The Civil Aviation official said they would conduct a third-party audit of all the 40 flying schools in the country in the wake of these scams and even cases of forged licenses coming to light.
Delhi Police say “We believe that we have opened up a Pandora’s Box. There seems to be many more people involved in the scam that seems to have grown in the last two years, especially after the proliferation of low-cost airlines.”
She reads on in disbelief. Then again, “Oh my God! I’m going on Indigo! Listen”:
In the latest incident an Indigo Airline woman pilot, Captain Verah Gulati, was arrested for obtaining a pilot’s license on forged documents. It came to light after was grounded following a series of hard landings.
A Civil Aviation Officer said “We found that she had submitted forged result cards of pilot license examination. She used a tout to bribe a Civil Aviation official to look the other way.”
She had failed in air navigation paper and was absent in the paper of radio aids and instruments in January 2009. She again appeared in April and July 2009 sessions, but failed both times.
Sources say that more than 1,700 pilots are now under the scanner and insist that several Civil Aviation officials who have been resisting the probe could be directly involved in the scam.
“Oh my God!”
“I’m sure it will be alright,” says Gillian soothingly.
“I’m not,” says Sita. “I’m going by train,” and she whirls off to the Sheraton’s Travel Desk to arrange same.
Half an hour later she returns. “I can get the Jaipur Bombay Superfast. It’s only eighteen hours each way.”
“But you’ll miss the wedding,” says Gillian.
“A bit, but there will be hundreds of people. Maybe a thousand. It will be alright.”
***
But, as always, we should leave the last word to Mark Twain. On leaving Jaipur he was lucky enough to see one of the Maharaja’s processions, a sight he knew then and we know now we will never see again. He wrote:
Then the wide street itself, away down and down and down into the distance, was alive with gorgeously-clothed people not still, but moving, swaying, drifting, eddying, a delirious display of all colors and all shades of color, delicate, lovely, pale, soft, strong, stunning, vivid, brilliant, a sort of storm of sweetpea blossoms passing on the wings of a hurricane; and presently, through this storm of color, came swaying and swinging the majestic elephants, clothed in their Sunday best of gaudinesses, and the long procession of fanciful trucks freighted with their groups of curious and costly images, and then the long rearguard of stately camels, with their picturesque riders.
For color, and picturesqueness, and novelty, and outlandishness, and sustained interest and fascination, it was the most satisfying show I had ever seen, and I suppose I shall not have the privilege of looking upon its like again.
62 From dacoit, originally a highway robber but now often used for any sort of robber.
63 In Indian clubs always a distinct, dedicated area.
64 A British singer of popular songs.
65 Of course still known by the old name Livy and Clara; “C” for Cawnpore, the old name for Kanpur.
66 Wheeler was a great Indophile, married to a high-caste Indian and even friends with Nana Sahib; thus his guard was down.
67 The adjutant bird is actually a stork and not a vulture. From a distance they look similar.
68 Literally, ladies’ room.
69 Ustad Ahmad Lahauri.
70 Now part of the British Crown Jewels and on display at the Tower of London.
71 From Life’s Handicap and about Lahore.
Part Five
...With A Final Flourish...
Delhi
Events conspired to make Mark Twain’s visit to Delhi a short one. Firstly, his schedule was still recovering from the two-week sick leave in Jaipur, delaying pre-booked Talks in Lahore and Rawalpindi[72]; secondly, he himself was still recovering from his illness in Jaipur and wasn’t in the physical or mental mood for more than cursory sightseeing, and one can only presume that Clara and Smythe were also still wheezy; thirdly, he had no Talk planned in Delhi and so no reason not to move on swiftly; fourthly, Delhi was suffering from “smallpox & water famine threatened”; fifthly, Delhi was still a quaint, provincial, cultureless city compared to the commercial capital, Bombay, and the administrative capital Calcutta; and lastly, they had every intention to make a more leisurely return to Delhi on their way back to Calcutta when he and the city should be in better health. As bad luck had it, the return trip was never made and so his twenty-four hours in Delhi was only a flying visit, albeit one made in some style residing in some style at the only mansion on top of the only hill.
