The Great Railway Bazaar

Chapter Ten

THE RAJDHANI ('CAPITAL') EXPRESS TO BOMBAY

Mr Radia (his name was on a label beside the door, with mine) was sitting on his berth, intoning a Hindi song through his nose. He saw me and sang louder. I took out my electric shaver and began to run it over my face; he drowned the whine of the motor with his lugubrious song. When he sang his expression was rapturous, in repose his face was sour. He looked at my gin bottle with distaste and told me that spirits were not allowed on Indian Railways, and to my owlish reply ('But I thought Indians believed in spirits') he only grunted. Moments later he pleaded with me to put my pipe out. He said he had once vomited in a compartment where an Englishman was smoking.

'I'm not English,' I said.

He grunted. I saw he was trying to read the cover of the book I had opened. It was The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda, a parting gift from Mr Gupta of the Simla ashram.

'Are you interested in yoga?' asked Mr Radia.

'No,' I said, studying the book closely. I wet my finger and turned a page.

'I am,' said Mr Radia. 'Not the physical side, but the mental side. The benefit is there.'

'The physical side is the best part.'

'Not for me. For me it is all mental. I like to exercise my mind with debates and discussions of all kinds.'

I snapped the book shut and left the compartment.

It was late afternoon, but already the orange sun was submerged in the dust haze at the far end of a perfectly flat landscape. Delhi is a city of three million, but a half an hour out of the station and you are in a countryside devoid of people, a green plain as flat as those areas of Turkey and Iran, which were so sunlit and empty they made my eyes ache. I made my way through the classes to the dining car: first class air-conditioned had carpets and cold door handles and fogged windows, and there was a shower in the Indian-style toilet but none in the awful booth designated (and this was an intemperate libel) 'Western-style'; the first-class sleeper had bare cells and plastic-covered berths, the chair car had seats arranged like those on a plane, and people were already tucked in for the night, with blankets over their heads to shut out the air conditioning and the bright overhead lights; there were card games in the wooden second-class compartments, and in the third-class sleeper the bookshelf berths were fixed to the wall in tiers like those on trains in old Russian movies. People reclined on the boards with their bony knees sticking out, and others queued in puddles at the toilet doors.

The dining car, at the bottom rung of this Indian social ladder, was a narrow room of broken chairs and slopped-over tables. Meal coupons were being sold. At this point in my trip I had turned vegetarian. The meat I saw in India was foul in any case, so I never had the cravings sometimes referred to as 'meat-fits'. And though I had no side effects (impotence, geniality, gas) I sometimes had second thoughts when I saw, as I did that evening, a fat sweating Indian cook in filthy pyjamas preparing vegetables for the pot by gathering them with his forearms and then slapping and squeezing them into a pulpous mass.

After dark we made a stop at Mathura Junction. I got out, and in the glare of the station platform was the now familiar (but no less horrifying) sight of the railway villagers. They were not locals: they were very black, thin, with small sharp teeth and narrow noses and thick glossy hair; they wore sarongs and camped on the platform with that air of proprietary completeness that suggested permanence. There were rows of charpoys, and at the unsheltered end of the platform greasy tarpaulins had been pitched like tents. They were spitting, eating, pissing, and strolling with such self-possession that they might have been in a remote village in the deepest Madrasi jungle (I took them to be Tamils) instead of under the gaze of the travellers on the Bombay express. One woman snatched up a child and helped him comb for lice in her scalp, and another woman, who I thought was crouching in despair, I saw after a moment to be playing peekaboo with an infant half-hidden in an orange crate.

I had passed these encampments too many times without looking closely at them. I found a man on the train and asked him if he would translate my questions. He agreed, and we found a willing interviewee. This was a fox-faced man with glittering white eyes and buck teeth, wearing a white sarong. He stood with his arms folded and stroked his biceps with slender fingers.

'He says they come from Kerala.'

'But why have they come so far? Are they looking for work?'

'Not looking for work. This is a yatra.'

So it was another pilgrimage.

