On a Shoestring to Coorg

by Dervla Murphy

  From Margao to Karwar is only forty-five miles but the journey took three and a half hours; Indian buses are probably the world’s least frustrating motor vehicles. They always arrive (unless they crash, instantly killing everyone on board), yet they move so slowly, and stop so often for so long, that one can observe quite an amount of local life from a well-chosen seat.

  This afternoon we passed first between newly harvested, golden-brown fields where pillars of blue-grey smoke marked bonfires of burning maize stalks. Then for miles our road twisted through lonely mountains covered in dense, shadowy jungle, or plantations of teak or eucalyptus – the last popular as quick-growing firewood. A few brown rhesus monkeys sat or sauntered by the roadside but Rachel missed them. In buses I refrain from pointing out things of interest, feeling she must be left to observe and absorb at her own pace. There is so much – details I take for granted – to delight and amaze her: full-grown bulls gently wandering between the benches in a bus stand waiting-room; cows with brilliantly painted horns wearing silver necklaces or garlands of flowers; flocks of bright green parakeets flying parallel with the road, racing the bus and, not surprisingly, overtaking it; petite women-coolies carrying great loads of earth or bricks or timber beams on their heads and babies on their hips; elaborately carved wayside temples; gigantic banyan-trees like bits of Gothic architecture gone wrong; cascades of bougainvillaea and poinsettia; demented-seeming, nearly naked sadhus moaning mantras as they hold their begging-bowls under one’s nose.

  A group of slim, ebony-skinned tribal people boarded the bus for a short time in the mountains but kept aloof from the other passengers. The men wore only the most meagre of loin-cloths and the bare-breasted young women were laden with necklaces of tiny black beads – each necklace must have weighed at least two pounds – and with large golden ornaments in their noses and ears. They also wore countless tinkling glass bangles on their slender arms and many silver rings on their toes.

  At the State border two armed military policemen came aboard to check all the luggage. Then they beckoned to three men who left the bus and followed them behind a small palm-frond shelter. A few moments later the men returned, openly replacing their rolls of rupees in their shirt pockets. Goa has long been a notorious smugglers’ colony and since the Government of India banned the import of luxury articles the Goans have been supplying foreign status-symbol goods to both the newly rich, who want to flaunt their new riches, and the traditionally rich, who want to maintain their normal standard of living. Nor do the State police on either side of the border overlook the opportunities thus provided. Also, alcohol is sold throughout Goa for about half the price demanded in heavily taxed Mysore State. So it was tactful of the police to ignore my rucksack.

  Over the border, we were still in unpeopled, heavily forested country, but the well-kept Goan road was replaced by a rough dusty track. Then we came to a village – to a town – to more villages – and were back in the ‘teeming millions’ belt. As the sun set I could see tiny lamps burning before crude shrines in domestic courtyards on the edge of the darkening forest.

  At last the bus stopped, its front wheels only feet away from the lapping waters of the Kalinadi river estuary. Boarding the antique, overcrowded ferry-boat, I took Rachel on my knee and admired the ribbons of pink and gold cloud reflected in the wide waters. Then, turning to look towards the open sea, I saw a picture of unforgettable loveliness. The dark expanse of the estuary was catching the last russet-and-green sunset tints on its ripples, and to the north palms were etched black against a royal blue sky, and to the west, silhouetted superbly against the final fiery band above the horizon, a solitary, slim boatman stood astride his loaded craft, leaning on a long pole, straining to push off.

  In India one rarely sees an ugly face but beside us on the bus today sat one of the ill-favoured minority who also suffered, poor lad, from severe acne. He passed the time by picking obsessively at his pimples and talking pidgin English to me, despite the evident impossibility of my being able to hear him above the rattling and roaring of our vehicle. On arrival at the ferry he solicitously helped us on to the boat, and off again at the other side, and then he insisted on taking us to the dak-bungalow in an auto-rickshaw. While I was thanking him, he predictably murmured ‘It is my duty’ and faded away into the night. Unfortunately the dak-bungalow was full; so, because of our spotty friend’s conviction that a dak-bungalow is the only suitable accommodation for foreigners, we found ourselves stranded two miles from the town’s hotels. While we were discussing what to do next an engineer from Bangalore introduced himself and as he knew Karwar well we gladly joined him in the search for rooms. A short, stout, middle-aged man, he spoke excellent English. I wondered if he would prove sufficiently Anglicised to offer to carry my water-bottle or foodbag but, though himself carrying only a fat brief-case, he made no attempt to share the white woman’s burden.