His party arrived from Jaipur at midnight - nine and a half hours late - at what was the old Delhi railway station, which was then being transformed into the Old Delhi Railway Station we see today. In fact it is now being transformed again with a heavy investment in digital signs, CCTV and even - praise the Lord - a coat of paint. Only the red-coated porters have remained the same down the ages: in Twain’s time they were called “coolies” as they still call themselves today. But whether they are coolies or porters their numbers are declining, put out of business by wheely luggage and voracious overpricing, often right under a sign giving the correct rate - half a dollar a bag. Even twenty years ago Indians traveled with their own bedding, it not being expected that hotels or hosts would provide any; another nail in the coolie coffin.
All the modernization does throw up some amusing quirks. At Old Delhi Station they have also invested in a new push button phrase announcer. A delightfully accented English female voice this morning echo-purrs: “The... 12.45... Jandiphur Mail... to Jandiphur Junction... will leave at... 12.45... sharp... we apologize deeply for any inconvenience caused.”
Outside the station is the epicenter of Old Delhi, which should more accurately be called Medieval Delhi. This is not meant disparagingly, it’s just the prefix “Old” gives the impression of a city far newer than it actually is.
Unfortunately the concept of the medieval only has negative connotations these days, conjuring up images of plague and pestilence in the dark days before sanitation, sleeping quarters, civic pride, footwear, reason and Renaissance. Perhaps Quentin Tarantino sums up the modern image best in Pulp Fiction when the gangster-baddie tells the pervert-baddie, “now I’m gonna get medieval on yo’ arse,” meaning the former is about to torture, in none too pleasant a fashion, if memory serves, the latter. Unfortunately this sort of careless banter gives a bad name not only to medievalism but to sado-masochism as well.
The fascinating point about medieval Delhi, or The MedDel Experience if it were ever Disneyfied, is that it transports one back to the India of Mark Twain’s time and to the Europe of Donatello’s paintings. The great qualification, of course, is the density of population. Now the Census Board estimate India’s population at 1.2 billion; they estimate that in 1900 it was around 150 million[73] or about an eighth of what it is now. In pre-capital Delhi it was less than half a million, a fiftieth of what it is today. An early morning walk, when forty-nine out of fifty people are yet to rise, serves as an indication of the density Twain would have seen here in Delhi.
And it’s all still here. The impromptu hairdresser, the trinket salesman, the old notice board, the open sewer, the stagnant mud puddles, the hand-pump well, the ear-cleaner, the cooper, the wheelwright, the beggar child, the sleeping bundle, the urinater, the random roadside pitch, the tailors’ stalls, the tea stalls, the liquor stalls, the hawkers and hustlers of the this and the that, the snoozing mange dogs, the shy cats, the boxed fowl, the goats, the cows and the cow pats, the street seamstresses, the street sweet sellers, the street shoe shiners, the street shavers, the street sleepers,
the street sweepers, the scavengers and the spitters, the maimed and the infirm, the rats, the open shops with raised floors, the man as a beast of burden worth less than a donkey and more than a child, the cottage industries, houses in the lanes so narrow neighbors can stretch out to touch each other, the lanes strewn with detritus variosis, the smell of farmyard and urine and rotting fruit and mulching vegetables, the smell of decay and heat.
And the good news? The people are the good news. Of course, one would prefer not to move back to medieval times, even as a courtier or squire, but we have lost something on the road to long life, freedom and prosperity; the immediacy of our relationships with everyone and everything around us; the immediacy of lives driven by the rather stark imperative: if you don’t earn, you don’t eat; the immediacy of a life led by the stick and carrot, the snake and the ladder, of religious belief. If one stands accused of patronizing voyeurism it is worth remembering that compassion in its original meaning is to feel sympathy with someone and not to feel sorry for someone, the latter the meaning the concept of compassion has drifted into.
