The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  My eyes streamed at the thought of eating a meal concocted from ingredients pilfered from a Calcutta dustbin. I am squeamish about food at the best of times. Yet I had to eat, for fear of offending the rickshawalla and his colleagues. How would Venky ever hold his head up high here again if I – his guest – did not dig in?

  Nudging the thumb and index finger of my right hand into the food, I wondered how I would get through the meal. Sharmila Roy tottered over to see I was getting plenty to eat. At first I hoped I would have enough time to stall; or to think of something. Then it struck me that the entire clientele were glancing back and forth at my fingers and my mouth, waiting for the first bite.

  Selecting a mass of fetid fish intestines, I squeezed out the juices with my fist and drew them up to my face. Sixty eyes scrutinized my movements. In a second it would all be over. My fingers trembled with alarm. My mouth twitched in anticipation. Then, as the first globule of fish entrails was about to pass between my lips, I had an idea. It was not one of unknown profundity, but, for a skin-of-the-teeth reaction, it would do. Rather than inserting the rotting fish guts into my mouth, I did a conjuror’s sleight-of-hand. The intestines never reached my terror-stricken digestive treat; they were slipped down my shirt instead.

  “Delicious!” I exclaimed, after stashing several handfuls of food in the same way. “I must come here again. Venky, this is a wonderful place.”

  The rickshawalla translated my applause, to the delight of Sharmila Roy. She was pleased with my ebullient appetite.

  In my enthusiasm, I had stuffed two complete pabda fish-heads, a pair of chicken feet, some mushy vegetables and a selection of entrails down my brown corduroy shirt. By the sixth or seventh fraudulent mouthful, my shirt was dark with grease. But, I reasoned pensively, I was no greasier than any of the other patrons. Indeed, the stinking fish oil had helped me blend in with everyone else.

  When the meal was finally at an end, I stood up to leave. As my lower abdomen became perpendicular once again, I sensed the fusion of fish heads, intestines and chicken’s feet slithering down into my boxer shorts. Venky led me back across the railway tracks. The forces of gravity drew the comestibles down further. Before I knew it, the rickshawalla was giving me unnerving glances … fish-heads had slimed down on to my shoes.

  The worst possible reception was awaiting me at the mansion. A leading Far Eastern diplomat had dropped in on a flying visit to Calcutta. He was escorted by a military colleague, and by a uniformed factotum. Feroze was entertaining the guests on the veranda. Observing me entering the courtyard, he waved for me to join them. After a lunch at the down-and-outs’ cafe, I was in no condition to meet Feroze, or his foreign dignitaries.

  Drenched in putrid curry sauce, with rotting fish intestines trailing from my cuffs, I was not a good advertisement for the Master’s tutelage.

  With desperate fumbling movements, I straightened my shirt-front and buttoned up the cuffs.

  “You’ll never guess what I’ve been through!” I chortled whimsically, as I approached the veranda.

  Unfortunately, before my remark had reached the group of immaculately coutured gentlemen, the odor of putrefaction hit them. The subordinate officer gagged as the stench overpowered him. The diplomat whipped out a handkerchief and stuck its corners up his nostrils like home-made corks. The Master, who was inky blue with rage and trembling visibly, beckoned me forward with his index finger. I edged over to his wicker chair.

  “Laboratory … now …” he whispered, smarting for revenge. “You look hungry. Have a meal on me … ten pebbles!”

  * * * *

  Two days passed. Feroze had been angered beyond all reason by my gaucherie. He slammed the shutters and roved about the darkened mansion, snarling. Outside trips were suspended. I was to practice elementary illusions until I could conduct myself better.

  When I implored Feroze to understand the life-threatening circumstances of my meal, he dismissed all excuses. Neither would he listen to my report – a veritable orgy of insider information and obscure detail. I had failed the course and that was that.

  “Please listen to me!” I urged him on the third day. “Please realize – I only got into such a messy state by a sly sleight-of-hand!”

  The Master sniffed haughtily.

  “I have practiced illusion for many years,” he said acrimoniously, “and I’ve never had cause to stick rotting fish down my pants.”

  “All right … if you won’t listen to my rendezvous with the Metro rental man, or to the meal at the Sealdah Station, would you give me one more chance to study insider information?”