'Where are they headed?'

'Here, Mathura,' the translator said, pronouncing it Muttra. The fox-faced man spoke again. The translator continued, 'He is asking that do you know this is a holy place?'

'The railway station?'

'The town. Lord Krishna was born here.'

And not only that, I read later. It was in Mathura that the Divine Cowherd was exchanged with the infant daughter of Jasoda in order to save him from being murdered by the giant Kans, a parallel of the Herod story. The town is also the scene of Krishna's youth, where he sported with the milkmaids and played his flute. The legends were pretty; the place itself seemed a grim contradiction.

'How long will the yatris stay?'

'For some days.'

'Why are they at the station instead of in town?'

'There is water and light here, and it is safe. There are robbers in town and some people get chased by rogues.'

'What do they do for food?'

'He says they have brought some, and some they get in town. The people on the train also give some.' The translator added, 'He is asking where are you from?'

I told him. In a corner of the platform, I saw the silhouette of a pot-bellied child with spindly legs, naked and clinging to a waterspout. It was alone, holding on, waiting for nothing; the sight of this futile patience cracked my heart.

'He is asking for money.'

'I will give him one rupee if he says a prayer for me at the Mathura temple.'

This was translated. The man from Kerala laughed and said something.

'He would have said a prayer for you even if you had given him nothing.'

The whistle blew and I boarded. Mr Radia had stopped singing. He was sitting in the compartment reading Blitz. Blitz is a noisy, irresponsible weekly paper in English that retails scandals in a semiliterate but bouncy style of which the following, from the film page, is a fair example:

Star-producer-director of JUHU, one of four bhais, hotted up his birthday like nobody's business.

The guest control order was out of bounds there! There were booze and broads and brawls by the host himself! He was high and headstrong, lording it over all. Hurled abuse at some and then fisted a guest. That's the time few walked out. Some hospitality that! What does he think himself to be? GODFATHER?…

Mr Radia continued to read, scowling with appreciation. Then our dinner trays were brought, and I noticed his was non-vegetarian. His hamburger came apart under his knife and he poked at it disgustedly. But he ate it. 'The first time I took meat I was violently sick,' he said. 'But that happens when you do anything for the first time, isn't it?'

With this bewildering epigraph he told me about his work. He had worked for Shell for twenty years, but discovered he loathed the English so much that he finally quit. His sense of grievance was strong and his memory for the humiliations he had been subjected to amounted to total recall. The English were domineering and exclusive, he said, but he was quick to add, 'Mind you, we Indians can be the same. But the English had their chance If only,' he said, and prodded his hamburger, 'if only the English had become Indians.'

'Was that ever on the cards?'

'Yes, they could have done it. No trouble at all. I went to a T-group session in Darjeeling. Debates and discussions. Very interesting. The wife of the director had just arrived from the States, and the second day she was there that lady was wearing a sari.'

I was sceptical about this proving anything and asked him how long the lady would stay in her sari.

'That's a point,' said Mr Radia.

Now he was the Deputy General Manager for a joint Japanese-Indian effort, making dry-cell batteries in Gujarat. He had had several run-ins with the Japanese -'Head-on-collisions – I had no choice!' I asked him how he found the Japanese. He said, 'Loyal, yes! Clean and hard-working, yes! But intelligent, not at allV It turned out that they were getting under his skin, though he preferred them to the English. The company was run on Japanese lines: uniforms, no sweepers or bearers, morning assembly, a joint staff-worker canteen, and common toilets ('That was a shock'). What nettled Mr Radia was that the Japanese insisted on dating the factory girls.

'That's the best way I know to demoralize the others,' he said, 'but when I asked them about it they said it would make the workers friendlier if the bosses took the girls out on dates. And they smiled at me. Have you ever seen a Japanese smile? I wasn't going to have it. "Nothing doing!" I said. "You want to argue? Okay, we'll argue. Let's take it to the manager!" Now I will be quite frank with you. I think these Japanese were going in twos and threes and having group sex.'

