What Am I Doing Here?

by Bruce Chatwin

  ‘The brains of a murdered man,’ he added, melodramatically. ‘Pantnagar produces the best seeds in India. Now human seeds have been sown in the canefields.’

  The police, he said, loaded the bodies onto a truck, burned them with gasoline in the canefield, and ploughed in the remains.

  ‘And even now, Sir, in that place you will smell putrefaction and burnt flesh!’

  The students dug up the bones and took them to the laboratory, but the verdict passed on to Charan Singh pronounced them the bones of jackals.

  ‘This is a question mark,’ Mrs G. said to me in Delhi two days later. ‘Whether the bones were jackals or whether people were burned in the fields, that has not been proved. What the students say is: “Why did they set fire to the fields? They must be hiding something.” But when we talked to Dr Pant he wasn’t sure whether the bones were human or not.’

  ‘So you think the shooting was planned in advance?’

  ‘It’s very difficult to say,’ she said. ‘I mean, it seems so senseless. I always find it very difficult to believe in anything for which you can’t find a cause. It all seems so cruel . . . ’

  Delhi

  Mrs G. lives in a low white bungalow, No. 12 Willingdon Crescent, a few doors away from her father’s house, Teen Murti. It is an excellent spot for staging a political comeback, because Teen Murti is a museum and place of pilgrimage. She shares these cramped quarters with her two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, their wives, and Rajiv’s two children. The cook has to prepare meals at the oddest hours, for the family and a couple of exhausted Irish wolfhounds. From time to time Mrs G. goes on fast – and will then order quantities of deep-frozen trout.

  Access to Mrs G. is controlled by the Assistant Private Secretary, R.K. Dharan: people say she is a puppet in his hands. He was once a tourist guide at the Red Fort. It was he who persuaded Sanjay there was a loophole in the constitution which would enable them to call a State of Emergency – although it is doubtful, in retrospect, if either was sufficiently literate to interpret a document of this kind. But Sanjay persuaded his mother. R.K. took their orders to the President, and most of the Opposition went to jail.

  R.K.’s office was in a garden shed. His hair was heavily pomaded, and he wore a white bush jacket. He seemed very anxious to make a good impression, and said we could call him ‘R.K.’. There was a stack of books and magazines on his desk.

  We talked for a while until the phone rang.

  ‘Excuse me, Sir,’ he said, ‘Madame is calling.’

  He waddled off towards the bungalow, but hastened back and, removing the top-most book, inserted it into the middle of the pile.

  ‘Psst!’ I called to my photographer friend Eve Arnold. ‘Watch the door. I’m damned if I’m not going to see what that book is.’

  The author was Chatpathi Rao, and the title Mimicry and Mono-acting. It was a handbook for ventriloquists.

  In another shed visitors had congregated for the darshan, or morning audience. At 9.15 Mrs G. emerged from behind the bamboo blind of the verandah. Someone handed her a black umbrella. She swept past a bed of red roses, and swept on to greet the crowd.

  There was a minor hullaballoo when Sanjay and Menaka came out with armfuls of papers and drove off to Tis Hazari Court, where he was in the dock.

  Sanjay makes a very odd impression: plump, balding, with thick, bright, downcurving lips. He is, of course, his mother’s blind spot. As a boy, he was a near-delinquent and she had to rescue him from various scrapes. In England he worked as an apprentice in the Rolls-Royce factory. In India, his Maruti people’s car was a fiasco. During the Emergency, he drew up the list of people to be locked away. Finally Mrs G. could bear the loneliness of dictatorial rule no longer. She overrode him – and called the election she lost.

  The Janata has a variety of criminal charges against him: the murder of a dacoit, the illegal bulldozing of slums in the Muslim quarter, frauds at Maruti factory. But the charge they are pressing is that he burned a satirical film called Kissa Kursee Kaa, The Story of a Chair.

