The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  As I was about to leave the nunnery, I saw a round loaf of home-baked bread sitting on a wall. I could smell it from quite a distance, fresh-baked and snug. Surprised that something so tempting would have been abandoned, I asked my guide whom it belonged to. He said, ‘The nuns believe that charity should be anonymous, that you should give to benefit someone in need to help them and not to receive thanks. And that is why the bread is on the wall.’

  As we descended down to the plateau once more, the villagers streamed out of their homes with pots, pans, whistles and drums. My guide pointed to the sky. It was darkening, as if night were approaching – a solar eclipse.

  As soon as the moon slipped over the sun, the villagers banged their pots and pans together, and shrieked for all they were worth.

  The only person not straining to frighten away the Devil was a Chinese official. He was standing in a doorway and looked very angry indeed, as if superstition was restraining progress. My guide started clapping his hands together hard. I asked if he too was trying to frighten the Devil and restore the sun. He turned to face the official and clapped even harder.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘If I do this for long enough, maybe the Devil will go back to his own home and leave us Tibetans in peace.’

  SIXTY-ONE

  Where Widows Go to Die

  BEFORE DAWN HAS BROKEN over Varanasi, India’s holiest city, a procession of figures wends their way down to the Ganges.

  Barefoot and cloaked in simple white saris, they move with slow, deliberate steps through the morning chill. Once at the margin of the sacred river, as the first rays of yellow light touch the mist, they cleanse their bodies in the dark waters of the Ganges. And, with the ancient city stirring to life behind them, the figures – a chain of women aged anywhere between twenty and eighty – stand in prayer. Each has the same invocation. They pray that God will see them, purged by the Ganges’ waters, and they pray that He will grant them their single wish – sudden and immediate death.

  Devika is standing at the centre of the group. Her features are refined, her face framed by an abundance of wet black hair. With eyes tightly closed and palms clasped together, she pleads to be lifted to Paradise. Like the other women, Devika, is in good health. At twenty-four, a lifetime stretches out before her. But, like the others, she too yearns for death.

  Varanasi is home to at least sixteen thousand such women. Each of them lives in a state of self-enforced limbo, desperate for execution. For, Devika, and the group of women surrounding her, are widows.

  Conservative Indian society affords no place for widowhood. As a wife, a woman was traditionally regarded as a chattel, property of her husband. With his death her life is without purpose

  Widowhood is a relatively new phenomenon in India. The practice of sati, a grieving widow climbing onto her deceased husband’s funeral pyre, traditionally put an end to the predicament of the surviving partner. But since the British made sati a criminal act in 1829, Hindu widows have lived as outcasts until their natural deaths. After the British law was passed, such women flooded to Varanasi, fabled ‘City of Light’, most hallowed place in Hinduism. They believe that to die beside the Ganges in Varanasi is to guarantee moksha: the release from the eternal cycle of reincarnation. And, they say, with death all sins are annulled as one slips into Paradise.

  Banished by their families and shunned by society, innumerable widows have turned to Varanasi since sati was abolished. Travelling from all corners of India, they begin a new existence: a life waiting for death. Scant sustenance is provided by pilgrims who flock to the city’s three thousand temples, and by the handful of charitable hostels dedicated to them.

  Take a stroll down the winding lanes that lead down to the Ganges and you see widows all around – stooping, praying, singing, or simply standing in silence. Most are dressed in plain white, or lightly patterned, saris. None wear bindis, the red religious mark on the forehead. None have sindhur, the vermillion dye worn in the hair-parting, sign of a married woman. Instead, they are expected to have their heads shaved once a month. For most, employment is out of the question. Traditionally equated with witchcraft, widows are reviled, resigned to begging for a living.

  Some unscrupulous employers take advantage of the desperate widowed women. Paying wages far below the standard rates, they run sweat-shops in the dark back streets at Varanasi’s Chowk. In one such alley, far from the temples and trappings of ritual, Devika crouches at a loom. Her hands are rough from work, her fingernails torn. Three years ago she journeyed to Varanasi from a village near Calcutta.

