A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  A Punjabi scholar working in Gujarat sings a poem by Shiv Kumar Batalvi, perhaps (I am told) the greatest Punjabi poet of modern times. When he starts to sing, Raj Kumar closes his eyes, makes a gesture as if he were taking over the place, or entering some private space of his own. His voice is so rich, so full of feeling and melody, it is enough in itself. But after a few verses he is ready to quit: I see darkness, he says. A cave. Someone should assist you, it is suggested. Yes. Who but the boy gets up and approaches, and between the two—a shaky yet not unintimidated boy, and the master—they take it away.

  A girl sings plaintively: I don’t know you, and neither do you know me, but our love has happened.

  It’s an old song that I know. To whom does she sing those words?

  This is still a land of romance, I tell myself, of song and love. Hearts still are given and taken away. It’s a place of signals, with looks, and handkerchiefs, and small gestures. A place of laughter. How well do I recognize these, how utterly have I lost them. The cynicism is reserved for politicians, among this middle-class crowd, the irony for foreign consumption.

  The Jagannath temple complex in Puri is one of the four major dhams, or holy centres of Hinduism. Even the self-proclaimed non-believers must have a go at it, get the darshanas, if not for themselves then at least for their neighbours, their friends, their mothers. The reigning deity of this temple is Jagannath, Lord of the Universe, the All-Seeing One, worshipped by followers of Vishnu and Shiva, Buddhists and Jains, and even Muslims. In the middle of every July, pilgrims pour into town for the annual chariot festival, in which chariots forty feet high and more, red and yellow, bearing Jagannath and his sister and brother, are conveyed in a symbolic procession round the universe. But it is January and we are not so lucky as to witness such a spectacle.

  Shoes are not allowed in the temple, and some therefore alight from our two buses enthusiastic and already barefoot, and walk the grimy, sandy, squelchy way to the temple. It’s a longish walk, along a busy commercial street crowded with pedestrians and pilgrims and lined with shoe stands where one may remove one’s shoes and take a token as a receipt. Only Hindus are allowed into the temple, a sign says, but who is to check and how? What exactly is a Hindu? I have not denied any Hindu god.

  The temples are famous for their intricate architecture, patient work of decades, details into which one could get easily lost. But few here are conscious of this, the atmosphere is one of a fete—no, a market—crowds of worshippers, gangs of hustlers. It seems like an offence, to the outsider, that a visit to such historic sites, national monuments, iconographic representations of mankind’s spiritual strivings, should be greeted by beggars and hustlers, self-proclaimed guides, who simply cling and cling, are not, are never, shaken off until the end of the visit when you get back on your bus.

  And then the sheer uncanniness of it: amidst the sordidness, the hustling, the thieving, the bargaining with the priests, a professor covers her head, goes for, tolerates, the darshana—because she has to; something deserves respect, only she can tell what that something is for her. The humility, the grace of such a worshipper is astounding, before the Brahmins with the blessings, and the icon of Shiva, and the attendants who make space for her by pushing others aside because she’s a “Madam,” a respectable lady, who has brought rupees, and they are merely the poor supplicants with nothing but endless woes.

  A beggar woman calls out, Help a poor woman, Bhagwan will give you a boy. A boy and girl in rags, of about five, come to beg. The heart melts. What will you buy with the money? Come on, tell, my companion, who’s just prayed, says in mock sternness. The two break into fits of giggles. They get a rupee. As we walk away, a pulling match. The boy gets to hold the coin.

  Back in the bus, a box of prasad arrives, sweetmeats blessed at the temple. Yes, I remember, it has to be taken with the right hand. One crumbles in my hand: an exploding ladoo, I exclaim. Every one laughs. But the spilt crumbs have to be carefully collected and thrown away, not stepped upon. There are some who would not even throw them away but consume them; but this is an educated crowd.

