by Rory Maclean
‘Your train’s booking is now closed,’ says a helpful stranger beside the deserted information desk. She and her three plump daughters in fruity-coloured saris sit on a mat like scoops of ice cream on a plate: banana, lime and cherry. Geckos scuttle on the beams above their heads. ‘You must go to Room 5 Platform 1 in one hour.’
One hour later, both the first and second Delhi trains have left.
At Room 5 Platform 1 – a panelled office of wooden desks and twine-tied bundles of cancelled tickets – I am allocated a seat on the next train (having changed my class of travel; there are eleven different classes on Indian Railways). I return to the first booking office with a new scrap of paper and buy my ticket. I go back to Room 5, pay a 25-rupee supplement and am allocated a seat.
All the sleepers are on their feet now, drinking plastic bottles of Krishna mineral water (‘Taste of Purity’), shitting behind the goods sheds. I sit on a stack of burlap sacks, swatting away mina birds, waiting for my train. As I take a sleeve of crackers from my pack, a dozen local children scramble around me, dirty hands outstretched. They’ve been fighting for the chance to unload a freight car and earn a few piastes. I give a cracker to a boy with a lazy eye, another to the toddler standing next to him, distributing the food evenly around the hungry semicircle. Taller kids appear behind the children, crowding them forward. A girl – maybe twelve years old, with a baby on her hip – reaches over their heads and grabs the package from my hand. She is as startled by her action as me. Then she runs away with the crackers, leaving the others still begging and me with no food left to give.
‘For your kind attention…’ is all I catch of a muffled announcement. I join the throng sweeping toward the Bandra Express, a mile-long tube of filthy, two-tone-blue carriages. Every day, 14 million passengers travel on India’s railways. This morning, half of them seem to be on my train. Five hours late, I lurch out of Hardwar – and a fellow traveller falls off the luggage rack and on to my lap.
My compartment is an unswept cell. Its bench seats are sardined with people. At any moment, I expect its revolving fan to snap off the ceiling and slice me like salami. Across from me sit a policeman heading to Laksar to deliver a summons, a young businessman with a nose as long and sharp as a needle and two quiet brothers from Bijnor. Beside me, a walrus-like Sikh, dressed in elegant white with a magnificent turban, stares at his miniature mobile phone. Dozens of eyes gaze in from the corridor as I’m the only foreigner in the carriage. Until a lean Westerner in pyjama bottoms pushes his sitar case through the steel door and drops into the pinch of space beside me.
‘You the writer?’ he asks me, inches from my nose, looking down into my notebook.
‘How do you know?’ I say as we shudder over a set of points.
‘This is India,’ he shrugs. ‘Once you jump on the tiger’s back, it’s hard to jump off.’
Jonathan’s accent tells me he’s Welsh. His greying hair is swept back from his crown and tied into a neat ponytail. His long face has firm skin and precise, neat features. He must have spoken to Australian Michelle. Or the silent swami.
‘I’m following the old overland trail,’ I tell him.
‘The long and winding road,’ he nods.
‘When did you do it?’ I ask.
‘Still on it,’ he answers.
Jonathan tells me he was born on Anglesey, the son of a lighthouse keeper and a CND activist who filled their tubulous home with alternative blasts of bebop and Brahms. To get away from the racket, Jonathan joined the local Labour Party rambling club, climbed all the Cambrian mountains, stood on top of a dozen peaks and ached to escape Wales.
‘Then it was the 1960s, even in Bangor.’
‘So you started hanging out at the Cavern Club?’ I say. Seeing the sitar. Thinking Beatles.
‘The Philharmonic Hall,’ he says. ‘At first, Europe seemed exotic. Amsterdam was a big scene. I heard Callas in Venice. But I felt a misfit in the West. I realized that if I was going to live life I couldn’t stay wrapped in cotton wool, listening to the Monkees.’
In 1968, Jonathan reached India and – like others before him – felt at home. He dressed in a bright orange kurta, bell bottoms and a Chairman Mao cap.
‘Life was one lassi to the next. A rupee bought four chipatis and a dried-pea curry. An extra 50 piastres bought a bowl of yoghurt,’ he says, recounting his first years with warm ease. ‘When money got tight, there was a sack of brown rice in the van. But the poverty, dear God, that transformed me.’
