by Norman Lewis
‘Yes, I guess that’s the name. Kangrapada,’ the man said. ‘You guys know the place?’ he asked, and Ranjan told him he did. It was an encounter that filled him with gloom.
‘They can put one of their houses up in five days,’ the man said, ‘and we already filmed the different stages. Tomorrow we’ll be filming a fiesta. Let’s say we hope we will. You never know with the tribals. Anyway, we’ve paid for it. Why don’t you guys come along?’
There was some trouble with the car in the morning and we made a late start. It was two hours to Kangrapada, most of it through lush, bird-filled jungle. There, just as Ranjan had described it, was the abandoned road-making machinery on the unfinished track, and within minutes we drove into Ranjan’s Eden. At this moment he had become silent, and I understood that something was wrong. What I saw here was so wholly different from the picture of this place he had so repeatedly painted, I began to suspect that he had been the victim of self-delusion brought on by pressures suffered prior to his visit, and that his Kangrapada was part of the delirium of hope. None of those elegant Parajas I had heard so much of were to be seen making silk on their balconies, and the men who should have been relaxed in the tribal manner appeared to be hurrying on urgent errands. Only an itinerant trader with a tray of cheap watches was to be seen. Ranjan asked him sternly, ‘With what will they buy these things?’ and the man returned an impudent smile. ‘They will buy them with money,’ he said.
Where were the women parading in their tribal finery, the spontaneous outbursts of music that set them dancing while the mild, white cows looked on? The shrine, coming into sight, was hardly more than a pile of stones tipped from a lorry, but what had become of the village elders gathered here on the surrounding benches to discuss village politics within earshot of their reasonable goddess? Instead, a makeshift fence had been put up round it, decorated with coloured ribbons. There were wide gaps in the row of circular Godba houses which overlooked the shrine, and which had featured in Ranjan’s repeated accounts of this place.
Leaving the car to go off and make enquiries, Ranjan returned with a depressing story. He had already mentioned that the Godbas had been persuaded to send a copy of one of their unique houses to a Bhubaneswar exhibition, where much excitement and admiration had been aroused among visitors who until then had believed that most tribals lived in conditions of primitive savagery. Now he had been assured that Godba houses were in demand and were being snapped up. Paraja ‘square’ houses that were easier to build were to fill the gaps.
‘The beginning’, Ranjan said, ‘of the end.’
We walked on, turned a corner and came immediately on the TV group from the Koraput hotel busy with their filming. A line of Godba girls were performing a dance in which a girl at the end of the line who carried a long-handled broom suddenly broke off to sweep vigorously at the ground. In the usual way, the action stopped for frequent repeats and the cameraman dashed about, climbed a step-ladder to film from above, then squatted to get a low-angle shot as close as possible to the ground. In the course of these repeated manoeuvres the Godbas maintained the habitual stolidity of expression imposed by their culture, which ruled out smiling except in private.
The director held up the action and strutted across to us. ‘Could I shift you guys a few yards out of the picture?’ he asked. He was friendly and polite. We backed away and he followed us. The dancers had fallen into listless postures, except the one with the broom who had continued to scrape at the earth. ‘Excuse,’ Ranjan said, ‘but what is this dance? No-one in this village will dance in this way.’
‘Or anywhere else, I guess,’ the director said. ‘This is a standard routine. You can change it around like you want, like we did with the broom. It’s easy for them to dance and easy for us to film.’
‘Do they take money for this?’ Ranjan asked him.
‘Not really money. Maybe a little inducement. I guess we put them to some trouble. This is supposed to be a fiesta and the dresses had to be made up specially.’
‘What happens next?’
‘We’ll film them dancing round the shrine,’ the director said. ‘After that it’s back to Koraput. Maybe we’ll see you there?’
So far as I was concerned, there was no point in prolonging our stay, but I waited for Ranjan to make some reference to his quest. Inconclusive minutes drifted by and I asked him what he was doing about the girl.
He seemed embarrassed. ‘She will be told that I am here. She will take friends to wait outside the village. That is custom.’
‘In that case, let’s go.’
We set off, driving slowly, and hardly had we passed the last village house when we saw the Paraja girls in a group on a slope by the road. There were eight of them of the same height, in identical scarlet dresses, and otherwise remarkably similar in appearance. The one Ranjan had come to see detached herself from the rest and came down to the car. She bent down to talk to Ranjan through the window. None of the tribals, Ranjan had told me, knew their ages, but I would have put her as seventeen. Her eyes were extremely wide, and she was smiling, as were all her friends, and there was something about her face that reminded me of the goddesses that had stared out at us from the many wall-paintings we had seen on this trip. Ranjan showed no signs of emotion and looked straight ahead. Five minutes passed, the low-voiced conversation tailed off. ‘Now we may go,’ Ranjan said. They nodded to each other and we moved away. ‘A disappointment?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘I am relieved.’
Nothing more was said of the episode until we reached Srikakulam, where the meagre trickle of traffic was snatched up in the roaring cataract of lorries on the National Highway NH5. Night was suddenly upon us, with open exhausts, a fog of dust and blazing headlights that identified the many wrecks by the side of the road. We were back in the old world we knew so well, but the full realisation of this only struck us when we ran into a police check. A smiling policeman told us we could expect a long wait while the cars ahead were being searched. He then held out his hand for a fifty-rupee bribe, and we were sent on our way.
