Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE SHATABDI EXPRESS TO CHENNAI

THE LONGER I STAYED in Bangalore, the less I liked it. Many of the Indians I met there wanted me to be dazzled by the changes, but I was more horrified than awed. What went under the name of business in Bangalore was really a form of buccaneering, all the pirates wearing dark suits and carrying cell phones instead of cutlasses. The place had not evolved; it had been crudely transformed — less city planning than the urban equivalent of botched cosmetic surgery. The proud, tidy, tree-shaded town of the recent past was now a huge, unfinished, and deforested city sagging under its dubious improvements, where it was impossible to walk without falling into an open manhole or newly dug ditch. Most of the sidewalks had been torn up and the trees cut down in the interest of street-widening. The bypass roads and flyovers were all under construction, wearing a crumbled and abandoned look, and the skinny men working on them, poking the clods of earth with small shovels, suggested they'd never be completed.

In a few years you won't recognize it, the developers said, but was that a good thing? The whole place smoldered in the foul dusty air of a building site. I realized that what I had liked about Amritsar and Jaipur was that they hadn't changed much since my first visit. They were larger, of course, but they were finished and habitable. Mumbai and Bangalore were simultaneously being torn down and built up, works in progress, but Bangalore's distance from the sea, from any body of water, made it grittier and gave it a look of anguish. And there was something else: I attempted many times to walk in Bangalore, but the traffic was so bad I seldom succeeded in crossing the street.

So, one morning at five, while the city was still asleep, only the call center shuttle buses and the temple monkeys and the sacred cows stirring, I slipped out on the express to Chennai, sliding through rice fields and palm groves to the coast. The train was fast: it was an eight-hour journey, short by Indian standards, and I arrived in time for a late lunch of Tamil food — steamed buns called idlies, masala dosa (a kind of crepe), soupy curry, and spiced potato, coconut, and curd, served on a freshly picked palm leaf. The city I had known long ago as Madras had quadrupled in size and yet looked the same: mildewed colonial buildings, tropical gardens, the streets thick with traffic, and just to the east a long sandy shore and the sea breeze from the Indian Ocean, which was a relief.

I had planned, in retracing my steps, to take a train from here to Rameswaram, at the tip of India's nose, and then the ferry to Sri Lanka.

"But there is a trouble in Sri Lanka," a travel agent told me.

"What kind of trouble?"

"A new offensive."

Tamils were well up on developments in Sri Lanka, since they had a stake in the guerrilla war. He meant the Tamil Tigers — they had attacked some Sri Lankan soldiers. The train to the south, the night ferry to Sri Lanka, had been fairly simple, even pleasurable, thirty-three years ago, but no information about this route was available in Chennai. It was another obstacle, like the Iranian visa I'd been unable to get, the war (and the kidnapping and murder of Western travelers) in Afghanistan, and the xenophobia in Pakistan. I was trying to follow in my own footsteps, but now and then I had to make detours.

The Chennai I had known as a city of around two million was now a sprawl of eleven million. Because Chennai had few tall buildings, it could grow only by spreading and overwhelming the surrounding villages, eating up the rice paddies and wheat fields, filling them with people and cars and hastily erected houses. Long ago, I had visited the outlying hamlet of Tambaram, beyond the southern outskirts of the city. Wooded, with tall trees and palm groves and gardens, a railway station, and a small college, Tambaram was now a crowded and urbanized precinct of Chennai, its rural atmosphere overwhelmed and altered. It was strange: as Indian cities underwent name changes — Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai — their character seemed to change too, as though they no longer had to live up to that old genteel image and could become nightmarish in new ways.

"Where going, sir?" said the doorman at my hotel.

"For a walk"

"Take car, sir," he said, and signaled for a taxi.

"Never mind."

"Walking not possible, sir!"

My hotel was near Mount Road. I intended to walk west, perhaps to St. Thomas Mount, a landscape feature mentioned by Marco Polo, where (so the story goes) the doubting apostle was martyred by a Brahmin wielding a lance. Both the lance in question and the remains of the saint were enshrined in San Thome Cathedral. I also wanted to stroll along Beach Road and look for evidence of the tsunami that had hit the year before.

"I'm walking," I said, and kept going.

The main road, with its emporiums and bazaars, was just a few minutes away. I reached it and began to negotiate my way, but the crush of jostling pedestrians and broken sidewalks forced me into the gutter. I stumbled along at the curb, bumped by rickshaws and spooked by honking cars. I kept this up for a hundred yards — hating it, growing frustrated, appalled by the huge number of people, their push and pull, shouldering me aside. I was bigger than any of these bandy-legged Dravidians, but it was all I could do to stay upright and moving forward.

