On the Ganges

by George Black

  One man told me his mango trees had withered; the help line told him what pesticide to use, with advice on how to handle it (wear gloves, stir with a stick, don’t get it on your skin). A ten-year-old said proudly that he had picked up the seven o’clock text one morning and run to the fields to warn his father that the local market was being flooded with a useless knock-off fertilizer. Someone else’s cow hadn’t been responding to artificial insemination; next time, the help line expert said, feed her half a kilo of paan, the stimulant derived from the areca nut, then lay her down with her backside higher than her head.

  “We’re trying to refine the system,” said the local sales manager for the cell phone company. “It’s no good telling someone the weather in Kanpur if they live in Allahabad. I have this idea: press one for mangoes, two for grapes, three for guavas.”

  BOOKWORMS

  Apart from the surviving residents of the eight neighborhoods that had been razed to the ground during the mutiny, no one seemed to miss the old Allahabad. The Anglican bishop of Calcutta, Reginald Heber, had stopped over for ten days in 1824. Apart from the massive fort of the Emperor Akbar and one or two Mughal monuments and ruins, he found the place “desolate and ruinous.” He reported that the natives called it Fakeerabad, the Abode of Beggars.

  Mirza Muhammad Asad-ullah Khan of Delhi, also known as Ghalib, who is described as a nobleman, poet, and letter writer, visited three years later. After a night of being tormented by bedbugs, he sat down and wrote “A Letter of Grievance from My Wanderings.”

  Oh Allahabad! May God damn that desolation.… How unjust to call this fearful place a city, how shameful that men should reside in this trap for fiends. If one compares this land to the plain of hell, hell would burn in anger.

  * * *

  Once the clearance crews had disposed of the rubble of the burned villages, the city was transformed by a great building spree. There were two cathedrals and a slew of churches, both Anglican and Catholic, mansions, parks, bandstands, law courts and colleges, private schools, libraries, and the inevitable Victorian clock tower with a cupola that would have looked better on a mosque. Promising boys were shipped off to boarding schools like Bishop Cotton in Shimla, the most favored of the Himalayan hill stations (founded in 1859, motto “Overcome Evil with Good”). Later they could go to the Doon School in Dehradun, which was staffed by veterans of Eton and Harrow (“Knowledge Our Light”).

  Mark Twain arrived by train in 1895, crossing the Yamuna on a long bridge. The river, which he called the Jumna, was pale blue and looked clean. The Ganges was muddy yellow and didn’t. He was tickled by the fact that the name of the city could be translated as Godville. He described the Civil Lines, where the British had built their residences, as “comely and alluring, and full of suggestions of comfort and leisure, and of the serenity which a good conscience buttressed by a sufficient bank account gives.” He didn’t recall seeing the “native town,” though he couldn’t remember why that was. Something to do with the mutiny, he thought. But he did encounter some of its inhabitants, the manservants who lay in front of your door at night and remained there all day, motionless as statues, in case your boots needed cleaning or your drink needed topping up. He found their subservience depressing. He tried to remember the Hindi phrase that meant “come, shove along,” but couldn’t bring it to mind.

  * * *

  Although it became one of the most anglicized, anglophone, and anglophile places in all of India, it was a Frenchman named Émile Moreau who did more than anyone to make Allahabad a city of books. Moreau arrived in the city in 1857 “during the unsettling phase of the Sepoy Mutiny.” A bookworm himself, he noticed that the English passengers at the new railway station always seemed to have their noses in a good book or magazine. Sometime in the 1870s, looking to prune his collection of thousands of volumes, Moreau spread out a sheet on the platform and offered some of them for sale. But having a French name was not the best marketing strategy, so he persuaded Arthur Henry Wheeler, the owner of a chain of bookstores in London, to lend his to the new enterprise.

  Later, Moreau was joined by a fellow bibliophile, a young Bengali named T. K. Banerjee, or TKB. Together, they created one of the great institutions of British India, the A. H. Wheeler chain of railway bookstalls. In Calcutta’s Howrah station, Wheeler was an elaborate structure made of Burma teak, manufactured in England and shipped out in sections. In smaller towns, it was usually the only place where you could buy anything to read. As part of its Indian Railway Library Series, the company was the first to publish the stories of Rudyard Kipling. Eventually, to some harrumphing from the English community, the Banerjee family took over sole ownership. Today you can buy books, magazines, newspapers, and comics at a Wheeler in more than 250 stations.

