Actually, it’s the wreckage of dozens of civilizations. India did not become a unified nation until Independence, and—if you count the bust-outs of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and part of Kashmir—it didn’t get unified then. Even under British imperial rule, India comprised thirteen provinces with considerable autonomy, a fluctuating number of anarchic frontier territories, and some seven hundred princely states under greater or lesser colonial control.
India has a population greater than Europe and North America combined. Its land area exceeds France, Germany, Great Britain, Iraq, Japan, Paraguay, and Ghana put together, and its citizens are that similar. They get along as well as everybody at the UN does. India is as complicated as the earth. Indeed, if a person were to claim the nationality of Earthling, there would be a one-in-six chance that the person was Indian. To all this, the Bharatiya Janata Party responds with a slogan: ONE NATION, ONE PEOPLE, ONE CULTURE.
Just when I thought I wasn’t getting it about India, I started to get it less. East of Varanasi, in Bihar state, we encountered a communist rally. Hundreds of agitated-looking agitators waved red flags and brandished staves. We were a ripe target for the anger of the masses—eight capitalist prats in Land Rovers with a trailer full of goodies protected only by a tarp. We were ignored. It seems the ideological fury of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist ) is directed primarily at the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
The latter runs Calcutta. According to my guidebook, “They have somehow succeeded in balancing rhetoric and old-fashioned socialism with a prudent practicality…. Capitalism is allowed to survive, but made to support the political infrastructure.”
Not that you’d know this by driving into Calcutta, where the infrastructure doesn’t look like it could support another flea. Certainly the Howrah Bridge over the Hooghly River can’t. It carries 60,000 motor vehicles a day, and they were all there when we tried to get across at 5 P.M. Packed along the filthy bank of the Hooghly were temples to scary gods, a ratty colonial fort, a coal power plant barfing cones of smudge, and the dreariest kind of glass-box office buildings. From a distance the city appeared to be an educational diorama: The History of Ugly.
I spent the next four days trying to accomplish something in India again. The Land Rover Discoverys IIs and the trailer had to be put into a cargo container. This would take twenty minutes. Adjusting the clock to Indian Daylight Wasting Time, that’s four days.
First the port was closed. Well, it wasn’t really closed. I mean, it was sort of closed because the port of Calcutta has silted in and is nearly useless. Only about three ships were there. This doesn’t keep hundreds of stevedores, shipping clerks, and port officials from coming to work. But there were city council elections that day with attendant rioting. So the police had to suppress voters and weren’t available for harassment at the port.
Then the port was closed because it was Sunday.
Then our shipping agents fell into an argument about when to pick us up at the hotel the next day. Not that they disagreed with each other.
“We will go to get them at nine-thirty in the morning,” one said.
“Oh, no, no, no, no,” said another. “It must be nine-thirty in the morning.”
“How can you talk like this?” said a third, stamping his foot. “The time for us to be there is nine-thirty in the morning!”
We had about ten shipping agents. As K. S. Sudarshan of the RSS implied, there’s no such thing as hiring an individual in India. In a Bihar village it took the services of two shops, four shopkeepers, and a boy running for change to sell me a pack of cigarettes.
While I waited for the port to open, I wandered the streets of Calcutta. The city is a byword for squalor. Most Americans suppose that to tour its precincts is to flush oneself down the toilet of humanity and amble through a human septic system. This isn’t true. There aren’t that many flush toilets in Calcutta. Anyway, parts of Washington, D.C., are dirtier (Congress; the White House when the Clintons were there), and Calcutta smells no worse than a college dorm.
The poverty is sad and extensive, but at least the families living on the Calcutta streets are intact families—talking to each other instead of themselves. I did see some people who seemed really desperate, addled, and unclean. But these were American hippies at Calcutta’s Dum Dum airport. I was standing in the ticket line behind an Indian businessman who stared at the hippies and then gave me a stern look, as if to say, These are your people. Isn’t there something you could do?