I liked to think of myself as unflappable, but the simple walk gave me pause: the hot day, the mob, the car fumes; my making so little progress on what I'd intended as a stroll down Mount Road, which was memory lane. I did not look for pleasure in travel, and I expected nuisance and delay. But this was something else, pointless and unrewarding effort of a sort that no one wants to hear about.

Only the natural courtesy, good nature, and geniality of the Tamils in the mob kept me from being trampled — that was a discovery. Overpopulation was made bearable by politeness. But, trying to walk, I was getting nowhere, seeing nothing, merely protecting myself.

"You see, sir?" the doorman said, summing me up on my sudden return. "Difficult"

Difficult was not the way I thought of the mobbed streets in Chennai. They were something else — unendurable, pure horror, cauchemardesque. They were freaking me out.

"Walking is not possible. Take taxi."

So I took a taxi to Beach Road and on the way reflected on the life of the expatriate American in India: the multitasking businessman or lawyer with his driver, his air-conditioned office, and his secretaries — India is the land of retainers, gofers, body servants, door openers, waiters, and flunkies. The spouse of such an expatriate is similarly elevated, transformed from a simple soul, possibly unlettered — who would have trouble finding India on a map — to a memsahib, the status of an important lady in society, with a cook, a cleaner, a chowkidar, a dhobi or launderer, and if she has a garden, she will have two gardeners.

Typically, this expat couple has limited interests, knows nothing about Indian history, does not speak Hindi. Their children may attend an exclusive school, catering to the children of wealthy Indians and diplomats, in which case the husband will be involved with the school and his wife busybodying with the other parents. They may talk about their hardship, but India has allowed them to taste power — the power of wealth and, even more beguiling, the power over servants and an ease of living that is almost unmatched in the world. In Bombay in 1860, the visiting Bostonian Richard Henry Dana recorded in his diary his surprise at the number of servants in English households (one modest house he visited had seventeen flunkies) and his shock at their low wages. "Their pay is very small & they find themselves [their own] food, lodging and clothing." Nothing had changed.

Inconvenient and grubby though India sometimes seems to the expatriates, it is preferable to being back home and having to drive their own car, cook their own meals, wash the dishes, and do the laundry. The role of the burra memsahib (the great lady), the corrupt quest for cheap labor, the laziness and complacency of the life, the clubbing and partygoing — all this was described in satirical detail long ago, as the dereliction of the British Raj, by Kipling, Orwell, and other mockers. But in this high-tech-driven Raj, the sahibs were back — in Delhi, in Mumbai, in Bangalore, in Chennai, and many other places. Most were Indians lording it over the cheap labor; many were Europeans, some were Americans.

Their counterparts in the old Raj hadn't walked; neither did these people. And now I was one of them, sitting in a taxi to avoid fighting the crowds. I did not like this at all. I did not approve of what I was doing.

I got to the beach — very hot, very dirty, like the wide flat foreshore of the beach at Santa Monica, but this one piled with wrecked boats, squat ting fishermen near them fussing with nets at the tidemark. It was hard for me to imagine a worse life than being a fisherman on the beach at Madras. Having been displaced by the tsunami, they lived in hovels — there were thousands of them — of crackling wind-blown plastic sheeting supported by stick frames of driftwood, two years after the seismic event. Many had been drowned. The blue plastic tarps wore the stenciling of emergency services. Some men were offshore hauling nets; women were selling fish by the side of the road; small children were playing cricket using appropriately shaped bats and wickets of driftwood.

There was no shade. In the blazing sun the temperature was well over 100 degrees. It would be much hotter next month.

I talked to people with memories of the tsunami. One old man said, "Full water, up to St. Mary's" — and he pointed a quarter of a mile away, inland, across Beach Road.

"Boats, too. Full damage," his son said.

These heavy twenty-five-foot boats, shaped like large fiberglass dories, had been lifted by the tidal wave and tumbled across the road onto the lawn of St. Mary's College.

"Master," one man said, tugging my arm. "Help us."

"You want money?"

"No money. You help pull boat."

I surprised them by taking hold of the line, and they laughed as I joined them in pulling one of the fishing boats up the beach and away from the tidemark.

That was one of six boats named Acts of Mercy. Others were named SOS Children's Village. The names reflected the charitable agencies that had provided them after the disaster struck.

I hung around to see them unloading the morning's catch — three or four boats accounting for about fifty pounds of small elongated fish, like oversized sardines. Skinny children gathered near me and made pleas of hunger, gesturing to their mouths, rubbing tummies, and some of the men, too, asked for handouts.