'Especially in twos,' I said. But Mr Radia was too worked up to hear me.

'I told them it was just not on! Prostitutes – okay, it happens all over the world! Girls from town – all right! Clean, healthy fun – fine! Picnics – count me in! I'll bring my wife, I'll bring my children, we'll all have a good time. But workers? Never!'

Mr Radia grew increasingly peevish about the Japanese. I complained of a headache and went to bed.

The conductor brought tea at half-past six and said we were in Gujarat. Bullocks and cows cropped grass at the edge of the line, and at one station a goat skittered on the platform. Gujarat, Gandhi's birthplace, is a hot, flat, but apparently very fertile state. There were guava orchards and fields of lentils, cotton, papaya, and tobacco stretching to the tilted palm trees at the horizon, and the irrigation ditches were cut like chevrons in these sleeves of landscape. Occasionally, a marquee of trees identified a village and dusty people could be seen washing in brown streams where the mud banks were covered with footprints like the tracks of stray birds.

'And here we are at Baroda,' said Mr Radia, turning to the window.

In the foreground a migration of ragged people carried bundles on their heads, following a bullock cart mounded with bruised furniture. The white hairless patches on the children's heads spoke of overcrowding, malnutrition, and disease, and they were all grinning in the glare of the sun.

'That, I believe is the new petrochemical plant. It's already in operation,' said Mr Radia.

We were passing a shantytown made entirely of flattened cardboard boxes and bits of hammered tin. Women squatted, slapping cow turds into pies, and inside the terrifying huts I could see people lying with their arms crossed over their faces. A man screamed at a running child; another howled at the train.

'Everything's coming up. Patel's factory. It's completely industrial here. Jyoti Industries. Worth crores, I tell you. Crores!'

Mr Radia was looking past the muddy ditch, over the heads of the skinny cows, the children with streaming noses, the crones in tattered headdresses, the many squatters who were making puzzled faces and shitting, the leathery old men leaning on broken umbrellas.

'Another new factory, already famous – Baroda furniture. I know the director. We've had him around for drinks.'

Then, heartily, Mr Radia the Anglophobe said, 'Well, cheerio!'

At Broach, fifty miles south of Baroda, we crossed the wide Narmada River. I was standing by the door. A man tapped me on the shoulder.

'Excuse me.' He was a dark bespectacled Indian in a flowered shirt, holding two coconuts and a garland of flowers. He moved to the door and, bracing himself on the handrail, pitched the garland, then the coconuts, in the river.

'Offerings,' he explained. 'I live in Singapore. I am so happy to be home.'

Late in the afternoon we were in the lowland of Maharashtra, gleaming swamps, the green inlets of the Gulf of Cambray, and just at the horizon the Arabian Sea. It had been cool in the morning, and pleasant at Baroda, but the afternoon ride to Bombay from Broach was stifling: the air was dense with humidity, and the feathery fronds on the tall palms drooped in the heat. At every siding I saw the feet of napping Indians sticking out from under packing cases and makeshift shelters. And then Bombay began. We were still quite far from the city centre – twenty miles or more – but the sight of a single sway-backed hut swelled to a hamlet of shacks, and then to an unbroken parade of low dwellings, their roofs littered with plastic sheets, bits of wood and paper, a rubber tyre, shingles held down with stones, and thatch tied with vines, as if this accumulated rubbish would keep the shacks from blowing away. The hovels became bungalows the colour of rotten cheese, then three-storey houses bandaged with laundry, and eight-storey apartment blocks with rusty fire escapes, getting larger and larger as we neared Bombay.

On the outskirts of the city the Rajdhani Express came to several alarming stops – so sudden, one of them toppled my water pitcher on to the floor and the next smashed a glass. We did not appear to be at stations for these stops, although there were people leaving the train. I saw them throwing their suitcases on to the tracks and leaping out themselves with the speed of deserters, picking up their baggage and racing across the line. I discovered they had pulled the emergency alarm cord (penalty for improper use rupees 250) because they were passing their houses. This was an express train, but by pulling the alarm the Indian could turn it into a local.

