by David Yeadon
He paused again and we all sat staring at the shimmering whiteness. Even the sky was white in the incredible heat. “He was a good man. I was his older brother. He should have listened to what I told him.” Another long pause.
“What happened?” A stupid question. I knew the answer.
The old man shaded his eyes. “He has his eldest son with him, twelve years old. A fine boy…”
There was a wedding in the village. We could hear the music over the mud-walled compound. Later there would be a procession and a feast of goat, spiced rice, and sweet sticky cakes.
“He went a different way?”
The old man looked even older. His face was full of long gashed shadows.
“You must go to the wedding,” he said. “They will be proud if you go. Not many people like you come to this place.”
“I’ve been already. But I think it made people a bit uncomfortable. I seemed to attract more attention than the bride and groom. One man looked quite offended, a man in a bright blue suit.”
He laughed. “Ah! Yes. I forgot he was coming. He is with the government—very important. He likes to take charge of things…just like my brother.”
“So what happened to your brother?”
The old man shrugged. “He took the wrong path. We found two of his camels on our way back. They were almost dead but we brought them back home to our village.”
The music of the wedding faded. It was hard to find shade from the sun. I looked across the Rann again. Almost one hundred miles to the other side, with no oasis, no water, no shade, just this endless salt-whiteness.
“He could have reached the other side. Maybe he decided to stay for a while?”
“His family is here. His wife and his children.”
“Maybe the army arrested him?”
“No, this was nine years ago. The army was not here so much at that time.”
“So you think he died.”
The old man drew a slow circle with his finger in the sandy dust.
“He became a ‘white,’ like so many others.”
“A ‘white’?”
“We call that name for men who do not return from the Rann. Part of their spirit remains in the Rann. There are many, many of them. Who can tell. Maybe hundreds of men. Hundreds of whites.”
“Back home we call them ghosts—the spirits of the dead still trapped on earth.”
“Yes I know about your ghosts. Here it is a different thing. We are not afraid of the whites. When we cross the Rann we remember them. They protect us. Sometimes they guide us.”
“But you never see them?”
The old man smiled and spoke quietly. “As I told you, the Rann is a very strange place and you can see many strange things…it is difficult to explain. The Rann is not like other things on earth—not even like other deserts. It has its own nature and if you listen and look and think clearly, you will be safe…”
“Your brother didn’t listen?”
“He was a good man but much younger than I. And he had many worries. His mind was full of many things. He could not hear clearly.”
“Do you think about him a lot?”
“He was my only brother. We had five sisters. But he was my only brother.”
“So, in a way, he’s still here.”
“Of course. He is a white. He will always be here.”
My long (very long) journey to the Rann began on the Nepalese-Indian border, in the gritty, noisy little town of Birganj. Sixteen hours of bone-crushing bus travel had brought me south from Kathmandu, over the passes and down through the gorges, and deposited me at this nonentity of a place. We were late arriving, not a particularly surprising occurrence in a land where precise bus schedules bear little relevance to reality.
“Sir, please be on time, sir.” I had been instructed in Kathmandu. “At six-oh-three A.M., sir, the bus will leave the square, and you must present your ticket ten minutes before departure, sir, otherwise there may be many difficulties.”
I had left my warm bed near Durbar Square, one of the most overwhelming urban spaces in the world, and arrived in another chilly fogbound square to find no sign of the bus at its alloted space. It was very dark and wet, and repeated inquiries always brought the same inevitable smile and shrug—the Nepalese equivalent of our “no-problem” response. But for the initiative of one small boy who told me the departure point had been moved to the other side of the square (I couldn’t even see the other side in the cloying gloom), I would have missed the bus and been obliged to start the whole rigmarole of ticket buying all over again.
The ride began with the barefoot bus driver praying to the various Hindu deities that decorated his tiny cab, and then rapidly deteriorated into a series of Looney Tunes crises, each more potentially disastrous than the previous one. The cyclist we ran into, a pothole we hit the size of a mine shaft, and the fruit seller’s cart we spilled to avoid a cow, were mere warm-ups to the chicken runs against mammoth Mack trucks, the race against a still-sliding landslide, the near spill into a sixty-foot gorge when a section of roadbed gave way, and the ultimate fury of our driver, who leaped out of his cab to confront another driver traveling at sloth pace up a steep ravine (only he forgot to set the handbrake first!).
All I wanted when we finally arrived in Birganj was a simple bed and sleep. A simple bed came easily enough (a square of plywood and a sheet in a freezing cold $3.00-a-night hostel), but sleep was hard to come by in a room also occupied by an enormous Australian earth gypsy whose snoring seemed to shake plaster off the walls and made the windows rattle. Haggard and dizzy with fatigue in the early dawn, I tried to sort out my papers for the border crossing while he insisted on telling me hard-luck tales of his injuries, illnesses, and illicit dealings, all the way from Darwin (“best place in the land of Aus, mate”) to Dar es Salaam. His pessimism and chronic dislike of almost everyone he’d met and everything that had happened to him made me wonder why he bothered traveling at all. His ultimate tirade was directed at “that bunch of bastard wogs” in Bombay who had managed to relieve him of all his worldly possessions except his sleeping bag and had even run off with his money belt crammed with dollars from some emerald-smuggling escapade in Malaysia. The air was purple with his profanities, and I was tired of him.
