The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  Fardus whipped out two cell phones, placed a call, paused, said, “Fish or chicken?”

  “Either one,” I said.

  The chickpeas arrived, spicy and covered with onions and peppers and lime juice. Fardus insisted on paying. I suggested tea, and soon after, it arrived; once again I wasn’t allowed to pay. The sun beat down and the breeze passed and the engine roared, and every now and then a wooden launch appeared alongside and transferred a few passengers. As we neared Chandpur a woman covered in black, only her eyes visible, appeared. Fardus’s sister. He introduced us and I went to shake her hand; it came out, hesitated, and withdrew without our touching. “In our culture, no touching,” he said. “But it’s okay.” Chandpur looked like how I imagined Zanzibar had appeared in Richard Burton’s or John Hanning Speke’s time—a cluttered bazaar, a world of garbage and wooden boats, some under sail, women covered in black and naked children glistening and shiny and playing in the trash-strewn water. A narrow market of wooden stalls pressed in on a mud street. Fardus paused and bought apples and oranges; again he refused my attempts to pay. We crossed railroad tracks and cut up a lane between walls with doors and waddling geese, and all three of us piled into a bicycle rickshaw and slipped past small houses fronting ponds covered in duckweed. It was silent, no cars or even auto rickshaws, just the tinkle of bicycle bells, hundreds of them, and the sounds of voices, commerce, and hammering as we passed a row of rickshaw workshops. “That’s the government primary school,” he pointed out. “The mosque.”

  People called out to him. “America!” I heard. “My mother’s sister,” he said. “My uncle. My cousin.” Fardus was home; everyone knew him and he knew everyone and every corner and tree and building. He started calling me “brother Carl.”

  We bumped down the road, the driver straining with the weight of all three of us. “My mother is away on Hajj, brother Carl,” he said. “My father is dead. He was a textile worker. My father’s coffin is behind there,” he said, pointing down a lane. We passed men and women bathing in ponds, scrubbing and lathered in soap, dropped his sister off at a corner, and jumped off at a tree-shrouded lane paved in bricks. We hung a left down a dirt path, and came to a door in a wall, which passed us into a yard and a garden and a small corrugated-metal house. Fardus’s uncle, who had a long, stately nose, was waiting in a blue shirt and a lunghi with his two brothers, aged sixteen and nineteen. “We must wash,” said Fardus, who went inside and emerged a minute later shirtless and barefoot in a green plaid lunghi. “This is my favorite one,” he said. In the corner of the yard stood a pump, and we squatted around the pump scrubbing our faces and hands with fresh, cool water and a bar of soap.

  A man appeared—I never knew who he was—and scurried up a coconut tree and started hacking coconuts off with a machete. Fardus expertly split them and emptied the water into a plastic pitcher, and then we all drank the semisweet juice, and munched on the fresh pulp. We went inside the house: one room with a double bed, another, bigger, with a double bed and table and television and wardrobe and a brand-new computer—they had no Internet connection—the ceiling bamboo, the floor bare concrete, smooth and cool to my bare feet. In a portico outside was a one-burner stove and some buckets, a woman with big eyes and a gold nose ring squatting in the dirt, cooking. It was a strange thing, a strange time. Fardus’s English wasn’t bad for the most casual conversation, but beyond the basics we couldn’t really go. His brothers and uncle spoke no English; I was there, in their house, in their lives, but there were great chasms of miles, distance, culture separating us. The food was served and only Fardus and I ate, the others sitting on the bed watching. It was delicious, though: huge piles of rice and chicken and fish, hard-boiled eggs, green spinachlike vegetables. We ate with our hands, Fardus urging me on and on, displaying a hospitality and generosity that felt overwhelming. Again, I had so little to offer; nothing, in fact, but myself. As always, my feelings were complex. Part of it looked idyllic: a quiet village, closeness of family and town, a place where you could be known and loved by everyone. And part of me knew the idea terrified me. It was the fundamental struggle of my life, between being connected and being separate, between being part of a group and being alone.

  Fardus and his brothers were enamored of America, so I gave my spiel—that it was hard work there, often cold and lonely, that people worked and worked and sometimes never realized the American dream. Families weren’t close; old people were institutionalized; people lived alone, not like this, in beds squeezed together. I pointed out their garden, their coconuts, their two bedrooms, their family close together. “What more could you want?” I said. “In America,” I said, “it wouldn’t be easy to have this.”