Calcutta’s pollution is more visible than it’s fashionable for American pollution to be—smoke and trash instead of microwaves and PCBs. The food sold on Calcutta’s streets may be unidentifiable, but it’s less likely than New York City hot dogs to contain a cow rectum. The crowding is extreme but you get used to it. You get used to a lot of things—naked ascetics, a hundred sheep being herded through downtown traffic, a single file of costumed girls linked by electric wires with one carrying a car battery and the rest having blue fluorescent tubes sticking out of their headdresses.
I was waiting to cross the busiest street in Calcutta when a four-story temple complex on wheels went by, complete with high priest, idols, acolytes, clouds of incense, blazing torches, and banging gongs. And what I noticed was that I wasn’t noticing it. Imagine the Pope (and quite a bit of Saint Peter’s) coming down Broadway at rush hour and you thinking, Should I jaywalk or wait for the light?
There’s a certain pest factor in Calcutta, mostly from the touting of roving market bearers. But it’s not without its entertainment value. Bearer No. A-49 from the New Market told me not to listen to any of the other bearers because they would get me into their shops and cut my throat. So be sure you get Bearer No. A-49. Accept no other. Lesser merchants, squatting on the street, sell everything from new Lee jeans to brightly colored pebbles and pieces of broken mirrors. The poster-wallah’s selection included views of the Taj Mahal, photographs of kittens tangled in balls of yarn, and the gore-faced goddess Kali holding a severed human head by the hair.
In the midst of this is the Oberoi Grand Hotel, with guards stationed at the gate holding sticks to use on touts and beggars. At the Oberoi everything is efficient, crisp, clean, and pukka (except when the electricity goes out). The Indians inside seemed as perplexed by the chaos of India outside as I was. I told Alex, the restaurant manager, about the muddle at the port. “Oh, this country,” he said, “there are no two ways around it.”
We had parked the Land Rovers and trailer in the hotel courtyard. The shipping agents came by to inform us that everything in the vehicles had to be clean and packed exactly as described on the customs documents. Iain Chapman, who had organized the world trip for Land Rover, and Rover engineer Mark Dugmore and I set about amending 1,700 miles of dirt and equipment disorder. It was 100 degrees in the courtyard. A dozen members of the hotel staff gathered to watch us. I don’t think they’d seen Westerners do actual work. (And—as far as my own experiences go in the offices and stores of America and Europe—neither have I.) Removing the trailer tarp, we discovered an ax had come loose from its lashing and punctured a container of beef stew and a can of motor oil. The trailer bed was awash in petroleum and what Hindus euphemistically call brown meat.
On Monday we went back to the port, where the customs inspectors ignored everything about our cleanliness and packing except the ax. “What is this?” said the chief inspector.
“An ax,” said Iain Chapman.
The officials conferred at length and decided it was so. Then there was a seven-hour delay because of an engine serial-number discrepancy. The customs inspectors were worried that we’d stolen one of the Discoverys IIs from Rover. “We’re from Rover,” said Iain. “These are the only Discovery IIs in Asia, and they can’t be stolen because they’re both right here.” The inspectors returned to their office to ponder this. We sat on the dock.
I asked one of our shipping agents why so many of the Tata truck drivers had decorated their front bumpers with one dangling shoe.
>
“Oh, for the heck of it,” he said.
Finally the Land Rovers were rolled into the cargo container. Things do eventually get done in India. My theory about why they do is that, although making business matters complicated is a great source of fun there, you know how it is with fun. Sooner or later it’s time for different fun—such as making family matters complicated. “I am a twenty-one-year-old man involved in a physical relationship with my thirty-six-year-old unmarried cousin for the past six years,” read a query to an advice column in a Calcutta newspaper. “It all began when…I raped her.”
I was sad to see the Discovery IIs go. They weren’t wrecked—an anomaly in this land. And they never broke down or exploded, which is more than I can say for ourselves when, leaving the docks, the police tried to arrest us because we had padlocks in our possession.
