The Great Railway Bazaar

by Paul Theroux

  ‘That was yesterday. I didn’t go back to Bangalore. I bought a ticket to Calcutta. I’m leaving – flying to Bangkok. If I hadn’t seen that Swami I might be married now, or at least betrothed – it’s the same thing. She was a nice girl, but I must have bad karma, and I don’t have a mole on my penis. I looked.

  ‘Pass the bottle,’ he said. He took a swig and said, ‘Never go back to a palmist.’

  Through Berhampur and Khurda to Cuttack where children splashed, diving around buffaloes submerged to their nostrils in the wide Mahanadi River. This was the northeast corner of Orissa, smallpox capital of the world – Balasore, the very name suggesting some itching illness. The station signboards were captions to images I saw from the train: Tuleswar, a woman carrying a red clay water jar on her head, bringing contagion to a far-off village; Duntan, a defecating Bengali posed like Rodin’s Thinker; Kharagpur, a man twisting the tail of his buffalo to make him go faster; Panskura, a crowd of children in school uniforms running along the tracks to their shantytown for lunch; and then the impacted precincts of Budge-Budge, where what I first took to be the poignant sight of an old man leading a small boy through the detritus of a train yard was a blind man with a devilish face squeezing the arm of the frightened child who was his guide.

  The travellers on the Howrah Mail had a look of fatigued solemnity. They paid no attention to the hawkers and vendors who became more frequent as we neared Calcutta, getting on at suburban stations to make a circuit of the open carriages. A man gets on with a teapot, balancing a row of nesting clay cups on his arm. He squawks, urging tea on the passengers, waving the teapot in each person’s face, and gets off: no sale. He is followed by a man with a jar of candy and a spoon. The candy man bangs his jar with the spoon and begins a monotonous spiel. Everyone is shown the jar, and the man continues to pound his spoon all the way to the door, where another enters with a tray of fountain pens. The pen man babbles and, as he does so, he demonstrates how the cap is unscrewed, how the nib is poised, how the clip works; he twirls the pen and holds it for everyone to see; he does everything but write with it, and when he has finished he leaves, having sold nothing. More get on with things to sell: buns, roasted chickpeas, plastic combs, lengths of ribbon, soiled pamphlets; nothing is sold.

  At some stations Indians dived through the windows for seats, but when the seats were filled they squashed themselves at the door, maintaining only an emotional contact with the railway car. They were suspended from the ceiling on straps, stacked against the wall like cordwood, heaped on the benches holding their knees together, and outside the Howrah Mail they clung to the fittings with such agility, they seemed magnetized.

  Near Howrah Station throngs of Biharis were throwing themselves into the greasy Hooghly River from sanctified ghats. Their festival, Chhat, was enlivening Calcutta, and it offered a chance for the Biharis to make a show of strength against the Bengalis, whose own Kali festival had sealed many streets with the chamber of horrors that is a Kali shrine: the goggle-eyed goddess twice life-size, with her necklace of human heads, sticking out a tongue as bright as a raspberry popsicle and trampling the mortally wounded corpse of her husband. Behind Kali, plaster tableaux showed four doomed men, the first impaled on a bloody spear, the second having his neck wrung by a skeleton, the third flattened by a hag who is simultaneously severing the fourth’s head. It was all a challenge to the Biharis, whose own processions involved tall mobile shrines draped in yellow cloth, carts loaded with women seated among heaps of banana offerings, looking deeply pious, and little troupes of transvestites dancing to bugle calls and drums.

  ‘There go the Biharis, off to throw their bananas in the Hooghly,’ said Mr Chatterjee, from the chair car. A Bengali, Mr Chatterjee wasn’t sure of the purpose of the Chhat festival, but thought it might have something to do with the harvest. I said I didn’t think the Calcutta harvest would be very large. He agreed, but said the Biharis enjoyed their annual chance to snarl Bengali traffic. At the head of every procession a black grinning boy, dressed as a girl, made the jerky movements of a dancer with his wrists and leaped in the air, his genitals whipping about in his crimson sari. From time to time, the young girls (who might have been boys) behind him dropped to the ground and prostrated themselves in the garbage-strewn streets.

