On a Shoestring to Coorg

by Dervla Murphy

  When at last we arrived here Ram held out his hand to say a Western-style good-bye and fixed his gaze on a box of cigars sticking out of my bush-shirt pocket. ‘Give me those cigars’, he requested, in an oddly peremptory tone. I stared at him, nonplussed by the strength of my disinclination to reward him for all his efforts. Then I opened the box and handed him one cigar. He could see there were four others, but he seemed not to resent my meanness. Turning away from him I realised something was out of alignment, though I couldn’t quite determine what. Perhaps because of this being Disembodied Day, the whole incident made me just a little apprehensive. It seemed to conceal a warning of some sort, possibly to the effect that it is perilously easy for Indians and Europeans to bring out the worst in each other.

  It is now 2 p.m., so Rachel should be back soon from her luncheon party. I had planned to sleep while she was out, but I seem to have reached that point of exhaustion at which sleep eludes one. Why do people regard flying as an easy way to travel?

  Later. My philosophical acceptance of Indian destitution did not survive this afternoon’s stroll around Bombay. Men with no legs and/or arms were heaped in corners or somehow propelling themselves along pavements; lepers waved their stumps in our faces or indicated the areas where their noses had been; deformed children frantically pleaded for paise and hung on to my ankles so that, as I tried to move away, their featherweight bodies were dragged along the ground; and – in a way worst of all – perfectly formed children, who could be like Rachel, sat slumped against walls or lay motionless in gutters, too far beyond hope even to beg. One pot-bellied, naked toddler stood quite alone, leaning against the pillar of a shopping arcade with a terrible expression of resignation, and mature awareness of misery, on his pinched, mucus-streaked face. Should he survive he will doubtless end up resembling the next wreck we passed – an ancient, armless man, wearing only a token loin-cloth and sitting cross-legged beneath the arcade, his shaven head moving all the time slightly to and fro, like a mechanical toy, and his hardened, sightless eyeballs rolling grotesquely.

  Around the next corner we came on a small girl who had festering scurvy sores all over both legs and was sitting on the edge of the pavement with her baby brother (I suppose) in her lap. He lay gasping, his mouth wide open, looking as if about to expire. He weighed perhaps ten or twelve pounds but, judging by his teeth, must have been at least a year old. Near by, a young woman with the dry, lined skin of the permanently hungry lay stretched full length in the shadow of a wall. Her skeletal torso and flaccid breasts were only half-covered by a filthy cotton wrap and her eyes were partially open though she seemed to be asleep. She may have been the children’s mother. None of the passers-by took any notice of her. One 5 paise piece lay in the tin begging-bowl by her side and a small glass of tea now costs at least 20 paise. As I dropped 50 paise into the bowl I was ravaged by the futility of the gesture. Of course one has seen it all before, and read about it, and heard about it, and despairingly thought about it. Perhaps it is too commonplace, too ‘overdone’, to be worth talking or writing about again. Perhaps the tragedy of poverty has lost its news-value. Yet it has not lost the power to shatter, when one comes face to face with fellow-humans who never have known and never will know what it feels like to eat enough.

  This evening I find another of Dr Radhakrishnan’s comments more pertinent than the one I quoted earlier. ‘There was never in India a national ideal of poverty or squalor. Spiritual life finds full scope only in communities of a certain degree of freedom from sordidness. Lives that are strained and starved cannot be religious except in a rudimentary way. Economic insecurity and individual freedom do not go together.’

  In the bed next to mine is an Iraqi woman journalist who also arrived today to report on India’s reaction to the oil-crisis. She admitted just now to feeling no less shattered than I am, though during the 1960s she worked in Bombay for four years. ‘One forgets,’ she said, ‘because one doesn’t want to remember.’

  ‘And why doesn’t one want to remember?’ I wondered.

  She shrugged. ‘It serves no purpose to clutter the mind with insoluble problems. Tonight, as you say, we are shattered. And in what way does that help anybody? It simply boosts our own egos, allowing us to imagine we have some vestige of social conscience. It’s only when the Mother Teresas feel shattered that things get done. Now I must sleep. Good-night.’