The Film-Star hotel in this town had no rooms, but Ranjan, nodding at the reception clerk, said, ‘You may give him one hundred rupees and he will find one.’ Instead we went to the General Lodgings, and settled over drinks to discuss the events of the day.
‘I don’t understand why you should feel relieved,’ I said.
‘Because I am one year trying to make a decision. Now that decision is made for me. I am happy because if that place is staying as it was I will never get away from it. Now it is ugly and I am free.’
‘So it’s to be one of those arranged marriages for you after all?’
‘There is no alternative. To marry a tribal person is easy. The father says, I give you my daughter. You go to get drunk together and it is finished. For me an arranged marriage is difficult. My father must find me a wife but he is poor. It must be a Brahmin lady but only an elderly one will marry a poor man. Or maybe some marriage-broker will be telling my father frankly we can offer a young girl but she is a little short, or suffering from one slight limp that can easily be put right, or there is small discoloration of the face not to be seen beneath the hair.’
‘The Parajas were very pretty,’ I said.
‘Please don’t tell me that. They are all looking the same. When I first went to that place I did not see this, but now I am realising it is so.’
‘It’s to be expected with inbreeding, I imagine.’
‘Yes, it’s to be expected. I was wishing to conceal this from myself, but now I must admit. I am happy that you also are telling me this is the case.’
There was an influx of affluent-looking guests who had clearly been unlucky at the Film-Star. The tribal environment was a land of lean men, but in returning to Srikakulam we seemed to have crossed an invisible frontier. Here, where success counted, it was advertised—as in this case—by bodily fat. Three of the newcomers wore blazers with brass buttons and all spoke in loud, confident English enlivened by slang f
rom the days of the Beatles. All these men ordered whisky and Ranjan, whose caste obligations ruled out spiritous liquors, decided that for once it was in order to break the rule. Our neighbours exchanged slightly off-colour jokes, laughed loudly and slapped each others’ backs. The strains of a quavering Indianised version of Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ squeezed through the cracks in the partition separating us from the next room. Down in the street the lights changed and the outer wall palpitated like a trapped bird’s heart as the lorries roared into action. A single whisky had restored the normal composure of Ranjan’s patrician features. ‘So we are arriving at the conclusion of our adventure,’ he said. ‘I have settled my problem, and for your purpose may we be calling it a success?’
‘Immeasurably so,’ I assured him. ‘It confirmed opinions already held, and that is generally satisfying.’
Ranjan had become more talkative than usual, to the point of letting fall odd facts relating to an unsatisfactory childhood. This, I understood, was to be put down to the whisky. I risked a question which, in his present mood, I felt he would be happy to answer. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What are you looking for in life?’
‘Freedom I am looking for,’ he said. ‘Of that there is no doubt.’
‘I guessed that would be the case. And where and how do you find it?’
‘From what my father is telling me, life is game to be played by the rules. Namely I must worship the gods, give alms, and if they are taking a prisoner away for his crimes I must bring food for that man. Things not to do are kill or rob, also sleeping in my neighbour’s absence with his wife. Meat not for consumption at any time. Pity this was not spoken of before drinking the whisky.’
I agreed that it was a pity. ‘But does it affect your freedom?’
‘Accomplish all these things, my father is telling me, and freedom is there.’
‘It’s a simpler business with our tribal friends,’ I said. ‘Naturally you were tempted to take the short cut.’
‘You have explained the fact of this matter.’
‘Although we’re both agreed now, it would never have worked.’
‘That, too, is the case. At the back of my mind there was always this feeling.’
‘Still, it was good while it lasted. Is there any chance you might be available for another trip of the kind we’ve done? I mean in a different area?’
‘The wishing to do this would be very strong for me. Now I am wanting to ask a question. Why are you travelling so much? Is someone telling you you must do this?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just a compulsion I’ve always felt. It’s the pull of the world. I spent most of my childhood on my own, and some of it was in the mountains of Wales. I would go exploring with the idea in my head that the farther I was from home the better it would be. The next valley would always be wilder. The lake would be bottomless, and I would find a mysterious ruin, and there would be ravens instead of crows in all the trees. Now it’s not just the Black Mountains of Dyfed, but the world.’
He seemed in part to have understood what I had been struggling to explain. ‘Could you call this freedom for you?’
‘No, not quite. It’s never quite that.’
‘And you are not looking to find people in your mountains?’
‘Nowadays, yes. I’m looking for the people who have always been there, and belong to the places where they live. The others I do not wish to see.’
About the Author
Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was one of the greatest English-language travel writers. He was the author of thirteen novels and fourteen works of nonfiction, including Naples ’44, The Tomb in Seville, and Voices of the Old Sea. Lewis served in the Allied occupation of Italy during World War II, and reported from Mafia-ruled Sicily and Vietnam under French-colonial rule, among other locations. Born in England, he traveled extensively, living in places including London, Wales, Nicaragua, a Spanish fishing village, and the countryside near Rome.
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Copyright © 1996 by Norman Lewis
Cover design by Kelly Parr
978-1-4804-3329-8
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