  The holy mob, the stink of sanctity, the legitimate noise: everything in Indian life seemed to sanction excess, and even politics had the puja flavour. While these religious festivals were going their bellowing way, the Socialist Unity Centre was organizing a bundh – a total work stoppage – and their preliminary rallies on the maidan with their flags and posters, processions and speeches, were practically indistinguishable from the displays of mass piety on Chowringhee’s sidewalks and at the sloshing ghats. This aspect of Calcutta is the first that meets the traveller’s eye, but the one that stays longest in the mind; it is an atmosphere of organized disturbance, everyone occupied in carrying out some programme or other, so much so that those stricken thousands one sees uniformly – uniformly, because space is scarce – lying or sitting on the sidewalk have the look of nonviolent protesters having a long afternoon of dedicated satyagraha (‘clinging to truth’). I imagined another group in an ambiguous posture when I read, in a Calcutta newspaper, ‘The leftist leaders also decided to resort to mass squatting …’

  From the outside, Howrah Station looks like a secretariat, with its not quite square towers and many clocks – each showing a different time – and its impenetrable brickwork. The British buildings in India look as if they have been designed to withstand a siege – there are hornworks and cannon emplacements and watchtowers on the unlikeliest structures. So Howrah Station looked like a fortified version of a mammoth circumlocution office, an impression that buying a ticket there only confirms. But inside it is high and smoky from the fires of the people who occupy it; the ceiling is black, the floor is wet and filthy, and it is dark – the long shafts of sun streaming from the topmost windows lose their light in dust on the way down.

  ‘It’s much better than it was,’ said Mr Chatterjee, seeing me craning my neck. ‘You should have seen it before they cleaned it up.’

  His remark was unanswerable. Yet at every pillar squatters huddled amid the rubbish they had created: broken glass, bits of wood and paper, straw, and tin cans. Some infants slept against their parents; others were curled up like changelings in dusty corners. Families sought refuge beside pillars, under counters and luggage carts: the hugeness of the station intimidated them with space and drove them to the walls. Their children prowled in the open spaces, combining their scavenging with play. They are the tiny children of tiny parents, and it’s amazing how, in India, it is possible to see two kinds of people in the process of evolution, side by side, one fairly tall, quick, and responsive, the other, whose evolution is reduction, small, stricken, and cringing. They are two races whose common ground is the railway station, and though they come quite close (an urchin lies on his back near the ticket window watching the legs of the people in line) they do not meet.

  I walked outside, into the midday chaos at the western end of the Howrah Bridge. In Simla, rickshaws were retained for their quaintness: people posed in them. In Calcutta, rickshaws, pulled by skinny running men in tattered clothes, are a necessary form of transport, cheap, and easy to steer in narrow back lanes. They are a crude symbol of Indian society, but in India all symbols are crude: the homeless people sleeping in the doorway of the mansion, the commuter running to his train accidentally trampling a station sleeper, the thin rickshaw-wallah hauling his plump passengers. Ponies harnessed to stagecoaches laboured over cobblestones; men pushed bicycles loaded with hay bales and firewood. I had never seen so many different forms of transport: wagons, scooters, old cars, carts and sledges, and odd, old-fashioned horse-drawn vehicles that might have been barouches. In one cart, their white flippers limp, dead sea turtles were stacked; on another cart was a dead buffalo, and in a third an entire family with their belongings – children, parrot cage, pots and p
ans. All these vehicles, and people surging among them. Then there was panic, and the people scattered as a tottering tram car marked TOLLYGUNGE swayed down the bridge. Mr Chatterjee said, ‘Too much of people!’