The young businessman switches on a well-travelled laptop. The two brothers look over his shoulder. The Sikh holds his mobile between the bars of the window to get a better signal. Beyond him spreads the Ganges, or at least its muddy riverbed. The holy water has been diverted through Neeldhara for a couple of weeks to enable a new sewer to be built. Beneath a rail bridge, thousands of lean men, women and children squat in the slime, scooping up handfuls of silt, sieving it through their fingers, searching for devotional gold medallions or even a single copper penny.
‘In ’68, 95 per cent of Indians lived in poverty,’ says Jonathan. ‘Religion held back realpolitik. The caste system stagnated social change. The country’s desperation turned me on to the Marxist interpretation of society.’
As I recall Chatwin’s comments on travellers driving Afghans into the arms of communists, the businessman raises his sharp nose. ‘Yet you – with your dollars – were content to bum around this “desperate” place?’ he says to Jonathan. The laptop’s screen is reflected in his dark glasses.
‘Namaste,’ he replies, pressing his hands together in the respectful manner of an older India. Meaning ‘I bow to you’ in Sanskrit. ‘Not every Westerner was middle class, you know.’
‘Even the poorest Welshman was rich beyond most Indian’s dreams.’
‘I hated to see the exploitation.’
‘Your lofty ideals were never much appreciated,’ says the businessman, affecting a striking balance between polite curiosity and hostility. He’s in his mid-thirties, stocky and strong, with deep brown eyes and oily, trimmer-clipped hair. He wears jeans and boots.
‘I’ve read that our influence wasn’t welcomed by everyone,’ I tell him.
‘It’s true that, in the sixties, India hadn’t opened its eyes,’ he goes on in the tone of an MBA graduate. ‘Most Indians were happy with their lot, believing that God lived among the poor, that a guest was your god, that it was our religious duty to help the traveller. Hippies were attracted to this “simple” contentment. But we had survived long enough on curd and bananas. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’
I want to ask the businessman more but he cuts us off, turning his attention back to his work. So I twist my head – there’s not enough room to turn my body – to Jonathan.
‘And the sitar?’ I ask, nodding at his case.
‘When the Bangladesh war closed the borders, I couldn’t afford to fly home,’ he says, distracted, an eye on our neighbour. ‘To make money I got into mix music.’
‘Mix music?’
‘The Royal Liverpool was one of the first orchestras to mix Indian soloists with a Western symphony. In 1955, the tabla master Ali Akbar Khan cut an album with Yehudi Menuhin. Then Shankar and Menuhin played together in ’66, around the time that Mayer started Indo-Jazz Fusions.’ As the train settles into its rhythm, Jonathan too regains his momentum. ‘I loved the sound, that crossover, so I started studying Indian technique.’
As the Beatles introduced the sitar to pop, classical musicians melded East and West, breaking away from the traditional structure of the chord sequence, laying the foundations of world music.
‘Britain offered me a job, a mortgage, the Bee Gees. I didn’t want to spend my life paying for crap, listening to crap. That wasn’t my scene. India gave me room to breathe, to find myself. For that I am deeply grateful.’
In a low marsh alongside the rails, naked boys pull at water-lily roots, collecting snails for supper. Behind them, their fathers harvest modest rice paddies by han
d. A water buffalo, with only its head visible, stands motionless in the water. As our filthy metal tube clatters past the fields, its whistle blowing off-key, an egret lifts into the sky, a flash of white against the emerald shoots.
The businessman, whose name is Arun, looks again at Jonathan. ‘So we’ve known India for the same number of years,’ he says, an edge of anger in his voice. ‘I was born about the time you decided that life was a succession of lassis.’
‘Not for everyone,’ I say.
In 1968, the year of Arun’s birth and Jonathan’s arrival, India teetered on the cusp of revolution. After Independence and Partition, with its appalling loss of life, Nehru came to power championing a vision of a secular, tolerant India. His socialist democracy set about abolishing feudal estates and building steel mills. His dream caught the imagination of India’s youth, who made him an icon of the optimistic new age. But, in private, Nehru saw himself only as ‘a traveller, limping along in the dark night’ and, by his death in 1964, much that he fought for proved illusory. His grand economic policies were overambitious. A massive influx of refugees, mostly from east Pakistan, precipitated a national crisis. Rice, wheat and sugar had to be rationed following a failed monsoon and severe droughts. China seized parts of the North-East Frontier. A staggering 60 million unemployed – about 10 per cent of the population – harboured huge resentment against the system.
