She was standing not far from the check-in counter. The air-conditioning in that corner was very cold. I hadn’t felt it at first. But then I was glad I had a thickish jacket. Even with that jacket I began to feel stiff after a few hours. I gave up the chair I hadn’t wanted to leave, and I joined the very slow refugee movement in the hall. I discovered a bookshop. I bought two Indian paperbacks, a book of cartoons by the cartoonist Laxman, and Khushwant Singh’s Book of Jokes, and discovered in five minutes (what I might have guessed) that humorous books require a full life and a contented mind; that where empty time stretches on without limit, the short joke, requiring only a few seconds’ attention, can be wearisome to the spirit, and can make a bad situation worse. Better simply to endure.
There was a restaurant. It was on an upper floor. It was comfortingly warm after the frigid conditions near the check-in counter. It took about half an hour, a plateful of cashew nuts I didn’t need, and a pot of tea I didn’t need, for me to realize that the musty, tainted smell of the restaurant was more than the smell of warmth, was the smell of an enclosed and airless room; that the air-conditioning there had broken down.
Cold downstairs, hot and dusty and choking upstairs. Outside, in the night, was the fresher, un-conditioned air; but to get at that somebody would have had to break the sealed glass.
And just as, according to some people, you can empty your mind in a meditation chamber by focussing on a single flame, so – among the becalmed travellers moving about in slow whorls in the aqueous fluorescent light, people increasingly like people in an allegory, darkly reflected in the glass that sealed them in, conversation now fled from most of them – so, thinking only of my flight number, I found that with every passing quarter of an hour I was taken more and more out of myself. I was taken far away from the man I had been earlier that day, and was becoming more like that American lady I had seen (when I had been more in command of myself), standing rigid beside her goods on a barrow: Indian architecture and air travel giving me, as it had given her, the Hindu idea of the illusion of things.
There was no escape. With every passing hour, the possibility of a return to the hotel in Bombay (would there be room?), and the hiring of a car for the 12 or 14-hour drive to Goa (where a hotel booking had to be taken up, or lost forever), became less and less a practical proposition. So between heat and cold I moved, withdrawn, living feebly on rumour.
But the man from Delhi was right. There was a plane to Goa; and when – time having ceased to matter – we swarmed and bumped aboard, there were the food-boxes of the Delhi man’s story, the grey cardboard boxes (with white-bread sandwiches and a pastry of some kind and an apple from the North) that his friends or relations had prepared for the airline for that day’s Goa flight. The plane felt over-used. The airline in-flight magazine was dog-eared. A piece of the overhead trim had shaken loose; every time the stewardess tapped it back in, it quivered out again. But there was Goa at the end of the very short flight. And it was interesting, getting out into the clean night air, at last, to see the name of the place spelt out in the Hindi Devanagari characters: Go-wa.
It was now well past midnight. We got into a cramped tourist bus. There was very little space between the seats, and the glass was tinted: it was like a continuation of the constraints of Santa Cruz. After some time we came to the Mandovi River. And there, literally, was a break in the journey. There was no bridge over the Mandovi River. There had been a bridge, a new one, until quite recently. But after standing for 10 years or so, the bridge had fallen down one day, and the Mandovi was now crossed by ferries, rough contraptions that looked as old as the century, but had been built only after the bridge had fallen down. Luggage was manhandled down from the roof of the bus on to Indian earth and then into the ferry, and then, at the other bank, out of the ferry and up on to the roof of a second bus: technology giving way (furtively, in the Indian night) to the India of many feeble hands doing simple small tasks.
And when, two days or so later, I saw the collapsed bridge in daylight, only the mighty piers standing, the linking pieces not there, it seemed to sum up the experience of that long day and night, the fracture in reality.
Nikhil, talking to me one day in Bombay of his religious faith, which was profound, had told me of his devotion, especially in times of crisis, to two figures: Sai Baba (not the current figure with the Afro hairstyle, but the original turn of-the-century teacher), and the Image of the Infant Jesus.
Nikhil came of a Hindu family, and his choice of Jesus – which at first was what I thought he meant – seemed unusual. But Nikhil had a particular image in mind, and he told me of the reason for his faith. He had once had some worrying legal problem in connection with his work. In this anxiety he had come across a leaflet about the Image of the Infant Jesus. The leaflet recommended that in times of special need prayers should be offered up to the Infant Jesus every nine hours. This was what Nikhil had begun to do. It meant getting up at a difficult time every two or three days, but it also meant that his days were built around the act of prayer. Nikhil lived with this devotion to the Image of the Infant Jesus over many weeks, and at last the legal problem that had been worrying him disappeared. Nikhil remained grateful. It was irrational, he said; he knew that; but he couldn’t help it.
Nikhil must have told me about the whereabouts of this image, but I hadn’t taken it in. At the hotel in Goa one morning I saw, at the entrance, a new, well-cared-for minibus with the words INFANT JESUS painted above the windscreen. I asked the driver about it. He pointed to a cream-coloured plastic figure – like a toy from a corn-flakes box – on his dashboard. The driver was a Christian Goan. He told me that the original image was in a church in Old Goa.