  Orissa is a land of temples, profusely ornamented on the outside and plain and dark inside. They were built between the sixth and thirteenth centuries AD, by artisans who remain unknown. Bhubaneswar alone boasts more than five hundred temples of this period. The Rajarani temple is a tourist site, surrounded by a well-tended lawn. A magnificent temple of red sandstone, completely covered on the exterior with intricately carved nymphs inside stone niches; but it is unused, there is no deity here. We take walks and group photographs, undisturbed, unmolested. The sense of mystery within the hollow, empty interior is deep, the imagination free to roam. A short walk away is the Lingaraja temple complex, dedicated to the deity Shiva. Outside, shoe and prasad stalls, catering to the pilgrims. This is a shrine in use and crowded. Inside the compound a single priest also accepts homage to the god Vishnu.

  One can visit temple after temple here. At a simple one in the middle of a busy street, two women at a shrine, eyes beseeching, pleading to a god. This human sight, so private a moment so publicly displayed, is the one that ultimately touches the most, leaves one humbled, feeling ignorant, superfluous. Universal mysteries aside, what domestic calamity, what private problems do these two bring? How would they be resolved? How mysterious, unreachable, the secret pains of another heart. I, too, recall women of my family, similarly beseeching, utterly helpless (they thought); some resolutions come, but never that elusive happiness, even in old age.

  Scenes outside the temple at Puri:

  A boy walking, his hands thrust inside his shorts, clutching at his crotch; a mangy dog limping along with bloody testicles. In the crowd outside the temple, outside the curio shops and tea stalls and clothing stores for visitors, a pigtailed girl of about eighteen in trouser suit weaving in and out on a bicycle, her school books on the carrier at the back. A scene so much from my own experience growing up in Dar es Salaam, I feel I could trace the rest of the girl’s day.

  A Sense of the Private: The Governor’s Special Quota

  At this point I would have preferred to make Calcutta my next stop. It is the closest large city. I have a recommendation from Toronto to a literary, not an academic, group. I suspect I will see a more intellectual, more left, and certainly very different crowd from the career academics I have so far been with. It seems like time to get that other perspective—a sharp jolt as it were, and a different, more open view of what is happening in India. With the happy, satisfied crowd I am with, the sense of emergency and crisis seems far away.

  But Trivandrum, Kerala, needs me; there are two emissaries from the south to tell me that, to beseech me to come; there is a workshop there they would like me to attend. Trivandrum it has to be, except that with the airline strike on, trains are booked solid, weeks in advance. There seems no hope. But in India, as I am learning, there is always a way.

  One of the guests happens to know the Governor of Orissa’s aidede-camp personally. Off we drive to Government House, but we find there that the ADC has gone home for lunch. With great pains, a sentry and a woman, perhaps a secretary, direct us to the eminence’s house. After a few wrong turns we find it. As we walk up a garden path, the ADC is putting his relatives into his Maruti wagon, to take them to the train station. He is a tall and youngish military man, a captain, and a north Indian. My case is explained to him: foreign visitor, a conference in Trivandrum. When does he want to go? the ADC asks. Tomorrow, they tell him, by the Coromandel Express; he has to give the inaugural lecture. The ADC could have hummed and hawed, he could have asked to see my passport. But he simply writes a chit, tells my companions, Buy a ticket and take it to the station master; I’m on my way there, I’ll meet you.

  And so, within an hour, a ticket on the Coromandel Express, on the Governor of Orissa’s Emergency Quota.

  Bhubaneswar–Coimbatore

  I remember musing, many years ago when I was a student and would often find myself between cities on a train in
North America, that it could go on forever, this journey, for all I cared, I could give my life to this long moment of rolling and roaring, of endless rhythm. I was a displaced person, like Zeno’s arrow going some place else even as I was stationary in another, and a train ride vivified the feeling of constant motion, going somewhere endlessly. Trains here in India are the next best thing to endless constant motion. The Puri Express of a few days before, though it seems months away now, so intense have been my experiences, was some nine hundred miles long, thirty hours in duration. This present journey is even longer, from the northeast to the bottom of India, Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea. What better way than to sit in a train responding to the ancestral homeland, every scene and every moment full of meaning and possibility, blooming epiphany? The only torment: the wet washrooms.

