by David Malouf
Late afternoon: my working-room at the top of the house; but so changed that I scarcely recognise it. The furniture from one half of the room has been carried across the hall, and in its place stand gauze reflector-screens fixed to a frame with ordinary housepegs (mine) and three powerful lamps. Black wires trail away in all directions or are coiled in heaps. To save us from tripping they are fixed to the floor, every metre or so, with adhesive strips, and Adriano has cut several more in case they are needed. Pressed with a thumb to the edge of my desk, the doorframe, the walls, they hang in uneven lengths, all quite practical and within easy reach of a busy hand, but giving the room an out-of-season festive look. I am reminded of something oriental and it takes me a little time to recall what it is: Chinese or Japanese poems, trailing bannerlike from the branches of trees …
Alex is wrapping the lights in paper now, clear blue, that crackles like cellophane. The tripod is set up, the sound-box appears. Once again I am hooked up to it with a wire down the leg of my trousers. This is no longer my working-room, though the sense of its being mine, in all the solitude and austere discipline of the writer’s existence, is just what we are trying to suggest. It is theirs – Bob’s, Adriano’s, Alex’s – site of twentieth-century technologies that have long since superannuated paper and pen. I am squeezed into a corner, behind my typewriter behind my desk. Bob consults the lens, then steps forward to adjust the desk-lamp – not for my convenience but to make its light fall in a particular spot among my papers and to bring its elegant, conical shade into a more aesthetic relationship with my head. He checks this and makes a little clucking sound, then steps forward and drops the paper-support on the typewriter. It is catching glare. The windows behind me have the inner shutters open. Bright sunlight pours in. But the glow of the lamps is infinitely stronger.
Too quickly now we are finished, the film is in the can – or rather the fifty or so bits and pieces of it that will sit in a refrigerator in Milan for a time, and must then be developed, juxtaposed and assembled into a form.
I stand looking out across the landscape, in pretty much the same position as the one Richard has chosen for the opening of the film. A big red sun hangs over the hills, and the snowy fields, with patches of black scrub between, are glaucous with a sickly glow, a kind of greasy rose-pink. By tomorrow or the day after, the snow will be gone; the transformation will be reversed and become a story that some child in the village (one of our snow boys, perhaps, Fabio or Michele) will tie his life to across fifty years, as Baldo does the winter of ’29. And we have it on film. You can see me taking a walk in it, from nowhere to nowhere. You can hear my footsteps, Alex’s ‘recording of footsteps in fresh snow’.
When I turn around again the room is being restored to normal. Adriano is tearing tapes off the wall with a sharp little rip. The lamps have been dismantled. Alex and Richard are easing a day-bed round the edge of the door-frame and back into the room. It is as if a life-film were being wound backwards. Soon the furniture will be in place and alone, my desk with the typewriter before me, I will begin to tap away in the silence –
Wednesday, January 9
When I got up this morning …
A FOOT IN THE STREAM
1
LIKE MOST VISITORS I have been inoculated against it. Not only with the cholera-typhoid, polio and gamma globulin shots I have been advised to take, and the course of Paludrine I shall be following a month after I leave, but by all I have heard about the place, that mixture of legend, statistics and shocking hearsay that has made it the extreme human experience.
The fear of India. It comes in many forms. Fear of dirt, fear of illness, fear of people; fear of the unavoidable presence of misery; fear of a phenomenon so dense and plural that it might, in its teeming inclusiveness, swamp the soul and destroy our certainty that the world is there to be read but is also readable.
Air travel is a risky business. The days have long gone when we could depend on paying our money, climbing aboard in a clean safe place, and being wafted, six miles above the sore places of the earth, to another clean place further on.
Two years ago, on a flight from Australia, I found myself stranded in Bombay, and though the transfer from aircraft to five-star hotel was made as quickly and comfortably as possible, there was still a stretch of real earth to be crossed – in this case the outskirts of a city – and India imposed itself: light, colour, vegetation, a milling throng of pedestrians, bicycles, animals of every description. I could barely take it in, save in the broad sweep.