  Mrs G. received us in a white room bare but for a vase of gladioli, one or two paintings, some lumps of quartz crystal and a spiky modernistic sculpture. Her chair was stationed beneath a photo of Pandit Nehru in profile. She presented herself as a modern, practical housewife: indeed the only one capable of ordering the affairs of India. She kept turning her hands over as if rinsing them – and knew exactly how to time the intervals between her smiles.

  But the interview was a bitter disappointment. Most of it consisted of petulant and rambling attacks against unidentified enemies. She attributed her election defeat to the ‘vicious propaganda of outside forces’, and when I asked her to name them, she said, ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  Her reasons for calling the Emergency made even less sense. She implied that Jayaprakash Narayan’s non-violent resistance movement had been leading India towards a civil war, like Bangladesh:

  ‘My chief ministers said, “Well, if you want to be a martyr that’s all right for you, but there’s no reason why you should force us into the same situation.” ’

  I asked about her plans:

  ‘I have no plans.’

  I asked about her political beliefs:

  ‘I really think I am a socialist because I believe in the basic things.’

  I asked about the secret of her attraction for the Indian masses:

  ‘Basically, I am a sympathetic person and that’s what creates a bond.’

  When I slightly overstepped the mark, she countered with a crack at the English:

  ‘There were these refugees . . . pouring over the border from East Pakistan. So I said to my cabinet, “We’ll have to send them back. We can’t feed all those people.” “Well,” they said, “we can’t send them back.” So I said, “Then let them go to England or some rich place.” ’

  The only real point of interest was her description of looking after her mother as she died of T.B. in a Swiss sanatorium. It was in Switzerland that she first read the story of Joan of Arc.

  ‘Rather morbid it sounds now,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t think of it in those terms. It was the sacrifice of Joan of Arc that attracted me, the girl who gave up her life for her country . . . ’

  Over the next couple of weeks she repeatedly harped on the theme of Joan of Arc. Often, when there was a lull in the conversation, she would start up the familiar refrain: ‘Joan of Arc . . . the girl who gave up her life for her country . . . ’

  Only when I switched off the tape-recorder did the conversation take an interesting turn: ‘Why did you put Rajmatas Jaipur and Gwalior into jail?’

  ‘I didn’t put them in jail. It was nothing political. They were in for some kind of currency fiddle’.

  ‘You have said the Janata Government is a kitchri. In England we have the same word, “kedgeree”.’

  ‘Yes, we used to have it for breakfast at Teen Murti. Lady Mountbatten taught my father’s cook how to make it: smoked haddock, rice and hard-boiled eggs. But in India kitchri means a “mess”. I’ll say it again and again, “The Janata is a mess.” ’

  ‘Do you think Mr Bhutto will hang?’

  ‘People who come to me from Pakistan say, “Yes, he will.” After all there’s been no little movement to save him inside the country and that’s what gave them the encouragement. I’m sure he did order the murder. He comes from a part of the country where life is incredibly cheap.’

  Mrs G. met Bhutto in Simla after the Indian victory in East Bengal.

  ‘What was he like?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, when he came to see me he was extremely frightened. We were standing together outside the Governor’s House and the crowd was looking on. It wasn’t a hostile crowd or anything. But he said to me, “I don’t like the look of that crowd. Couldn’t you wave at them or something?” So I said, “No. Wave at them yourself. After all, it’s your show.” So he waved and they waved back. But even after we got Bhutto and his daughter inside, it took us quite a lot to get them calmed down.’<
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  ‘But he was rather charming, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was extremely nasty to me.’

  Cochin, Kerala

  After a whistle-stop round of speeches at Bombay airport, we have followed Mrs G. to Kerala where she hopes to mend a split within the Congress Party. Her faction here is quite strong: a Kerala MP, Mr C.M. Stephen, is her Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, or Lower House. But she has been a controversial – not to say hated – figure since 1960, when she persuaded her father to boot out the elected Communist State Government.

  They put on a good show at the airport. Chanting crowds cheered her and Mr Stephen to a white Mercedes that belonged to a local drink concessionaire. We followed in a taxi.