  ‘My husband died seven years ago,’ she says in a frail voice, as she pauses from her weaving. ‘He was twenty-two years older than me and died of lung cancer. We were married when I was thirteen. After his death I found myself unwelcome at his ancestral home where we lived. His mother told me that I was cursed. She said that her son had passed away because of me, and she ordered me to leave right away. I wept very hard. I had nowhere to go. My mother-in-law sold my belongings and gave me enough money for a third class single ticket to Varanasi. She swore that if I ever returned she would blind me.’

  Her hazel eyes staring in concentration at the floor, Devika cannot forget the ordeal that brought her here. ‘When I arrived in Varanasi, it was as if I were a leper,’ she continues. ‘Ordinary people spat at me. Others shouted insults or crossed the street to pass me. Mothers whispered to their children “Don’t look, she’s diseased!” I begged at a temple dedicated to Kali. Gradually, I have learned how to survive. And the longer I spend, the better I understand.’ Devika sponges a hand over her face. ‘The widows who have lived here for many years are best positioned,’ she adds, ‘it’s they who know where to stand to catch a pilgrim’s eye.’

  After eight months of begging, Devika was given a job at the weaver’s shop. Emaciated and recovering from malaria, she now weaves blankets fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. Her wage of just forty rupees (50p) a day, is a third of the going rate. Every month she pays half her earnings back to her employer as rent for the small room she shares with two other widows.

  ‘The work is hard,’ Devika says stoically, ‘but I thank God for giving me this chance. Each night I pray to Him to let me die soon. I know that He has heard my pleas. I know that He will take me soon.’

  When asked if she would ever marry again, Devika looks confused at what must sound to her like a completely inane question.

  ‘How could I wed a second time?’ she asks in confusion. ‘That’s impossible. I am a widow.’

  Although they have flocked to Varanasi only since sati was abolished, widows have sought refuge in the holy city for at least two thousand years. Teenage dowagers and those in their early twenties are not uncommon in Varanasi. Some say that widowed girls as young as eleven can be found eking out an existence in the back streets of the Chowk. Resigned to mourn until the end of their days, they live as beggars.

  Like Devika, most believe that their span of life on Earth will draw to a close before long. But decades spent working for a pittance, or bowing with cup in hand, proves such anticipations wrong.

  Sixty-three years ago, Gita Sarkar arrived by ox-cart at the City of Light, fleeing after her husband died of typhoid. She had dreamt of cleansing her soul in the Ganges, and yearned for a speedy delivery to Paradise. These days her face is aged, wrinkled like elephant hide, her body rigid with arthritis and wrapped in white. She spends her time at the dying rooms of the Bhavan Hospice. Gita, now eighty-two, was just nineteen when she arrived in Varanasi, newly-widowed and grieving. She had been married at ten. ‘Long, long ago I was a wife, a mother and a daughter,’ she says in a faltering voice, ‘but when my husband expired, what was I to do? His family told me to stop eating – to simply starve myself to death. When I refused, they poisoned my daughter. I ran away and came here to Varanasi.’

  As Gita tells her tale, the widow in the next cubicle is pronounced dead. Her slender corpse is wrapped in muslin and laid on the stone floor of the small ch
amber. There is no ritual, just the echoes of a drum beating monotonously in a courtyard outside. An oversized leather-bound volume is pulled open and the name of the latest deceased is entered in the crowded columns. Gita pauses for a moment from her memories in respect, and then goes on.

  ‘When I arrived here all those years ago,’ she says, ‘most of the widows were so young, many of them little more than children. It was no surprise I suppose, after all most of us had been married as infants to old men. I prayed for death and expected that it would soon follow. But death has eluded me. Now nearly all those of my generation are dead. They have gone to heaven – they’ve been freed. I shall be with them soon.’

  Next door, the body is prepared for immediate cremation. The hospice, which provides free accommodation for almost sixty widows, covers the expenses of the funeral. A simple cotton shroud is wrapped over the corpse, which is then taken through the winding streets down to the ‘burning ghat’ on the western banks of the Ganges.