"I'll buy your fish," I said. I intended to give them money for their catch and then hand the fish back to them. "How much for all of this?"

"No. Buyers are there," the old man said.

"Money, money," the younger men said.

I was backing up. I didn't want to show them any money. I said, "You have fish. Fish is money."

"Fish is little money."

That was probably true. I said to one of the boys, "You come with me," and he followed me to Beach Road. I gave him some rupees, just to make a graceful escape from this crowd of twenty or more hungry and half-naked men, looking small and spidery on the hot white sand.

I walked up the scorching road by the beach, and after a mile or so I recognized an odd cylindrical building from my first trip, and from an old watercolor I owned. The painting's style, the art of it, was undistinguished — I had bought it cheap in London — but it depicted an unusual structure of this city. The title was The Ice House, Madras. I knew very little about the building other than that it had been put up to store ice that had been sent by ship from New England.

The building, with its single castle tower, which I had first seen in a state of disrepair, a ruin of flaking green paint, had been renovated and repainted. With wide verandas, arched windows, and a bright, creamy façade, it looked smug and renewed in a compound behind a wall. Around it was a garden of purplish bougainvillea, and in the driveway a statue ringed by flowering shrubs. The plaque at the gate said, Vivekanandar Illam.

Since I owned an old picture of this former ice house, I had wondered about the building for thirty years. Now it was open, one of the sights of Chennai, with its history displayed in its newly painted rooms. I went inside and bought a ticket and browsed. A little of its past was given, and I dug up the rest. It had been built in 1842 by Frederic Tudor, "the Ice King," a merchant from Boston. Tudor had brought the first shipment of ice in 1833 from Massachusetts to Madras on the clipper Tuscany, and later built this storehouse. In the beginning, most of Tudor's ice came from ponds near Boston where I had skated as a boy.

From his cabin, Henry David Thoreau had watched the Tudor Ice Company cutting blocks of ice on Walden Pond in the winter of 1846-47. Impressed, Thoreau wrote about it in his journal, as well as in the "Pond in Winter" chapter of Walden, estimating that on a good day the cutters could produce "a thousand tons" of ice slabs. Knowing that the ice was being shipped to India provoked Thoreau to lyricism in his journal: "Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of… Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well," and "The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."

Tudor continued to bring ice to India for the next thirty years, until he died in 1864. Later (so one of the captions in the Ice House said), "the invention of the 'steam process' of making ice ruined [the ice import] business." The Madras Ice House became defunct, and in the 1890s it passed into the hands of an Indian businessman, who enlarged it, naming it Castle Kernan.

When Swami Vivekananda visited Madras in February 1897, the fanciful-seeming structure, cylindrical and strange, was regarded as suitable for his holy presence. The Swami stayed in the building, "delivered seven electrifying lectures," and was urged to consecrate it as a spiritual center. He agreed, and a few months later sent his disciple Swami Ramakrishna to spread the word. Ramakrishna lived a guru's life here, meditating and preaching spiritual renewal.

One day in 1902, while praying in the Ice House, Swami Ramakrishna heard "a bodiless but familiar voice declaring 'O Sasi [Swami R], I have spat out the body'" — and soon afterwards Ramakrishna received the news that Vivekananda had passed away.

Eventually the Ice House was bought by the Indian government. It was first used as the Brahmana Widows' Hostel, then a teachers' hostel, and then was left to rot. When I saw it in 1973 it was a semi-ruin. It was now a spiritual center and a museum, a permanent exhibit of the life and work of Swami Vivekananda, an architectural curiosity and part of India's "cultural heritage," so the sign said; but also, in its way, a permanent contribution to the Chennai skyline from a New England entrepreneur.

This little discovery and its history cheered me up, but when I left the Ice House and headed south along Marina Beach towards Mylapore and its churches, I was followed by a troop of ragged children, begging for money, asking for food, for anything; and by the time I had outwalked them, I was back in the crush of people and traffic.

In my Bangalore hotel I had found a discarded copy of Dream Catcher, by Margaret Salinger, a memoir of her experience growing up in the J. D. Salinger household. It was a humane and insightful account of a volatile man whose moods dominated the family. He was not lovable, vulnerable Holden Caulfield, but paranoiac and self-important, with an easily ruffled disposition. Margaret convincingly made the case for the Salinger household having all the traits of a cult and J.D. himself the severe attributes of a cult leader.