It was a famous image, of tested efficacy. The plastic image on the minibus dashboard was the merest symbol of the real thing. The church the minibus driver spoke of was, in fact, the famous cathedral of Old Goa, where Saint Francis Xavier was buried.
This cathedral, and the other Portuguese buildings of Old Goa, some way inland on the Mandovi River, were quite staggering in the setting. So far from Europe (six months’ sailing even in the 18th century); so bright the light; the white beaches speaking more of the empty islands of the New World (but empty only after they had been ‘dispeopled’: they would have been populated and busy at the time of the discovery) rather than the crowded villages and towns of old India, with its tangled past. Part of that Indian past was right there, in Old Goa: in the Arch of the Viceroys, which had been created out of an arch of the – barely established – Muslim ruler the Portuguese had dispossessed. Through that arch, it was said, every new viceroy of Goa ceremonially passed when he arrived.
In another old building, now the museum, there was a gallery with portraits of all the viceroys of Goa. The portraits had been done in batches. One portrait was of Vasco da Gama. A fabulous name, but the portrait of him, as of the other viceroys, was clumsy, a kind of poor shop-sign art. The art of the colonisers didn’t match their venturesomeness. This deficiency fitted in with what one knew of the brief period of Portuguese vigour; and it perhaps explained why, outside Old Goa, so little remained of Portugal, adding to the unreality of the damp-stained rococo ecclesiastical buildings of Old Goa.
Still, it was the early date of the Portuguese empire in India that continued to astonish. Every day I was reminded of it when – far from Old Goa on the Mandovi, and just with a sight of the remains of great red-stone military fortifications, all circles and straight lines, on a tropical beach – I sat down to eat in the hotel, and saw an old European print of Goa reproduced on the paper place-setting. The engraved legend gave the year of the arrival in India of the fierce and victorious Portuguese viceroy, Albuquerque: 1509. He conquered Goa the next year. Just 18 years after Columbus had discovered the islands of the New World, and before that discovery had proved its worth; nine years before Cortés started on his march to Mexico. In India itself, before the great Mogul emperor Akbar was born.
Haters of idolatry, haters of all th
at was not the true faith, establishers in Goa of the Inquisition and the burning of heretics, levellers of Hindu temples, the Portuguese had created in Goa something of a New-World emptiness, like the Spaniards in Mexico. They had created in India something not of India, a simplicity, something where the Indian past had been abolished. And after 450 years all they had left behind in this emptiness and simplicity was their religion, their language (without a literature), their names, a Latin-like colonial population, and this cult, from their cathedral, of the Image of the Infant Jesus.
Nearly everything else of Portugal had been swallowed up in the colonial emptiness. There had been a statue of the poet Camoens in the main square of Old Goa – Camoens, the author of the Lusiads (1572), the epic of the expansion of Portugal, and the true faith, overseas. But the statue was taken down (and placed in the museum) after Goa had been absorbed into independent India; and a statue of Mahatma Gandhi was put up in that 16th-century Portuguese square.
Camoens knew Goa and East Africa and Malaya and China; he was like Cervantes in Spain, an old adventurer in imperial wars. He was the first great poet of modern Europe to write of India and Indians; and he wrote out of the hard-won knowledge of a decade and a half of 16th-century wandering. There is a wonderful living sense of south-western India in his poem, not only in its account of kings and castes and religion and temples (the great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, destroyed by the Muslims seven years before Camoens published his poem, is felt to be in the background), but also in dozens of smaller things: the Indian ruler, for instance, who receives the just-arrived Vasco da Gama, chews pan to the 16th-century Portuguese rhythms of Camoens’s verse.
It might have been thought that Goa would have been as proud to claim Camoens as it was proud to claim Saint Francis Xavier. But the statue had been taken down; and though the hotel place-setting repetitively proclaimed the antiquity of Portuguese Goa, there was no copy of his poem in the hotel bookshop, and no one there even knew his name. India had its own priorities and values. The tourists who came in coaches to the square of Old Goa came less for the architecture (and the statue of Mahatma Gandhi) than for the Image of the Infant Jesus in the cathedral. They bought bundles of wax tapers and lit them in a cloister.
Old Goa was very old. Almost as many years separated it from the present as separated the final Roman defeat of Carthage from the fall of Rome itself. And Portugal (though it lived on in 20th-century Europe) had become the museum here. A new middle-class India had become the tourists. That was an astonishing twist in history. Portugal had arrived in 1498 and triumphed in 1509–10. Just over half a century later the great Hindu empire in the South, the empire of Vijayanagar, was defeated and physically laid waste by a combination of Muslim rulers; almost at the same time, in the North, the Mogul power was entering its time of glory. It might have seemed then that Hindu India, without the new learning and the new tools of Europe, its rulers without the idea of country or nation, without the political ideas that might have helped them to preserve their people from foreign rule – it might have seemed then that Hindu India was on the verge of extinction, something to be divided between Christian Europe and the Muslim world, and all its religious symbols and difficult theology rendered as meaningless as the Aztec gods in Mexico, or the symbolism of Hindu Angkor.