  A forceful lady – and a realist.

  17 November. Y.W.C.A. Hostel, Bombay.

  Most of the young women here seem to be Christians from Kerala or Goa. They speak intelligible though not fluent English and work as teachers, secretaries, clerks, receptionists or shop-assistants. By our standards the majority are outstandingly good-looking, though too many have bewilderment, loneliness – and sometimes disillusion – behind their eyes. Transplanted from sheltered, gregarious homes to this vast and callous city of 6 million people, their lives must be dreary enough. Overprotected upbringings will have done nothing to prepare them to make the most of their stay in what is – much as I dislike the place – India’s premier city and an important centre of every sort of social and cultural activity.

  None of those to whom I have spoken has any relative or friend in Bombay: if they had they would not be staying in a hostel. Yet they consider themselves lucky to have got into the Y.W.C.A. and one can see their point; the place is clean and spacious, though gloomy with the endemic gloom of institutions, and the charges are reasonable. We are paying only Rs. 25 per day for four meals each – as much as one can eat – and two beds in a six-bed, rat-infested dormitory. To Rachel’s delight, pigeons nest in the dormitory rafters (hence the rats, who appreciate pigeon eggs) and cheeky sparrows by the dozen hop merrily around the floor. The walls are decorated with large, violently coloured photographs of the girls’ favourite film stars and four ceiling fans keep the temperature comfortable.

  In India the establishment of even the simplest facts can take several hours and it was lunch-time today before I could feel reasonably certain that tomorrow at 8 a.m. we may board a steamer to Panaji (Goa) from the Ballard Pier. However, our misdirected wanderings in search of this information were enjoyable enough and at one stage took us through the narrow, twisting streets and lanes of the old city, where many of the Gujarati houses have carved wooden façades, recalling Kathmandu. Rachel was thrilled to see craftsmen at work behind their stalls – sandalwood carvers, tortoise-shell carvers, brass-smiths, coppersmiths – and when we passed the unexciting eighteenth-century Mombadevi Temple she said she wanted to ‘explore’ it. But a rather truculent priest demanded Rs.io as an entrance ‘offering’ so I suggested she postpone her study of Hindu architecture until we reached some more spiritual region.

  In the enormous, high-ceilinged hostel refectory we lunched at the matron’s table by an open window and, as we ate our rice and curried fish, watched a kite eating a rat (ex-dormitory?) in the topmost branches of a nearby fig-tree. Then Rachel got into conversation with two friendly Peace Corps girls, on their way home from Ethiopia, who invited her to accompany them to Juhu beach. She accepted delightedly and, as an afterthought, suggested that I might come, too.

  Juhu is only ten miles from the city centre but it took us two hours to get there. Today Bombay’s taxis are on strike, in protest against the government’s suggestion that auto-rickshaws should be introduced into the city to conserve fuel, so the buses were impossibly crowded and we had to walk to the railway station.

  Even when the suburban train was moving, agile urchins constantly leaped in and out of our carriage, hawking a wide variety of objects, edible or decorative. The little girls were no less daring and strident than the little boys and Rachel became quite distressed lest one of them might fall under the train. (She herself is by nature extremely cautious, with a tendency to pessimism which can be exasperating: but at least it means I need never worry about her doing reckless deeds.) There is an enormous difference between the children of the truly destitute, who are past trying, and these ragged
but enterprising youngsters with their mischievous eyes, wide grins and flashing teeth.

  Juhu beach is lined with tall palms, expensive hotels and the homes of the rich. Where we approached it, through a gap between the sea-front buildings, a large notice said ‘Danger! Bathing Forbidden!’ The sand stretched for miles and was unexpectedly deserted, apart from a few servants of the rich exercising a few dogs of the rich, yet within seconds of our beginning to undress a score of youths had materialised to stand and stare.

  The Americans decided simply to sunbathe, because of the above-ground sewage pipes we had passed on the way from the station, and to avoid whatever the danger might be I kept close to the shore, where the water was shallow, tepid and rather nasty. I couldn’t even feel that I was being cleaned, since my own pure sweat was obviously being replaced by something far less desirable. I soon got out but Rachel refused to emerge until the huge red balloon of the sun had drifted below the horizon.