  Allahabad is still the headquarters of A. H. Wheeler & Co. Pvt. Ltd., and I stopped by one day and bought an anthology of writings on the city. Anglophilia and bibliophilia were as strong among educated Indians as they were among their colonial masters. They smoked Wills Gold Flake cigarettes, sipped whiskey and soda at the Cosmopolitan Club, read Shaw and Galsworthy and Somerset Maugham, dropped phrases in French like characters out of Tolstoy. They typed essays on Royal typewriters and went to Oxford and wrote theses on The Castle of Otranto and the Gothic novel. After Independence, their children read Enid Blyton’s adventures of the Famous Five and the Secret Seven and flew with Biggles on his intrepid missions against the beastly Hun. The boys rode Raleigh bicycles and played cricket with bats signed by the legendary Englishman Sir Len Hutton.

  The editor of the collection I’d bought was a local poet named Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Growing up in the sixties, his tastes had evolved from Rabindranath Tagore to the Penguin Modern Poets. He read Ginsberg’s “America” and Corso’s “Marriage” and Ferlinghetti’s “Underwear” (“Women’s underwear holds things up/Men’s underwear holds things down”). He and his friends learned how to speak like Holden Caulfield. They got hold of an imported copy of the Village Voice that described a new publication called Fuck You/a Magazine of the Arts. On the veranda of a house at 18 Hastings Road, named for the first governor-general of India, they cranked out a local version on a dusty Gestetner mimeograph. The price was given as “Anything commensurate with your dignity—and ours.” In deference to local decorum, they called it damn you/a magazine of the arts.

  AT BARNETT’S HOTEL

  George Barnett and his wife, Rose, had an exceptional talent for icing cakes, and everyone agreed that Barnetts of Allahabad, the House for Fresh Confectionery, which also sold butter toffees, “nut hardbakes,” and butterscotch, was the finest in the city, if not in all of India. In the 1930s, the Barnetts turned their mansion at 14 Canning Road, with its expansive lawns, white colonnades, and elegant porte cochere, into a hotel with eight bedrooms, a convenience for passengers arriving on the new Imperial Airways flight from London to Calcutta. Allahabad was the penultimate stop, and by the time it got there, the Handley Paige airliner had hopscotched its way through Paris, Brindisi, Athens, Alexandria, Cairo, Gaza, Baghdad, Basra, Kuwait, Bahrein, Sharjah, Gwadar, Karachi, Jodhpur, Delhi, and Kanpur. The whole journey cost £122; getting off in Allahabad knocked £8 off the fare. For travelers staying overnight, Barnett’s Hotel laid on a five-course dinner, veg and non-veg. For those who simply wanted a quick bite during their layover, Barnett’s provided it on wheels, driving snacks out to the Allahabad aerodrome in a converted 1928 Chevrolet.

  In May 1947, with India’s independence three months off, the Barnetts decided they had had enough. They departed for Bombay and bought two tickets home on the Cunard Line’s MV Georgic. The hotel was sold. The deed of sale valued the contents, including the beds, cake molds, and adjustable toffee cutters, at forty-four thousand rupees, and the goodwill at another twenty-six thousand. But Barnett’s fell into decline and disrepair, reopened, closed, changed its name. By the time I made my second visit to Allahabad, it had been restored to life as the Hotel Harsh Ananda, with a website that announced “i
ts new journey in a unique & modern avatar.” Its specialty now was not butter toffees but the hosting of custom-designed weddings (Village Theme, Buddha Theme, Rajasthani Theme, Peacock Theme) for as many as two thousand people. For Muslim celebrations, it offered to provide tables segregated by gender. I decided to stay there for a few days.

  * * *

  Canning Road had been the heart of the Civil Lines, the British residential area. Nowadays it was M. G. Marg—Mahatma Gandhi Road—but it still had a faded grandeur, an old lady without her makeup. I walked from one end of it to the other, starting at the Gothic Revival All Saints’ Cathedral. Consecrated in 1887, it had been modeled on the east end of Canterbury Cathedral, complete with stained-glass windows and flying buttresses. A man was peeing in the bushes, and a couple of teenagers got up giggling from the lawn, adjusting their clothing.