“What the hell kind of thief comes back with the locks instead of the swag?” Iain asked them. Maybe an Indian one, if it would complicate matters.
I stayed on in Calcutta for a few days, in awe at a dundering muddle of a place that seems in total disorganization but where I couldn’t even get lost because everyone with a clean shirt speaks English. And they speak it in a style that is a reminder of India’s claim upon the language. There were Indians speaking English when most of America was gibbering in Gaelic, German, Italian, or whatever on the wrong side of the Ellis Island fence. Placards ask that Calcutta’s subway be treated WITH RESPECT AND AFFECTION. Street signs say, I USE FOOTPATHS, DO YOU? Yet the country’s per capita gross domestic product is only half of China’s.
Indian journalist Gita Mehta says India turns out five million university graduates a year. That’s four times the number of bachelor degrees awarded annually in the United States, But the ancient guild of scribes still does brisk business outside Calcutta’s General Post Office. Scores of men hunker on the sidewalk writing and reading other people’s letters. Forty-eight percent of Indians are illiterate, including almost two-thirds of Indian women.
You walk by a newsstand—a news squat, to be precise—and see the Calcutta Telegraph, the Calcutta Statesman, the Asian Age, the Times of India, and stacks of newspapers printed in Hindi and other languages. The Telegraph ran a Know-How feature on particle physics. A Statesman op-ed page had an article on energy efficiency: “The heat rate of the power plant, in layman’s terms, refers to how much kilo calorie of heat is required to produce 1 kwp of power.” You think you’re in a nation of Einsteins until you read the advice columnist’s answer to the rapist: “At this stage of life you ought to detach yourself from this cousin to secure a healthy life…. Initially your cousin provoked you in the act, and hence it cannot be called rape.”
In the midst of Calcutta’s street stampede (not a figure of speech, considering sacred cows), there are young hawkers with what look like shoeshine boxes. What’s offered for sale isn’t a wing-tip buff. The youths crouch in the hubbub, juggle the tiny wheels and springs of wristwatches, and set the timepieces running again. There is a whole street in Calcutta lined with stalls too small and ill-equipped for lemonade sales. Here artisans with flame-heated soldering irons rearrange the logic on the latest computer circuit boards. Then you look up from your newspaper and see a man walking around wearing a bucket upside down over his head.
Good Luck,
Uncle Peej
“Here’s a printout of your letter to Ophelia,” said Max. “It sounds an awful lot like the article you did for that hippie travel magazine, National Geodesic. Don’t drop it and break a toe.”
My wife lowered The New York Times travel section as Max marched off. [He seems a bit grouchy today.] “You know,” my wife said to me, “we haven’t been anywhere together since we took Muffin to Venice and the pigeons landed on her head. When Poppet is old enough to be left for a long weekend, we should plan a trip. Although India sounds a bit…subcontinental. Spain, maybe. Just the two of us.”
I’d love to go somewhere with you, my dear, I said. But you know who I’d really like to travel with? New York Times travel writers. They’re amazing. More than a century after Stanley and Livingstone, they’re still discovering unexplored parts of the globe. And when Times travel writers disembark in these uncharted regions, they never encounter monsoon floods, clouds of biting flies, or guerrilla war. These writers must be wonderfully knowledgeable about meteorology, entomology, and political science. I know they possess great intellectual resources, because they are able to find mental stimulation in Canadian church architecture and Belgian watercolor artists. The ability to conjure interest in anything, no matter how dull, is a trait I wish we had. I also wish we had some of that special American money Times travel writers possess. They can go to Paris, find a charming pension next door to the Louvre, have a glorious meal, and take in a brilliant cabaret act, all for about a hundred dollars. I go to Frankfurt, stay at a Novotel, eat one bratwurst at the airport, and I’m out a grand. Also, traveling with Times travel writers must be like having a personal bodyguard. I notice they are always treated with courtesy, even in New York, so obviously they’re well armed. But most of all I’d like to travel with New York Times travel writers because I admire them. While others talk about helping humanity, they take action. Wherever they go poverty, disease and oppression disappear, replaced by vigorous service economies where every native has gainful and satisfying employment—waiting hand and foot on New York Times travel writers.