  Just enough firewood is weighed out log by log and a makeshift pyre is assembled. The cadaver is positioned, a few drops of sandal oil are sprinkled over it, and the consecrated flame is applied. Three hours after death, and the ashes of yet another widow are cast into the dark sacred waters. With it, another dream of moksha, entrance to Paradise, is attained.

  Director at the hospice, Kunal Bashak, has attended too many cremations to remember. ‘We try to ensure that these ladies – who are so hated by everyone – die with the dignity they deserve,’ he says. ‘Unlike other hospices in Varanasi, we only have space for those who are ready to die. When they come here, widows, often ask for their food to be stopped. Death comes quickly.’

  Strolling about the lanes that form the great bazaar is Ravi Gupta, a short, bespectacled south Indian man. While others avert their gaze, to avoid eye-contact with passing widows, for fear of attracting the evil eye, Gupta greets Varanasi’s mourning women.

  For six years he has studied widowhood in Varanasi, and is a friend to them all. ‘Don’t listen to people when they tell you that widows no longer come here,’ he says sharply. ‘There are almost as many widows here now as after Partition. And, although pilgrims support most of them, more and more are being used as slave labour in workshops around the town. Young girls, married in childhood and widowed as teenagers, are being tricked into prostitution now as never before. A mafia controls the illegal workshops, the illicit trade, and force beggars to pay rent for their “patch”.’

  Gupta has petitioned for an organized government pension for each widow. ‘Red tape and corruption prevent most women eligible to claim pensions from ever getting them,’ he says. ‘People still believe that widows are cursed or diseased; that even by simply speaking to them one will somehow get infected. Others are calling for sati to be reintroduced, defending the idea saying that it’s tradition. It’s not surprising that Indian widows are so desperate to die – they are being treated very unjustly!’

  Balancing precariously on a slender concrete platform outside a cobbler’s kiosk, Yaksha Mishra waves out to Gupta. The two have become good friends. Yaksha, sixty-nine, has lived on the slab – measuring two foot by four – since 1976. When it rains she furls herself up in a crumpled plastic sheet. And, when it is hot, she veils her head with the embroidered hem of her sari. The platform costs her ten rupees a month in rent – paid directly to the local dada, mafioso, as protection money.

  ‘Yes of course I long to leave Varanasi and go to heaven,’ she whispers narrowing her eyes, ‘but for now life continues. I am comfortable with my situation. When people pull their children from the window as I walk by, I smile at them. Decades as an outcast has made me strong.’ Yaksha pauses to accept a rupee coin from a passing pilgrim. ‘Many of the widows who come to Varanasi torture themselves. They compete in their misery. One will cut her legs with a razor blade; another will walk across broken glass. And, although a widow who kills herself will not reach heaven, sometimes a woman is so dispirited that she will buy zeher, poison.’

  As the evening draws to a close, there’s the muffled clang of temple bells in the narrow lanes, bustling with priests and sacred cows. Squatting, forgotten against one wall of the passage, are a dozen widows. A middle-aged pilgrim sprinkles a handful of rupee coins to the line of outstretched hands.

  ‘I am here searching for my own mother,’ he says. ‘She was banished by my Dadi, my paternal grandmother, when my father died suddenly in my childhood. I know there’s almost no hope of ever finding her alive, but I come each year. People think I am mad to continue with the search. But how could I live with myself if she is here, living as a beggar on Varanasi’s streets?’

  Nearby, a handful of figures moves once again through the dispersing twilight towards the Ganges, their bare feet pressing into the soft mud of the riverbank. All clothed in white, they stand with their arms outstretched, their fingers splayed wide, and their eyes firmly closed.

  As the ancient City of Light hides beneath a curtain of darkness behind them, the widows renew their simple and identical prayer to God.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Women on Death Row

  WHERE HIGHWAY 231 crosses the Tallapoosa River in central Alabama, the sky is inky grey, the panorama cold and forgotten.

  A ghostly silence hugs the landscape.

  As the road ascends a low hill, you get your first view of the Tutwiler Prison for Women. Square watch-towers loom upwards from the compound, every inch of it encircled by electric fences and razor-wire. Locked down inside the jail’s white-washed walls, Alabama’s five most feared female inmates await their rendezvous with the electric chair.

