“Of course,” he insisted. “They come and jeer during our rituals, ridicule our sacred images.”
“But even if they were stupid enough to want to do such things,” I objected, “their sense of decorum would keep them from behaving like that.”
He merely laughed. “Obviously you don't know them.”
The post office here is a small stifling room over a shop, and it is full of boys seated on straw mats. The postmaster, a tiny old man who wears large diamond earrings and gold-rimmed spectacles, and is always naked to the waist, is also a professor; he interrupts his academic work to sell an occasional stamp. At first contact his English sounds fluent enough, but soon one discovers that it is not adapted to conversation, and that one can scarcely talk to him. Since the boys are listening, he must pretend to be omniscient, therefore he answers promptly with more or less whatever phrase comes into his head.
Yesterday I went to post a letter by airmail to Tangier. “Tanjore,” he said, adjusting his spectacles. “That will be four annas.” (Tanjore is in south India, near Trichinopoly.) I explained that I hoped my letter would be going to Tangier, Morocco.
“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “There are many Tanjores.” He opened the book of postal regulations and read aloud from it, quite at random, for (although it may be difficult to believe) exactly six minutes. I stood still, fascinated, and let him go on. Finally he looked up and said: “There is no mention of Tangier. No airplanes go to that place.”
“Well, how much would it be to send it by sea mail?” (I thought we could then calculate the surcharge for air mail, but I had misjudged my man.)
“Yes,” he replied evenly. “That is a good method, too.”
I decided to keep the letter and post it in the nearby town of Nagercoil another day. In a little while I shall have several to add to it, and I count on being able to send them all together when I go. Before I left the post office I hazarded the remark that the weather was extremely hot. In that airless attic at noon it was a wild understatement. But it did not please the postmaster at all. Deliberately he removed his glasses and pointed the stems at me.
“Here we have the perfect climate,” he told me. “Neither too cold nor too cool.”
“That is true,” I said. “Thank you.”
In the past few years there have been visible quantitative changes in the life, all in the one direction of Europeanization. This is in the smaller towns; the cities of course have long since been Westernized. The temples which before were lighted by bare electric bulbs and coconut oil lamps now have fluorescent tubes glimmering in their ceilings. Crimson, green, and amber floodlights are used to illumine bathing tanks, deities, the gateways of temples. The public-address system is the bane of the ear these days, even in the temples. And it is impossible to attend a concert or a dance recital without discovering several loudspeakers in operation, whose noise completely destroys the quality of the music. A mile before you arrive at the cinema of a small town you can hear the raucous blaring of the amplifier they have set up at its entrance.
This year in south India there are fewer men with bare torsos, dhotis, and sandals: more shirts, trousers, and shoes. There is at the same time a slow shutting-down of services which to the Western tourist make all the difference between pleasure and discomfort in traveling, such as the restaurants in the stations (there being no dining-cars on the trains) and the showers in the first-class compartments. A few years ago they worked; now they have been sealed off. You can choke on the dust and soot of your compartment, or drown in your own sweat now, for all the railway cares.
At one point I was held for forty-eight hours in a concentration camp run by the Ceylon government on Indian soil. (The euphemism for this one was “screening camp.”) I was told that I was under suspicion of being an “international spy.” My astonishment and indignation were regarded as almost convincing in their sincerity, thus proof of my guilt.
“But who am I supposed to be spying for?” I asked piteously.
The director shrugged. “Spying for international,” he said.
More than the insects or the howling of pariah dogs outside the rolls of barbed wire, what bothered me was the fact that in the center of the camp, which at that time housed some twenty thousand people, there was a loudspeaker in a high tower which during every moment of the day roared forth Indian film music. Fortunately it was silenced at ten o'clock each evening. I got out of the hellhole by making such violent trouble that I was dragged before the camp doctor, who decided that I was dangerously unbalanced. The idea in letting me go was that I would be detained further along, and the responsibility would fall on other shoulders. “They will hold him at Talaimannar,” I heard the doctor say. “The poor fellow is quite mad.”
Here and there, in places like the bar of the Hotel Metropole at Mysore, or at the North Coorg Club of Mercara, one may still come across vestiges of the old colonial life; ghosts in the form of incredibly sunburned Englishmen in jodhpurs and boots discussing their hunting luck and prowess. But these visions are exceedingly rare in a land that wants to forget their existence.
The younger generation in India is intent on forgetting a good many things, including some that it might do better to remember. There would seem to be no good reason for getting rid of their country's most ancient heritage, the religion of Hinduism, or of its most recent acquisition, the tradition of independence. This latter, at least insofar as the illiterate masses are concerned, is inseparable not only from the religious state of mind which made political victory possible, but also from the legend which, growing up around the figure of Gandhi, has elevated him in their minds to the status of a god.
The young, politically minded intellectuals find this not at all to their liking; in their articles and addresses they have returned again and again to the attack against Gandhi as a “betrayer” of the Indian people. That they are motivated by hatred is obvious. But what do they hate?