“Isn’t there one single place you’ve enjoyed?”
His mood changed. The swearing and cursing subsided, and this hairy giant of a man became almost teary-eyed as he told me about Bhuj, the idyllic Gujarat coast (“Not a bloody soul for miles. The best beaches in India, mate. No one ever goes there.”) and the mysteries of the Rann of Kutch.
So, thank you whatever your name is; I forgive you your snoring and your jaundiced outlook on life and your self-pitying tirades, and will remain ever grateful for your introduction to this truly fascinating corner of India.
Now the only thing I had to do was get there.
Traveling by bus is the only real way to experience India. You just lean back (actually leaning is a rather difficult thing for the average-sized Westerner because of the cramped space between the seats), stop trying to drive the bus in your mind (you couldn’t anyway—it takes total Indian logic and faith to negotiate even the quieter country roads littered with tractors, cattle, bicyclists, lines of basket-carrying pedestrians, and wild dogs. And as for the towns—forget it!), and let the whirligig of impressions roll by. Here’s a transcript of one of my tapes, a bit garbled, but I think it captures the flavor of bus travel in India well enough:
…a truck on its side in a hole in the road, didn’t he see it, did it just open up? We’re slowing down to get through all the spectators; kids are selling us Cadbury’s chocolate bars, newspaper cones full of peanuts for three cents…here’s a woman with enough branches and lumps of wood bundled on her head to break the proverbial camel’s back…a guru-seeking English couple behind me speak in pungent epigrams, out-Zening each other (one-up-Zenship?)…a cartoon sign indicates that spitting is prohibited on the bus so everyone’s hacking and spittin
g…enormous dew-covered spiders’ webs in the bushes by the roadside…behind another bloody white cow again in the middle of a twelve-foot-wide road and all the driver’s honking doesn’t make any difference at all…now he’s put the tape back on, the same one of Indian music we’ve had for hours and hours over the same cracked speaker. It seems to keep changing speed—or is that the way it’s meant to sound?…ah, stopping again. The beer isn’t bad. But I can’t take any more dhal bhat and curried eggs. A glass of mango lassi—beautiful. This is nice and crunchy—what is it? I said what-is-it? Little birds. Sparrows. Oh boy…off again now past a street market under umbrellas—six men in a line operating sewing machines; open-air dentistry—that’s novel; a barber plucking out nose hairs one at a time; bright-painted pedal-cabs all over the place; piles of beautifully ornate saris on a table; a herd of goats gone crazy; the smell of little bits of dough deep-frying in an old oil drum over a pile of red hot charcoal…cabs like tiny temple shrines dripping with ornaments…elaborate washing rituals at roadside taps—such a concern with cleanliness, especially the feet…towering posters for Indian films (you can spot each of the ritualized characters a mile away: the black-faced villain with scimitar mustache; the lovelorn hero; the shy, modest heroine; the plump, plotting matron; and the comic—there’s always a comic)…piles of lemons and limes for sale on the steps of a very old and very lopsided temple…a riverbank smothered in drying laundry…drying chilies on rooftops, brilliant reds…odd little dog kennel-sized stores selling pens, cigarettes, matches, combs, perched on platforms supported on four wobbly wooden legs (temporary businesses, no property taxes?)…signs everywhere for Campa Cola, Thumbs Up Cola, Frenzi ice cream…latticed beds by the roadside for sleepy store owners…so many, many people. You never seem to get away from crowds…we’re playing chicken again with a truck, the road’s only wide enough for one of us, he’s coming straight for us—jeez—c’mon pull over—wow! How the hell did we miss him?…the bus driver’s mate leaning out and shouting at the truck driver, banging instructions in code on the side of the bus (one for watch out; two for watch out!, three for what?). Too late, we’ve hit it (only we never hit anything, or at least nothing that we notice. It’s like magic. A constant barrage of inevitable accidents that never happen).
Out in the country again, very flat, rice paddies I think; a few mud houses with round cow dung patties drying on the walls…men performing their most intimate toilets out in the open fields, trousers down a short way, chatting to one another…a teacher sitting cross-legged on a stool outside a mud-walled school lecturing to a class of thirty, forty children…a swarm of preschoolers, gleefully naked, frollicking in a green pool…the body of a very old man dressed in rags and clutching a long pole at the roadside. (Is he dead? We miss him by inches and he just lies there.) A sense of all these scenes repeated endlessly across all of India, beneath a patina of colonial organizational officialdom that has long since clogged up and atrophied—and yet—still a vitality here, a frazzling pace of life, colors, laughter, variety; an acceptance of the unchanging nature of things; a calm in the midst of unending chaos…I’m worn out just watching it all—it’s like a TV docudrama. How would I feel if I were actually out there, in it, trying to do something, to accomplish something…?