  On the outskirts of town, a lathi-charge was coming down the street. The anti-Indira demonstrators dropped their black flags and scampered away from the ‘hard hits’. We swerved. A man fell close to the taxi and was clubbed in the gutter. At the fourth blow blood spurted over his face. Sixty-one casualties were taken to the General Hospital. No one was killed.

  Mrs G. installed herself in the Old Divan’s residence: a wooden building wherein, in the ground-floor saloon, there were ferns in a brass jardinière, watercolours of Venice and a print of the Madonna of the Rocks.

  At sunset black clouds banked up and burst: but the downpour did not prevent about a quarter of a million drenched figures from filing past to pay their respects.

  Mrs G. reviewed them from a balcony on the top storey, seated on a chair which had been placed on a table. She jammed a torch between her knees, directing the beam upwards to light her face and arms. She rotated the arms as if performing the mudras of Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth. One group of marchers carried mock corpses, wrapped in orange cloth and with names in devanagari script. They were the three old men of the Janata: Morariji Desai, Jagjivan Ram and Charan Singh.

  ‘They’ll stop at nothing,’ Mrs G. laughed, ‘but I suppose it’s all right.’

  I was sitting on the table.

  ‘Do get me some more of those cashew nuts.’ She turned to me. ‘You’ve no idea how tiring it is to be a goddess.’

  The rain cleared and I went into the street to join the marchers. Their pupils dilated as they gazed in adoration at the tiny illuminated figure.

  An hour later, I was sitting again behind Mrs G. on the podium of the Cochin Stadium: but the rally was a dismal performance. She spoke in English, in a thin, whining voice, and listed a catalogue of accusations against the Janata.

  ‘No control . . . strife . . . no law and order . . . atrocities are commonplace . . . no homes for the homeless . . . Harijans (Untouchables) burned alive . . . lathi charges . . . Instead of strengthening the voice of the voiceless they are more interested in haranguing me . . . But we have something more important, the love of the people. We can feel the pulse of the masses . . . ’

  She had not felt the pulse of this mass. Thousands and thousands turned their backs, and, in the arc lights, we watched the upper tiers draining, and snaking for the exits.

  At the breakfast press-conference Mrs G., dressed in a crisp flower-printed sari, demonstrated her flawless technique for dealing with a roomful of men. She poured from the teapot in her best memsahib manner. If anyone presumed to ask an awkward question, she said, ‘Do have another cup of tea!’

  One journalist, bolder than the rest, was not to be put off.

  ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘when you were in power, did you throw out the foreign press? Why are you now courting the foreign press?’

  She looked hard in my direction: ‘I don’t see the foreign press.’

  At eight sharp the motorcade set off north for Calicut. Mrs G. sat on the back seat of the drink concessionaire’s Mercedes. We followed in far greater comfort and style, in the doctor’s car: an immaculate white Humber Super Snipe with the Red Cross flag fluttering from the bonnet.

  ‘What could go wrong with Mrs Gandhi?’ I asked the doctor.

  ‘She might get stoned,’ he said wearily. ‘But the worst we expect is an allergy to flowers.’

  The doctor had already surprised us with the bust of Stalin in his living room. This was his story:

  Sometime in the Fifties, he was a house-man at the General Hospital in Newcastle-on-Tyne. Among his patients was a Conservative MP who was expected to die of a bloodclot approaching his heart. The MP wanted to die, but wanted to live until Saturday when his racehorse was running at Longchamps. On Friday evening came news that the horse had been kicked and couldn’t run.

  ‘Damn it,’ said the MP. ‘I’d have known what to do. Feed him a couple of pounds of onions.’

  The doctor, remembering an ayurvedic cure, asked, ‘Do you ever eat onions?’

  ‘Hate onions,’ said the MP. ‘Always have.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to feed you two pounds of onions.’

  They forced the onions down the MP’s throat. The clot dissolved - and the man lived.