In their frustration, many young Indians turned to spiritual cults or extremist militant groups. A peasant uprising in Naxalbari in Darjeeling became the flashpoint for armed revolt. The Naxal guerrillas imported communist ideals and aimed to force revolution on India. They rejected electoral politics and called for a return to an agrarian economy.
Five years later, the ‘Emergency’, when wide powers were given to the prime minister, finally crushed the movement by suspending fundamental rights. Thousands were held without trial. The press was censored. In a joke printed at the time in the underground newspaper the Battledrum, Gandhi rose from the dead to ask Indira, now leader, what had happened to his India.
‘Where are my spectacles?’ he asked her.
‘We gave them to the hippies.’
‘Where is my dhoti?’ His homespun loin-cloth.
‘We gave it to the hippies.’
‘Where is my stick?’
‘That we’ve kept to ram up the rectums of Indians.’
Arun looks at his Rolex and says, ‘I suppose we should be grateful to you for perpetrating the myth of self-discovery.’ His dark eyes are resolute yet dart about the hot compartment. ‘That at least did wonders for our foreign-currency reserves.’
‘Why are you so hard on him?’ I ask.
‘Because his generation was so naive,’ Arun says to me. ‘No wonder Bhagwan and the Maharishi managed to fleece them so successfully. I do admire those gurus. They sold themselves with the same smart marketing that sold flower power.’ He goes on, ‘You know Sai Baba used to pull a stream of ash and watches from the air? When the Mumbai magician P. C. Sorcar Jnr met him, he conjured up a watch, an alarm clock and a plate of rassogolla, a milky sweet dripping with syrup.’
‘Sai Baba was a charlatan,’ says Jonathan, now irritated. ‘Bhag-wan fled his ashram, leaving behind ninety-three Rolls-Royces. The Maharishi also failed because of materialism. All he wanted was a Western mind and washing machines.’
‘You can’t say he failed, not with his annual turnover,’ says Arun. ‘The gurus’ mistake was not having an exit strategy.’
‘I once heard a story about an American student flying into Delhi,’ I say. ‘He dropped some LSD, then stripped off all his clothes and started to run up and down the aisle, claiming to have been a sadhu in his past life, crying out, “Daddy, I’m coming home!” The stewards and stewardesses sat on him to restrain him.’
Arun smiles, ‘Those were the days when Air India promised nirvana to tourists for $10 a day.’
‘Costs a bit more today,’ I say.
As we speak, the train thunders across another bridge, the noise halting conversations, the shadows of girders strobing across our faces. The smells of scorched metal and spices waft into our carriage, mixing with the coarse heat of bodies. A tray of nuts and seeds appears in the doorway of the compartment, held aloft by a skinny, serious boy. Jonathan cuts across his sales cry, saying, ‘Once, I was travelling alone on a train. I got out to stretch my legs and came back to find my backpack had been stolen. “Do not worry, sir, there are many poor people in India,” the conductor told me. So I learnt that money didn’t matter.’
Arun gapes at him – the modern Indian unable to understand the romantic Welsh convert – then looks out of the window.
The sun burns through the thin clouds, delivering a noontime heat at half-past nine in the morning. Poor, line-side homes open on to the rails. Our sweltering express runs between their front rooms and blue-tile temples. At Laksar, the platform is so long that, as the train slows, announcements are heard over seven or eight times along the run of tannoys. Shoeless sweepers press their brooms between the crowds. A porter loses his load of green bananas. The distant locomotive’s departure whistle can hardly be heard above the rattle of the carriage’s fans.
‘Hippies weren’t considered bad hats at first,’ says Arun, still peering out of the window. ‘The majority of Indians knew nothing about them and their drug culture until Haré Rama Haré Krishna.’
Now Jonathan looks away with a sigh. ‘Dreams died with that movie,’ he admits, playing with his fingers in obvious anxiety.