In the course of the book, Margaret mentions her father's interest in Raj Yoga and Sri Ramakrishna, who was Vivekananda's guru. She quotes from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna:

A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts and practice austere discipline, but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on "woman and gold," I say, "Shame on him!" Woman and gold are the most fearsome enemies of the enlightened way, and woman rather more than gold, since it is woman that creates the need for gold. For woman one man becomes the slave of another, and so loses his freedom. Then he cannot act as he likes.

"The only thing worth reading" was J. D. Salinger's judgment on this bit of pompous misogyny. Swami Vivekananda was another story. He is praised by Seymour Glass in the Salinger short story "Hapworth 16, 1924." A scripture I found at the Ice House suggested why this might be so. The Swami said, "Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy — by one or more or all of them. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines or dogmas or rituals or books or temples are but secondary details."

***

I STILL WONDERED IF I might find a ferry to Sri Lanka. Often, it was not until I was near a point of departure that I got reliable information. It was easy in Chennai to find out about airline flights to New York City; it was impossible to get a straight answer about ferries that departed Rameswaram, just down the line.

Chennai was listed among the cities described as being the engines driving the economy of the new India. Foreign companies relocated here to improve their profits, to manufacture clothes and electronics, to get their phone calls answered, to outsource their piece goods. Yet my being in Chennai only confirmed what I had felt in Bangalore, that the new India was rising on the backs of poorly paid (but well-educated) workers. Yes, it was better than their starving, and I admired their work ethic. But I had seen enough; it was another shocking and unfinished transformation, and I hated having to contend with the continuous struggle and nonconsensual rubbing in this reeking sprawl of eleven million people, no matter how conscientious they were.

***

THE BEAUTIFUL THING about boredom or irritation in an Indian city was that it could be relieved by catching a train. I went to Egmore Station and bought a ticket for the morning train to Tiruchirappalli—"Trichy" to most Tamils. It was less than a six-hour ride, with coconut trees and paddy fields the whole way. The man in the next seat introduced himself as Sathymurthy. He was a Tamil. I asked him if he knew anything about the ferry to Sri Lanka.

"Notwithstanding the present crisis," he began, and then, in the mellifluous generalities I had come to associate with Indians who had no idea what they were talking about, he described the situation in the south. I was soon asleep. When I woke, he was gone and the train was pulling into Tiruchirappalli.

Trichy was everything I hoped for: small, dusty, mostly rickshaws, rising from the flat outskirts a vast rock fort with a temple on top, and farther out an ancient, partially painted temple complex covering many acres. With this, cheap food and fruit juice, a small population, and no traffic to speak of: the sort of country town that had hardly changed in thirty — or perhaps a hundred — years. No outsourcing here, no talk of the new India, no careerists, no techies, no industrial parks or call centers, and the best hotel in the place was a great bargain.

I visited the temples, taking my time — it was 95 in the shade — and tried to make plans to go farther south. Rameswaram was only half a day from here.

"No ferry," I was told by Mr. Sundrum, a writer I met in Trichy who had recently been to Rameswaram. More mellifluous generalities. "Fighting has flared up."

I did not know it at the time, but this fighting was the start of a major offensive that had begun in the north of Sri Lanka by the group that called itself the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. At the end of it, more than four thousand people would be dead.

Sundrum said, "There are boats to Sri Lanka. The Tigers run them. They have their own transport system. They can take you across."

But this would mean finding someone in the Rameswaram immigration office to bribe, so I could get an exit stamp in my passport. And then crossing the Palk Strait, which was heavily patrolled because of the recent killings and bombings. On the other side, I would be safe in Tamil-occupied territory, but entering Sri Lankan territory (picking my way through the land mines), I'd have to seek out a Sri Lankan immigration officer and bribe him for a stamp, because I had entered the country illegally. I expected the crossing to be a lot of trouble, but the danger of being killed was something else.

"It wasn't like this before," I said.

"Fighting is there," Sundrum said. "Why don't you go to Chennai and look at the call centers and the new developments in IT? Trichy is nothing. Chennai is a leader."

"I've done that. I want to take the ferry."

Sundrum was rather proud of the fact that the Tigers were in control of the Palk Strait, that they ran a rudimentary ferry service. In their hearts all the Tamils I met wanted the Tigers to succeed, though they were a murderous lot who had blown up an Indian prime minister, assassinated Sri Lankans, displaced tens of thousands of people — Tamil and Sinhala alike — violated peace agreements, and raised hell.

For the time being I stayed in Trichy, caught up with my notes, visited the temples. I liked walking in the town, which was not populous but covered a broad area, on both banks of the Cauvery River, wide and waterless in this dry season. And even in this heat, being a pedestrian was enjoyable most of the time.