  The doctor took out his album of press-cuttings. Time showed a smiling young man in horn-rimmed glasses: the discoverer of carraganen, a chemical contained in onions that was a powerful anti-coagulant and might conceivably transform heart-surgery.

  But you couldn’t patent an onion: the rest was a sad tale. He came back to India. No one took any notice. He now worked for a private clinic in Cochin owned by a man I felt was completely deranged.

  On the way we passed pink-eared elephants, brick-kilns and churches that looked like Chinese pagodas. Most of the slogans were welcoming. But from time to time a string of old shoes was suspended across the road: the worst of all Hindu insults.

  One graffito read, ‘Indira Gandhi is a notorious fascist witch’.

  At every village Mrs G. got out of the car, mounted a platform decked with Congress-I flags, and thanked the crowds for their ‘warm and dutiful welcome’. As the morning wore on, more and more garlands of jasmine and marigolds were festooned around her neck: each one had a banknote pinned to it. The heat had the effect of moving her to shriller and shriller rhetoric: ‘The full force of the Government is on one small woman.’

  Calicut

  Eve Arnold and I go through alternative phases of ‘Love Indira’ or ‘Loathe Indira’. Today was ‘Love Indira’ day.

  At the approach to Calicut, the Black Flag boys were out in force. Mrs G., slumped under her mound of flowers, got through unscathed, but the Humber Super Snipe, like some stately relic of the Raj, was obviously mistaken for her car. A small rock smashed the driver’s window and hit him on the head. Another rock smashed my window and landed in my lap. The flying glass lightly grazed my scalp and the side of my neck.

  Suitably patched up, I went to the afternoon press-conference where Mrs G. was again handing round cups of tea.

  ‘Good Heavens, Mr Chatwin,’ she said, ‘whatever happened to you?’

  ‘I was stoned, Mrs Gandhi.’

  ‘That’s what comes of following me around.’

  But when the conference broke up, she rushed towards me: ‘Are you sure you’re all right? Have they really got all the glass out? Well, thank Heaven for that! Do you want to lie down?’

  No. I did not want to lie down. But Eve did. She was wilting in the heat.

  Mrs G. sized up the situation and led Eve into her own bedroom where her briefcase was open and papers were strewn about. She laid her down on the bed and let her sleep for two hours. She then returned with the eternal cup of tea, and said she needed the room to change.

  It was, of course, excellent public relations. It was also very pleasant behaviour.

  I talked to Mrs G.’s secretary, Nirmala Deshpande, a small, determined spinster who is very vociferous on the subject of her employer. Miss Deshpande was sitting on the floor unthreading the banknotes from the garlands.

  ‘Look what we got on the way,’ she said, stuffing them into a bag. ‘The people give her what they have.’

  One of Mrs G.’s secrets, she said, was her stamina. Physically, she could outpace every other Indian politician. In th
e elections of Andhra and Karnataka she went to bed once in sixteen days.

  For dinner at the Circuit House we had real mulligatawny soup made of fresh pepper and asafoetida. Then we went to another evening rally. The Black Flag boys had rioted in the afternoon and the Security Guards were taking no chances. Rifles and sub-machine-guns glinted in the moonlight. Mrs G., as usual, was completely fearless: but I did wish she’d make a better speech and not rant on about ‘witch-hunts against me and my family’.

  After all, it was she who locked up the Opposition.

  Mrs G. left Calicut at 3.30 am on her way to Manipur, a tribal area on the Burmese border which was out of bounds for foreigners.

  Eve and I went to Madras and to the temples at Mahabalipuram, and then returned to Delhi. The mood had changed, drastically. When we first arrived, most people thought Mrs G. was finished. Now, they were tempering their words.

  A by-election had been called in the constituency of Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. The Congress-I candidate, a Mrs Kidwai, stood a good chance of winning. If she did win, it would mean the Hindu heartland had forgiven Mrs G. for the Emergency - and that nothing would stop her coming back.

  One Delhi journalist had it all worked out: Janata was Weimar: 12 Willingdon Crescent was Hitler’s cell in Landsberg Castle.