  A woman sleeps in the seat-bunk across from me, her husband, without a sleeping berth of his own, sits near her feet. She hardly says a word, doesn’t eat, even when she sits up. Eat, he says several times. She declines. A tear in her eye. Why is she crying? No, I realize, she seems to have a cold. Finally she opens her box, brings out puris, pickle, and something else—but I give them their privacy, I look away.

  The Coromandel goes up to Madras, arrives twenty-four hours after departure, in the evening. From here I have to catch another train, on which I don’t have a reservation. The station is teeming with people, India in motion. You have to know where you are going, you have to have a ticket. It all looks hopeless. With me is an escort, on his way to Trivandrum, who has a reservation on ordinary second class. Out of desperation for my case we take a rickshaw to the bus station; perhaps I can catch a bus. The bus station, too, is packed. We return to the train station. My companion, Hussein, goes to look around, comes back with the information, having peeked at the reservation chart for the train, that four berths are vacant in second-class AC. Get into one of them, he instructs me, and I do just that. We encounter the TC, ticket collector, and declare my Emergency Quota status. But the Orissa governor’s influence does not extend this far. First-class passengers have priority, says the TC, what can he do? Hussein goes away with him to have a chat in private and returns. Go and give him fifty rupees, he advises me. Tell him it’s for his trouble. I go outside on the platform, where the TC awaits, and mumble something about the emergency quota and hand him the fifty rupees. The TC is embarrassed, says, If you need anything let me know. And on the way, he does inquire after me, in the morning brings me a cup of coffee.

  In the middle of the night he brings a woman to the berth opposite mine. A young woman in red sari, with a child, and a family elsewhere in the compartment that comes to see her occasionally. Perhaps they, too, have paid off the TC. A young man comes several times—husband or brother? Later in the night a young woman sits on my berth, at the edge, and watches over the girl. Definitely not a sister, I think, she is too formal; and definitely not her husband’s sister. Must be a bhabhi, her brother’s wife. It’s the girl’s own family. The young woman leaves after a while.

  The girl’s brought her bedding with her, and neatly makes up the bed, and makes a bed for the baby, too—nice, frilly, pink and yellow with a plastic sheet. I know exactly how she’s going to sleep, I tell myself. On her side, back towards me, the baby (a quiet, obliging type) in the concave in her front.

  But first she feeds the child; I turn away. Later, after one more visitor to inquire after her, she prepares to sleep. Shall we turn off the light? I ask. She does it. A relation soon comes by and partly draws the curtain to her berth.

  There is a certain humbleness bred out of a common humanity that one experiences in such situations. How in close proximity one does one’s thing, retaining a sense of modesty and dignity, a sense of private self. The woman feeds the child some more, on her side, then sleeps on her back.

  I’m trying to say that now I’m in India. And I feel an empathy I cannot fully understand.

  “Eleven Burnt Alive in Bombay”—headline, Deccan Herald.

  And so, somewhere, the “disturbance,” or the “communal violence,” goes on, the fire rages. Once more a glimpse of the dark side behind the warm embrace, the familiarity. An unease descends upon the soul. There is a real mystery to these mob violences, something truly unfathomable.

  We get off at Coimbatore to change trains. The station has rooms for resting, each with a bed, a shower, and a toilet, at one hundred rupees a day. My companion, Hussein, finds it scandalous that we should pay that much for only an hour or two. But at this point I’m willing to pay five times that much, though I don’t tell him this. After a shower and coffee I tell him I’m ready to go the twelve more hours to our destination. It’s been thirty-six hours since we left Bhubaneswar and I don’t know whether I am coming or going, what day of the week it is. Toronto seems far far away.

