Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  Lallan Singh arrived with an electrician who ran a cable up one of the trees in our camp to connect a large-wattage bulb. At night it would effectively illuminate Tara and, we hoped, keep the boys awake. I watched shamefacedly, but Lallan Singh consoled me. Three other elephants, he told me, had escaped during the night. It was only a precaution.

  Our first buyer offered seventy thousand rupees for Tara. This man, a magnificent actor, almost brought tears to my eyes. He told me of the wonderful elephant he had owned for thirty years, which he only rented out on very auspicious occasions. Just last week, tragedy struck when he was away on business. He had instructed his mahout to take the elephant to one of these very special occasions. The mahout, a lazy man, did not carry out his orders and when he returned he gave the mahout a sound beating. A week later the mahout disappeared, not before he had poisoned the elephant, which had just died. I declined his offer.

  After Tara returned from her bath, I went shopping. From one of the many stalls specialising in elephant decorations, I bought her a beautiful brass neck bell attached to a bright crimson silken cord. Anklets made of bells and strips of silken material to hang from ears and tusks were also available, but I wanted to keep her looking simple, elegant, like a beautiful woman at a ball, wearing a plain dress, unadorned, except for one astonishing piece of jewellery. She did not need decoration.

  I employed a specialist in elephant painting. After drawing a line that sharply demarcated the blackness of her oiled crown from the natural grey of her skin, he created with simple coloured chalks of purple, yellow, white and blue, a series of flowers and lotuses on her ears, face and trunk. In the centre, between her eyes, he traced a dazzling star. Taking down the Union Jack, we draped it over Tara’s shoulders and when prospective buyers approached, Bhim and Gokul would dramatically draw it back.

  As Don and Aditya had disappeared earlier to take photographs, I set off through the Haathi Bazaar, leaving Tara with the boys. My nostrils were instantly filled with the evocative smells of India—spices, incense, the heavy scent of the tribal woman, mixed with the more pungent odour of urine and excrement, and found myself thinking I never wanted to leave. Passing down the elephant lines, mahouts and owners alike called me over—not out of curiosity but because I was part of them, an elephant man, inexorably entwined with their way of life. I sat cross-legged by little fires and shared bowls of tea and littis, small balls of hot dough roasted over the ashes. I inspected their elephants, checking their backs for tell-tale sores and scars, and chuckled disapprovingly when, opening their mouths, I found patches of black on their pink tongues.

  Easily now, I mounted the elephants by way of their trunks and tusks. I sat caressing their ears, and barked commands to make them sit. I watched a big male having part of its tusk sawn off, for a legal sale of ivory. The mahout first carefully measured the distance from eye to lip. After marking a spot which avoided cutting into the nerve, he sawed through it quickly. In India ivory fetches about five thousand rupees a kilo. Magically, the tusk will grow back, just like a finger nail.

  At one encampment stood a huge tusker, excessive in its ornamentation. Richly caparisoned in red brocade, bells hung round its neck and feet, yellow and red silken scarves dangled from its ears and tusks and its tail was braided with silver tinsel. The beast swayed from side to side continuously, its piggy little eyes transfixing everyone who passed, with a stare of pure venom. An old mahout warned me to keep my distance. This was a dangerous elephant, he told me. In the last ten days it had killed three people.

  I counted a hundred and ninety elephants; last year there had been more than three hundred and next year probably there would be even fewer. It is inevitable that this way of life will, in time, die out.

  Leaving the Haathi Bazaar I moved on to the other animal markets. For the first time, the sheer size of the great mela struck me. At the horse lines I watched a small snow-white arab, its pink eyes heavily kohled to highlight their dullness, its tail dyed the colours of the rainbow, being put through its paces. The rider urged him along at a furious pace, then suddenly pulled him dead on his hocks, whirling him about to perform a kind of “pas” or, in military terms, “marking time.” The horses were even more elaborately decorated than the elephants. Some sported headbands worked in gold thread, others had their legs encircled with brass bangles. One wore a necklace of silver and gold, containing verses from the Koran. They came from Rajasthan, the Punjab, Afghanistan, and even Australia, watched over carefully by their dealers, old men with faces creased like parchment paper, shrewd, all-knowing eyes wrinkled against the glare of the sun.