  Snatching at a bluebottle with his hand, the Master turned to face me.

  “Never say that I am not lenient,” he said coldly. “You have one chance to prove yourself. One slip up and the jar of stones will be your reward.”

  Feroze was more like a villainous vizier from A Thousand and One Nights than a prominent conjuror. In times past such a person might have controlled an empire. Hafiz Jan had been right about the Master’s tyrannical course – it wasn’t a “course” at all. Rather, it was a tortuous regime run by a confirmed sadist. Although avid for revenge, I still wanted to impress Hakim Feroze. A single word of applause would have been remuneration for the suffering.

  Looking back, I must have been deranged to consider infiltrating Calcutta’s most arcane profession. But as I reasoned it, the magician wanted insider information: and I would provide him with just that.

  There would be no need for the services of Venky, at least not until I had done the reconnaissance myself.

  During the six and a half weeks I had spent under the supervision of Feroze, a mysterious theme had distracted me. With my daily routine mapped out with illusory training and dead-end studies, I had not had time to explore the subject fully. Not, that is, until now.

  Rather than searching for conventional fodder to requite the Master’s craving, I took a rickshaw to South Park Street Cemetery. The time had come to penetrate Calcutta’s most sinister realm – the world of the skeleton dealers.

  Instead of entering the graveyard through the main gates, I climbed through the hole in the east wall. I could not chance being noticed.

  As if enveloped by a spider’s web, everything in Calcutta is connected to everything else. To locate his prey, a hunter must navigate a course across the delicate gossamer of threads. Given enough time, everything in Calcutta would lead one to everything else. But with Feroze impatient for results, I had no time to waste.

  Within the hour I had tracked down Topu, the youth who lived with his friends in the cemetery. I explained that I required an appointment with the city’s konkalwallas. Topu showed no surprise. He said that, for a fee, he could arrange such a meeting. I was to return to the cemetery shortly before midnight. It all seemed very easy – almost as if Topu was used to arranging rendezvous with the skeleton dealers. But as I handed over a few rupees to lubricate the wheels of efficiency, I was nagged by doubts. What if the konkalwallas thumped me on the head? Before I knew it, I’d be traveling freight class in a crate to Zurich as a medical skeleton.

  The risks were high. But I was not going to be beaten by a few niggling doubts. Rather than descending into the Underworld alone, I would take a confidant with me. I pondered the situation. Who could I trust? The Master? No chance. He would have nothing to do with such a scheme. What about Gokul? Too old. Rublu? Too hunched. My shortlist was thin on names. With the others unsuitable, only one name remained. Venky. I had not known him long, and had not seen his reactions under fire.

  But there was no other choice.

  Topu had been hesitant in agreeing to let me bring an acquaintance along. A supplementary fee, paid in crisp hundred-rupee notes, quashed his indecision. Venky was worth the expense – he would be my Insurance policy against the acid bath.

  Next stop after the burial ground was a roadside drinking den frequented by rickshawallas, in Chetla, south of Alipore.

  Venky, who had been spending all his wages on f
enny, had told me I could find him there when he was “off duty”. Unfortunately for his family in Purulia, Venky was off duty and inebriated much of the time. A wooden shack set in bushes off the main road, the bar was haunted by a select breed of cirrhotic alcoholics. In ambiance, it was like a contemporary version of a nineteenth-century opium den. Instead of opiates, gritty moonshine was poured from a single jug. An uncomfortable aroma of alcohol-based urine lingered about the room. Seven or eight hardened drinkers lay comatose in the dirt. One of them was Venky. When we were done with the konkalwallas, I would have to give him a few days to dry out.

  “Venky,” I said in a solicitous tone, “I’d like you to come with me tonight.”

  The rickshawalla was too intoxicated for conversation. He was singing in his sleep. I pushed back one of his eyelids. The eyeball was rolled upwards. As I felt for a pulse, the owner of the watering-hole wandered over. A great hulk of a man, his face was obscured by six days of beard. He pointed quizzically to the unconscious rickshawalla. I nodded. Seizing Venky by his throat, the manager pulled him to his feet. Venky opened one eye and surveyed the room.