  Back on the road, we stopped at a foodstall to buy deliciously crisp, spiced potato-cakes, stuffed with onions and freshly cooked over a charcoal fire that flared beautifully in the dusk. Then we stood at a bus stop for thirty-five minutes, during which time seven alarmingly overcrowded buses lurched past without halting. The eighth and ninth did stop, but took on only the more belligerent members of the assembled mob, so before the tenth appeared I requested the girls to fight their way on, take Rachel from me and, if I got left behind, cherish her until we were reunited. In fact neither the tenth nor the eleventh stopped, but we successfully assaulted the twelfth.

  The narrow streets of the Ville Parle bazaar were lit by a golden glow from hundreds of oil-lamps hanging over stalls heaped with every sort of merchandise: bales of shining silks and vividly patterned cottons, stacks of gleaming copper pots and stainless steel ware, round towers of glittering glass bangles, pyramids of repulsively Technicolored sweetmeats, acres of fresh fruit and vegetables, mountains of coconuts, molehills of cashew-nuts, hillocks of melons, forests of sugar-cane and gracefully overflowing baskets of jasmine-blossom. Mingling with the dreamy richness of the jasmine was that most characteristic of all Indian evening smells – incense being burned in countless homes to honour the household gods. (Foul gutters and festering sores, jasmine and incense: India in a nutshell?)

  Through the jostling, noisy crowd – uninhibitedly abusing, joking, arguing, gossiping, chiding, haggling: no sign here of Hindu inertia – through this pulsating crowd moved creaking ox-carts and hooting buses, chanting sadhus and yelling balloon-sellers, thoughtful-looking cows and overloaded handcarts, cursing cyclists and battered trucks, hoarse lottery-ticket sellers and faceless Muslim housewives carrying so many purchases beneath their burkahs that they looked pregnant in the wrong places. ‘It’s fun here,’ said Rachel, ‘but you must be careful not to lose me.’ She fell asleep on the train and had to be given a piggy-back home from Churchgate Station.

  2

  Hippies in Goa

  18 November. At sea between Bombay and Panaji.

  The deck-area of our steamer is not too crowded and after Bombay one appreciates sea-breezes, even when adulterated by clouds of hash; forty or so of our fellow deck-passengers are hippies on their annual migration from Nepal, or the north of India, to Goa.

  In affluent Europe I find it easy enough to understand an individual hippy’s point of view, but on seeing them massed against an Indian background of involuntary poverty I quickly lose patience. Several of those within sight at this moment are emaciated wrecks – the out-and-outers, travelling alone, carrying no possessions of any kind, clad only in tattered loin-cloths, their long sadhu-style hair matted and filthy, their bare feet calloused and cracked, their legs pitted with open scurvy sores, their ribs and shoulder-blades seeming about to cut through their pallid skins, their eyes glazed with overindulgence in Kali-knows-what and their ability or will to communicate long since atrophied. This is dropping-out carried to its terrible conclusion – but dropping into what, and why? Certainly these wrecks will soon drop into a nameless grave, and for their own sakes I can only feel the sooner the better. One agrees when hippies criticise the essential destructiveness of a materialist society, but what are they offering in its place?

  All day we sailed south under a cobalt sky, within sight of the mountainous Maharashtrian coast, past dark-sailed fishing-boats that scarcely have changed since pre-Aryan times. The deck, shaded by a vast tarpaulin, never became too hot and now the night breezes feel deliciously cool.

  This afternoon, while Rachel was bossing three shy little Goan boys into playing her sort of game, I was talked at by a young engineer from Poona who proved to be a compulsive statistics quoter. He told me that Maharashtra makes up one-tenth of India’s territory, that two out of every five industrial workers employed in India are Maharashtrians, that the Indian film industry, most of the defence factories and two-thirds of the textile and pharmaceutical industries are in Maharashtra, that that State contributes more than one-third of India’s revenues and that its per capita consumption of electricity is more than twice the all-India average.

  At this point the plump, amiable young Goan who was sitting on my other side – father of Rachel’s current boyfriends – remarked thoughtfully, ‘And in the capital of Maharashtra more than a lakh people sleep on pavements every night.’