In lamplit shanties, in a haze of wood-smoke and dust, men were tapping away at metal or scouring great copper dishes and pots. In other places, in the manner of all Third World countries, mysterious things were being done with car-tyres and inner-tubes; motorbikes and cars were being worked on, all the parts laid out beside the road while mechanics in greasy overalls, or in shabby native dress, squatted or lay with their feet sticking out into the traffic. Naked children splashed in puddles. Pedlars spread their wares on a bit of carpet. Pigs rooted in garbage, cows wandered. It was all very dense and confusing.
Later, back at the airport, I had to run the gauntlet outside the old departure shed – more people standing, squatting, lying rolled in rags or blankets than I had ever seen in so tight a space. It was very nearly impossible to pick your way between them, and I trod, horrifyingly, on something soft. I thought it might be a hand.
I was waylaid just before the entrance by a mob of children, very slight and shrill and fiercely importunate. Baksheesh, baksheesh, they wailed, a dozen small hands tugging. I put my hand in my pocket, and in fumbling with the last of my Indian change dropped a shower of small coins on the pavement. They were immediately swept up. But the child who dived under my feet to retrieve them (he might have been seven) did not scurry off as I expected. He reappeared, holding the coins out to me on a grubby palm, and I saw that the little scene we were involved in had not been resolved by my clumsiness, merely suspended. We still had our roles to play out. There were dignities. This wasn’t a grab-as-grab-can situation as I had thought. It had structure, a social shape that was in every sense to be observed.
I took back my coins, the children resumed their wailing; but I was hooked.
It is that little incident that has brought me back.
It is true of Europe as well, but one sees more than ever in a country as packed as this that space is one of the most oppressive forms of privilege.
Lutyens’ design for New Delhi is grandly impressive, but the monumental layout, with its wide, tree-lined boulevards and infinite vistas – from palace, through triumphal arch into the mist of a winter dawn – makes shameless use of the rhetoric of space to proclaim a distant and unapproachable authority. Very appropriate no doubt to the Raj, but odd in a democratic republic. (The same is true of Washington, whose prototype, for all Jefferson’s noble intentions, is imperial rather than republican Rome.)
Coming in from Old Delhi, where a single laneway not much more than shoulder wide has 600 goldsmiths’ shops and the noise is deafening, I am very conscious of the regulation twelve feet of clipped green lawn between the tables in the Imperial Hotel garden and the subdued, cosmopolitan voices. This too is a pocket of the Raj. Dense foliage shuts us off from the roadway, and even the birds, wagtails and crows, are mannerly and few. Waiters in crisp white native dress, long coats belted with lime green and gold, their turbans of starched batiste, move about unobtrusively in sneakers. Quiet deals are being negotiated. Tourists are stepping back a moment to enjoy space and tranquillity, a time out of the real India.
Leaving Delhi just after dawn on the five-hour drive to Agra, I feel almost disoriented by the emptiness of the avenues, the eerie absence, in this densely crowded country, of people. Patrician mansions, coolly classical, stand in immaculate gardens. In the bluish light children are making their way to school, all in clean school uniforms. Not far off a lone workman, who has been sweeping up, squats to piss. Others, wrapped in blankets against the cold, ride slow
ly past on bicycles to a place further on where some sort of work is in progress (the whole of Delhi is being recycled for the Asian Games). Great piles of earth have been flung up. Men are working with picks and shovels; women whose bright saris, green, orange, scarlet with gilt borders, go oddly with their status as the lowest form of manual labour, are removing the rubble in paniers which they balance lightly on their heads while ragged toddlers fellow behind. Tents are pitched on the site and spill out across the wide grassy footpath. Cookfires are smoking, clothes have been spread for the sun.