  “Haa, Sahib!” he choked as his single functioning eye focused on me. The pupil dilated sharply.

  “Venky, wake up!” I shouted. “All this drinking is very bad. You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  His neck still imprinted with finger marks, Venky stood to attention as best he could.

  “You are to come with me later,” I said. “I need your services tonight.”

  “OK,” he coughed. “Where to going?”

  “First to Park Street,” I said, attempting to conceal the evening’s gruesome schedule, “then we’ll be going on to meet some old residents of Calcutta.”

  “Very nice”, winced Venky, “elderly gentlemen?”

  “Yes, elderly gentlemen,” I said. “I suppose you could call them that.”

  TWELVE

  Curse of the Skeleton Dealers

  With the moon high overhead, and a chorus of bats screeching in the mango trees, Venky, Topu and I roved out of Calcutta, towards our nocturnal engagement with the skeleton dealers. The journey was too far to be made by rickshaw, and so we took a battered old Ambassador cab. By his quiet enthusiasm, I suspected this was Venky’s first time in a Calcutta taxi. The vehicle rumbled away from the deserted streets of central Calcutta, heading north-west over the Vidyasagar Setu Bridge. Venky chortled that we should have taken his rickshaw. But then, quite suddenly, he passed out. His blood was still pure alcohol.

  Twenty minutes after crossing the Hoogly, Topu called for the taxi to pull up. The driver was paid, and we descended into the jungly undergrowth. Venky would not waken from his slumber. I feared he would be more of a liability than a life-saver. Topu bent over him, and pinched a nerve behind his left ear. Although I'm unclear which nerve it was, the reaction was startling. The rickshawalla jumped forwards, charged with adrenaline.

  We waited in a drainage ditch beside an amber light. Every few seconds it would flash on, bathing us in a glorious surge of saffron. The road disappeared into the darkness about thirty meters ahead. When I asked Topu what we were doing, he told me to be patient.

  Skeletons have always appealed to me. My fascination began when, as a child, I was taken to the crypt of a former Cistercian monastery in Sedlec, in what’s now the Czech Republic. The thirteenth-century vault had been designed as an ossuary, a bone store. Every so often, when the graveyard was full to capacity, the skeletal remains of the villagers would be dug up and stacked up in the crypt like logs ready for burning. By the 1870s more than forty thousand skeletons had been squirreled away in Sedlec’s ossuary.

  Spurred on by eccentric whims, the Schwartzenberg family, who owned the church, commissioned an artist to create something special from the bones. The maestro, Frantisek Rint, yearned to convert the skeletons into magnificent art. He set to work transforming the crypt into his fantasy.

  Twin bone urns line the steps which lead down to the vault. The chamber itself is crammed with exquisite cherubs, ships’ anchors, candlesticks, skull-and-crossbone bunting, and the formidable coat of arms of the House of Schwartzenberg: all created from human bones. Rint even signed his name in bones. But the masterpiece is the mighty chandelier. With at least one of every bone from a skeleton, it has seven candle-holders, each crafted from a human skull. As a child, the Sedlec crypt had affected me considerably, spawning a macabre curiosity for the used-body business.

  A half hour passed. No sign of our contact. Only dismay as we realized that the gutter was full of cockroaches. Another half-hour slipped by. Venky was sleeping peacefully, unaware of our investigation. Then, just as I was about to quiz Topu for the hundredth time, a slender figure slipped from the undergrowth behind us. At first I couldn’t make out his face; just that he was wearing a checkered lumberjack’s coat.

  Topu exchanged greetings with the man. Venky and I were introduced to him. I tried to sustain an air of solemnity, as if the used skeleton business was one of high stakes. As my eyes scrutinized the contours of his face, the amber light flashed on, bathing him in apricot light.

  This was a man with truly hideous features. His eyes were pea-sized and unfriendly. His right cheek was bisected by a deep scar; and the lower portion of his face was dominated by a distinct lantern-jaw. One would have been hard pressed to imagine a more suitable facade to go along with his profession, of grave robber.

  Well, “grave robber” implies one who exhumes buried corpses from the earth. Our contact was more of a straightforward body thief than an all-out grave robber.