But it hadn’t been like that. Through all the twists and turns of history, through all the imperial venturings in this part of the world, which that Portuguese arrival in India portended, and finally through the unlikely British presence in India, a Hindu India had grown again, more complete and unified than any India in the past.
History in Goa was simple. In the long colonial emptiness the pre-Portuguese past had ceased to matter; it was something to be picked up from books; and then the 450 years of Portuguese rule was like a single idea that anyone could carry about with him. To leave Goa, to go south and west along the narrow, winding mountain road into the state of Karnataka, was to enter India and its complicated history again.
Just as Portuguese rule had given a great simplicity to the history of Goa, so British rule gave a direction to later Indian history and made it easier to grasp. Events, at a certain stage, could be seen to be leading up to British rule; and, thereafter, events could be seen leading to the end of that rule. To read of events in India before the coming of the British is like reading of many pieces of unfinished business; it is to read of a condition of flux, of things partly done and then partly undone, matters more properly the subject of annals rather than narrative history, which works best when it deals with great things being built up or pulled down.
Historical names were on that road down through Karnataka. Bijapur was one such name. It was the name of a Muslim kingdom, established almost at the same time as the Portuguese in Goa (Goa had, in fact, been taken away from Bijapur). The name was associated in my mind not with Goa or Old Goa, but with a fine, Persian-influenced 17th-century school of miniature painting: the very name brought the faces and the postures and the special colours and costumes to my mind. But how did Bijapur fit into the history of the region? What were its dates, its boundaries? Who were its rulers and enemies? It was hard to carry all of that in the mind: I would have to look it up in the books, and even then (though I would learn that it had lasted two centuries) I would get no more than the bare bones of dates and rulers. Its achievements, after all, hadn’t been that great; there was nothing in its history to catch the mind, as there was in the art (and the architecture, from my reading: a certain kind of dome). And so that name of Bijapur, and the other historical names on the road south, were like random memories in an old man’s mind.
There had been too many kingdoms, too many rulers, too many changes of boundaries. The state of Karnataka itself was a new creation, post-British, post-independence, a linguistic state, answering the new pride, the new sense of self, that the nationalist movement had fostered.
The land was sacred, but it wasn’t political history that made it so. Religious myths touched every part of the land outside colonial Goa. Story within story, fable within fable: that was what people saw and felt in their bones. Those were the myths, about gods and the heroes of the epics, that gave antiquity and wonder to the earth people lived on.
All the way south through Karnataka there were buses full of young men strangely dressed, in black tunics and black lower cloths. They looked like young men on a holiday excursion, but the black they wore was unsettling. When I got to Bangalore I learned that the men in black were on a pilgrimage. They were going to a shrine in the southernmost state of Kerala. The shrine honoured Ayappa, a Hindu ruler and saint of days gone by. The pilgrimage was essentially a Hindu affair; but the pilgrims to Ayappa were also required, in an unlikely way, to do honour to Vavar, an Arab and a Muslim, who had been a friend and ally of Ayappa’s.
Only men could go on that pilgrimage, and for 40 days they had to live penitentially. No meat, no liquor, no activity conducive purely to pleasure; and they had to stay away from women. The last stage of the pilgrimage was a 25-mile walk up a hill to the shrine of Ayappa. There, on a particular day in January, a divine light appeared. Not everyone who went on the pilgrimage went for the light; most people walked up to the shrine on days when there was no light.
I learned all this from a young man who befriended me in Bangalore. His name was Deviah; he wrote about science for a daily newspaper. He came from a farming family; produce from the family land was still sometimes sent to him in Bangalore by the night bus. Deviah had been on the pilgrimage for the first time eight years before. He had gone when he was feeling low, and was oppressed by thoughts that he had done very little in the five years since he had left college. He thought he had been changed by the pilgrimage – the discipline of the 40 penitential days, the long walk up to the shrine, the companionship on that walk, and seeing the way people had begun to help one another. He also felt he had had professional luck afterwards; and he had gone almost every year since then. Deviah didn’t believe in the divine light. He th
ought it might be only burning camphor, and the work of a human agency; but it didn’t lessen his faith. It didn’t lessen his wonder at the story of Ayappa.
This was the story Deviah told.
‘Ayappa was a real figure, about 800 years ago. He was born in interesting circumstances. Raja Rajashekhar didn’t have children. He and his queen did penance to Shiva and asked for the gift of a son. One day when Raja Rajashekhar was out hunting on the banks of the River Pampa – which in Kerala is as holy as the Ganges in the north: it can wash away your sins – he found a boy child with a bell attached to its neck. The raja began to look for the parents of the child. A rishi, a sage, appeared – in fact, the rishi was Lord Shiva himself – and told the raja that the child was meant for him. The raja, the rishi said, was to take the child to the palace and bring him up as his son. “But whose child is he?” Raja Rajashekhar asked. The rishi said, “You will find out on the boy’s twelfth birthday.”
‘So Raja Rajshekhar took the foundling to the palace and looked after him. That palace is still there, by the way. It is not like the maharajas’ palaces you see today. It is quite a small house. The raja looked after the child as his own, and it began to be understood that the boy would succeeed Raja Rajashekhar when the time came.
India: A Million Mutinies Now Page 19