  It was wonderful, but awkward and exhausting, too. And I had to leave to catch the ferry back to Dhaka. Fardus insisted on escorting me. The brothers and uncle lined up, I shook their hands, they touched their hearts and we left, this time squeezing into an auto rickshaw with three others and the driver, all touching each other. “I am going to quit the army in January,” Fardus said, as we drank a quick cup of tea at the docks. “I’m going to go to Romania and work as an electrical contractor. I will make seven hundred dollars a month, while here I make seventy dollars a month.”

  I said nothing, just nodded and tried to understand, to empathize, and then it was time and we hugged and he waved goodbye as the ferry slid out into the river in the silver light of the late afternoon. But I couldn’t help thinking it was a mistake—of the awful winter in Romania, of Fardus, warm Fardus, far from his family and village and his father’s coffin and brothers and uncles and water pump and coconuts and fresh spicy fish in a cold and grim Romanian apartment working for nothing. How much could he save? What were the chances of being trapped there for years?

  The captain invited me into the bridge, which had nothing. No GPS. No radar. Not even a radio. Just a wheel. And then I walked downstairs and lay on a bench, sleepy, full, full of Fardus’s world and Bangladesh and the river and my own loneliness and my failure to go deeper. Again I thought perhaps I should have stayed in Chandpur: a house, try to build a life; no, even then would that be deep enough? The diesels thundered and dusk came and I read Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and men came up to me and stared, and then darkness fell, and I thought of Fardus and his fine balance between hope and despair. We were two hundred feet from the banks, passing old wooden dories and wooden freighters, unlit save for small fires burning on them, each a world unto itself. This river, flowing to other rivers, flowing to the ocean; the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Casamance, all part of one world and all different and all the same. I wanted to look into every boat, every house. I wanted to touch each person, to taste every meal, to open them up and slip into each like a suit of clothes. But I couldn’t. The world was too big. Too diverse. There were too many languages and not enough time; it was easy connecting with people like the families in first class. We had a shared language, technology, worldview. We all loved prosciutto and Picasso and lying on the beach in the sun and sitting with friends in a café. But to pass the days with the poor was something else. I sat up, gazed into the darkness. We slid past a boat with no lights at all, just a black shadow, its gunwales underwater, the dim outlines of figures standing at the stern. The deeper I pushed, the harder it became to know them, the more ignorant, curious and powerless I was. Each was a world unto its own that I could glimpse but never know.

  A speeding Blueline bus on Sunday hit a tree in New Delhi, killing a woman and injuring 20 people. The accident happened when the bus went out of control on the Ashok Road in New Delhi. The privately owned Blueline buses, dubbed “killer buses,” caused 120 deaths on the roads of the capital last year and the toll this year has reached 19 so far.

  —Hindustan Times, March 23, 2008

  NINE

  What To Do?

  CIGARETTE WRAPPERS and paan wrappers littered the dirt. Noise, the constant clamor of horns and voices that never stopped in India. Long coils of rope lay on the ground next
to the bus, as turbaned men from Rajasthan climbed a ladder with huge boxes balanced on their heads. The roof was already covered in burlap sacks three feet high, and more stuff was being hoisted up every minute. A queen-sized bed with a carved headboard. A sofa. A whole world was up there. Beneath the bus squirmed a man in a white T-shirt, black with grease and oil. The oil pan lay on the ground. We were supposed to be leaving for Patna, the capital of Bihar, in thirty minutes, which didn’t look too likely.

  Bihar was India’s poorest state, with an illiteracy rate of nearly 50 percent. It was rife with banditry, murder, suicide, road accidents, and corruption. I thought it might be interesting to take the bus right through its midst.

  Avoid traveling through Bihar at night, warned the Lonely Planet guide to India.

  “My god, why would you take a bus to Patna?” wrote an Indian, when I posted a query about safety and logistics on the guidebook’s Thorn Tree bulletin board.

  “You must not take the bus,” said a taxi driver. “The train.”

