12 Edmondstone Street

by David Malouf

  The oddness of Indian headgear: I don’t mean only the men with the lamps, or the women balancing two waterpots, one of terracotta, the other of bronze, or the children staggering under a papal crown made of dung-cakes, flat little cow-pats arranged in circles to a height of three feet or more. I am thinking of the caps in every shape and colour, the toques, turbans, headcloths, and the improvised combinations like the black scarf tied over a pink tea cosy worn by the driver’s boy on the bus, and the smart outfit of the man and wife in the seat behind me, two black ghosts; she completely obscured by a knitted balaclava, only her eyes showing, and the diamond in her nose, he in a red patent-leather flying-cap with a peak and earflaps lined with fur.

  P.H. is a computer engineer from Ottawa who has been working here on an engineering project. ‘After six months in this country,’ he tells me reflectively, gazing out at a village scene, ‘I have come to the conclusion that at any given moment one in every three Indian males’ – there are approximately 300 million – ‘has his hand on his crotch.’

  Drivers often turn out to be more interesting than guides. My driver at Delhi said nothing while the guide was with us, but the moment she got down to take a scooter became almost voluble.

  He is a mountain man from Kumouan, Jim Corbett country up near the Sino-Tibetan border, very small and soft-spoken, about fifty. He asks me where I come from and what I do. When I tell him I am a writer, he informs me in his incomprehensible English that he is fond of poetry and begins, as we hurtle through the Delhi traffic, to quote. I take it at first for something from one of the local epics, but recognise at last the Bard: ‘Under the greenwood tree / Who loves to lie with me?’

  Our driver at Fatepur Sikri was a Hindu, very refined, in a neat ginger suit, yellow shirt and tie, and with impeccably polished shoes. An ex-driver for the R.A.F. The guide on the other hand looked ill and seedy, in a thin jacket much-stained and glossy with wear, a collarless shirt, dusty downtrodden slippers and no socks. His name, he told us, was Gordon. He had studied at St John’s College, Agra, graduating in 1958, and was an M.A. Sad, sick and suffering keenly from the cold, he kept manoeuvring us into positions where the view mightn’t be so good but where he could at least linger a moment in the sun.

  Mr G. is full of facts. When he hears I am an Australian he immediately rattles off the names of all the states and their capitals, including triumphantly, Hobart. The Taj, he informs us in a poetic moment, is ‘a tear on the cheek of eternity’. His excellent English has an oddly old-fashioned quality. ‘What line are you in, sir?’ he asks at one stop, and when we come to the shrine of a Moslem saint that he cannot approach because he has failed this morning to take a bath (it was so extremely cold) he begs us ‘not to take it ill’. After a good deal of talk about religion, and the remarkable ecumenism of the Emperor Akhbar (who hoped to reconcile Hindus, Moslems, Christians and Buddhists in a single faith, and whose capital at Fatepur embodies the vision in stone), Mr G. confesses that he is a Methodist. He and the driver tease one another, amiably at first, then with subdued hostility.

  Mr G. explains that the peasants here are too uneducated to use a tractor: they believe their gods are in the fields and are afraid of breaking their heads with the blades. The driver winces. Also, the peasants cannot be taught to practise birth control, they are too stupid. ‘And after all, sir, sexual pleasure is the poor man’s only entertainment.’ Mr G. has two children, twin boys, though he tells us sadly that an older girl died less than a year ago. The twins were a mistake that fate has now adjusted. The driver has five children, all in Delhi, all healthy and doing well, two of them with degrees.

  Mr G. stares hopelessly out the window at peasants moving slowly behind yoked oxen, and sucks at a thin cigarette, though the driver has already made it plain that he objects. When we get out again he makes immediately for the sun.

  He and the driver have a brief, sharp disagreement over a bird. It is clearly a kingfisher, as the driver says, but Mr G. insists it is a jay, and he continues to insist as if his account of the number of Akhbar’s wives or the height of a tower depended for their credibility now on the name of the bird. The kingfisher keeps reappearing, flashing its turquoise wings in pools, among columns, to taunt him.