  Mr Chatterjee walked across the bridge with me. He was a Bengali, and Bengalis were the most alert people I had met in India. But they were also irritable, talkative, dogmatic, arrogant, and humourless, holding forth with malicious skill on virtually every subject except the future of Calcutta. Any mention of that brought them up short. But Mr Chatterjee had views. He had been reading an article about Calcutta’s prospects. Calcutta had been very unlucky: Chicago had had a great fire, San Francisco an earthquake, and London a plague as well as a fire. But nothing had happened to Calcutta to give planners a chance to redesign it. You had to admit, he said, it had vitality. The problem of pavement dwellers (he put the figure at a quarter of a milion) had been ‘somewhat overdramatized’, and when you considered that these pavement dwellers were almost exclusively engaged in ragpicking you could see how Calcutta’s garbage was ‘most intensively recycled’. It seemed an unusual choice of words, and it strayed close to claptrap: vitality in a place where people lay dead in the gutter (‘But everyone dies eventually,’ said Mr C.), the overdramatized quarter of a million, the recycling ragpickers. We passed a man who leaned at us and put his hand out. He was a monster. Half his face was missing; it looked as if it had been clumsily guillotined – he had no nose, no lips, no chin, and clamped in his teeth, which were perpetually exposed, was the bruised plug of his tongue. Mr Chatterjee saw my shock. ‘Oh, him! He is always here!’

  Before he left me at the Barabazar, Mr Chatterjee said, ‘I love this city.’ We exchanged addresses and we parted, I to a hotel, Mr Chatterjee to Strand Road, where the Hooghly was silting up so badly, soon all that would float on it would be the ashes of cremated Bengalis.

  I stayed in Calcutta for four days, giving lectures, seeing the sights, and losing my lecture fees at the Royal Calcutta Turf Club on the Saturday I decided to leave. On the first day the city seemed like a corpse on which the Indians were feeding like flies; then I saw its features more clearly, the obelisks and pyramids in Park Street Cemetery, the decayed mansions with friezes and columns, and the fountains in the courtyards of these places: nymphs and sprites blowing on dry conches, who, like the people living under them in gunny sacks, are missing legs and arms; the gong of trams at night; and the flaring lamps lighting the wild cows pushing their snouts into rubbish piles, vying with the scrabbling Indians for something edible. The high mock-Moghul tenements

  hustled it, and crushed it, and stuck brick-and-mortar elbows into it, and kept the air from it, and stood perpetually between it and the light …

  You groped your way for an hour through lanes and bye-ways, and court-yards and passages; and you never once emerged upon anything that might be reasonably called a street. A kind of resigned distraction came over the stranger as he trod those devious mazes, and, giving himself up for lost, went in and out and round about and quietly turned back again when he came to a dead wall or was stopped by an iron railing, and felt that the means of escape might possibly present themselves in their own good time, but to anticipate them was hopeless …

  Among the narrow thoroughfares at hand, there lingered, here and there, an ancient doorway of carved oak, from which, of old, the sounds of revelry and feasting often came; but now these mansions, only used for storehouses, were dark and dull, and, being filled with wool, and cotton, and the like – such heavy merchandise as stifles sound and stops the throat of echo – had an air of palpable deadness … In the throats and maws of dark no-thoroughfares … wholesale dealers in grocery-ware had perfect little towns of their own; and, deep among the foundations of these buildings, the ground was undermined and burrowed out into stables, where cart-horses, troubled by rats, might be heard on a quiet Sunday rattling their halters, as disturbed spirits in tales of haunted houses are said to clank their chains …

  Then there were steeples, towers, belfries, shining vanes, and masts of ships: a very forest. Gables, housetops, garret-windows, wilderness upon wilderness. Smoke and noise enough for all the world at once.

  There is more, and it is all good, but I think I have quoted enough to show that the best description of Calcutta is Todger’s corner of London in Chapter IX of Martin Chuzzlewit. But having decided that Calcutta was Dickensian (perhaps more Dickensian than London ever was), and knowing that I could not share either the excitement of the Bengalis, who agreed with the enormous billboard put up by the State Bank of India (CALCUTTA IS FOREVER), or, what is more curious, the chummy regard of the Americans I met there for this vast and yet incomplete city that I felt would someday undo them, I decided to leave it and so leave India.