[I don’t know if it was something I said, but my wife seems slightly miffed. A getaway would be a nice surprise, and I’m glad I thought of it.]
My dear, I said, everything’s fixed. I’ve bought the train tickets. Poppet and Muffin will stay with Nick’s folks. And for our second honeymoon, we’ll go to New York and eat at Elaine’s.
“For our second honeymoon,” said my wife, “we’ll go to New York and eat at Elaine’s.”
Yes! I said. Elaine’s is a haven for writers. You know how insecure and timid we writers are. The great thing about Elaine’s is the safety. For instance, I’m safe from the food. Every other place in New York seems to be specializing in some horrible gustatory fad: Tibetan dirt salads or Provençal escargot sorbets. God help us if Manhattan restaurateurs ever discover the anthropophagite entrées of the New Guinea highlands. But Elaine never serves me a fish that isn’t dead yet or a Bolivian guinea pig terrine. In fact, at Elaine’s I’m safe from physical excitement of any kind. Elaine realizes that we writers live our whole lives on paper in the sincere hope of never having to live them anywhere else. There are no fistfights. And anyone who’s seen Elaine slam-dunk a paparazzo is unlikely to start one. There is no “pickup” nonsense. If you go home from Elaine’s with someone, you’re probably married to her—or anyhow someone you know is.
I’m safe from romance and adventure at Elaine’s. And, more important, I’m safe from literature. Writers attract bores the way booze attracts writers.
If you’re going to the kitchen, could you freshen this up for me, dear?
As I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, I spend ten hours slicing at a Gordian knot of a book chapter, and then I get cornered by the counterman at Starbucks who went to the Iowa Writers Workshop and wants to discuss mimetic distance and objective correlatives. At Elaine’s people know better. They’re writers themselves. They know what to say. They say, “How much was the advance?”
I should have gone into the time-share vacation condominium business with Uncle Ned. But Elaine doesn’t think so. She takes writers seriously; she respects me for being one. I suppose she’s been wrong about other things in her life, too, but it’s great that there’s one place where I’m safe from being thought of as, mainly, a failed time-share vacation condominium salesman. And no matter how much money Uncle Ned makes, he won’t be able to get a good table at Elaine’s—unless he buys the movie rights to my book.
My wife opened a copy of Fodor’s Guide for Single Women Traveling in the Mediterranean and said, rather cryptically, “One thing I’ll say for you. When life
hands you roast beef, diced ham, pared raw potatoes, brown sauce, sliced mushrooms, dry sherry, garlic salt, and a pinch of basil—you make a hash of things.”
12
August 2001
I got an e-mail from Ophelia in Calcutta,” said my godson Nick. “She’s given up her search for enlightenment and is staying at the Oberoi Grand.”
That’s good, I said.
“I guess so,” said Nick. “She sent an attachment with the e-mail. It’s a manifesto.”
A Call for Belief Control
It is a tragic fact that guns kill people. But if we are concerned about people getting killed, we must realize that mere gun control will not put an end to shocking violence. During the past thirty centuries, millions of people have died because of the negligent possession of religious beliefs. “And Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea…. And the water returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh,” for example. Then there’s the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, additional trouble in the Middle East, mass killings in the Balkans, Jonestown, Waco, and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. That is to name only a few examples of what happens when people take religion into their own hands. An international campaign for Belief Control should be a first priority among morally engaged and politically committed persons.
We can start in our own country by advocating a few basic positions that almost all Americans can be expected to support:
Restrict the import of dangerous and flimsy foreign religions such as Hare Krishna and the Sun Myung Moon Unification Church.
The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.) Page 28