  The station is crowded with dozens of men who look like some kind of mendicants: clad in black dhotis going round the waist and black shirts, with marks on the forehead. They are all barefoot and carry cloth bundles which they tend to hold on their heads. Some have bells tinkling at the waist, most also carry water flasks; two exceptions among them wear trousers instead of dhoti, and two others have canvas shoulder bags. Sometimes a line of them passes by, chanting. I’m told they come from all places and are on their way to a pilgrimage to Lord Ayyappan, a form of the god Vishnu.

  Coimbatore–Trivandrum

  I did not catch the name of this train, but it is crowded. No space, says the TC. People get in anyway, even find places to sit. I feel bold enough by now to do the same. On the train from Delhi, and later the one from Bhubaneswar, sitting with strangers, facing each other for hours, watching and being watched all the time, I felt intolerably overexposed. Now I feel I can sit anywhere. Almost.

  The pilgrims, it appears, cannot find seats or a place to pause on the train, lines of them pass through our compartment, clutching their bundles, looking very cheerful. The scenery outside is pleasant—the Western Ghats in the distance to my right, a lot of lush greenery all around, with a profusion of coconut and banana trees. Colourful yellow, blue, and pink houses. Not much sign of the kind of poverty of the north, not close to the track at least. Halfway to Trivandrum, the pilgrims all get off, hang around the station platform. From here they will proceed on foot to a pilgrimage site up a mountain. As I watch, a few of them take to the adjacent tracks to attend to nature, facing away. One can only look away in return.

  Scootering through the Countryside in Search of Lost History

  “Our Martyrs are the fountainhead of our sorrows,” says a somewhat puzzling slogan written in English on a public fence. There are signs and slogans all over Trivandrum; as in Bengal, the hammer and sickle is prominently present. Kerala has had elected communist governments on and off for many years, although at present it’s Congress that holds office. The student movement is a force to be reckoned with. It will provide the next generation of political leaders and has to be indulged. Currently they are holding the university vice-chancellor under siege in his residence; only the police can see him, important business (such as that relating to the workshop I am attending) has to be smuggled in to him. He has been charged with possessing a fraudulent degree from Sussex. A previous vice-chancellor, who returned from America to take up the post, I am told, died of a heart attack. Such are the strains of this office.

  Kerala is a long stretch of lush green land between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats; next to it, in the east, lies Tamil Nadu. The landscape is dominated by coconut trees, rivers, and canals; the language spoken is Malayalam. This is the real south; Hindi is almost a foreign tongue, and the English spoken is hard to understand. I was asked, upon arrival, to see a Yum Yum Thomas, influential journalist; it took me two days of asking and considerable embarrassment before I realized that M. M. Thomas was meant. There is a certain reserve in the people. Whereas in the north people come at you, tell you things, are curious about you, thrust their books into your hands, here they hold back. This reserve they a
ttribute to their sense of personal pride. It is for me a little like going from Brussels to Antwerp, as I happened to do once, many years ago. But there are no beggars here to touch your feet or thrust their hands at you inside a rickshaw. The long-distance STD booths are full in the evenings, with people making calls worth a few rupees to one wonders where, until one is told that all villages are connected to telephone lines. Traffic is orderly; unlike in Delhi, cars actually drive behind one another, they wait at stop signs, and signal before turning. And there is more colour here, houses look freshly painted, blue, pink, yellow, with attention to detail in their construction.

  Because it faces the Arabian Sea, Kerala has ancient links with Arabia. The population is divided between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians; one is taken with pride to the city centre, where a mosque, a temple, and a church stand facing each other. The first Christians were converted by Saint Thomas in the first century. But the recent disturbances in the north have made people conscious of who they are, in a way they weren’t before, they say.

  The slogans in evidence everywhere in the city are due to a national students’ congress that is about to open. On the afternoon of the opening parade, the city promises to come to a standstill; ordinary people start off early for their homes, to leave the city centre to the students. I take up an invitation by Hussein to go to his home for dinner (and therefore spend a night there). He is honoured, and so am I.