In 1971 Bollywood produced an unexpected blockbuster. In the film, Zeenat Aman – a former Miss India – ran away from home to follow the hippie trail to Nepal. The hit song ‘Dum Maro Dum’ caused a sensation, as did the sight of stoned Westerners twisting and kissing in a candle-lit Kathmandu night-club. ‘Dope Take Dope’ began with a whoosh of exhaled smoke and swelled into a Doors-like rhythm as Aman, lost and disillusioned, danced with the flower children. A Hendrix lookalike played the guitar. ‘Free Love’ was tattooed on a man stripped to the waist. Later, Aman killed herself; a first cinematic casualty in the fusion of East and West.
Jonathan says, ‘At every tea stall, in every bazaar, people chanted “Dum Maro Dum”.’
‘And when we tired of singing the song, you became her murderers,’ Arun says to Jonathan.
In India and Pakistan, newspapers started to turn against the transcendental intruders. Indira Gandhi, having once welcomed the hippies as ‘children of India’, now criticized their careless dressing and hedonism. The Rawalpindi Sun wrote, ‘It is tragic indeed that our youth should indiscriminately try to ape Western values.’
‘When we hear about the so-called independence of the Western woman – bouncing around in mini-skirts and bell-bottoms trying to take a last go at life, let us not close our eyes to their ordeals,’ continued the article. ‘Imagine a girl in a snow storm and bone-chilling winds waiting at a bus-stop in order to reach her office in time to avoid the dirty looks of her boss. Imagine her sitting on typewriter for eight hours, coming back wet and tired to her apartment, with no one to welcome her. What can this independent girl do but take a double Scotch and start cooking the dinner?’
The correspondent concluded, ‘I fail to understand the reasons which prompt our boys and girls to be lured by the so-called advanced Western civilization.’
‘Do you know Gandhi’s comment on Western civilization?’ asks Jonathan. ‘He said he thought it was a good idea. Haré Rama Haré Krishna was part of the commercial crap we’d tried to leave behind.’
A laugh escapes from Arun. ‘The paradox is you brought it with you,’ he says.
‘And you embraced it,’ replies Jonathan.
The train runs on. The Ganges plain spreads toward the horizon, its large, fertile fields surrounded by poplars. Cow pats dry for winter fuel beneath the high-tension pylons. Within a few hours’ journey are four of Hinduism’s holiest sites, as well as the city where the Buddha first preached his message. Across from the Ta
j Mahal, there stands – as in Istanbul – a Pizza Hut.
‘Rishi Bhoomi,’ says Jonathan, looking out of the window. ‘The Land of Sages is what Indians call this country. There’s meant to be a sage destined to teach enlightenment to every seeker.’
Arun raises his eyebrows and glances up from his laptop. He says, ‘A devotee asks his guru, “What should I seek in the cradle of civilization?” The guru looks at the man with infinite compassion and answers, “Zanussi”.’
26. Ticket To Ride
At a hundred oval work stations, students in saris and baseball caps book flights from Gatwick and JFK to Johannesburg and Sydney. Calls from Paris, Dublin and Frankfurt are routed to Delhi. Beneath posters of Spanish footballers and notices about a pending Royal Mail strike, the young sales staff work four-hour shifts, usually after class, reading their horoscopes and loading Ganesh idol screen-savers between calls. A technician, having inadvertently stubbed his toe against a hard drive, touches his forehead and heart with his right hand to pay respect to Saraswati, the goddess of learning. I’m reminded that Indians have a gift for transforming the prosaic into the extraordinary, whereas the travel industry ferrets out the unique and turns it into the mundane.
Arun is a tourism consultant. On the phone, he becomes Arnie. Next to him, French-speaking Manisha is Monique. Beyond a potted palm sits Jaideep.
‘Call me Jerry,’ he says, holding out his hand.
Their employer is Tecnovat Data, the Indian subsidiary of ebookers, a European dot.com owned by the American travel-and property-services provider Cendant. Its open-plan operations floor, with screens and keyboards, could be in Croydon or Kalama-zoo. In the back office, another five hundred employees issue tickets, settle accounts and crunch numbers for a dozen other European and American travel agencies. In the free staff canteen, Team UK watch BBC World, read the British papers and try to keep up with events on Coronation Street. The German team discusses the Füssball Weltmeisterschaft and Air Berlin’s new schedule.
‘The European markets are still sensitive to overseas call centres,’ says Arun, slipping on his headset. ‘So we try to give the impression of being a local operation.’