  The Maharashtrian glared. ‘At Nhava Sheva a second Bombay is to be built soon,’ he said coldly.

  ‘How soon?’ wondered the Goan mildly, his eyes on the Western Ghats.

  ‘Sooner than anything is likely to be built in Goa!’ snapped the Maharashtrian.

  The Goan continued to gaze at the mountains. ‘But I don’t think we need new buildings,’ he said. ‘Not many, anyhow. We are content.’

  ‘Content!’ sneered the Maharashtrian. ‘Do you not know that after 450 years of the the Portuguese ruling not one village had electricity? Now after eleven years of the Indians’ ruling, most villages have it.’

  The Goan looked from the mountains to me and smiled very slightly. ‘But for a lot of those 450 years no village anywhere had electricity,’ he observed.

  Then he and I stood up and went to make sure our respective offspring had not flung each other overboard.

  At about five-thirty we altered course, making for Ratnagiri harbour, and the sun was swiftly sinking as we sailed between high headlands, covered with long red-gold grass that glowed like copper in the slanting light. A romantically ruined fort and a small white temple crowned the cliffs to starboard – lonely against the sky, looking out to sea. ‘It is a very holy temple,’ my Roman Catholic Goan friend told me. A civilised respect for all religions has rubbed off on to many Indian Christians from their Hindu neighbours.

  In Ratnagiri’s wide lagoon little craft sped towards us like water-beetles and briefly the western sky was a flaring expanse of scarlet and purple, orange and violet. Then the sun was gone, but still I stood enchanted, gazing across the dark green waters of the bay to where distant flecks of firelight marked the many thatched huts on the lower slopes of the steep encircling hills.

  A steamer puts in at Ratnagiri every evening, except during the monsoon, yet our arrival caused such excitement we might have been calling at Pitcairn. The unloading and loading of passengers and cargo took over an hour, but unfortunately Rachel missed the fun – having gone to sleep, almost literally on her feet, at four o’clock. A Spartanish upbringing is now paying off: she thinks nothing of lying down on a filthy deck amidst scores of talking, eating, praying or copulating Indians. Yet she cannot – positively cannot, without retching – tolerate the deck-class loo and I have had to show her the way to the first-class lavatories. No amount of Spartan brainwashing can reasonably be expected to eradicate this sort of inherent fastidiousness.

  A hazard I had overlooked was the degree of spoiling to which a small child would be exposed in India. During these first few days it has perhaps helped to give Rachel confidence in relation to her new surroundings, but I hate to think what four m
onths of it will do to her.

  Indian reactions to the very young can be most trying from a European’s point of view. While we were unloading at Ratnagiri Rachel slept deeply, undisturbed by hundreds of people – passengers, crew and coolies – running, leaping and shouting all around her. Yet, despite her being so obviously exhausted, at least a dozen women had to be physically restrained from trying to fondle, play with and talk to her. I fear a few of them misunderstood my motive and fancied I was operating some mleccha caste taboo. In a country of overcrowded joint-family dwellings there can be no conception of a child’s need for long hours of unbroken sleep. In other respects, too, the tendency is to treat Rachel as an animated toy rather than a human being. Most of the Indians we have met so far are complimentary about her in her presence, recklessly provoke her to show off (little provocation is needed) and allow her to interrupt their conversations with impunity. All this naturally aggravates her bumptiousness, which trait seems to me the chief distinguishing mark of small female humans. But perhaps I should have said ‘Western humans’, since most Indian children are evidently immune to it. The Indian tradition discourages the development of a child’s self-reliance and no doubt counteracts what to us is ‘spoiling’. One can afford to be tolerant of bad manners and constant demands for attention, and effusive about a child’s allegedly winning ways, if one has no real regard for him as a unique human personality.

  Another minor problem at present is how to take Rachel’s occasional harsh criticisms of the behaviour of certain Indians. For instance, early this morning our half-empty bus twice sped away from bus stops, leaving several would-be passengers behind, and she asked, ‘Why didn’t the driver give these people time to get on? He’s being cruel.’