  Venky and I had had no idea, but the walled patch of land behind the main road was one of Calcutta’s leading body dumps. Moving in single file, we edged our way to the far end of the wall. The lantern-jaw man pulled a home-made ladder from the gutter and propped it against the barrier. One at a time we clambered up, and jumped down into the enclosed field.

  His lungs filling with the stench of rotting flesh, Venky turned to me, as if ordering an explanation.

  “Old gentlemen,” I whispered.

  Dozens of pedestrians are killed in Calcutta’s traffic every month. Most of the corpses are claimed by relatives and taken away to be cremated. But a sizable number are never collected. Some are too mutilated to be accurately identified. Others are not claimed as their families can’t afford to have them cremated. With Calcutta so close to Bangladesh, the authorities are fearful of sparking another dispute between Muslims and Hindus. So, instead of automatically being cremated according to Hindu funerary rites, all unclaimed cadavers are abandoned in a secluded field on the outskirts of the city. Intentions are sound: the residents of the dumping ground are intended for burial. But with so many random forces hindering legitimate actions, the body-stealers slip by and spirit away what is, for them, a valuable commodity.

  Even by moonlight, the body dump was extremely unpleasant. Dozens of corpses lay strewn about in varying stages of decomposition. Some had been gnawed by pye dogs and were missing their heads, hands, or entire limbs. Others were partially clothed. More still had rubbery Bengali weeds, what looked like liverwort, growing up through them. All were rotting. The odor of fetid flesh is especially unpleasant. Inhaling it is like being hit in the face again and again with a cudgel.

  As I trod in the giant footsteps of Lantern Jaw, I chewed on my fist. I wasn’t cut out to be a skeleton thief. Staggering behind me was Venky, who had lapsed into a state of deep trauma.

  Lantern Jaw poked about with a stick, searching for a corpse of good height, with good teeth. He selected a relatively new cadaver. It was that of a female. By the light of my key-fob flashlight, I made a swift examination of her face. Death is not a condition which live members of the human species are apt to understand. As I stared at this and other cadavers, so many questions came to me. How had the repulsive blemishes occurred? Why were the hands gnarled and distended like root-ginger? Was I going to look like this one day?

  Topu observed me staring into the face o
f Lantern Jaw’s find. He placed a hand on my shoulder blade and tugged me away. Perhaps he sensed that I was already deeply disturbed. Whereas my agitation was inward, Venky’s was loud and overbearing. The rickshawalla was praying at the top of his voice. When I tried to hush him, he grew even more distressed.

  Fearing we might be given away by Venky’s screams, Lantern Jaw wrenched the female cadaver from the soil like a discarded, decomposing mannequin. He hid it beneath branches at one end of the field. He would, I suspected, be back for it later.

  Topu had sworn me to secrecy. He said it was he who would be held accountable if I were to reveal the factory’s location. In any case, I have no idea how he supposed I would remember details of the convoluted route.

  By three a.m. we had reached the plant.

  Lantern Jaw slid into the shadows like a cat-burglar, as the main door was pushed open. Topu went in first. Moments later he beckoned for Venky and me to follow. By the way Topu was greeted; it was evident that he was in some way involved. As the dozen or so workers welcomed him, I considered his motives. Had he been peddling antique English skeletons from the Park Street burial ground?

  The two hours which Venky and I spent at the skeleton processing factory constituted one of the most unnerving experiences I have ever endured. It’s impossible to liken it to anything else. But rather than being repugnant, the business struck me as constructive. Its products – medical skeletons – were fashioned from unwanted raw material … rotting corpses.

  Located in an abandoned brick-walled warehouse, the plant was formed from a series of small chambers. Lit by three or four low-watt bulbs, each was dedicated to a specific purpose. In the West we tend to think of factories as cavernous halls filled with unwieldy machines and uniformed workers. This misguided perception evaporated as we toured the plant.

  The rickshawalla and I regrouped in the modest reception area. I whacked Venky on the back, hoping to reassure him. He perked up somewhat. A tattered sofa, a desk and tranquil posters of the Himalayas belied the grisly business of the next room. A manager had arrived to show us around the premises. He was introduced grandly as the “night operator.” By his fawning mannerisms and obsequious demeanor, it was obvious he was expecting a hefty bribe.