Later, in a more distant suburb that is not tree-lined or grassy but baked red, the workers’ encampment is more substantial. Mud walls have been raised to a height of eighteen inches and dun-coloured tents pitched over them. Soon, with tombs off in the distance among rocky outcrops that might be the fortifications of abandoned cities, we pass villages, also of mud. Everywhere in the early cold men are washing at pumps, in tanks, in canals or at village wells, standing in their loincloths and darkly gleaming as they pour water over their head and shoulders or stoop to wash their feet or rinse their clothes, which they lay out on bushes to dry.
We leave the city at last, but the stream of pedestrians does not diminish as one might expect. It thickens, moving in both directions at the side of the road: youths in smart Western dress, trousers and sweater, or a blazer with a starched open-necked shirt, others in skirts hooked up at the groin and an overshirt, faded but clean; others again in flowing pyjamas, some wearing turbans, others with what looks like a loose bandage round their head, many with their shoulders in tartan blankets, or with a scarf under the chin as if they were suffering from mumps; some barefoot, others in sandals or slippers; all moving at the same easy pace, in the stately, straight-backed style that makes walking look so good, so natural. There are no slouchers or shufflers here. They walk with purpose, and it is this that makes these crowds so odd to the Western eye. Where have they come from? Where are they going? They suggest some important rendezvous up ahead, a circus performance it might be, or a cricket match or political rally; just ahead or just behind. (But if it was behind we missed it, and if ahead we never arrive there.) Odd members of the crowd turn off into a village, or a whole line of women starts off across a field, or the throng swells round a flimsy settlement where food is being sold and passers-by can rest on benches or curl up on bare cots; but the stream never thins out. It might go on like this right across the country. The whole of India seems to be on the move between its borders, endlessly tramping, even when we are far out in the countryside.
People move four or five deep on either side of the main traffic, which consists of trucks, each with a metal canopy over the cabin painted with images of Ganesh or Shiva and draped with silver and gold tinsel (they look, as they approach, like fast-moving altars that have mown down a forest of Christmas trees), buses, carts drawn by yoked brahmahs with their horns painted sky-blue, lime green, yellow or by little white asses piled to four times their height with thatching, drays with enormous worn-down truck-tyres drawn by graceful slow-stepping camels, behind which the all-India transport drivers lean on their horns and blare.
Occasionally, at the side of the road, a casualty. One truck is tipped forward with both its front wheels removed; it has been brought to its knees. Another, further on, with its off-wheels missing, is an elephant on its side. This is not just fancy or ‘a way of putting things’. One feels here that machines, in joining the animal forms of transport, have entered a single stream of creation that includes men, beasts, birds, insects, trees. The inclusiveness of the Indian, and specifically the Hindu view, subtly blurs in the mind as in the eye our usual categories.
The promiscuousness of India, its teeming plenitude, far from being oppressive, seems invigorating. It humbles but lifts the spirit. It seems immemorial, endless, indestructible. Things have been like this forever, and will go on like this, in defiance of every catastrophe, into a future too remote to contemplate. We will survive here, we humans, one species among many – that is what India promises. Even the economy, the real economy which is going on all about us and consists of millions of hands engaged in the smallest of tasks, even that, as I know from village life in Italy, is unshakeable, because the shocks that open great gaps in Wall Street are registered here as the merest hairline-cracks in a dried-mud wall. If this life is closer to primitive beginnings, it is also further off from the distant, the inconceivable end. Going down into the streets of Jaipur, among the stalls, the shoppers, the hawkers with their wares laid out on the pavement; among the sellers of pan with all the paraphernalia of the ritual and a row of bright, heart-shaped leaves set out on a metal tray; among the roasters of peanuts with their coke stoves, the spice sellers, sweet sellers, schoolchildren, loungers, rickshaw-men waiting for fares, street-musicians in costume playing one-stringed fiddles, cows, dogs, camel-drays, I was amazed by the number of individual traders with nothing much for sale except a few trinkets or half a dozen pencils or lumps of quartz.
