India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  Elizabeth hurried after him. She felt nervous about going into Margaret's bedroom after having been so explicitly forbidden to follow her. But Margaret only looked up briefly from where she was sitting on her bed, reading a letter, and said, “Oh, it's you,” and “Shut the door.” When he had put down the tea, Shafi went out again and the two of them were left alone.

  Margaret's bedroom was quite different from the rest of the house. The other rooms were all bare and cold, with a minimumof furniture standing around on the stone floors; there were a few isolated pictures hung up here and there on the whitewashed walls, but nothing more intimate than portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Ramakrishna and a photograph of the inmates of Mother Teresa's Home. But Margaret's room was crammed with a lot of comfortable, solid old furniture, dominated by the big double bed in the center, which was covered with a white bedcover and a mosquito curtain on the top like a canopy. A log fire burned in the grate, and there were photographs everywhere—family photos of Arthur and Margaret, of Margaret as a little girl, and of her parents and her sister and her school and her friends. The stale smell of food pervading the rest of the house stopped short of this room, which was scented very pleasantly by woodsmoke and lavender water. There was an umbrella stand that held several alpenstocks, a tennis racquet, and a hockey stick.

  “It's from my sister,” Margaret said, indicating the letter she was reading. “She lives out in the country and they've been snowed under again. She's got a pub.”

  “How lovely.”

  “Yes, it's a lovely place. She's always wanted me to come and run it with her. But I couldn't live in England anymore, I couldn't bear it.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  “What do you know? You've only been here a few years. Pour the tea, there's a dear.”

  “Babaji was wanting a cup.”

  “To hell with Babaji.”

  She took off her sandals and lay down on the bed, leaning against some fat pillows that she had propped against the headboard. Elizabeth had noticed before that Margaret was always more relaxed in her own room than anywhere else. Not all her visitors were allowed into this room—in fact, only a chosen few. Strangely enough, Raju had been one of these when he and Elizabeth had stayed in the house. But he had never properly appreciated the privilege; either he sat on the edge of a chair and made signs to Elizabeth to go or he wandered restlessly around the room looking at all the photographs or taking out the tennis racquet and executing imaginary services with it; till Margaret told him to sit down and not make them all nervous, and then he looked sulky and made even more overt signs to Elizabeth.

  “I brought my sister out here once,” Margaret said. “But she couldn't stand it. Couldn't stand anything—the climate, the water, the food. Everything made her ill. There are people like that. Of course, I'm just the opposite. You like it here too, don't you?”

  “Very, very much.”

  “Yes, I can see you're happy.”

  Margaret looked at her so keenly that Elizabeth tried to turn away her face slightly. She did not want anyone to see too much of her tremendous happiness. She felt somewhat ashamed of herself for having it—not only because she knew she didn't deserve it but also because she did not consider herself quite the right person to have it. She had been over thirty when she met Raju and had not expected much more out of life than had up till then been given to her.

  Margaret lit a cigarette. She never smoked except in her own room. She puffed slowly, luxuriously. Suddenly she said, “He doesn't like me, does he?”

  “Who?”

  “‘Who?’ ” she repeated impatiently. “Your Raju, of course.”

  Elizabeth flushed with embarrassment. “How you talk, Margaret,” she murmured deprecatingly, not knowing what else to say.

  “I know he doesn't,” Margaret said. “I can always tell.”

  She sounded so sad that Elizabeth wished she could lie to her and say that no, Raju loved her just as everyone else did. But she could not bring herself to it. She thought of the way he usually spoke of Margaret. He called her by rude names and made coarse jokes about her, at which he laughed like a schoolboy and tried to make Elizabeth laugh with him; and the terrible thing was sometimes she did laugh, not because she wanted to or because what he said amused her but because it was he who urged her to, and she always found it difficult to refuse him anything. Now when she thought of this compliant laughter of hers she was filled with anguish, and she began unconsciously to wring her hands, the way she always did at such secretly appalling moments.

  But Margaret was having thoughts of her own, and was smiling to herself. She said, “You know what was my happiest time of all in India? About ten years ago, when I went to stay in Swami Vishwananda's ashram.”

  Elizabeth was intensely relieved at the change of subject, though somewhat puzzled by its abruptness.

  “We bathed in the river and we walked in the mountains. It was a time of such freedom, such joy. I've never felt like that before or since. I didn't have a care in the world and I felt so—light. I can't describe it—as if my feet didn't touch the ground.”

  “Yes, yes!” Elizabeth said eagerly, for she thought she recognized the feeling.

  “In the evening we all sat with Swamiji. We talked about everything under the sun. He laughed and joked with us, and sometimes he sang. I don't know what happened to me when he sang. The tears came pouring down my face, but I was so happy I thought my heart would melt away.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said again.

  “That's him over there.” She nodded toward a small framed photograph on the dressing table. Elizabeth picked it up. He did not look different from the rest of India's holy men—naked to the waist, with long hair and burning eyes.

  “Not that you can tell much from a photo,” Margaret said. She held out her hand for it, and then she looked at it herself, with a very young expression on her face. “He was such fun to be with, always full of jokes and games. When I was with him, I used to feel—I don't know—like a flower or a bird.” She laughed gaily, and Elizabeth with her.