  Even at the end the driver gets the better of him. In a little difficulty about fares and tips I fail to make clear how much each man is to get, and when Mr G. demands an adjudication lose my nerve. I abandon him to the driver’s goodwill. He looks hurt. I have played just the part in Mr G.’s world that has been assigned to me. For all his Methodism and his M.A. he is always on the losing end of things, even here when he might have expected of fellow Christians some sort of solidarity against the heathen Hindu.

  Poor Mr G. His sallow face and thin shoulders, his inability to approach the shrine, his lesser share, our odd course round the sights as we follow the sun – all this will stay with me longer, I suspect, than the wonders he has to show us, impressive as they undoubtedly are. He will always haunt the place, like his opposing spirit, the flashy, blue-winged kingfisher that would not, for all his naming and renaming of it, become a jay.

  I don’t think I have ever been in a place that is so morally or spiritually dangerous.

  India is full of temptations for the westerner. The temptations to voyeurism for example, to look on all this through a plate-glass window (or camera lens), at a safe, air-conditioned distance, and to titillate the eye, as the Sunday magazines have instructed us, with colour, action, and misery in its most picturesque forms. The temptation to play god, and with a gesture that costs us the price of a Coca Cola congratulates ourselves on our compassion, our human kindness. The temptation to believe that we have understood what we have been confronted with, that the commonness of human nature, coupled with an extraordinary personal sensitivity, has revealed to us the meaning of gestures, actions, movements of the heart that are impenetrably foreign and mysterious. It would take a saint to avoid all these temptations and no one does; but it’s as well to be aware of them and to remember that India is subtle. Any new occasion may spawn a temptation you have not yet taken account of.

  I give two rupees to a young man in a dirty headcloth, but very bright and cheerful-looking, who is wheeling on a wooden cart a woman with neither fingers nor toes. The two rupees produce a look of astonishment as at a miracle. The young man lights up. The whites of his eyes and his white teeth appear. He opens his palms as before a divinity. I am invited to see myself as a kind of god. A fountainhead of miracles.

  I turn away, embarrassed. Not only by the accident that has made me one of the gods, or by the man’s gesture, which looks spontaneous but probably isn’t, but by the number of factors in this encounter that I cannot hope to understand.

  How far is this display of wonder a formal offering to my self-esteem? What is the relationship between this handsome, able-bodied youth and the woman? Is he her protector, or is she in fact being exploited by him and with what willingness on her part or under what compulsion?

  These questions are unanswerable and they make all such occasions painful in the extreme. To walk on blindly as if no need existed, or as if all this were mere theatre, is to be in one moral predicament; to react puts you immediately in another. And of course to be concerned with moral predicaments at all is an indulgence, if all it involves is the desire to be in the right.

  No element in the street scene here is so strange to Western eyes as the way animals, not all of them entirely tamed, move in and out of the lives of men.

  We like animals in their place: lions in cages, cats and dogs at the fireside (replete with canned food and expensively packaged niblets in the shape of bones), bullocks out west or in plastic for the grill. Our exile from the Garden brought us absolute power over the rest of creation in exchange for a guilt we are free to feel or not as we please – on the whole a convenient bargain.

  India seems never to have heard of this absolute distinction on which our superiority and power is based. Man and the beasts form a
single stream. Cows roam freely in the streets and are fed but not eaten. (In the market at Jaipur I saw them feeding on pomegranates.) There are stray dogs everywhere, of a kind one never sees in Europe, lean creatures out of a mediaeval Apocalypse, the females with enormous teats; also hairy half-wild pigs, sometimes black, often brindled, with very pink naked-looking piglets. Goats wander in flocks, almost always without a herder. Most engaging of all are the squirrels, grey with a triple stripe down the back where they were stroked by Lord Krishna; and the ubiquitous, shamelessly playful, serious-sad and free-ranging monkeys.

  In the main street of Jaipur, I glanced up at the elegant pink facade opposite, with its pepper-pot domes and pierced screens, and was astonished to see swift grey monkeys flying about above the heads of the pedestrians, swinging through the air from sill to parapet, from ledge to tower, and realised that on my side too they must be right above me, as indeed they were.