For one thing, subconsciously they cannot accept their own inability to go on having religious beliefs. Then, belonging to the group without faith, they are thereby forced to hate the past, particularly the atavisms which are made apparent by the workings of the human mind with its irrationality, its subjective involvement in exterior phenomena. The floods of poisonous words they pour forth are directed primarily at the adolescents: it is an age group which is often likely to find demagoguery more attractive than common sense.
There are at least a few of these enlightened adolescents in every town; the ones here in Cape Comorin were horrified when, by a stratagem, I led them to the home of a man of their own village named Subramaniam, who claims that his brother is under a spell. (They had not imagined, they told me later, that an American would believe such nonsense.) According to Subramaniam, his brother was a painter who had been made art director of a major film studio in Madras. To substantiate his story he brought out a sheaf of very professional sketches for film sets.
“Then my brother had angry words with a jealous man in the studio,” said Subramaniam, “and the man put a charm on him. His mind is gone. But at the end of the year it will return.” The brother presently appeared in the courtyard; he was a vacanteyed man with a beard, and he had a voluminous turkish towel draped over his head and shoulders. He walked past us and disappeared through a doorway.
“A spirit doctor is treating him…” The modern young men shifted their feet miserably; it was unbearable that an American should be witnessing such shameful revelations, and that they should be coming from one in their midst.
But these youths who found it so necessary to ridicule poor Subramaniam failed to understand why I laughed when, the conversation changing to the subject of cows, I watched their collective expression swiftly change to one of respect bordering on beatitude. For cow-worship is one facet of popular Hinduism which has not yet been totally superseded by twentieth-century faithlessness. True, it has taken on new forms of ritual. Mass cow worship is often practiced now in vast modern concrete stadiums, with
prizes being distributed to the owners of the finest bovine specimens, but the religious aspect of the celebration is still evident. The cows are decorated with garlands and jewelry, fed bananas and sugarcane by people who have waited in line for hours to be granted that rare privilege, and when the satiated animals can eat no more they simply lie down or wander about, while hundreds of young girls perform sacred dances in their honor.
In India, where the cow wishes to go, she goes. She may be lying in the temple, where she may decide to get up, to go and lie instead in the middle of the street. If she is annoyed by the proximity of the traffic streaming past her, she may lumber to her feet again and continue down the street to the railway station, where, should she feel like reclining in front of the ticket window, no one will disturb her. On the highways she seems to know that the drivers of trucks and buses will spot her a mile away and slow down almost to a stop before they get to her, and that therefore she need not move out from under the shade of the particular banyan tree she has chosen for her rest. Her superior position in the world is agreed upon by common consent.
The most satisfying exposition I have seen of the average Hindu's feeling about this exalted beast is a little essay composed by a candidate for a post in one of the public services, entitled simply: “The Cow.” The fact that it was submitted in order to show the aspirant's mastery of the English language, while touching, is of secondary importance.
THE COW
The cow is one wonderful animal, also he is quadruped and because he is female he gives milk—but he will do so only when he has got child. He is same like God, sacred to Hindu and useful to man. But he has got four legs together. Two are foreward and two are afterwards.
His whole body can be utilized for use. More so the milk. What it cannot do? Various ghee, butter, cream, curds, whey, kova and the condensed milk and so forth. Also, he is useful to cobbler, watermans and mankind generally.
His motion is slow only. That is because he is of amplitudinous species, and also his other motion is much useful to trees, plants as well as making fires. This is done by making flat cakes in hand and drying in the sun.
He is the only animal that extricates his feedings after eating. Then afterwards he eats by his teeth whom are situated in the inside of his mouth. He is incessantly grazing in the meadows.
His only attacking and defending weapons are his horns, especially when he has got child. This is done by bowing his head whereby he causes the weapons to be parallel to ground of earth and instantly proceeds with great velocity forwards.
He has got tail also, but not like other similar animals. It has hairs on the end of the other side. This is done to frighten away the flies which alight on his whole body and chastises him un ceasingly, whereupon he gives hit with it.
The palms of his feet are so soft unto the touch, so that the grasses he eats would not get crushed. At night he reposes by going down on the ground and then he shuts his eyes like his relative the horse which does not do so. This is the cow.
The moths and night insects flutter about my single oil lamp. Occasionally, at the top of its chimney, one of them goes up in a swift, bright flame. On the concrete floor in a fairly well-defined ring around the bottom of my chair are the drops of sweat that have rolled off my body during the past two hours. The doors into both the bedroom and the bathroom are shut; I work each night in the dressing room between them, because fewer insects are attracted here. But the air is nearly unbreathable with the stale smoke of cigarettes and bathi sticks burned to discourage the entry of winged creatures. Today's paper announced an outbreak of bubonic plague in Bellary. I keep thinking about it, and I wonder if the almost certain eventual victory over such diseases will prove to have been worth its price: the extinction of the beliefs and rituals which gave a satisfactory meaning to the period of consciousness that goes between birth and death. I doubt it. Security is a false god; begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost.