  For Rachel’s sake, this was the sort of situation I had hoped to avoid, since I believe a small child can be expected to rough it only if allowed enough sleep at regular hours. However, she was thoroughly enjoying being out under the stars as we pushed our way through the noisy, crowded bazaar from one full hotel, or doss-house, to another. Children usually revel in unalarming crises which prove that grown-ups are not always able to organise things exactly as they want them.

  Eventually we gave up and went to a vegetarian restaurant where we sat by open windows in the purdah compartment and much astonishment was expressed at the speed with which I – having eaten nothing all day – dispatched a moderately hot curry and a foot-high mound of rice. In South India food is served either on a large circular metal tray – usually, nowadays, of stainless steel – or, more sensibly, on a large square of banana-leaf. No cutlery is used and every restaurant is provided with hand-basins for the rinsing of hands and mouths before and after meals; if running water is not available a barrel or water-jar and several dippers will be placed beside the basins. The majority of South Indian restaurants are owned and run by Brahmans, since food cooked by the highest caste may be eaten by most Hindus. Usually in such establishments the floors are not very well swept, the tables are a trifle grubby, the walls are badly in need of paint, the hand-basins are fairly revolting and the latrines are quite unspeakable – but in the kitchens all will be well. Probably, in fact, a lot better than in most European hotel kitchens.

  When we stood up to leave, our friend abruptly announced that he had decided to take us to the Government Polytechnic College, where the warden – a friend of his – would certainly allow us to doss down. So off we went in another rickshaw, weaving and honking and bouncing through the packed streets, back to the dak-bungalow suburb where the handsome, British-built college also stands, overlooking the sea.

  The warden is away for the night, but his deputy received us most warmly – we might have been expected guests – and at once decided the luckless foreigners must have the warden’s room. Within seconds of Rachel’s lying on the narrow cot under the mosquito-net she was asleep and I then returned to the huge, high-ceilinged, almost unfurnished room where our host had been having his supper off a steel tray when we intruded. He ordered tea for me and we were joined by several of his staff, including three Tamils and a Madrasi Christian. All were dressed in lunghis and loose shirts and each man carried with him his own light chair, though they might well have felt more relaxed sitting on the floor. Our host wears thick horn-rimmed spectacles, which suit his long, lean, very dark face, and he is obviously a man of outstanding ability. For hours we sat happily drinking tea and discussing South Indian languages, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, the caste system, cow-worship, Watergate and Indian attitudes to birth control. I found these teachers excellent company. It is always the half-educated Indians who get one down. The educated and the uneducated each have their own style of charm and graciousness.

  When the conversation turned to birth control I mentioned something that has been haunting me for the past few days – a colossal advertisement in Bomb
ay’s railway station proclaiming ‘Sterilisation “The Best Method”. Many Lucky Prizes Awards/Certificates to Promoters and Patients who Under Go Vasectomy from 20 Jan. ’73 to 7 March ’73.’

  The deputy-warden and most of his staff agreed that, despite the inevitability of such a campaign, there is something disquieting – even sinister – about attempts to solve a population problem by depriving men and women, for ever, of their procreative powers. I asked their opinion of the sixty or so recanalisation centres, to which men who wish to replace dead children may apply; but it seems these operations carry no guarantee of success and the centres are little more than a propaganda device to reassure parents who fear sterilisation because of India’s high infant mortality rates.

  I have always been anti-sterilisation, perceiving behind the idea an insult and a threat to human dignity. Yet looking around any Indian railway station, or walking through any Indian bazaar, one realises there is now merely a choice of threats. And perhaps sterilisation is preferable to slaughtering or being slaughtered by one’s neighbour.