There is so much enterprise here. A little girl of not much more than eight is selling handkerchief-sized kites to her contemporaries outside a school, they in smart uniforms, she in rags. In front of the City Palace a boy of maybe six, carrying a shoe-brush and tube of cream, suddenly scuttles out of the shadows, dabs at my left boot and begins polishing. He is very persistent. He talks and talks and rubs away even as I walk, and won’t be put off. He has set himself up with the brush and cream as capital and is making his way. He is utterly ragged, shoeless himself and very dirty; I can believe that he is one of the many here who live and sleep in the streets. But he has such energy, such tenacity and resourcefulness, that I can also imagine him surviving as the dusty little sparrows do. He seems indestructible.
He belongs to a group of four or five such waifs who huddle in the roots of a fig tree. One of his companions scurries out. He has a sack. He squats beside it, lays out his stock and begins work. Rolling a coin in his palm he makes it disappear, then reappear out of his mouth, his ear, his nostrils, out of the empty air.
He is a working model of the system itself. His hands move swiftly. Very neat and economical in his movements, he is an automaton, a coin-producing machine that just happens, since this is India, to have arms, eyes, fingers, ears, and a mouth that, when it is not regurgitating fifty-paise pieces, keeps up a continuous but incomprehensible patter. The aim, as in every capital venture, is to attract interest. The least flicker of it in a passer-by and a kind of contract will have been signed in which the display becomes a performance and the boy will have won the right to be paid.
So it goes on. These are not beggars, they are small-scale entrepreneurs of their own skill and readiness to serve. There are millions of them. All it needs is the response of another individual and these tiny actions will be gathered into the dense, shifting economy of the place, that passage of coins, goods, services from hand to hand that keeps a whole subcontinent honourably alive and moving from one day to the next.
Real beggars are few outside the big cities, and even they have something to offer: a mark of fate, the ability to whine effectively (piteously, formally, lyrically in the case of two urchins outside the Jaipur museum), or the capacity to strike up with the passer-by a relationship that immediately establishes obligation, but of an obscure kind that is all the more difficult to deny.
In the abandoned city of Fatepur Sikri I am approached by a very old bare-legged man with a white beard and a clean, loose-fitting turban. He has chosen me because I am the only person in the huge open square who is not occupied with a camera. He points to the top of the Victory Gate opposite. It is 146 feet high.
‘If the sahib gives 100 rupees,’ the old fellow offers, ‘I will jump from the top and the sahib can take a nice photograph.’
‘But I have no camera.’
The old boy lifts his shoulders and grins. ‘Well sahib, give me two rupees then because I am such a very old man.’
He delivers this as if it were the punchline of a j
oke, and I laugh and give him the two rupees, but feel the joke would still work if I did not. Only then it would be his turn to laugh and walk away.
It is difficult to explain the sense of freedom I feel at being for a moment outside history as we conceive it.
A simple example. The swastika, which immediately evokes for us a set of responses that may range from anxiety, guilt, terror, through a perverse joy in the glamour of violence to moral despair at what we are all capable of, remains untouched here by ‘the facts of history’. That complex of forces that for Europeans has the code name Auschwitz, and which for nearly four decades now has darkened our notion of our own possibilities, has no power here, because in the history of this place Auschwitz never happened.
India has its own forms of oppression (and the evil of untouchability is dark enough for any society to bear) but they are of another kind. To step out of our own culture for a time does not relieve us of history, or of the human nature that flows from it; but it does make history relative, and leaves us surrounded for a moment by 700 million souls who are innocent of what we know because the culture, the ‘human nature’ that produced it, is not theirs.
Looking out of the window at Agra I saw something fantastic: a whole line of men with lamps on their heads, five petrol lamps each, shining new, arranged in a three-foot high pyramid. The men walked in a straight line – there were seven in all – beside a canal. Later I saw the same men, or others, walking along beside the highway with all the lamps lighted.
They are the lamps that light village stalls. You look up, and there in the pitch darkness of India is a brilliant tray of apples or little yellow cakes, or a row of white-shirted salesmen sitting cross-legged on a bench covered with a snowy sheet.