  Beyond the horses, stretching for almost two miles, were paddocks crowded with cows, bullocks and buffaloes. Finally, I reached the bull pens, known locally as the “jewel market.” Apart from the elephants, the bulls fetch the highest prices.

  Making my way back to Tara I entered the shopping centres, a maze of streets lined with booths, overshadowed by the giant Ferris wheel of the fun fair and the Big Top of the circus arena. A crowd surrounded a pair of chained, moth-eaten bears. Goaded by their keeper, they shuffled miserably from paw to paw in time to a disco song. For five rupees you could dance with them.

  Dense clumps of sugar cane had spread through the fields here and provided refuge for numerous co bras. A lot of people were bitten by them, Ranjan said, but forceful eradication was impossible for religious reasons. Instead nonviolent persuasion was traditionally practised. The great event took place every year at the time of the November halfmoon when a large contingent of snake charmers appeared on the scene. The snake charmers located the ants’ nests in which the cobras had taken up residence and played music to in duce them to leave their holes. They were then fed with milk, molasses, and the only recently discovered gastronomic inducement, popcorn, which had become their favourite food. The ceremony of feeding at an end, each cobra was presented with a new dhoti, after which the priest would wish them a happy and successful year and beg them to cease to bite members of his community.

  —Norman Lewis, A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India

  A discordant screeching announced the bird market. Hyacinthine blue macaws from South America sat quietly on their perches, their feathers ruffled, swivelling their heads suddenly, blinking their baleful eyes. Nepalese mynahs chuckled and laughed, and a cage of little rice birds, so gaudy in colour that the owner admitted they had been dyed, hopped nervously from side to side. Outside, a shiny black mynah loaded and fired a miniature cannon, and for ten rupees would play cards.

  The inevitable snake-charmers squatted at the sides of the streets, playing their flutes tunelessly to serpents swaying from wicker baskets. One snake-charmer, more enterprising than the rest, advertised “a fight to the death” between a mongoose and a cobra. I hoped he had an unending supply of cobras, for inevitably the mongoose would win. Or perhaps he waited until he had attracted a large enough crowd to make it worthwhile.

  Jugglers ferried their way through the crowds performing with extraordinary skill considering all the pushing and shoving. As I pushed and shoved I noticed an exceptionally tall man with piercing eyes bearing down on me. I tried to move, but it was as if I was hypnotised. Dipping a long large finger in a small jar of vermilion, he stabbed it against my forehead and demanded five rupees. I christened him “dot man” and over the next few days, whatever preventative measures I took, he always managed to get me. Once, seeing him approach I slipped behind Aditya as the great finger shot out like a sword. I thought I had escaped. Aditya, obviously a seasoned mela veteran, simply ducked and I received it on the end of my nose.

  “Your teeth pulled for only twenty rupees. Get a new set. A new look.” Dentists did a roaring trade from padded chairs operating foot drills. Naive patients writhed in agony as the dentists dug into mouths with what looked like pairs of pliers. In intervals between the shops bold placards hung advertising eating houses, their cuisine varied to suit the tastes of every caste and creed. The smell reminded me of the observatio
n of the old planter who wrote in his Reminiscences of Behar: “I cannot say the dishes look tempting while the smell of bad ghee makes you wish you had put a little extra eaude-Cologne on your handkerchief before you left your tent.“

  Passing brassière shops and signs advertising “Genuine Siamese Twins” I entered the Bombay Bazaar. The smell of bad ghee disappeared in a wave of perfume. Here was everything for the lady. Women, young and old, queued up at scent booths, in which men sat cross-legged behind a thousand different bottles. After twirling cotton-wool onto long silver sticks, they dipped them in and dabbed them on the backs of waiting hands. Glass bangle-sellers displayed their incandescent wares on long tall poles. They fought a losing battle to prevent their eager clients from shattering fragile merchandise as the women pulled and pushed them up and down their arms.