  I was on my way when I saw the hopping man in the crowd on Chowringhee. He was very strange: in a city of mutilated people only the truly monstrous looked odd. This man had one leg – the other was amputated at the thigh – but he did not carry a crutch. He had a greasy bundle in one hand. He hopped past me with his mouth open, pumping his shoulders. I went after him, and he turned into Middleton Street, hopping very fast on one muscular leg, like a man on a pogo stick, his head rising above the crowd, then descending into it. I couldn’t run because of the other people, black darting clerks, swamis with umbrellas, armless beggars working their stumps at me, women proffering drugged babies, strolling families, men seeming to block the sidewalk with their wide flapping trousers and swinging arms. The hopping man was in the distance. I gained on him – I saw his head clearly – then lost him. On one leg he had outrun me, so I never found out how he did it. But afterwards, whenever I thought of India, I saw him – hop, hop, hop – moving nimbly through those millions.

  17. The Mandalay Express

  AT sundown in Rangoon, the crows that have been blackening the sky all day soar to their roosts as the shrill bats waken and flap in hectic circles around the pagoda-style towers of the railway station. I arrived at this hour: the bats were tumbling past the crows, and the pale yellow sky was inked like Burmese silk with the brush marks of the black bodies. I had arrived by air in Rangoon on a Saturday night – there is no train from India – and the Burmese appetite for movies I had noticed on a previous visit was undiminished. Sule Pagoda Road, with its five theatres, was mobbed with people, dressed identically in shirt, sarong, and rubber sandals, men and women alike puffing thick green cheroots, and looking (as they waved away the smoke with slender dismissing fingers) like a royal breed, strikingly handsome in this collapsing city, a race of dispossessed princes.

  I had only one objective in Burma: to take the northbound trains from Rangoon via Mandalay and Maymyo to the Gokteik Gorge in the Shan States, beyond which China sprawls. Across this gorge is a magnificent steel trestle bridge, the Gokteik Viaduct, built in 1899 by the Pennsylvania Steel Company for the British Raj. I had read about the bridge, but not in any recent book. Early in this century enthusiasm for railway travel produced a spate of optimistic books about railway travel: the French were building the Transindochinois line to Hanoi, the Russians had brought the Trans-Siberian almost to Vladivostok, the British had laid track to the very end of the Khyber Pass, and it was assumed that Burmese railways would extend in one direction to the Assam-Bengal line and in the other to the railways of China. The books had apocalyptic titles like The Railway Conquest of the World (by Frederick Talbot, 1911) and described, country by country, how the globe was to be stitched by railway track. The judgements were occasionally disagreeable. Ernest Protheroe in Railways of the World (1914) wrote: ‘John Chinaman – cunning, tenacious, and virile – for centuries kept the “foreign devil” at arm’s length … But, however much the Chinese hated the white man, they commenced to recognize the value of railways …’ The Gokteik Viaduct, much celebrated in these books, was an important link in a line that was projected beyond the northern border town of Lashio into China. But the line had stopped at Lashio (nor were Burmese railways ever to meet Indian ones),
and I had heard many rumours about this American-built bridge: one was that it had been blown up during the Second World War; another that the line had been captured by Burmese rebel forces under the command of U Nu; and another that it was off-limits to foreigners.

  To avoid startling the Burmese at the ticket window of Rangoon Station I asked about the train to Mandalay. There were two men at the window. The first said there was no printed timetable I could buy. The second said, ‘Yes, we have no timetable.’ It seemed to be the practice in Burma to have two men at each job, the second to confirm whatever the first said. Instead of a timetable, and like Ceylon, there was a blackboard at each station with the arrivals and departures chalked on it. But both men were certain about the Mandalay train.

  ‘Departure, seven o’clock. Morning time.’

  There was one class, they said. I was to find this to be the equivalent of Indian third class – wooden seats, broken windows, no berths, no bedrolls, no dining car, none of the complex comfort of Indian Railways, involving retiring rooms, dinner coupons, bedding chits, invoice for upper-class luggage, ticket vouchers, and morning tea.

  ‘I’d like a ticket to Mandalay.’

  ‘Sorry, the window is closed.’

  But the window was open. I mentioned this.

  ‘Yes, it is open so to say, but it is closed for selling.’

  ‘You come at six o’clock, morning time,’ said the second man.

  ‘Are you sure I’ll get a ticket?’

  ‘Maybe. Even much better come at five-thirty.’

  ‘How long does it take to get to Mandalay?’

  ‘Twelve hours. But it breaks down. You might arrive Mandalay at eight.’

  ‘Or nine?’