Gandhi marveled at all this energy. What was it he said? Something like “We must be Indians first and Indians last.” Well it looks like he got his wish. India flows on and on, as Indian as it’s always been and possibly always will be, at least in these vast hot heartlands. And another telling quote, this time from Rudyard Kipling: “And the epitaph dear: A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”
It was rather sneaky of me. But I couldn’t resist it. The zap-Zening of the English couple I’d heard in the seats behind me had merely been a preparatory duel, a prologue to the real battle. I could sense the tension. So could the Indian passengers, although they couldn’t understand a word of their brittle exchanges. I was tempted to turn around and study them but that would have to wait. The contest was about to begin—a mutual masterpiece of bickering between two lovers who may have known and loved each other a little too long:
SHE: I told you I don’t have them.
HE: Yes, you do.
SHE: I never had them.
HE: I brought them for you. You asked me.
SHE: I’ve never seen them.
HE: They were on the pile.
SHE: Did you move them?
HE: No. Did you?
SHE: How could I if I never knew they were there?
(Long pause and sounds of searching through backpacks. Then a sort of embarrassed silence.)
SHE: I’ve found them.
HE: I told you they were there.
SHE: I must have forgotten.
HE: I wish you’d listen to what I say.
SHE: Why? Are you always right?
HE: More often than you think.
SHE: Why are you being nasty?
HE: I’m not being nasty. I’m being honest.
SHE: You’re getting angry now.
HE: I’m definitely not getting angry.
SHE: Why are you so angry all the time?
HE: It’s things like this that make me angry.
SHE: You must have a very deep anger inside.
HE: I do not.
SHE: Why are you so defensive?
HE: You make me defensive, saying I’m always angry. You always assume I’m wrong.
SHE: I don’t always assume you’re wrong.
HE: It’s a pattern. You always do it.
SHE: What a horrible person you make me out to be.
HE: You’re not horrible. You just act unpleasantly at times. Like I’m being dishonest. It hurts.
SHE: Well you’re not always honest.
HE: Neither are you.
SHE: And you’ve often hurt me.
HE: You often hurt yourself.
SHE: No, I don’t.
HE: You do. I did nothing to hurt you intentionally.
SHE: Well—you did anyway.
HE: I’m sorry. But sometimes that’s your problem, not mine.
SHE: Oh—very clever.
HE: It’s not clever at all. It’s the truth.
SHE: I must be a terrible person..
HE: No you’re not. You just keep dumping on me, and I’m getting tired of it.
SHE: I don’t mean to dump on you.
HE: So why do it?
SHE: I don’t know.
HE: Do we have a problem? Something we should talk about?
SHE: I don’t know.
HE: Do you still love me?
SHE: Yes. Do you still love me?
The rest of the conversation was lost to the din of the traffic. We were passing through another village and chaos reigned as usual. They seemed to reach an amicable hiatus though. When I finally turned around they were both asleep, her head on his shoulder. (It’s amazing how little non-incidents like this helped pass the time.)
Bus travel seems endless. People get on, people get off, but the journey goes on forever. The only thing that changed were the occupants of the seat beside me. So far I’d had three Indian companions, each of whom had slept through all the noise, heat, and confusion. I envied them their tranquility.
Then came a spritely young woman, a nurse from Eire, with a wonderful singsong way of talking. All her sentences ended in an upswing of Irish brogue. In spite of five months of backpacking around India from ashram to ashram, she still retained that bright-eyed enthusiasm of the novice traveler. Nothing seemed to phase her. She was totally in love with her life on the road—not a bit of the tired TET anywhere. I envied her too and was sorry to see her leave.
And then Dick Davies arrived, a young Welshman with a prematurely old face, deeply lined and flecked with dark scars. He wore an old suede hat, Australian style with one brim turned up, baggy green corduroys, and a torn leather jacket so stained with grease, food, blood, and mud that it was difficult to tell its original color.
At
first I thought that he too would sleep out the journey like my three Indian companions, but our conversation became animated when we compared notes on Kathmandu and the Himalayas.
“I’m a real white-water nut,” he told me with a grin that made his old face suddenly look very young. “Himalayas, Central America, New Zealand, Africa, you name it. I’ve been kayaking there.”
He was a true world wanderer, who had spent most of the last decade of his life seeking out white-water wonderlands all around the globe. I felt envious once again.
“I’ve never done any white-water stuff,” I said. “Somehow I don’t think I’d enjoy it that much.”
He laughed. “It doesn’t make that much difference what you do really. Like anything good in life, you end up pretty much in the same place.”
“And you get there by kayaking.”
“Yeah. Listen, I’m not one of the religious types. Y’know. You’ve met them. Nepal, Ladakh, the south. They’re all over India. They’re all looking for something that makes everything make sense.”