  In large mirrors, the ladies coquettishly painted on different hues of cosmetics and lipstick and applied kohl to their eyes, while others tried on gold nose and ear ornaments. Baskets filled with brilliant hues of sindoor (the powder used to make the tikka) sat in rows of tiny coloured mountains and gorgeous bolts of gauze, silk, and cotton to be made into saris, fluttered like butterfly wings as they were gently unfurled.

  As I moved on, persistent salesmen pressed me to buy their products; brasswork from Benares, inlaid boxes and trays and miniature Taj Mahals from Agra, enamel objects from Jaipur, beautifully embroidered shawls from Kashmir, and in one rather modern shop a Hells Angel’s leather biker’s jacket and a pair of correspondent brogues.

  The ingenuity of the beggars knew no bounds. Beside a man sitting near the temple lay upright in the dust what appeared to be a human head—and it was just that. He had buried his colleague up to the neck and rubbed his face with paste to give it the colour of a corpse. Another simply walked around naked from the waist down, with a large padlock clamped through the end of his penis. Yet another had buried himself head downwards to the waist and was managing to breathe through the open ends of two bamboo tubes that just broke the surface of the ground. Unfortunately, he had neglected to hire an assistant. Passersby liberally helped themselves to his begging bowl.

  On the other side of the temple, I came across the Naga Sadhus, who are fiercely ascetic and protect their privacy zealously. Trained in all forms of fighting they are treated with great respect. Their naked bodies daubed in ash, their faces painted white and vermilion, they resent any intrusion from outsiders, and woe betide anyone stupid enough to try and photograph them. I managed a short conversation with one of them. As a penance, he had not sat down for six years and supported his stiffened and deformed legs by leaning on a kind of wooden swing. He was most indignant when I told him that an elephant belonging to King Louis XIV did not lie down for the last ten years of its life and had worn two holes in the stone buttress with its tusks, on which it supported itself. I beat a hasty retreat.

  I had seen the physique of the people of Andhra, which had suggested the possibility of an evolution downwards, wasted body to wasted body, Nature mocking herself, incapable of remission. Compassion and pity did not answer; they were refinements of hope. Fear was what I felt. Contempt was what I had to fight against; to give way to that was to abandon the self I had known. Perhaps in the end it was fatigue that overcame me. In spite of all that I had read about the country, nothing had prepared me for this.

  —V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness

  There were the usual abominable sights of the poor unfortunate cripples. One was more terrifying and heartrending than anything I had ever seen. It was a young boy—or rather what was left of a young boy—just a small torso supporting a head, twisted and contorted by some hideous disease. He was pushed around in a little cart. On it perched a parrot, which took your money in its beak.

  As I re-entered the Haathi Bazaar, I witnessed two extraordinary fights. Both had been caused by theft, and both were not without humour. The first was a clash of titans between two female elephants, staked next to one another. One of the females had stolen the other’s sugar cane. She turned quickly on the thief and instead of using her head as a battering ram, she tried in the most ludicrous fashion to bite off the other one’s tail. They whirled round trumpeting and squealing in a cloud of dust, looking like squabbling schoolgirls pulling each other’s hair. Three or four mahouts, armed with spears, waded in quickly and put an end to this farce.

  The second fight was decidedly one-sided until an unusual intervention stopped it. A thief had been caught and was being punished in typical local fashion. His hands had been tied behind his back and his feet bound together. Two hefty men wielding long bamboo sticks proceeded to give him a sound beating on his head and the soles of his feet until he was a crying, bleeding wreck. The women, I noticed, particularly enjoyed this spectacle and joined in enthusiastically kicking the unfortunate man’s ribs with sturdy feet, their toes encircled by gold rings, like knuckle-dusters. He would have been killed but for the sudden arrival of a tall, pale, sweating Englishman, a camera slung around his neck, wearing a floppy sun hat. I looked more closely. It was a friend of mine, a travel editor for a glossy London magazine. He waded bravely into the mêlée holding his hands above his head shouting “Bas, bas,” the only word he knew in Hindi. When this had no effect, he clasped his hands fervently together as in prayer, fell to his knees and cried “por favore, por favore!!” Immediately the beating stopped and the crowd became silent. He called the police, who took the bleeding man away.

