metal taste’) they spent an immense amount of time introducing themselves to each other. In bursts of Tamil speech were English words like ‘reposting’, ‘casual leave’, ‘annual audit’. As soon as I joined the conversation they began, with what I thought was a high degree of tact and courage, to speak to one another in English. They were in agreement on one point: Delhi was barbarous.
‘I am staying at Lodi Hotel. I am booked months ahead. Everyone in Trich tells me it is a good hotel. Hah! I cannot use telephone. You have used telephone?’
‘I cannot use telephone at all.’
‘It is not Lodi Hotel,’ said the third Tamil. ‘It is Delhi.’
‘Yes, my friend, you are right,’ said the second.
‘I say to receptionist, “Kindly stop speaking to me in Hindi. Does no one speak English around this place? Speak to me in English if you please!” ’
‘It is really atrocious situation.’
‘Hindi, Hindi, Hindi. Tcha!’
I said I’d had similar experiences. They shook their heads and added more stories of distress. We sat like four fugitives from savagery, bemoaning the general ignorance of English, and it was one of the Tamils – not I – who pointed out that the Hindi-speaker would be lost in London.
I said, ‘Would he be lost in Madras?’
‘English is widely spoken in Madras. We also use Tamil, but seldom Hindi. It is not our language.’
‘In the south everyone has matric.’ They had a knowing ease with abbreviations, ‘matric’ for matriculation, ‘Trich’ for the town of Tiruchirappalli.
The conductor put his head into the compartment. He was a harassed man with the badges and equipment of Indian authority,
a gunmetal puncher, a vindictive pencil, a clipboard thick with damp passenger lists, a bronze conductor’s pin, and a khaki pith helmet. He tapped my shoulder.
‘Bring your case.’
Earlier I had asked for the two-berth compartment I had paid for. He had said they were overbooked. I demanded a refund. He said I’d have to file an application at the place of issue. I accused him of inefficiency. He withdrew. Now he had found a coupé in the next carriage.
‘Does this cost extra?’ I asked, sliding my suitcase in. I didn’t like the extortionate overtones of the word baksheesh.
‘What you want,’ he said.
‘Then it doesn’t.’
‘I am not saying it does or doesn’t. I am not asking.’
I liked the approach. I said, ‘What should I do?’
‘To give or not to give.’ He frowned at his passenger lists. ‘That is entirely your lookout.’
I gave him five rupees.
The compartment was gritty. There was no sink; the dropleaf table was unhinged; and the rattling at the window, rising to a scream when another train passed, jarred my ears. Sometimes it was an old locomotive that sped by in the night, its kettle boiling, its whistle going, and its pistons leaking a hiss with the warning pitch of a blown valve that precedes an explosion. At about 6 a.m., near Bhopal, there was a rap on the door – not morning tea, but a candidate for the upper berth. He said, ‘Excuse me,’ and crept in.