BRUCE CHATWIN
(1940–89)
Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, in 1940. After a brief career as an archaeologist, he turned to writing, and in his short career—he died of AIDS in 1989—showed his skill at several genres. In his travel book In Patagonia he followed in a British tradition of adventurous travel that Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming had created during the high noon of empire. Readers in postimperial Britain quickly warmed to his accounts of meetings with strange people in marvelous lands. He went on to publish three much-acclaimed novels, On the Black Hill, Utz, and The Viceroy of Ouidah. In The Songlines, he consummated a lifelong interest in nomads. He also excelled in the short magazine piece: the kind of slick, clever writing that the weekend supplements of British newspapers used to specialize in. He traveled often to India, clearly excited by the country's treasure trove of exotic stories. The piece excerpted here on the Indian wolf-boy is characteristic of his writing; it lies on the borderlines of fact and fiction where Chatwin was often to be found, in both his life and work.
SHAMDEV: THE WOLF-BOY
Last Easter Saturday, Father Joseph de Souza put on a freshly laundered soutane and took the bus from Sultanpur to Lucknow, to celebrate Mass in the Cathedral. With him went an eightor nine-year-old boy whom he was taking to Mother Teresa's Mission of Charity. The boy was unable to speak. Instead, he would clench his fists against his neck, depressing his vocal chords to make a low muted noise halfway between a growl and a howl.
Along the road the bus passed through the forest of Musafirkhana, where, about four years earlier, the boy had been found at play with his foster-brothers—who, it was said, were wolfcubs.
From Romulus and Remus to Mowgli in Kipling's Jungle Book, there have been stories of man-cubs being saved and suckled by wolves: as well as by pigs, sheep, leopards, bears, and, recently in the Sahara, by gazelles. No single case has been proved beyond doubt. It is conceivable that Pascal—the name bestowed on the new arrival by the mission Sisters—will turn out to be the exception.
Pascal immediately befriended the orphanage dog—although, one day, he took its ear in his mouth and bit hard. During the first week, he would rip off his clothes, chuck away his food, and when he got hold of a pair of glasses, he clashed them together like cymbals. During the second week, be began to settle down. He learned to greet people with the Hindu salutation “Namaste! ” He liked to travel round the garden sitting upright in the back of a bicycle rickshaw. The Sisters did have to watch him with other children: for sometimes, without warning, he would flick his fingers into their eyes.
One morning, a troupe of Rajasthani entertainers came down the street with monkeys jingling their bells, and a bear on a chain. Someone held up Pascal so he could get a better look— and he, as if suddenly seized with a fit, struggled and tried to throw himself into the bear's arms. A mission worker, having watched this behavior, decided to rename Pascal “Baloo”—like Baloo the Bear in The Jungle Book—and wrote a short article about him for one of the Lucknow papers.
The article was syndicated in the foreign press. I was in Benares when I heard of it: I took the train to Sultanpur and looked up Father Joseph, who teaches at a school run by the Sisters of the Little Flowers of Bethlehem. He is a small, wrinkled, optimistic south Indian who has spent forty of his sixty-nine years in the Hindi north. In the hot weather he sleeps alone on the roof of a barracklike building, at the far end of the compound from the nuns. In the yard below there grew some leggy papayas. A kennel housed a ferocious Alsatian that yanked at its chain, howled, and bared its teeth as I passed. Father Joseph's colleague, Sister Clarice, then gave a tea party in my honor at which she and two other nuns told their version of Pascal's story:
Early in Easter week a Muslim woman came to the school with news that an “animal-child” was roaming the western part of the town, scavenging for scraps. The Sisters found him on Good Friday, filthy and abandoned, crouching in a niche in the wall of a mudbrick house. The owners of the house said that a laundrywoman had come to claim him a few days earlier
.
“But she didn't want him back,” Father Joseph interrupted, “seeing he's come from the jungle and all. That's what it is. Once a baby's been touched by an animal, they abandon him and all.”
Father Joseph said that, in the course of his ministry, he had often heard stories of “wolf-children,” but had never set eyes on one. He knew of one case where a mother had lost her child at nightfall, and returned to find a female wolf guarding it.
The Sisters succeeded in tying up the boy and taking him back to the school. When they bathed him, he bit them. He spat out some Cadbury's chocolate. They gave him dal and chapatis, but “he threw the plate and all”; and when he heard the Alsatian barking, he rushed toward the kennel and tried to get inside. The Alsatian suddenly went quiet. They then put the boy to bed and locked the room.
“I heard him growling in the night and all,” said the old priest—and the morning had found him hunched against the door.
My train got to Sultanpur in the late afternoon. By a lucky coincidence, only a few hours earlier the Sisters had received a visit from the man who originally “rescued” the boy in the forest. His name was Narsing Bahadur Singh and he was the thakur, or headman, of the village of Narangpur, about three miles outside the town.
The thakur owned a food stall near the railway repair yards and would often take along his wolf-boy, whom he called Shamdev. He said that Shamdev was always getting lost, or running after pariah dogs, but usually had the knack of finding his way home. When Sister Clarice taxed him with a rumor she had heard: that he used to exhibit the boy in a booth, for money—he was extremely indignant and went away.
India in Mind Page 4