***
For the late arriving Twain party it was bed-time. They trotted in their tongas past the sites they would see the next day: Kashmere Gate, Nicholson’s grave, Civil Lines, up Delhi’s only hill to The Ridge, past the 1857 War Memorial and so on to the mansion in which they were staying. It was quite a place, in quite a spot, with quite a history.
The Delhi of twenty million now and the Delhi of half a million then is built on the plains, all flatlands but with one exception, a small hill in the center called, reasonably enough, The Ridge. In 1830 the British Indian enthusiast William Fraser[74] built a fabulous white Palladian mansion on top of The Ridge; it was indeed the mansion on the hill and was occupied in 1896 by the Twain party’s hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Burne of the Bank of Bengal; bankers clearly did as well than as they do now. Twain remembered it as “a great old mansion which possessed historical interest. It was built by a rich Englishman who had become orientalized - so much so that he had a zenana. But he was a broadminded man, and remained so. To please his harem he built a mosque; to please himself he built an English church. That kind of a man will arrive, somewhere. In the Mutiny days the mansion was the British general’s headquarters. It stands in a great garden - oriental fashion - and about it are many noble trees.”
It is still here - after a fashion. It has now been absorbed, swamped, by the enormous, sprawling, filthy Hindu Rao Hospital[75] whose turn it now is to occupy the prime location in Delhi. The main part of the old mansion is now the Plastic Surgery Ward; the annex, where the zenana would have been, is the Endoscopy Unit. The building itself could certainly use some plastic surgery; the introduction of any kind of endoscope into its foundations would probably cause it to collapse.
The rambling two-story mansion where the Twain party stayed was never the prettiest building in India but next to it now is rotten fruit fallen from the ugly tree. The Sub-Continental Hideous-style Nursing School was erected in 1957 and has not been touched since. What were probably maroon walls have long since faded to a shade of dirty rust; the window frames and lintels are all rotten and crumbling; the ground floor windows are either broken or cracked. The nurses’ uniforms are shabby too and the nurses themselves look like they’ve just crawled out of a glorified squat, which they have. It is adjacent to the old zenana. Now say what you like about zenanas, but the harems and their inmates were magnificent feats of decoration - at least the ones of my imagination are - and it doesn’t seem fair that their memories should have to live next to a squalid block of put-upon nurses.
One constant from Twain’s time are the monkeys, who together with the patients and the staff, the pigeons and the bats, the cockroaches and the rats, go to make up Hindu Rao’s population. Twain noted that:
...they are monkeys of a watchful and enterprising sort, and not much troubled with fear. They invade the house whenever they get a chance, and carry off everything they don’t want. One morning the master of the house was in his bath, and the window was open. Near it stood a pot of yellow paint and a brush. Some monkeys appeared in the window; to scare them away, the gentleman threw his sponge at them. They did not scare at all; they jumped into the room and threw yellow paint all over him from the brush, and drove him out; then they painted the walls and the floor and the tank and the windows and the furniture yellow, and were in the dressing-room painting that when help arrived and routed them.
Two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning, through a window whose shutters I had left open, and when I woke one of them was before the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my note-book, and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. I did not mind the one with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me; it hurts me yet. I threw something at him, and that was wrong, for my host had told me that the monkeys were best left alone. They threw everything at me that they could lift, and then went into the bathroom to get some more things, and I shut the door on them.
***
If the Sepoy Uprising’s most heroic resistance was played out at Lucknow and its most shameful episode happened in Cawnpore, it was here in Delhi that some of the most ferocious, close quarter fighting took place. Survival informed every action; Stalingrad springs to mind. There were over thirty actual battles and hundreds of skirmishes during the long summer of 1857 and many of the fiercest took place around the mansion in which the Twain party stayed. No doubt battle scars still remained. The resistance was heroic here too as Delhi, being the seat of the last Moghul Emperor,[76] was the rallying point for sepoys and fellow travelers from Meerut, sixty miles northwest of Delhi and from across the northern plains. The British were outnumbered by perhaps much as fifty to one and their ranks were depleted by cholera as much as by the attacks.