  On the sidewalk nearby, in front of a handsome but derelict red-arched building, there was a small squatter colony. Kids ran up to me, saying, “Babuji, babuji,” and stretching out their palms. With a long night’s drinking ahead, scruffy men were jostling to press damp wads of ten-rupee bills through the metal grille of a Model Shop—sometimes known as an English Wine Shop—in exchange for bottles of cheap liquor. There were street stalls and sidewalk fires, puttering diesel generators and kerosene lamps, and the open drains were filled with gray-green sludge. Farther on there were mini-malls and pretentious but shoddily built commercial buildings with reflective blue glass faÇades and signs advertising the Personality Maker Unisex Saloon and Body Spa.

  It was a warm and sultry evening, and I stopped for a beer at the Grand Continental Hotel on Sardar Patel Road. I was the only customer. Two waiters in striped waistcoats stood to attention against the wall, like caryatids. A short, corpulent bartender in a dark suit poured me an ice-cold Kingfisher and put a power-pop ballad on the CD player. A cricket match was playing on the flat-screen TV. In India, there is always a cricket match playing on TV, and usually on half a dozen different channels. A younger man with a notebook was taking an inventory of the Indian whiskeys lined up on the shelf. Bagpiper, Royal Stag, McDowell’s, most of them made from fermented molasses and any resemblance to whiskey being purely coincidental.

  There was a raised dais at the end of the room, covered in a red cloth. Some men were moving cushions around and setting up low mike stands for a harmonium and tabla drums. A sign advertised a nightly recital of ghazals, poetic songs of love and loss.

  “But I’m the only person here,” I said to the bartender as he brought me another Kingfisher. “How can they perform ghazals to an empty room?”

  He wobbled his head. “Sir, they are starting at 7:30 only.”

  I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to eight.

  ALLAHABADMINTON

  Edmonia Hill, known to her friends as Ted, was the dark-haired twenty-nine-year-old daughter of the Reverend R. T. Taylor, president of a Methodist women’s school, Beaver College, in Pennsylvania, which, more than a hundred years later, found it necessary to transform itself into Arcadia College, a name that reflected both its ideals and its wish to avoid further sophomoric satire.

  Ted met Rudyard Kipling at a dinner party in Allahabad in December 1877. Newly arrived from Lahore, he had been assigned to Allahabad as assistant editor of the weekly edition of India’s leading newspaper, The Pioneer. She described him as “a short dark-haired man of uncertain age, with a heavy mustache and wearing very thick glasses. Mr. Kipling looks about forty, as he is beginning to be bald.” In reality, he was twenty-two. She was enchanted; she decided she would call him Ruddy.

  He had taken temporary rooms at the Allahabad Club, but the winter nights can get chilly in this part of India, and Ted and her husband, Samuel Alexander Hill, a science professor at Allahabad College and an enthusiastic amateur photographer, thought he would be more comfortable if he moved into their home, Belvedere House, a gracious thatched bungalow that was right next door to the Pioneer Press. It was one of the few buildings that had been left standing after General Neill’s rampages in 1857.

  Kipling showed up at Belvedere House in his horse trap, which he called the Pig and Whistle. They gave him the Blue Room, which had its own red sandstone veranda and caught the morning sun. He had his own bathtub, which a servant filled with water from a goatskin slung over his shoulder. He found the house ideal for his purposes. It was set a quarter mile back from the bustle of the main road, surrounded by several acres of flower gardens and greenery. Professor Hill would sit around on the veranda reading The Pioneer after breakfast, “clad in samite mystic wonderful.” When he was done with the newspaper, he would pick up “a portentous big stick,” stroll off down the long, leafy avenue of North Indian rosewood trees, and “exhort the idle labourers that life is real, life is earnest, and tapping road metal as though it were glass is not its goal.”

  Ted and Ruddy flirted shamelessly, though there seems to be no reason to think it ever amounted to more than that. “He was animation itself, telling his stories admirably, so that those about him were kept in gales of laughter,” she wrote. “He fairly scintillated.” Belvedere House had two tennis courts and six badminton courts. Kipling didn’t play tennis, but he could hold his own at badminton. “If life here was to be tempered with Allahabadminton, he would begin to take comfort,” Ted said.

