by Paul Theroux
Indoo, being very positive, semaphored with his head. He said, “White-water rafting on the Ganges. Bring your bathing costume. I shall provide a hamper and all other requisites.”
We left Delhi by car at four-thirty the next morning, Indoo sitting in front with the Sikh driver, Eden and I in the back. We slept on the way, jogging along in the dark, and it was sunny when we woke up at Roorkee—Indoo wanted to show us the canal and the carved lions. We stopped for tea and bananas, and then drove on—the Sikh honking incessantly at cyclists and bullock carts.
“This is a holy city,” Indoo said at Hardwar, and when the Sikh hesitated, perhaps thinking that some sight-seeing was expected, Indoo said firmly, “Carry on.”
He pointed out Rishikesh (“The famous Beatles visited here”) and we drove on. The road began to rise and curve above the river, but after a few miles the Sikh turned sharply right and we traveled down a narrow track to the riverside.
“This is the camp.”
There, among thin-leaved trees and twittering birds, was a pair of stone buildings. Two sturdy Indians wearing shorts and T-shirts sat with their backs against the warm stone, drinking tea in the sunshine. Just beyond them was the Ganges, thirty yards wide and frothing over smooth brown boulders. This alone was a surprise: I had always thought of it as a flat silent river, mud-colored and turgid. This was more like a mountain stream.
The two Indians scrambled to their feet when they saw us. Indoo shouted to them in Hindi and they hurried into one of the buildings. Ten minutes later they served us a late breakfast of fruit and a burned oily omelet. Eden made the motions of eating but did not eat.
The Indians were caretakers, they were cooks, they were drivers and boatmen. While we ate they tidied the gear, sorted the equipment and began inflating the raft.
Eden said, “This is fantastic. I can’t believe I’m here. I feel excited, like a little girl on her first expedition.” She clutched my arm and said in a squeaky voice, “I’m so frightened!”
“If you don’t want to come with us you can stay here,” Indoo said. “We have all necessary facilities.”
“I’m going with you,” Eden said in a different and intimidating voice, as though her courage had been impugned. “Do you think I’d let you leave me behind?”
Indoo was rattled by the severity of her reply. He turned to me and said, “It’s so good to see you, Andrew!”
We strapped the raft to the car roof and drove along a bumpy road to a point several miles upriver, where there was an unoccupied villa. We parked in the grounds of this big empty place and changed into our bathing suits in its musty carriage house. Here the river was wider than at the camp, and not so turbulent, but Indoo said there was white water just around the bend, where there was a dome-shaped stony hill.
We walked to the rocky riverbank and in bright sunshine put on our life jackets.
“There’s something about putting on a lot of uncomfortable equipment that makes me nervous,” Eden said, buckling the straps.
“And crash helmet and gloves,” Indoo said.
“Oh, Jesus. See what I mean?”
Indoo stood at the water’s edge and showed us how to paddle—the techniques of slowing down, and turning, and speeding when it was necessary to power the raft out of a hole in the rapids.
“Why don’t we practice in the raft?” Eden said, and it was clear that she felt foolish standing on dry land flipping her paddle back and forth, attempting the correct strokes.
“We cannot,” Indoo said. “When we are on the raft there will be no time. River will be flowing too fast. Remember, this is Ganga!”
“Mother Ganga,” one of the boatmen said eagerly.
“Oh, Jesus,” Eden said under her breath.
“You don’t have to come,” I said, speaking casually, so as not to make an issue of it.
But Eden was insistent. “I’m not staying behind,” she said, and to Indoo, “Show me that turning stroke again.”
“That is the spirit,” Indoo said.
Six of us knelt in the big rubber raft—Eden and I in the bulgy bow—and we pushed off from the bank. The raft seemed an ungainly thing, like a misshapen rubber tire or a beach toy, but in the first set of rapids I saw that it was a useful shape. Its sides were cushions—the best protection against the sharp rocks in the shallow rapids—and the whole raft lifted and flexed and squeezed itself through the turbulence, as Eden screamed. The rushing water drowned the sounds of her fear.