  There was great excitement in the camp when I returned. Tara’s price had gone shooting up, from seventy to ninety thousand rupees. This offer had come from a man, Aditya told me, who had a dishonest face and apparently owned a hotel in Delhi. The man had said his elephants were well looked after and simply took tourists for rides once a day. Unfortunately, one of them had been hit by a bus.

  Our procession into Sonepur town to garland the statue of the freedom fighter was most impressive. The grandees of the Shoba Theatre supplied us with a bodyguard and I felt terribly important. Forming a phalanx around us, they spearheaded a path through the gaping onlookers. Our entourage, however, did not quite match that of the Prime Minister of Nepal who arrived in Sonepur in 1871 with a bodyguard of three hundred gurkhas and a harem of pretty, lively Nepalese princesses.

  My self-importance now blown out of all proportion, I expected a tumultuous welcome to greet me. Instead, there was an infuriated, sweating policeman, trying vainly to control the traffic, roaring uncontrollably around the monument, and a madman juggling ludoos. One of the grandees placed a garland of marigolds in my hand. Self-consciously I climbed over the fence protecting the statue, looped the garland over the marble head, and feeling I should somehow justify this honour that had been bestowed upon me, bowed deeply. As I climbed out, the madman dropped his ludoos, grabbing me fiercely in a sticky embrace.

  Again cocooned by our bodyguard, we soon reached a large building like a warehouse, constructed from wood and corrugated iron. Its front façade was painted gaudily with ladies cavorting in various stages of undress. Tannoys noisily advertised the delights of the show to an eagerly waiting crowd, pushing and shoving to get nearer an entrance controlled by four large policemen wielding large lead-topped bamboo canes with clinical efficiency.

  “Welcome to the Shoba Theatre, Mr. Shand,” the spokesman shouted. “As you can see it is very popular. Come. We will go through the back.”

  Inside it resembled an aircraft hangar. At one end, shrouded by a gauzy curtain, was the stage, the backdrop a grove of palm trees set against a starry night. Below, in the pit, fenced off by large iron palings, sat the orchestra tuning their instruments in a cacophony of discordant notes. Behind the pit were the best seats, costing twenty-five rupees, and separated from them by a triple-stranded barrier of barbed wire, was standing room only, at five rupees per person. The theatre put on three shows daily and could hold a crowd of eighteen thousand people.

  We sat sipping tea and eating cakes in the wings. Aditya and I were introduced to t
he artistes—highly painted, plumpish ladies in sequinned outfits, their male partners squeezed into tightly fitting jumpsuits, brocaded like matadors’ costumes. The building vibrated suddenly, as the gates were opened and a surge of people fought their way in.

  Behind the curtain, a row of chairs had been placed beyond a large red ribbon. A barrage of arc lights hit us as we sat down. I felt inordinately self-conscious and nervous. Sweat began to trickle down my back. The star of the show, Miss Shoba, whose appearance caused a roar of excitement from the crowd, blessed and garlanded us. Long speeches followed. The Master of Ceremonies, wearing a smart, navy blue blazer with shiny gold buttons and white bell-bottomed trousers, introduced me as the famous English mahout and gave a lengthy account of my adventures. The crowd became instantly restless, longing for the show to start.

  The band struck up, the gauzy curtains lifted and a pair of scissors were thrust into my hands. I stood up, sawed through the ribbon and stammered a few appropriate words, which Aditya then translated. Miss Shoba reappeared and led me off the stage to a small smattering of applause. I wanted to leave immediately to see Tara but Aditya insisted it would be impolite. We must stay to watch at least one act.

  I’m glad we did. A seductive girl dressed in a black, transparent sari worked the crowd into a frenzy. The origins of the dancing girl go back to the Gandharva women, renowned for their beauty and skill in dancing and singing. In the old days when the fair was a meeting place for Rajas, zamindars, big agriculturists, and businessmen, the girls made a good harvest. Fees of five hundred or one thousand rupees were a common feature for a few dances. On some of the more noted dancing girls, lakhs of rupees used to be spent for more personal services.