  I wasn’t too worried, though. As a native Washingtonian who felt quite safe when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the U.S., it never surprised me whenever the alleged horrors of a place failed to materialize. Still, I liked to be prepared. Airport security in Kolkata had taken away the knife I’d had since Colombia; I bought a razor-sharp, handmade one from a vendor on the street and had a tailor at an open-fronted shop the size of a telephone booth sew me a sheath that I could strap to my leg. And hailed a taxi for Babughat, one of Kolkata’s bus terminals. Which, of course, wasn’t a terminal at all, but a chaotic, trash-strewn strip of dirt along the Hooghly River lined with buses, each with a sandwich board advertising a destination. Most were served by multiple buses, Patna just one.

  It only traveled at night, leaving at 4:00 p.m. for the seventeen-hour journey.

  But no worries! Ranjit Pandit clapped me on the back, said he was the driver, and we’d be on the road by 4:30 p.m. Even better, the bus had cramped berths over the seats in place of the luggage racks, and I booked one.

  The assistant driver squatted on the ground and had the whites of his eyes washed. The professional eye cleaner waved his hands theatrically like a magician, swept a black chopstick through his oily and dusty hair, and scraped the sticks, covered in charcoal and hair grease, across the driver’s eyeballs. He waved his hands. The driver blinked, his eyes tearing. More flourishes. The eye cleaner twirled a swab of cotton around the tip of the chopstick, dipped it in a glass bottle, and swabbed that across both glistening, bloodshot orbs. It looked horrendous.

  At five the horn sounded; miraculously the engine was back together. We all piled in and lurched through Kolkata traffic as the sun dropped, the window at my berth open, babies screaming, my stomach cramping for the first time on my journey. The air was acrid, smelling of diesel and exhaust and shit, a layer of grit and dust streaming in and covering me. The city looked like it had been scooped up into a big cup, shaken violently for a decade, and then dumped on the ground.

  In the end, though, I had no complaints about my journey to Patna. The bus was full, the aisles taken by fifty-kilo bags of rice. The knife was unnecessary. I was, as usual, in a cocoon of generosity and watching eyes. Ranjit handed me a down pillow covered in red velvet; the wind (and dust) streamed in from the open window at my shoulder; we stopped every three hours for a break—twenty-five men standing (or squatting) in a line like some grotesque Roman fountain. The first stop almost made me retch. We stood in a line next to roadside stalls, a trillion insects flying and buzzing in the lights, pissing into a trench that had years of plastic water bottles, plastic wrappers, toilet paper, and reeked of shit and piss. Then I remembered doing the same thing in Peru, in the rain as we descended toward Puerto Maldonado, and I laughed; around the globe right at this very minute, probably, were lines of men and women pissing in mountains and on highways and in jungles next to battered buses.

  This journey to Patna and back was Ranjit’s life. He was thirty-six, earned 300 rupees (US$6.00) for each trip, seven days a week. I asked him where he lived. “Here,” he said, patting the bunk across from mine, which he shared with his co-driver. It was a telling answer, for he had a wife and two sons in Kolkata. He saw them between morning and afternoon departures, but the bus to Patna was where he lived. “But you must come back to Kolkata and call me and bring your family,” he said, writing his cell-phone number in my notebook.

  We watched three Bollywood films on the twenty-inch TV bolted to the door between driver and passenger sections. “The hero!” Ranjit said, pointing to the hero. “That man,” he said, “is about to get slashed with knives.” A band of circling motorcyclists slashed the actor with knives. Then everyone broke out in song and dance, the lovers flitting among palm trees as the bus honked and inched past bullock carts and tractors. Ranjit knew every scene; he’d watched them all an untold number of times. But he delighted in them all the same, could barely take his eyes off the screen. The romance, the singing, the sudden outbreaks of violence, the family struggles and redemption, were formulaic, yes, but they spoke so clearly to Ranjit’s soul that there was something comforting and amazing about it. Popular American films were all about alienation and individuality; even in romantic comedies the lovers existed almost in a vacuum rather than in the big Indian family.

  We pulled into Patna at 10:00 a.m. I was so covered in dirt, I looked like Pigpen. But an elephant was walking down the street, and the city was a dynamic jumble of brokenness and blacktop covered in sand and cows munching in piles of garbage.