  “Does Raju make you feel like that?”

  Elizabeth stopped laughing and looked down into her lap. She tried to make her face very serious so as not to give herself away.

  “Indian men have such marvelous eyes,” Margaret said. “When they look at you, you can't help feeling all young and nice. But of course your Raju thinks I'm just a fat, ugly old memsahib.”

  “Margaret, Margaret!”

  Margaret stubbed out her cigarette and, propelling herself with her heavy legs, swung down from the bed. “And there's poor old Babaji waiting for his tea.”

  She poured it for him and went out with the cup. Elizabeth went after her. Babaji was just as they had left him, except that now the sun, melting away between the trees behind him, was even more intensely gold and provided a heavenly background, as if to a saint in a picture, as he sat there at peace in his rocking chair.

  Margaret fussed over him. She stirred his tea and she arranged his shawl more securely over his shoulders. Then she said, “I've got an idea, Babaji.” She hooked her foot around a stool and drew it close to his chair and sank down on it, one hand laid on his knee. “You and I'll take those children up to Agra. Would you like that? A little trip?” She looked up into his face and was eager and bright. “We'll have a grand time. We'll hire a bus and we'll have singing and games all the way. You'll love it.” She squeezed his knee in anticipatory joy, and he smiled at her and his thin old hand came down on the top of her head in a gesture of affection or blessing.

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  (1865–1936)

  Rudyard Kipling spent the first five years of his life in India. It was an idyllic childhood, enclosed by servants and sensuous sights. Its memory was sharpened by a traumatic uprooting to England, described most poignantly in his short story “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and worked its way into almost everything he wrote about India. It even survived his later strident allegiances to the Briti
sh Empire. Or, perhaps his sincerely felt awareness of the white man's burden made for another kind of intimacy with the brown man. Certainly, the stories Kipling wrote on his return to India as a young journalist in the 1880s and the later novel Kim (1901) show a feeling for Indian landscapes and peoples that writers much more politically correct have seemed to lack. In the following excerpt from Kim, where the half-Irish boy Kim travels with a Tibetan lama on the Grand Trunk Road, Kipling's eye takes in the labor gangs on the railway tracks as well as the bride-groom's pony turning “aside to snatch a mouthful from a passing fodder cart.” Both knowledge and admiration rest behind the vision of the hillmen of Kulu and Kangra and the “Ooryas from down country” and the “wayside shrines—sometimes Hindu, sometimes Mussalman—which the lowcaste of both creeds share with beautiful impartiality.”

  from KIM

  “Now let us walk,” muttered the lama, and to the click of his rosary they walked in silence mile upon mile. The lama, as usual, was deep in meditation, but Kim's bright eyes were open wide. This broad, smiling river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and crowded Lahore streets. There were new people and new sights at every stride—castes he knew and castes that were altogether out of his experience.

  They met a troop of long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets of lizards and other unclean food on their backs, their lean dogs sniffing at their heels. These people kept their own side of the road, moving at a quick, furtive jog-trot, and all other castes gave them ample room; for the Sansi is deep pollution. Behind them, walking wide and stiffly across the strong shadows, the memory of his leg-irons still on him, strode one newly released from the jail; his full stomach and shiny skin to prove that the Government fed its prisoners better than most honest men could feed themselves. Kim knew that walk well, and made broad jest of it as they passed. Then an Akali, a wild-eyed, wildhaired Sikh devotee in the blue-checked clothes of his faith, with polished-steel quoits glistening on the cone of his tall blue turban, stalked past, returning from a visit to one of the independent Sikh States, where he had been singing the ancient glories of the Khalsa to College-trained princelings in top-boots and white-cord breeches. Kim was careful not to irritate that man; for the Akali's temper is short and his arm quick. Here and there they met or were overtaken by the gaily dressed crowds of whole villages turning out to some local fair; the women, with their babes on their hips, walking behind the men, the older boys prancing on sticks of sugarcane, dragging rude brass models of locomotives such as they sell for a half-penny, or flashing the sun into the eyes of their betters from cheap toy mirrors. One could see at a glance what each had bought; and if there were any doubt it needed only to watch the wives comparing, brown arm against brown arm, the newly purchased dull glass bracelets that come from the North-West. These merrymakers stepped slowly, calling one to the other and stopping to haggle with sweetmeat sellers, or to make a prayer before one of the wayside shrines—sometimes Hindu, sometimes Mussalman—which the low-caste of both creeds share with beautiful impartiality. A solid line of blue, rising and falling like the back of a caterpillar in haste, would swing up through the quivering dust and trot past to a chorus of quick cackling. That was a gang of changars— the women who have taken all the embankments of all the Northern railways under their charge—a flat-footed, big-bosomed, strong-limbed, blue-petticoated clan of earth carriers, hurrying north on news of a job, and wasting no time by the road. They belong to the caste whose men do not count, and they walked with squared elbows, swinging hips, and heads on high, as suits women who carry heavy weights. A little later a marriage procession would strike into the Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust. One could see the bride's litter, a blur of red and tinsel, staggering through the haze, while the bridegroom's bewreathed pony turned aside to snatch a mouthful from a passing fodder cart. Then Kim would join the Kentish-fire of good wishes and bad jokes, wishing the couple a hundred sons and no daughters, as the saying is. Still more interesting and more to be shouted over it was when a strolling juggler with some halftrained monkeys, or a panting, feeble bear, or a woman who tied goats' horns to her feet, and with these danced on a slack-rope, set the horses to shying and the women to shrill, long-drawn quavers of amazement.

