An Area of Darkness

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  On the way back to Srinagar I watched him prepare a face for Mr Butt. He ceased to be animated; he became morose and harassed; he unnecessarily loaded himself in the bus with bags and baskets and made himself as uncomfortable as he could. When we got off the bus his expression would have convinced anyone that Gulmarg, so far from being a holiday from hotel work, had been tedious and exhausting. He subtly overdid his glum attentions to us, as though convincing himself that we had been a great strain. It was possible, too, that he shared our anxieties about the holy man and the pilgrims and was being defensive in advance. When we were driving in the tonga along the lake boulevard he said, ‘Mr Butt he say you not pay for me as guide.’

  Guide! Had he been our guide? Hadn’t he persuaded us to take him to Gulmarg, hadn’t he dropped daily reminders? Hadn’t we paid for his pony rides?

  *

  ‘Yesterday big sadhu say, “I feel I go Pahalgam today.” ’

  So Ali Mohammed reported. And they had gone, leaving only the ruined lawn, mud-splashed walls and a few lentils, already sprouting in the mud, to speak of their passing. In the garden the first canna had opened, bright yellow with spots of the purest red.

  I showed the sprouting lentils to Mr Butt.

  ‘O sir,’ he said. ‘My shame. My shame!’

  And, as if to underline this, he came to me on the following day with Aziz, and through Aziz he said, ‘Sir, you ask Maharaja Karan Singh to tea. Maharaja Karan Singh come to tea here, I take down hotel sign, I sack customer, I close hotel.’

  *Luxury, with Indians, and especially Hindus, always seems contrived and strenuous. No people are so little interested in interiors. This lack of interest appears to be historical. The Kama Sutra, after laying down that the man of fashion ‘should reside where he has a good chance of earning riches but should for preference select a city, a metropolis or a big or small town’, prescribes the furnishings of a drawing-room: ‘This outer room should contain a bed, richly mattressed, and somewhat depressed in the middle. It should have pillows at the head and the bottom and should be covered with a perfectly white clean sheet. Near this bed there should be a small couch on which the sexual act should be performed so as not to soil the bed. Over the head of the bed there should be fixed on the wall a lotus-shaped bracket on which a coloured portrait or an image of one’s favourite deity should be placed. Beneath this bracket should be placed a small table, one cubit in breadth, set against the wall. On this table the following articles, required for the night’s enjoyments, should be arranged: balms and perfumed unguents, garlands, coloured waxen vessels, pots for holding perfumes, pomegranate rinds and prepared betels. There should be a spittoon on the floor near the bed; a lute, a drawing slab, a pot with colours and brushes, a few books and wreaths of flowers, too, hung from elephants’ tusks let into the wall. Near the bed upon the floor should be placed a circular chair with a back for resting the head on. Boards for the games of dice and chess should be placed against the wall. In a gallery outside the room cages for pet birds should be hung from ivory tusks fixed into the wall.’ (Translated by B. N. Basu.)

  7. Pilgrimage

  IT WAS KARAN SINGH, the young Maharaja of Kashmir, now the elected Head of the Jammu and Kashmir State, who encouraged us to join the pilgrimage to the Cave of Amarnath, the Eternal Lord. The cave lies thirteen thousand feet up the eighteen-thousand-foot Amarnath Mountain, some ninety miles north-east of Srinagar, and is made holy by the five-foot ice lingam, symbol of Shiva, which forms there during the summer months. The lingam, it is believed, waxes and wanes with the moon and reaches its greatest height on the day of the August full moon: on this day the pilgrimage arrives. It was a mystery, like Delphi, of the older world. It had survived because it was of India and Hinduism which, without beginning, without end, scarcely a religion, continued as a repository and living record of man’s religious consciousness.