  The statistics are well known. An Indian is born every 1 seconds, which means that more than 55,000 are born a day, which means that at present a country with 2·4 per cent of the world’s land and 1 per cent of the world’s income is supporting 14 per cent of the world’s population. These are menacing figures, particularly when one has personally tasted the flavour of Indian urban life. Our struggle to get on a bus at Juhu beach was only slightly annoying; but for those who have no escape from the consequences of over-population, which in Indian cities constantly offend almost every sense, such experiences can be infuriating. During the hot weather, especially, they often provoke to uncontrollable violence people whose nerves are already frayed by hunger and money-worries.

  A decade ago, when the world first heard of the Indian government’s sterilisation campaign, many people were deeply shocked; now one is half-inclined to wish it luck. And it is being moderately effective; the deputy warden told me that well over 2 million men were sterilised during 1971-72. In 1965 India’s Birth Control Programme was given ‘top priority’ and launched on a ‘war footing’ and in the fourth Five-Year Plan some Rs.3,000 million were to be set aside for its promotion: so no one can say the Indians have not been trying. Yet the population went up from 361 million in 1951 to 548 million in 1971. By now it must be nearly 600 million and if one dares to look ahead one can see the spectre of compulsory sterilisation on the horizon. My teacher friends emphasised that this would be repugnant to most Indians, but then we gloomily agreed that many ethical scruples may have had to be disregarded, all over the world, before the end of the twentieth century.

  Now I am back in the warden’s room, where I have had to close the window, because of weirdly zooming insects, and switch on the fan. Considering the status of its usual occupant, this apartment is very simple. The only furnishings are the cot, a long narrow table laden with books and papers, two camp-chairs and a steel filing-cabinet. Over a small shelf in one corner hangs a picture of a blue-bodied Shiva – representative of life-energy in all its manifestations – with a third eye in the middle of his forehead and wearing a necklace of serpents. On the shelf are the remains of a puja offering, a safety razor and a small tin of Nescafé.

  Some moments ago a kind student looked in to tell me our bus for Mundgod leaves at eight-thirty in the morning. When I first asked about this, nobody here had ever heard of Mundgod – a small town four miles from the Tibetan Refugee Settlement where we are going to spend the next few days. This settlement is run by an outstanding Tibetan refugee leader, T. C. Tethong, and his Canadian wife Judy, an old friend of mine. To get there it seems we must take one bus down the coast to Kumta, another to climb into the ghats and a third from Sirsi to Mundgod. My map tells me a more direct route would be through Kadra and Yellapur, but I suppose the local man knows best.

  3

  Tibetans in Mundgod

  23 November. Mundgod Tibetan Settlement.

  Four and a half months ago I stood in hot sunshine on a steep mountainside overlooking a deep green valley. Far above, long lines of freshly printed prayer-flags were suspended between pine-trees and all round me hundreds of Tibetans were chattering, laughing and praying. The women looked gay in ankle-length chubas and striped aprons; some of the older men had retained their pigtails, tied across the crown of the head, and a few wore turquoise and gold pendants on the left ear to mark their positions as lay state officials. Grey-haired peasants with calm, strong, wrinkled faces twirled prayer-wheels, wafts of incense came from the tall temple half-way down the slope and a four-man band was playing rousing Tibetan dance music. Occasionally lamas in orange and maroon robes passed through the crowd and were greeted reverently. Everyone looked happy and excited for we had gathered together to celebrate the thirty-eighth birthday of His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama.

  That was in Switzerland, well off the tourist track and three miles from the nearest village. Many of the more prosperous young Tibetans had come to the monastery by car from the nearby towns where they worked as watchmakers, carpenters or factory hands. They moved awkwardly in their long robes, now worn only on special occasions, and their wives fed babies from shining, sterilised bottles. The older children were drinking Coca-Cola through straws and exchanging remarks in Swiss German. Almost everyone was lavishly decked out in silver, jade and turquoise jewellery, but these ornaments were brand new. The old pieces had been sold in India for a few rupees when the refugees were starving.

  Ten years ago I lived on another mountainside, also steep and pine-clad and criss-crossed with prayer-flags. That was at Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills, where in those days most Tibetans wore lousy rags and the air reeked of makeshift latrines and so many orphaned children died every week – of dysentery, bronchitis, measles, scurvy and malnutrition – that one dared not allow oneself to feel for them.