Temples attracted beggars. I had seen this my first day in India, in Amritsar — the grovelers at the Golden Temple. But it had been true since Turkey: wherever there was a mosque, there were beggars; they hung around churches, they lined up at temples. I had seen them again in Tbilisi, in Ashgabat, in Bokhara and Tashkent. They were a feature of Indian temples, grizzling for rupees, whining, sometimes demanding; everywhere I'd gone they'd thrown themselves at my feet or pawed my sleeve. I'd usually surrendered something. Indians were instinctive givers, especially the pilgrims and penitents, who built up good karma by giving.

Because of Trichy's ancient and well-preserved temples, many pilgrims visited, and consequently so did many beggars. The beseeching poor were part of the Indian scene: the lame and the halt, the blind, the limbless, with outstretched palms or begging bowls, sometimes displaying a limp or a drooling infant, an ashen-faced tot with the pox.

I did not harden my heart against them. I handed over some rupees and moved on, pondering the Indian miracle.

A smiling boy in a school uniform approached me.

"Good afternoon, sir. Where do you come from?"

I told him, and complimented him on his fluency.

"I speak English well because I study it at school," he said.

He was sturdy, about twelve or thirteen, his uniform spotless, though he wore no shoes. I asked him his name.

"My name is Murugam. India is my country."

I thanked him and walked towards the temple gate.

"Give me ten rupees," he said.

"Not today."

"Buy me a Coca-Cola."

"Sorry."

"All right, give me five rupees."

"Tell me why."

"I come from a big family. Give me one rupee. Give me something. Give me your ball pen."

He said that because I was writing in my small notebook: Boy. Uniform. Murugam.

As I walked away he began hissing curses at me, and he became loudly abusive when he saw me give some money to a crippled old woman who lay in a heap with her hand extended, palm upward.

Beggars I saw as part of life in India. How could you have 1.3 billion people and not have beggars? They went with the temples, they were part of the landscape — they weren't even the worst part. But they got me down. You could live a long time in India if you stayed indoors, bossing the servants, but I was outside most of the time, usually in the role of a pedestrian, and many other people were outside too.

My time was up: I had to move on to Sri Lanka. I admitted to myself that I was spooked and needed relief.

One day I saw a round rotted fruit by the side of the road. It was crawling with insects, alive with big ants, blackened by them. Was it a coconut or a durian? Whatever, it represented a little world of hunger obscured by its eaters.

I finally left Trichy, and India. What sent me away was not the poverty, though it was pathetic and there was plenty of it. It wasn't the dirt, though it sometimes seemed to me that nothing in India was clean. It wasn't the pantheon of grotesque gods, some like monkeys, some like elephants, some wearing skulls as ornaments, some in a posture of repose under the hood of a rearing cobra — terrifying or benign to the believers propitiating them with flowers. It was not the widow-burning or the child marriages or the crowds of the cringing and the limbless, the one-eyed, the stumblers, the silent ones who hardly lifted their eyes. An experience of India could be like entering a painting by Hieronymus Bosch — among the deformed, the fish-faced, the crawling, the flapping, the beaked, the scaly, the screaming, the armless, and the web-footed.

Not the heat, either, though every day in the south it was in the high 90s. Not the boasting and booming Indians and their foreign partners screwing the poor and the underpaid for profit. Not the roads, though the roads were hideous and impassable in places. Not the fear of disease or the horror of the obscenely wealthy, though the sight of the superrich in India could be more disquieting than the sight of the most wretched beggar.

None of these. They can all be rationalized.

What sent me away finally was something simpler, but larger and inescapable. It was the sheer mass of people, the horribly thronged cities, the colossal agglomeration of elbowing and contending Indians, the billion-plus, the sight of them, the sense of their desperation and hunger, having to compete with them for space on sidewalks, on roads, everywhere — what I'd heard on the train from Amritsar: "Too many. Too many." All of them jostling for space, which made for much of life there a monotony of frotteurism, life in India being an unending experience of nonconsensual rubbing.

And not because it was India — Indians were good-humored and polite on the whole — but because it was the way of the world. The population of the United States had doubled in my lifetime, and the old simple world that I had known as a boy was gone. India was a reminder to me of what was in store for us all, a glimpse of the future. Trillions of dollars were spent to keep people breathing, to cure disease, and to extend human life, but nothing was being done to relieve the planet of overpopulation, the contending billions, like those ants on the rotting fruit.

I had not felt that way in India long ago, but I was younger then. I took the short flight over the Palk Strait to Sri Lanka, into a different world.