  Karan Singh had gone to the cave some years before, though not with the traditional pilgrimage, and he had published a vivid account of the journey. I could not share his religious fervour, but I relished his exact descriptions of snowclad mountains, icy green lakes and changing weather. To me the true mystery of the cave lay in its situation. It was at the end of a twenty-mile track, a journey of two days, from Chandanwari, which was as far as the jeep-road went. For many months of the year this track disappeared under Himalayan snow and the cave was inaccessible; and in summer, in spite of the annual efforts of the Public Works Department, the track was difficult and in bad weather dangerous. It zigzagged up a two-thousand-foot drop; it led over a pass fifteen thousand feet high; it was a narrow ledge on a bare, curving mountainside. Beyond the tree-line breathing was not easy, and the nights were very cold. The snow never completely melted. It remained hard in sheltered gullies and canyons; it formed solid bridges over summer-slackened streams, bridges which on the surface were as brown and gritty as the surrounding land but which several feet below, just above the water, were scooped out into low, ice-blue caverns.

  How had the cave been discovered? How had its mystery been established? The land was bare; it offered no fuel or food. The Himalayan summer was short, its weather treacherous. Every exploration, like every pilgrimage even today, had to be swift. And how had this mystery, so much of ice and snow, so briefly glimpsed each year, penetrated to every corner of ancient India? Himalayas, ‘abode of snow’: how could they be related to the burning North Indian plain and the palm-fringed beaches of the South? But they had been charted, their mysteries unearthed. Beyond the Amarnath Cave was the mountain of Kailas and beyond that the lake of Manasarovar. And legends attached to every stage of the Amarnath pilgrimage. These rocks were what remained of defeated demons; out of that lake Lord Vishnu arose on the back of a thousand-headed serpent; on this plain Lord Shiva once did the cosmic dance of destruction and his locks, becoming undone, created these five streams: wonders revealed only for a few months each year before disappearing again below the other, encompassing mystery of snow. And these mountains, lakes and streams were indeed apt for legend. Even while they were about you they had only a qualified reality. They could never become familiar; what was seen was not their truth; they were only temporarily unveiled. They might be subject to minute man-made disturbances – a stone dislodged into a stream, a path churned to dust, skirting snow – but as soon as, on that hurried return journey, they had been left behind they became remote again. Millions had made the journey, but the naked land carried few signs of their passage. Each year the snows came and obliterated their tracks, and each year in the cave the ice lingam formed. The mystery was forever new.

  And in the cave, the god: the massive ice phallus. Hindu speculation soared so high; its ritual remained so elemental. Between the conception of the world as illusion and the veneration of the phallus there was no link; they derived from different strata of responses. But Hinduism discarded nothing; and it was perhaps right not to. The phallus endured, unrecognized as such, recognized only as Shiva, as continuity: it was doubly the symbol of India. So often on journeys through the derelict Indian countryside it had seemed that the generative force alone remained potent, separate from its instruments and victims, men. To those whom it degraded and deformed its symbol remained, what it had always been, a symbol of joy. The pilgrimage was appropriate in every way.

  *

  ‘You want a cook,’ Aziz said. ‘You want one man for help me. You want coolie. You want sweeper. You want seven pony.’

  Each pony came with its owner. This would make fourteen of us altogether, not counting animals, with Aziz in charge.

  I began pruning. ‘No cook.’

  ‘He not only cook, sahib. He guide.’

  ‘There are going to be twenty thousand pilgrims. We don’t want a guide.’

  The cook was Aziz’s protégé. He was fat and jolly and I would have liked to take him. But he had revealed, through Aziz, that he shared Aziz’s disability; he too had been advised not to walk and he too required a pony for himself. Then he had sent word
from the kitchen, through Aziz again, that he required a new pair of shoes for the journey. I couldn’t afford him. I decided, too, that the coolie was unnecessary; and the sweeper was to be replaced by a small spade.

  Aziz, defeated, suffered. He had known glorious establishments and he had no doubt visualized an expedition in the old style. He must have seen himself jacketed, trousered and fur-capped, trotting about on his pony and superintending. Now he saw only five days of labour. But he had never been to Amarnath and he was excited. He told us that the Muslims had been there first and that the cave, lingam and all, used to be a Muslim ‘temple’.