  * * *

  Writing for India’s leading newspaper seemed like a fine thing to Edmonia Hill. On a hot night, when it was lit by a flickering hurricane lamp, she found the press room a magical, exotic place. The “half-naked men who turn the presses look picturesque in the uncertain light as they loll against the black wall.” The presses themselves “look mysterious and ghastly, and from the far end comes the tick-tick of the type being set up by white-sheeted yawners.” Sometimes the workers ruined the layout by dripping wax onto it from their guttering candles. Boys slept on the tables.

  Kipling, on the other hand, detested his new job. “My work on the Weekly was not legitimate journalism,” he complained. He chafed at the space limitations. Everything had to be written or cut to fit. “Your poetry good, sir, just coming proper length today,” the foreman told him on one occasion.

  Sprawled out on cushions in front of the fireplace at Belvedere House, Kipling devoted himself to what he considered his real writing. In a single febrile year, he turned out six volumes of short stories, which Wheeler published in its Indian Railway Library Series. Professor Hill’s photographs of the forests in central India inspired the settings in The Jungle Book where Mowgli and his companions fought Shere Khan the tiger. Kipling’s stay in Allahabad gave him the backdrop for “Rikki Tiki Tavi,” the trusty mongoose who protects his English owners from the snakes that live in a “large garden, only half cultivated, with bushes as big as summer houses of Marshal Niel roses, lime and orange trees, clumps of bamboos, and thickets of high grass.” It was the garden of the Hills’ bungalow.

  * * *

  I’d heard that Belvedere House was still standing, semiderelict and occupied by squatters. As far as I could tell from the descriptions, it was somewhere in a warren of small roads and open fields near Allahabad University and the Holy Trinity Church.

  Kipling? Pioneer Press? Newspaper? Belvedere House? My questions elicited nothing but shrugs, blank looks.

  “Printing?” one passerby said. “Here there is printing.” He gestured at a narrow dirt alley, where I found an elderly Muslim man dozing in a yard outside his workshop next to a piece of antique machinery, surrounded by stacks of what looked like printed signatures, folded but unstitched. The alley came to a dead end. I retraced my steps, made a turn, and found myself in another cul-de-sac. Nothing here seemed to go anywhere. Finally, I stopped two men who frowned and debated the question and thought the word Belvedere rang a bell. They pointed me down a road that ended in a pair of iron gates, overhung with what I thought was a North Indian rosewood and flanked by stone pillars that had lost most of their red paint. Behind it was a three-story brick building, with laundry
hung out to dry on the balconies. On a rusted yellow sign on one of the gates, there was a symbol that might have been a butterfly, or might have been the slanted eyes of the goddess Kali, and below that were a couple of mobile numbers and lettering that, being in Hindi, meant nothing to me.

  Since it was a Sunday, I expected to find the place deserted, but a watchman was drowsing at the door, and he ran off smartly to find his employer, who came out a few minutes later, beaming a welcome. I apologized for disturbing him on a Sunday. “No, sir, we are working here on Sundays, there is no problem with that,” he said.

  He introduced himself as Anupam Agarwal and said he was the proprietor of the Belvedere Printing Works. I asked him what he knew about the great English writer.

  “Ah, yes, Kipling. I came to know about Kipling only from an Australian. He spoke very fine Hindi. He told us that Kipling has lived here and he has written ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ here. This Australian was writing a biography of three writers—Amartya Sen, Rabindranath Tagore, and my great-grandfather. He said he would send me a copy of the book, but he never did so. He left me his business card, but I have lost it.”

  It seemed like an odd trio, a contemporary Bengali economist, India’s greatest poet, and an obscure nineteenth-century writer-scholar, who was best known, I found out later, for translating Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice into Urdu.

  “This was he, my great-grandfather,” Mr. Agarwal said. He pointed to a life-size portrait on the wall of a white-bearded old gentleman in a formal black jacket with a gold watch chain. He was standing between a red curtain and an ornamental plant in a brass pot, which made it look as if the artist had copied it from a Victorian photographer’s studio shot. It was not a very good painting; the lower half seemed unfinished.