The next day, 17 March, Mark Twain set off to see the battle sites, still fresh as legends in the minds of the British officers showing him around. Next to the old mansion and new - well, quite new - hospital is the 1847 War Memorial set high in the middle of The Ridge. The War Memorial is well cared-for but The Ridge is in a sorry state. What could be a lovely strolling or picnic spot for the beleaguered Delhiites, or a forest or garden park on the only high spot with any hope of fresh air in Delhi, has been taken over by layers of old litter, troupes of reputedly rabid langur monkeys - not all of them of the live-and-let-live variety - and by trollops of hijras.
A hijra is a eunuch, a breed with a reputable past and a disreputable present. The use of eunuchs[77] may have died along with the harems they served but in India, where change takes its time, they have survived as a kind of sub-caste of transvestites. There are reputed to be a million of them but Indian statistics can be dressed up both ways too. Unlike the TVs of Eastern Asia who can easily pass themselves off as women until the moment of passione porpora, the TVs here make no effort to hide their hairy, deep-voiced male origins expect by plastering themselves in cheap rouge and loud lipstick and wrapping themselves in the most gaily colored sarees.
If they make no effort to hide their male origins one has to say they make a massive effort to hide their male organs. Mala, one of the hijras on The Ridge, a hideous concoction in bright yellow, his/her black face whitened then rouged like a parody of femininity, explained the process after a hundred rupees helped her remember it. I’m too squeamish to write it down and you’d be too squeamish the read it, but castration is only the half of it... well, use your imagination. Mala claims that the process is entirely safe and the bleeding stops within a day. Older hijras perform the cuts and indentation, while the younger ones nurse the new recruit back to health.[78]
Indians see them as a curate’s egg; some give them money to bring good luck to a bride or new child, some give them money not to be touched by them, especially at traffic lights where they camp up and down the lines. Others give them money for sexual favors, the trade they ply up here on The Ridge: they are
after all the girly-boys of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s disdain and indeed Mala’s first thought was that I was a great white punter.
Eventually one finds one’s way past the unpredictable monkeys and hideous hijras to the octagonal Gothic steeple that is the War Memorial. The Inscription reads: “This monument was erected in 1863 in memory of those who died in the fighting of 1857 during the Mutiny. It is built on the site where Tailor’s Battery defended this position. The names of the Officers and Jawans are inscribed herein, in memory of their bravery and sacrifice in defeating the enemy.”
Below it is another plaque erected twenty-five years after Independence: “The ‘Enemy’ of the inscriptions on this monument were those who rose against colonial rule and fought bravely for national liberation in 1857. In memory of the heroism of the immortal martyrs for Indian freedom.” So there.
After the War Memorial they rode down the hill to the area still known as Civil Lines, the scene of some of the bitterest fighting. Many of the buildings still showed their scars. Today one better take an auto-rickshaw down as the monkeys lie in wait on either side of the road. I say to myself: whatever you do, don’t take a banana out of your pocket. Then, silly, you don’t have a banana. True, but they don’t know that.
Civil Lines was from where the British governed Delhi in the nineteenth century, a sort of Old Delhi version of New Delhi, which of course is exactly what it was: where all the great and the good lived before being decanted into Lutyens’ new city. Civil Lines is still a broad, tree-lined avenue with comfortable bungalows behind high walls. When King George V visited India in 1911 he announced, on what with hindsight seems like almost a whim, that the capital would move from Calcutta to Delhi and the empire would build a new Delhi, New Delhi, to accommodate it in the most sumptuous, jewel-in-the-empire style. Civil Lines, the old New Delhi of old Delhi, then went into a decline and one feels particularly sorry for the owners of the opulent Maidan’s Hotel, who opened in grand style in 1903 in the prime spot in Civil Lines only to find their hotel more often empty than full ever since.
The Indian Equator Page 23