  He reported to Mr Butt. Mr Butt summoned an English-knowing lake scribe and a few days later, when I was in bed with yet another cold, sent in his estimate:

  From Srinagar to Palguime Boy Bus Rotin 30.0.0.

  3 Roding Poine Rotine 150.0.0.

  2 Pakige Roine Rotine 100.0.0.

  Tente a Kachen 25.0.0.

  Tabel a chare Bed 15.0.0.

  one colie 30.0.0.

  350.0.0.

  Sweper 20.0.0.

  Extre loding and Noey Loding colie 20.0.0.

  390.0.0.

  From 11 august up to 17 august

  7 day conteri Food 161.0.0.

  Rs 551.0.0.

  If you going Bus for Imri Nath then is last 100 Rs.

  It was a remarkable document: an unfamiliar language, an unfamiliar script, and most of its approximations understandable. Too understandable: I was being overcharged. I was bitterly disappointed. I had known them for four months; I had declared my affection for them; I had done what I could for the hotel; I had given them a party. It must have been the depth of this disappointment; or it might have been my two days in bed. I jumped up, pushed Aziz aside, ran to the window, threw it open and heard myself shouting to Mr Butt in a strange insincere-sincere voice, the result perhaps of remembering, even while I shouted, that I had to speak clearly, as to a child, and to use words which he would understand: ‘This is not good, Mr Butt. Butt Sahib, this is not honest. Mr Butt, do you know what you have done? You have hurt me.’

  He was standing in the garden with some boatmen. He looked up, startled and uncomprehending. Then his face, still turned up to me, went blank. He said nothing.

  In the silence that followed my words I felt foolish and not a little uneasy. I closed the window and quietly got back into bed. India, it was said, brought out concealed elements of the personality. Was this me? Was this the effect of India?

  Whatever it was, it alarmed them at the hotel; and when, after giving me time to cool down, they gathered around my bed to discuss the estimate, they were solicitous, as though I was ill with more than a cold. Their manner also held reproach: it was as if, during all the weeks I had been with them, I had concealed my emotionalism, thereby encouraging an approach for which they could not, with justice, be blamed.

  In the end many rupees were knocked off the estimate and we became friends again. Mr Butt seemed happy; he came with us to Pahalgam to see us off. Aziz was happy. He was wearing his fur cap, Ali Mohammed’s striped blue suit, sandals (Mr Butt had refused to lend his shoes again), and a pair of my socks. He did not have the retinue he would have liked, but no one else on the pilgrimage appeared to be travelling in comparable style. We did, after all, have a staff; and we had a second tent for the staff. And when, at sunset, we halted at the crowded camp in the smoking woods of Chandanwari, he not only managed by his swift, intelligent arrangements to create something like luxury in the midst of restrictions, but he also managed, by his mixture of bustle, of orders sharply given to the pony man and his assistant, and of reverential exaggerated attentions to us, to hedge us around with dignity. The camp was a chaos of tents and guy-ropes and cooking stones and pilgrims defecating behind every bush. The woods were already littered with uncovered excrement; hanks and twists of excrement crowned every accessible boulder of the Lidder River, beside which we had camped. But Aziz made us feel apart; he put us on show. This was his craft, his pride. And just as that morning when we set out from the hotel for Gulmarg he could not hide his pleasure, but had to tell everyone he passed on the lake that he was off to Gulmarg, so now, pouring warm water for me to wash my hands, he said, ‘Everybody asking me, “Who is your sahib?” ’ It was less a tribute to me than to himself.