The Ganges here was not a sluggish silent thing. It was blue and loud and very cold, reminding me of the melting glacier that was its source in the foothills of the Himalayas.
When we got through the first white water, Indoo gasped with pleasure and said, “If you fall out, protect your face and swim for the bank if you can. Otherwise we’ll pick you up.”
“Now he tells us,” Eden said, and I knew from her bad temper that she was really scared.
In this quiet reach in the river, Indoo gave us instructions for the set of rapids up ahead. We were to use the draw stroke, and when we entered the boiling hole beneath the rock we were to paddle with all our might in order to propel the raft out of the whirlpool—otherwise we would be hammered down by the force of the water, and kept there.
“Beautiful,” Eden said in a toneless voice.
The rushing water was as loud as a cataract and had the same rhythm of a pounding engine. The Indians at the stern were howling to keep their spirits up. It was a shattering minute of cold water and loud noise and frantic paddling. I looked aside and saw Eden’s mouth open, and her drenched face and white teeth.
And then we were out of it: we surfaced in the warmth and silence of another river bend.
“I’m cold,” Eden said. “I’m exhausted.”
One of the Indians squawked in Hindi, and the other replied.
Indoo said, “They see something.”
There was a sandbank ahead with a loose pile of dark driftwood on it.
We paddled towards it, the men talking in their own language.
“What are they saying?” Eden asked.
“It is a body,” Indoo said, as the raft swept onto the sand, a few feet from the jumble of bones.
His way of saying it, a bhodhee, made it seem especially like a carcass. The thing was leathery and ill-assorted, like a smashed valise, which in a sense it was. Only the skull gave it away: its teeth and its yellowed dome were the human touch.
“Let’s move out,” Eden said. “I don’t want to look.” Her helmet was off, her hands over her face. “Just leave it.”
The two Indian boatmen were talking solemnly.
Indoo said, “They are saying we must bury it.”
“How far do we have to go down the river?” I said.
“A mile,” he said.
“Are there any more rapids?” Eden asked.
“It is rapids, rapids, rapids, from here to the camp.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Eden said.
Indoo looked soulfully at me and said, “An unburied body is a terrible thing.”
But Eden was looking downriver in a desperate way and saying, “If we don’t go now—”
“It is not a matter for discussion,” Indoo said. “We have no choice. And remember this is Mother Ganga.”
Indoo saw Eden glancing back at the boatmen, who were standing over the scattered bones and chanting.
“They are doing puja,” he said, and smiled to reassure her.
“And you’re just standing there,” Eden said to me. She sounded disgusted and victimized, but what had I done to her?
As we were talking we had stepped ashore and tethered the raft. Eden turned her back on us and walked quickly along the sandbank. When she had gone some distance and we no longer felt self-conscious from her disapproval we lifted the bones onto our paddles. The four of us moved slowly along the sand to the highwater mark, balancing the bones on the broad paddle blades. We used the paddles to dig a hole and we eased the skeleton in—the Indians murmuring Ram! Ram! Ram! in their puja—
and we covered it all with the largest boulders we could find.
None of us said another word. It was as though we had known that dead person, and from the way we had found it we sensed that the person—woman or man—had died violently and alone. No rites had been observed, the corpse had not been burned, and until we had seen it on the sandbank it was just part of the trash on the river. It could have been Ong Khan; it could have been me.
It had been upsetting, but the exertion of carrying and digging calmed me, and the reverence of the others impressed me. They had gone to some inconvenience to bury the human remains and keep them safe from dogs and fish and carrion crows. In a world of ambiguity and cross-purposes this was indisputably a good deed. I liked it best for having been carried out in such a solemn and dutiful way in the full knowledge that there were no witnesses and that it would never have been recognized or acknowledged. We might have simply paddled past the carcass, but of course we couldn’t. I did not want to die as Ong Khan had.