  In the eighteenth-century Astronomy Park, the instruments of heavenly calculation are disposed like giant pieces in a game, or like modern geometric sculptures – a stairway sixty-five feet high, leading nowhere but permanently fixed on the Pole Star, a granite sun-dial, two sunken hemispheres, one the complement of the other, with marble head-rests beautifully inscribed where the star-gazer can rest his head on the name of Aldebaran and find the star itself immediately overhead. In that quiet place, among the giant discs and triangles and free-standing figures of the zodiac, monkeys lope about like stoop-shouldered scholars grown small and grey with thinking or with having looked down the wrong end of the evolutionary telescope. They settle and sit chin on hand, brooding.

  The animals are everywhere, either as companions in labour or as beasts left free to wander in their own lives, but always as creatures who belong to a single creation that has not yet been culled and cowed and simplified in the interests of a dominant species. It is easy to see here how one might develop an attitude of non-violence towards the creatures out of a belief that the same spirit of energy plays up and down from the lowest forms of life to the most complex and refined.

  My only remaining fear is of being bitten: by a rabid dog, I tell myself, or by a bat in the cave temples at Ellora, but really, I think, by India itself.

  I have a dream in which I am moving through a garden full of cobwebs, like the white cobwebby frost that covered the whole landscape when we came in to land at Delhi in the early dawn. I was through it, using my hands to open a path and avoiding the odd scorpion-like creatures, fat and orange-yellow, that hang in the webs, until my left hand is swathed in the stuff, a heavy white glove. I am almost through when one of the scorpions fastens on my right hand and stings, but without pain, in fact with a painless but paralysing sweetness; and I think of the shoeshine boy in the Tibetan market on Janpath who, while I am momentarily distracted, has put a dab of cream on my boot and suddenly throws up his hands exclaiming: ‘But what is this, sahib? What is this I see?’ So that once again I am involved in a drama, a relationship from which I cannot be extricated save by the offer, as always, of a propitiatory fee.

  How much of what I see here do I really take in? Everything happens so fast, there is so much of it, and the language of human gesture is not universal.

  At Agra we were shown artisans at work in a marble factory. In the yard outside, where great slabs were being unpacked from straw, half a dozen youths were skylarking about in a boisterous universal manner; but on the open verandah, where three others were at work gouging out designs with a chisel, shaping the semi-precious stones on a wheel to make leaf-and-flower motifs and painstakingly setting them, something occurred that I could not interpret and still can’t.

  One of the boys (he might have been fifteen), using a pair of tweezers and a live coal, was engaged in setting the stones in a white paste. Suddenly, as the factory owner turned away a moment, he gave us a wild look and held up four fingers in some sort of appeal. Another demand for rupees? It looked like more than that. In a more melodramatic situation it would quite clearly have been a sign that he was being held against his will, a desperate cry for rescue.

  Nothing explained itself, we passed on. But I see that wordless gesture, four tense upthrust fingers and an open mouth, as an image of what I have failed to understand here, a message I am deaf to and have not received, an uncomfortable reminder of the million tiny events I have been present at that escaped my attention and which added together would make a wall of darkness in which what I have seen is the merest flash of chips in a mosaic, an eye, a hand, the fragment of a broken arch, the passage of a kingfisher’s, a bluejay’s wing.

  THE KYOGLE LINE

  1

  IN JULY 1944, when train travel was still romantic, and hourly flights had not yet telescoped the distance between Brisbane and Sydney to a fifty-five minute interval of air-conditioned vistas across a tumble of slow-motion foam, we set out, my parents, my sister and I, on the first trip of my life – that is how I thought of it – that would take me over a border. We left from Kyogle Station, just a hundred yards from where we lived, on a line that was foreign from the moment you embarked on it, since it ran only south out of the state and had a gauge of four-foot-eight. Our own Queensland lines were three-foot-six and started from Roma Street Station on the other side of the river.