  His troubles began the next day. For half a mile out of Chandanwari the path ran easily between rock and the boulder-strewn Lidder River until it came to the almost vertical two-thousand-foot wall of Pissu Ghati. Here the path narrowed and zigzagged up and up between rocks, the slain demons of one legend, for two miles. The pilgrims queued for the climb, and the queue moved slowly. At Chandanwari it did not move at all. It was hours before we could get going, and then we discovered that during our morning’s stupor one of our pony men had absconded. So Aziz’s torment began. The ponies had to be urged up Pissu Ghati, their loads held in place – we could hear the pony men’s cries all the way up and the occasional crash of tumbling loads – and there was nothing Aziz could do but to get off his pony and start pushing the abandoned, tent-laden pony up the steep path: he in his striped blue suit, his fur cap, his Terylene socks, he who had been forbidden to walk. Dignity abandoned him. He complained like a child; he cursed in Kashmiri; he swore to get vengeance; he asked me to write to Mr Madan. His whip hand flashed again and again. ‘Bloody swine man!’ he shouted in English, and the Terylene socks sagged down his stamping, sandalled feet. His cries grew fainter as we went ahead on our ponies. Looking down, we glimpsed him from time to time negotiating a hairpin bend, angrily dodging the tent-poles, and each time he looked tinier, dustier, more crumpled and more enraged.

  We got to the top and waited for him. We waited a long time, and when at last he appeared, shouting behind his still recalcitrant pony, he was a picture of outraged misery. Ali Mohammed’s blue suit had been discoloured by dust to the fawn of my Terylene socks, the tops of which had now worked their way down to his heels. Dust stuck to his small sweating face; even through his crumpled clothes I could feel the fragility of his suffering legs. My delight in his discomfiture, his abrupt transformation from majordomo to Kashmiri ghora-wallah, pony man, now felt like malice.

  ‘Poor Aziz,’ I said. ‘Bloody ghora-wallah.’

  This encouragement was a mistake. From now on he talked of nothing but the renegade ghora-wallah. ‘You dock his pay, sahib.’ ‘You write Mr Madan Touriasm.’ ‘You complain Government, they take away his permit.’ And he made up for his walk up Pissu Ghati by staying on his pony all the way to Sheshnag. We shouted to him to get off, to give his assistant a rest. He never heard; it was we who got off our ponies, to give the chance of a ride to the assistant, excessively burdened by Aziz after Pissu Ghati. Breathing was not easy; walking was painful, even up the gentlest slope. Aziz rode serenely on now. A pony had been provided for him; that was part of the contract. Dignity gradually returned to him. He became once again the majordomo, importantly slung with an English vacuum flask, which he had insisted on carrying. (‘This is beautiful Thermos,’ he had said, passing a sensuous hand over it, and throwing one of our own words back at us.) From time to time he halted and waited for us; and as soon as we caught up with him it was: ‘You go see Government. They take away ghora-wallah permit.’ He was out for blood; I had never seen him so determined.

  In front and behind the pilgrimage stretched in a thin irrelevant line of movement which appeared to have no beginning or end, which gave scale to the mountains and emphasized their stillness. The path had been trampled into dust, inches thick, that rose at every step. It was important not to overtake or be overtaken. Dust overcame the dampness below wet rock; dust powdered the hard snow in gullies. Over one such gully a skull-capped Kashmiri had made himself the harassed master. He had a spade and feverishly dug up snow, which he offered, for a few coins, to pilgrims. The pilgrims, continually pressed from behind, could not stop. Nor could the Kashmiri: he frantically dug, ran with extended spade after the pilgrims already departing,
did a lightning haggle, took his coins, ran back, dug again. He was all motion: it was a one-day-a-year trade.

  We had passed the tree-line and now we came into sight of the milky green lake of Sheshnag and the glacier that fed it. From Karan Singh’s essay I had learned that the icy waters of Sheshnag were auspicious. Some members of his party had gone down the half a mile or so to the lake, to have a lucky dip. But he had made a compromise: ‘I have to admit that I used the less orthodox, though certainly more convenient, method of getting water from the lake carried up and warming it for my bath.’ It would have been pleasant to dawdle here, to go down to the lake. But the pilgrimage pressed us on, and Aziz was anxious to camp.