  Myth and misinformation surround America’s women on Death Row – two thirds of them are white, ranging in age from eighteen to seventy-five. In more than sixty per cent of cases the victim was an adult male, most often an abusive partner.

  Built in the late ’thirties, Tutwiler Prison has a cramped and ominous atmosphere, one stripped of any comfort.With its old-fashioned no-frills construction, the jail is free from the high-tech features common in more modern penal institutions. The long stone-floored corridors echo to the sounds of steel gates opening for a moment, before slamming shut. Like most of the nation’s female prisons, Tutwiler incarcerates women convicted of petty theft, as well as others condemned for far more brutal crimes.

  Turn right off the main passageway, where the general population is housed, and you come to an unmarked entrance. Without warning, the tempered-steel door opens from behind, swinging inwards. A pair of towering women guards in blue uniforms take the signatures of the visitors. There is a different atmosphere here.

  Most striking of all is the silence.

  Silence that is, except for the high-pitched screams of a deranged inmate. The bars of her cell are fitted with a fine lattice grate to prevent her from hurling faeces at the guards. As her delirious shrieks shatter the quiet, you move down the special corridor. This is the heart of Tutwiler, the solitary confinement wing of Death Row.

  Linda Block sits on her bed in a cell at the far end of the isolation unit. With light grey hair, huge olive green eyes and chalky white skin, Linda, forty-eight, is the most recent woman to be sentenced to death in the United States. Dressed in the white prison-issue tunic, bearing the monogram of the jail, she glances around her windowless cell. The walls are a putrid yellow; the floor is bare cement. Linda’s few possessions are kept in a battered cardboard box at the foot of her bed.

  ‘I have been here since December,’ she says in a calm voice. ‘Before this I was a publisher, a pillar of society. I was known and respected across the country. I hadn’t even ever had a speeding ticket. Then I shot a cop and everything changed.’

  Before her conviction, Linda Block published Liberatis, a political magazine. Far from the sort of person you might expect to find residing on Death Row, she hails from the well-heeled end of society. More likely to be accused of white collar crime than murder, Linda’s peers were shocked that a woman of such social standing c
ould end up on Alabama’s Death Row.

  ‘Now I’m condemned to die in an electric chair,’ she says. ‘I’m regarded as the most heinous criminal of all. Being on Death Row is in itself a dead feeling. You are already dead to the world, to your friends, family and, especially, to the public. The state just hasn’t destroyed the body yet.’

  Linda spends a lot of time thinking about the incident that got her sentenced to death in Alabama’s electric chair. A police officer died in the shooting. And, when a cop dies in the Deep South, there’s enormous pressure to press for the maximum punishment – electrocution.

  According to her account, Linda was using the telephone at a gas station in eastern Alabama when her husband, George, was approached by a police officer. When asked to show his driving license, he leaned into the car. Fearing that he was reaching for a gun, the officer pulled his own weapon. At the trial, the police contended that the gunfight which ensued was an act of naked aggression on the part of Linda Block’s husband. As she was walking back to the car, Linda saw the officer and her husband exchanging shots.

  ‘Whatever the reason, am I supposed to stand there,’ she asks, ‘and allow the cop to shoot my husband till he’s dead?’ Without wasting a moment Linda pulled her own revolver and began to fire at the officer as well. Amid the hail of bullets the cop staggered to his car and drove away.

  ‘Just because a man puts on a badge,’ says Linda, ‘it doesn’t mean he’s superhuman. Nonetheless, we knew that we’d shot an officer and the mentality of the force would be crazed. If you shoot a regular civilian they’ll come after you, but not with the ferocity as when they’re hunting a “cop-killer”.’

  As they made their escape from the area, Linda and George hit a massive police roadblock. They thought then and there about committing suicide. But Linda was terrified for the safety of her ten-year-old son. He had been sitting in the back of the car all along. Only when she surrendered, did Linda realize that the cop they had shot was dead. Forensic evidence used later in court showed that it was probably her bullet that killed the officer. She and her husband were charged with murder. Both were sentenced to die in the electric chair, making them the only married couple on Death Row.