  I was familiar with all this business of gauges and lines from school, where our complicated railways system, and its origins in the jealously guarded sovereignty of our separate states, was part of our lessons and of local lore, but also because, for all the years of my later childhood, I had seen transports pass our house ferrying troops across the city from one station to the other, on their way to Townsville and the far north. We lived in a strip of no-man’s-land between lines; or, so far as the thousands of Allied troops were concerned, between safe, cosmopolitan Sydney and the beginning, at Roma Street, of their passage to the war.

  Our own journey was for a two weeks’ stay at the Balfour Hotel at the corner of King and Elizabeth Streets, Sydney. The owner was an old mate of my father’s, which is why, in wartime, with all hotel rooms occupied, we had this rare chance of accommodation. Train bookings too were hard to come by. We would sit up for sixteen hours straight – maybe more, since the line was used for troop movements. I was delighted. It meant I could stay up all night. Staying awake past midnight was also, in its way, a border to be crossed.

  I had been many times to see people off on the ‘First Division’, and loved the old-fashioned railway compartments with their foliated iron racks for luggage, their polished woodwork, the spotty black-and-white pictures of Nambucca Heads or the Warrumbungles, and the heavy brocade that covered the seats and was hooked in swags at the windows. When we arrived to claim our seats, people were already crammed into the corridor, some of them preparing to stand all the way. There were soldiers in winter uniform going on leave with long khaki packs, pairs of gum-chewing girls with bangles and pompadours, women with small kids already snotty or smelly with wet pants, serious men in felt hats and double-breasted suits. The afternoon as we left was dry and windy, but hot in the compartment. It was still officially winter. When the sun went down it would be cold.

  My mother would spend the journey knitting. She was, at that time, engaged in making dressing-gowns, always of the same pattern and in the same mulberry-coloured nine-ply, for almost everyone she knew. There was rationing, but no coupons were needed for wool. I had been taught to knit at school and my mother let me do the belts – I had already made nine or ten of them – but was waiting because I didn’t want to miss the border and the view.

  What I was hungry for was some proof that the world was as varied as I wanted it to be; that somewhere, on the far side of what I knew, difference began, and that the point could be clearly recognised.

  The view did change, and frequently, but not suddenly or sharply enough. It was a matter of geological forms I couldn’t read, new variants of eucalypt and pine. The journey from this point of view was a failure, though I wouldn’t admit it. I sta
yed excited and let my own vivid expectations colour the scene. Besides, it wasn’t a fair test. We had barely passed the border when it was dark. It did get perceptibly colder. But was that a crossing into a new climate zone or just the ordinary change from day to night? The train rocked and sped, then jolted and stopped for interminable periods in a ring-barked nowhere; then jerked and clashed and started up again. We saw lights away in the darkness, isolated farmhouses or settlements suggesting that some of the space we were passing through was inhabited. We got grimy with smuts.

  My mother knitted, even after the lights were lowered and other people had curled up under blankets. I too kept wide awake. I was afraid, as always, of missing something – the one thing that might happen or appear, that was the thing I was intended not to miss. If I did, a whole area of my life would be closed to me for ever.

  So I was still awake, not long after midnight, when we pulled into Coffs Harbour and the train stopped to let people get off and walk for a bit, or buy tea at the refreshment room.

  ‘Can we?’ I pleaded. ‘Wouldn’t you like a nice cup of tea, Mummy? I could get it.’

  My mother looked doubtful.

  ‘It wouldn’t do any harm,’ my father said, ‘to have a bit of a stretch.’

  ‘I need to go to the lav,’ I threw in, just to clinch the thing. It had been difficult to make your way through standing bodies and over sleeping ones to the cubicles at either end of the carriage. The last time we went we had had to step over a couple, one of them a soldier, who were doing something under a blanket. My father, who was modest, had been shocked.

  ‘Come on then.’ We climbed down.

  It was a clear cold night and felt excitingly different, fresher than I had ever known, with a clean smell of dark bushland sweeping away under stars to the escarpments of the Great Divide. People, some of them in dressing-gowns and carrying thermos flasks, were bustling along the platforms. The train hissed and clanged. It was noisy; but the noise rose straight up into the starry night as if the air here were thinner, offered no resistance. It felt sharp in your lungs.