I remembered how as an altar boy at St. Ray’s serving at three funerals earned us a wedding. There was no relation between that empty ritual and what we had done this morning, which had been like taking the first awkward steps towards inventing a religion. It was the first sign I had ever had that I might find my way back to believing.
As we began to launch the raft I felt elated, recalling how we had carefully packed the pathetic bones and skull into the hole. It was like being in the presence of grace, the old confessional thrill of truthfulness and hope that I had felt as a child. It was a sweet Easter feeling.
“We dug the hole with our paddles,” I started to say.
“Don’t tell me,” Eden said—and she kicked the raft. “I don’t want to hear about it. I just want to get out of here. I’m freezing.”
Indoo understood. He said, “We are a bit short of time. We will take the quick way back. No rapids.”
“Thank God for that,” Eden said.
The day ended abruptly and not as we had planned. We stopped in Hardwar for puris, and on the way made stops for Indian sweets and ice cream.
Indoo said, “When I go on these trips I do all the things I never do at home. I eat snacks. I drink colas. I take ice cream. I am happy.”
“I know how you feel,” Eden said.
“Maybe.”
“I hope you don’t think I overreacted to that dead body,” she said.
Indoo wagged his head, saying yes and no. He liked being enigmatic and I knew he was enjoying himself when he said to Eden, “We Indians say the world is maya—illusion. It does not exist. Truly. The secret lies in letting go of things.”
“That’s lovely,” Eden said.
“Some other day we will come back to the Ganga.”
3.
A day or so later in Delhi I was in the hotel bar looking through Murray’s Guide and I saw Eden enter the lobby. I had mixed feelings about men staring at her. I was proud of her beauty, but I hated the stupid greedy way that men stared, doing it not in appreciation but with a kind of possessiveness. I particularly resented Indians doing it, because it was forbidden for anyone to stare at their women, and because I knew that they regarded most western women as brainless whores and bitches. I saw that hunger and contempt on their faces and hated them for it.
“Those men were eyeing you,” I said, when she came into the bar.
“They probably don’t have anything better to do,” she said. She wasn’t insulted; I wondered whether she had actually been flattered.
“Where have you been all afternoon?”
“Out,” she said, pursing her lips in a small girl’s mischief-mouth.
I had to admire her resourcefulness. True, this was only Delhi, and it was easy to get a taxi and go anywhere in the city. But she had never been to India before: this was all alien and some of it threatening.
“Have a drink,” I said.
“I’d love some lassi,” she said.
Liquid yogurt, served cold in a glass: where had she learned about that? I decided not to ask her.
The salted lassi was brought. Eden took a sip and then set the glass down. She was perspiring slightly, her hair was damp, her skin glowed, her blouse clung to her breasts. She smiled at me and touched her throat, a graceful gesture, smoothing her nails against the pale skin of her neck. Watching her fingers I saw that she was wearing a new necklace.
“What’s that?” I said.
She drew sharply away and smiled at me.
But I had seen—I’d had a glimpse of a bone necklace of tiny carved objects.
“Is it skulls—one of those crazy Tibetan things?”
The carved beads were yellow against her skin.
“I’m not going to tell you,” she said, and her hand moved from her neck to her breasts, lightly encircling them. “If you want to find out you’ll have to come upstairs.”
And she finished her lassi, licking the flecks of foam from her lips. She got up and left the bar, moving slowly with a lovely swing that made her hips seem thoughtful, and not noticing anyone as she passed through the lobby.
I was still seated. I called for the bill, and followed her; but she was already upstairs.
To be playful, I knocked on the door. She did not answer. I waited a moment and then knocked again. A small voice said, “Come in.”