  I didn’t linger, though. It felt like I’d been on the road for a long time, moving constantly, barely a conversation with a native English speaker. I felt tough, road-hardened, able to endure anything and eat anything and talk to anyone. But there was a price: I was aching for connection; my family felt far away in time and space, and being already separated from Lindsey didn’t help. E-mails were becoming more rudimentary, perfunctory. As for friends, e-mails from them had been slowly trailing off. I was just out there. Somewhere. I did have friends in New Delhi, though, and Thanksgiving was approaching; I was eager to get there. The Majhdad Express left at eight that night, and the train station was a carnival of all India: a couple with two monkeys on ropes, women with gold toe rings and silver anklets, wrapped in brilliant purple and saffron and sky blue. A man with his hands and forearms chopped off shook the stubs in my face. A small boy lay huddled on newspapers. A blind man led by a blind wife stumbled along with a tin cup. I sat on a concrete bench, squeezed between two men. Another came up, thrust his hips and shoulders against me, wedged himself in. A man with only one eye and a little girl in bare feet came over, pushed my shoulder with his hand, then pried them both in. We were completely squished together. It was beautiful and ugly and full of life, but also otherness, an otherness I couldn’t hope to pierce. And the more I was in the middle of it, the lonelier I felt, the loneliness of the crowd exposing my solitude. I was like a walking ghost, a presence among the throngs, but unnoticed, unseen by them, too.

  It got worse on the train. My plank was three tiers up, removed, swarming with mosquitoes. We rattled and roared and shook through the night, a cold wind chilling me to the bone and covering me with Mother India’s omnipresent gritty dust. I passed the long night in a fetal position. Shivering. But a few hours later I was showered and shaved and deep in a sofa within the comfort of my friends’ silent and spotless New Delhi apartment.

  THINGS HAPPEN when you least expect them. But, I suppose, you have to be ready for them in the first place, even if you don’t know you are. My friends took me to a chichi dinner party at a grand house with high ceilings and a roaring fireplace and wine and a meal cooked by their chef, and the next morning I could barely get out of my big soft bed. After months of street food and the tap water of Mumbai and Kolkata and Dhaka, Delhi’s Belly had found me. A fever coursed through my body. I ached, and the Cipro I popped hit back, covering my face with hives.

  Then terrorists s
truck Mumbai. Outside Café Leopold, where I’d met Nasirbhai two weeks before, gunmen sprayed automatic gunfire and lobbed hand grenades. And at Victoria Terminus, the locus for all our commuter train adventures, more than fifty people were killed. My hosts disappeared; she, a diplomat, became swallowed by the unfolding attack and hostage crisis. Her husband, a journalist, jumped on a plane to Mumbai on Thanksgiving morning, leaving me, again, alone. “Go to the Thanksgiving dinner we were invited to anyway,” my friend said in a call from the airport. “I’m sure it’ll be okay; just tell him the situation. And bring the case of beer I was supposed to.”

  I still felt a little sick, not to mention awkward asking a stranger to let me come to his Thanksgiving dinner, but I made the call anyway. The host replied with grace. “Everybody had to go to Mumbai, so I’m not sure who’ll even be here, but at least there’ll be plenty of food,” he said. “You’re most welcome to come.”

  Feeling like I had a stone basketball in my stomach, I lugged the case of beer into the Delhi night and hailed an auto rickshaw. It was far, the driver got lost, the temperature dropped; I froze as we wheeled and whined for an hour through the chaos, until he dropped me off at wide concrete house behind walls, and I stepped into the warmth of an apartment filled with the smell of turkey and the laughter of children.

  “Hi,” said an American woman with thick brown hair and big brown eyes, wearing a flowery dress and black tights and no shoes. “Who are you?” I’d been asked a lot of questions in the past months, but never that one. The world of expat journalists in New Delhi was small; everyone knew everyone else, and I was an alien. She was direct. Sparkling. Inquisitive. The dinner party was small, casual, and most of the significant others were gone, deployed to cover the carnage in Mumbai. We ate off plates on our laps and she blasted questions at me; I liked her curiosity. We talked about the future of magazines. What we were doing. She’d had a couple of my editors as professors at journalism school. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, especially her hands. She was as tall as I was, both awkward and graceful, but her fingers and hands had a life of their own; they were the most feminine hands I’d ever seen. They floated and danced and drew me in.