  The lama never raised his eyes. He did not note the moneylender on his goose-rumped pony, hastening along to collect the cruel interest; or the long-shouting, deep-voiced little mob— still in military formation—of native soldiers on leave, rejoicing to be rid of their breeches and puttees, and saying the most outrageous things to the most respectable women in sight. Even the seller of Ganges water he did not see, and Kim expected that he would at least buy a bottle of that precious stuff. He looked steadily at the ground, and strode as steadily hour after hour, his soul busied elsewhere. But Kim was in the seventh heaven of joy. The Grand Trunk at this point was built on an embankment to guard against winter floods from the foothills, so that one walked, as it were, a little above the country, along a stately corridor, seeing all India spread out to left and right. It was beautiful to behold the many-yoked grain and cotton wagons crawling over the country roads: one could hear their axles, complaining a mile away, coming nearer, till with shouts and yells and bad words they climbed up the steep incline and plunged on to the hard main road, carter reviling carter. It was equally beautiful to watch the people, little clumps of red and blue and pink and white and saffron, turning aside to go to their own villages, dispersing and growing small by twos and threes across the level plain. Kim felt these things, though he could not give tongue to his feelings, and so contented himself with buying peeled sugarcane and spitting the pith generously about his path. From time to time the lama took snuff, and at last Kim could endure the silence no longer.

  “This is a good land—the land of the South!” said he. “The air is good; the water is good. Eh?”

  “And they are all bound upon the Wheel,” said the lama. “Bound from life after life. To none of these has the Way been shown.” He shook himself back to this world.

  “And now we have walked a weary way,” said Kim. “Surely we shall soon come to a parao [a resting place]. Shall we stay there? Look, the sun is sloping.”

  “Who will receive us this evening?”

  “That is all one. This country is full of good folk. Besides”— he sunk his voice beneath a whisper—“we have money.”

  The crowd thickened as they neared the resting place which marked the end of their day's journey. A line of stalls selling very simple food and tobacco, a stack of firewood, a police station, a well, a horse trough, a few trees, and, under them, some trampled ground dotted with the black ashes of old fires, are all that mark a parao on the Grand Trunk; if you except the beggars and the crows—both hungry.

  By this time the sun was driving broad golden spokes through the lower branches of the mango trees; the parakeets and doves were coming home in their hundreds; the chattering, grey-backed Seven Sisters, talking over the day's adventures, walked back and forth in twos and threes almost under the feet of the travellers; and shufflings and scufflings in the branches showed that the bats were ready to go out on the night picket. Swiftly the light gathered itself together, painted for an instant the faces and the cart-wheels and the bullocks' horns as red as blood. Then the night fell, changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country, and bringing out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood smoke and cattle and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes. The evening patrol hurried out of the police station with important coughings and reiterated orders; and a live charcoal ball in the cup of a wayside carter's hookah glowed red while Kim's eye mechanically watched the last flicker of the sun on the brass tweezers.

  The life of the parao was very like that of the Kashmir Serai on a small scale. Kim dived into the happy Asiatic disorder which, if you only allow time, will bring you everything that a simple ma
n needs.

  His wants were few, because, since the lama had no caste scruples, cooked food from the nearest stall would serve; but, for luxury's sake, Kim bought a handful of dung cakes to build a fire. All about, coming and going round the little flames, men cried for oil, or grain, or sweetmeats, or tobacco, jostling one another while they waited their turn at the well; and under the men's voices you heard from halted, shuttered carts the high squeals and giggles of women whose faces should not be seen in public.

  Nowadays, well-educated natives are of opinion that when their womenfolk travel—and they visit a good deal—it is better to take them quickly by rail in a properly screened compartment; and that custom is spreading. But there are always those of the old rock who hold by the use of their forefathers; and, above all, there are always the old women—more conservative than the men—who toward the end of their days go on a pilgrimage. They, being withered and undesirable, do not, under certain circumstances, object to unveiling. After their long seclusion, during which they have always been in business touch with a thousand outside interests, they love the bustle and stir of the open road, the gatherings at the shrines, and the infinite possibilities of gossip with like-minded dowagers. Very often it suits a long-suffering family that a strong-tongued, iron-willed old lady should disport herself about India in this fashion; for certainly pilgrimage is grateful to the Gods. So all about India, in the most remote places, as in the most public, you find some knot of grizzled servitors in nominal charge of an old lady who is more or less curtained and hid away in a bullock cart. Such men are staid and discreet, and when a European or a high-caste native is near will net their charge with most elaborate precautions; but in the ordinary haphazard chances of pilgrimage the precautions are not taken. The old lady is, after all, intensely human, and lives to look upon life.