When I opened the door she stepped from behind it. She was naked for the whole of her lovely length. She kissed me and began to fumble with my shirt. She was wearing the necklace—one moment it was squeezed into her cleavage, and the next it was looped around a breast. It was as I had thought a string of small skulls, carved from bone, staring with empty eye-sockets and grinning without lips.
Eden took hold of me and pushed me down to the bed. She sucked me, more with eager greed than pleasure, and then squatted on my nodding cock, fitting it into her with one hand, as her necklace of little skulls shook in my face. As I came she grunted and thrust harder and threw her head back, the necklace still rattling.
“It was a present,” she said later, when we woke from our sudden doze. And then she explained. She had found a shop that sold antiques—good ones, she said, real ones, the scarce one-of-a-kind that seldom reached the United States. She told the Indian owner (“a crazy little guy in a skullcap”) about her magazine and said she wanted to feature his shop in the Destinations section.
“The shop is full of great stuff,” she said. “Some of it is funky and some of it is incredible.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
She said, “Are you putting me on?”
She would do an article, she said, and commission an Indian photographer to illustrate the piece. The shopkeeper had accepted the idea.
“Did you think he might object?”
And he had sent her away with the necklace.
“He just took it out of a drawer and hung it around my neck,” Eden said. “He refused to let me pay him.”
“Do you find that strange?”
“You’re being really sarcastic, Andy. I can’t stand it when you run people down.”
She was right. I had vowed that on this trip I would simply wander with her and say nothing, and I had broken that vow.
I said, “They’re yak bones. Tibetan refugees carve them. I’ve seen them in Darjeeling.”
Eden dug into her bag and brought out two other objects.
“He also gave me this and this. One’s a flute and the other’s a drum, I think.”
“They’re Tibetan, too.”
“You say it with such certainty. How can you be so sure?”
“Because Indians would never make any object out of human bones. That flute is a legbone—looks like a femur,” and I stroked her thigh. “The drum is made from a human skull.”
Eden started to laugh, as though she had just been made the butt of a mild joke.
“I told you he was crazy!”
I looked at the bones and saw a whole human head in the little drum and a skinny brown leg in the flute. I began to grieve
for the way they had been mocked: they were lying on the thick white marble table with a copy of last week’s Time magazine and an empty bottle of Campa Cola and some torn rupees that looked like dead leaves.
“Are you going to keep them?”
“I suppose you want me to bury them.”
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” I said, and thought of how we had laboriously dug a hole with canoe paddles at the edge of the upper Ganges for bones just like these.
Eden laughed again and stood up. She was still naked. She had a piece of lopped-off cranium in one hand and a length of legbone in the other, and clicking at her throat the yellow necklace of skulls on a string.
She climbed onto the bed, still standing, and I saw little pearls of dew glistening on the hair beneath her navel, the neat beard pointed and dark and damp from our lovemaking. She straddled me, and then put one foot on my chest in a clumsy conquering way.
“What are you looking at?” she said in a tone of fierce teasing, as she moved her legs apart.
We made love again, and she was even more active than before. Afterwards we lay exhausted on the bed with the Indian sun just before it set piercing the curtains and leaving a bright hot stripe across our bodies.
“At least meet the guy,” she said. “You might change your mind.”
He was a starved-looking Kashmiri named Ismail. He had a bony face and bloodshot eyes. I distrusted him for his quivering politeness and the way he praised Eden and deferred to me. He seemed on rather familiar terms with her, though he had only met her that one time. I disliked his attentiveness, his furtive scrutiny, his subtle pressure, and his habit of bending double to spit silently onto the floor. Most of all I detested his air of confidentiality, the way he whispered and pretended to be conspiring with us when he mentioned prices. Someone had taught him the word “maximum.” “It is maximum value,” he said. “In Europe it will fetch maximum price.”
I said very little. Ismail talked a great deal. When I spoke I could not keep the sternness and the impatience out of my voice. This made Ismail all the more deferential, and his whisper became a hiss.
“I can give you maximum advice,” he said.