  Why, then, was I overcome by sadness as I looked around at the healthy, well-dressed, contented Tibetan community in Switzerland? United in loving families, secure in their well-paid jobs, accepted and admired by the Swiss, it seemed that for these 700 or 800 migrants, at least, the refugee story had had a happy ending. Yet to be among them oppressed me almost intolerably.

  At eleven o’clock we moved into the temple and a long, long queue formed to lay ceremonial white muslin scarves before His Holiness’s portrait. The altar was laden with butter lamps (an expensive expression of devotion in Switzerland), and with little mounds of rice and sacrificial cakes; and, watching the Tibetans ritualistically presenting their scarves, I wondered what – if anything – all this meant to youngsters who had lived most of their lives in Switzerland and would never live anywhere else. There was a striking contrast between the expressions and general demeanour of the young Tibetans, reared in Switzerland, and their elders, reared in Tibet. It sounds glib to say that the faces of the older Tibetans were marked by a serenity that passeth European understanding; yet this is the simple truth.

  The scarf-bearing queue was still long when suddenly I knew I could take no more. The emotion I had been trying to suppress all morning had the strength and quality of one’s feelings at the death-bed of a beloved friend. As we left the temple, Rachel asked, with the animal perception of a 4-year-old, ‘Why are you so sad today? This is a birthday party.’ But of course I could not explain.

  Remembering all that today, as we walked from Mundgod town, I half dreaded arriving at this settlement. I am absurdly vulnerable about Tibetans. A sentimental fool, perhaps, but in good company; many distinguished scholars deplore the erosion of Tibet’s traditional culture no less than I do.

  We saw no motor traffic and few people on our narrow road. All around stretched miles of golden stubble, green pulses and dark ploughland, encircled in the distance by powder-blue mountains. The silence was broken only by the calls of jewelled birds, the occasional creaking of straw-laden ox-carts or the tinkling of cow-bells. The light had an exhilarating clarity, a cool breeze blew –
we were at about 2,000 feet – and small cotton-wool clouds sailed high.

  Suddenly I stopped and pointed into one of the wild mango-trees that grow by the roadside. Rachel looked and went scarlet with excitement.

  ‘Monkeys!’ she whispered ecstatically. ‘Millions and millions of monkeys!’

  ‘About a dozen,’ I corrected prosaically.

  Half a mile farther on we turned a corner and far away in a stubble-field I saw what was unmistakably a group of Tibetans. Their physique and very way of moving is so utterly different from the Indians that they were at once identifiable and, as we drew nearer, I heard their familiar and beautiful harvest song: a most poignant sound. From the edge of the field we could see three elderly men and two young women threshing grain; they were dressed in rags and darkly sunburnt but their faces revealed what the Tibetans in Switzerland have lost. When they noticed us I waved and called ‘Tashi Dele!’ and they waved back and laughed and bowed and stuck out their tongues. (The origin of this custom had to be hastily explained to an appalled Rachel.) As we walked on my heart was full of hope; it seemed everything might be all right at Mundgod.

  I found Judy astonishingly unchanged by marriage and the thirties. Tall and slender in her chuba, she still looks like an 18-year-old and it is hard to believe she first came to India ten years ago, to work as a C.U.S.O. volunteer under the gruelling conditions I have described in another book.

  Soon we were sitting drinking tea on the wide veranda of an attractive guest-bungalow vividly decorated in Tibetan style; this building is somewhat misleadingly known as ‘The Palace’ because it was built primarily for the Dalai Lama’s use during his visits to South India. Judy and her husband, who is known as T.C., live in a tiny three-roomed bungalow, less than half the size of ‘The Palace’, on the same rise of land overlooking the administrative heart of the settlement – the office of His Holiness’s representative (T.C.), the office of the Co-operative Society (of which T.C. is chairman) and a branch of the local bank. Near by are the workshop, school, hospital, shop and old people’s home for those who have no surviving relatives. And all around, replacing the dense forest that grew here only seven years ago, are the level, neat fields now owned by the refugees, not all of whose nine villages could be seen from our veranda.