There was a fat boy, a recent graduate from the Dehra Dun School of Engineering. He was on his way to Poona for a job interview. He told me why the train was stopping with such force, and he described how the alarm worked.

He said, 'Person who wishes to leave train pulls cord and dewice inside releases wacuum causing brakes to seize in that particular bogie. Conductor is sure which bogie alarm is pulled, but there are so many people he does not know who has pulled chain. Conductor must reconnect dewice and create wacuum in order for train to move.'

He spoke so slowly and methodically that by the time he finished this explanation we were in Bombay.

It was at a railway station in Bombay that V. S. Naipaul panicked and fled, fearing that he 'might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd'. The story is told in An Area of Darkness. But I did not find Bombay Central especially scarifying; a closer acquaintance with it made me think of it as a place of refugees and fortune hunters, smelling of dirt and money, in a neighbourhood that had the look of the neglected half of Chicago. The hurrying daytime crowds might have frightened me more if they had been idly prowling, but in their mass there was no sense of aimlessness. The direction of those speeding white shirts gave to these thousands of marchers the aspect of a dignified parade of clerks and their wives and cattle, preparing to riot according to some long-held custom, among the most distinguished architecture the British Empire produced (cover your good eye, squint at Victoria Station in Bombay, and you see the grey majesty of St Paul's Cathedral). Bombay fulfils the big-city requirements of age, depth, and frenzy, inspiring a chauvinism in its inhabitants, a threadbare metropolitan hauteur rivalled only by Calcutta. My one disappointment came at the Towers of Silence, where the Parsis place their dead to be eaten by vultures. This may strike a casual visitor as solemn barbarity, but it is based on an ecologically sound proposition. The Zoroastrian at the gate would not let me in to verify it. I had been brought there by Mushtaq, my driver, and, leaving, I said perhaps the stories were not true – I couldn't see any vultures. Mushtaq said they were all down at the towers feeding on a corpse. He looked at his watch: 'Lunchtime.' But he meant mine.

After my lecture that evening I met several writers. One was Mr V. G. Deshmukh, a jolly novelist who said that he could not make a living by his pen. He had written thirty novels. Writing is the single activity in India that doesn't pay, and anyway this man wrote about the poor: no one was interested in reading about poor people. He knew, because the poor were his business.

'Famine relief, resettlement, drought prevention, under-privileged, anything you can name. It is a headache sometimes. But my books don't sell, so I have no choice. You could call me an organizer.'

'How do you prevent droughts?'

'We have programmes.'

I saw committees, position papers, conferences – and dusty fields.

'Have you prevented any lately?'

'We are making steady progress,' he said. 'But I would rather write novels.'

'If you've written thirty, surely it's time to stop.'

'No, no! I must write one hundred and eight!'

'How did you arrive at that figure?'

'It is a magic number in Hindu philosophy. Vishnu has one hundred and eight names. I must write one hundred and eight novels! It is not easy – especially now, with this damned paper shortage.'

The paper shortage was also affecting Kushwant Singh's Illustrated Weekly of India. His circulation was 300,000 but he was about to cut it down to save paper. It was an Indian story: Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure. India, the largest rice-grower in the world, imports rice. 'Hunger is the handmaid of genius,' says the Pudd'nhead Wilson epigraph above one of the Bombay chapters in Mark Twain's Following the Equator, and truly India's hunger-inspired genius threatens to sink her. Every success I heard of convinced me that India, swamped by invention, was hopeless and must fail unless what I saw later that night ceases to exist. It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

Unable to sleep, I went for a walk. I turned left out of my hotel and walked a hundred yards past the brothels to the sea wall, counting the sleeping figures as I went along. They were stretched out on the sidewalk, lying side by side; some were on pieces of cardboard but most slept flat on the cement, with no bedding and few clothes, their arms crooked under their heads. The children slept on their sides, the others on their backs. There was no sign anywhere of their possessions. I reached seventy-three and turned the corner, where down the road that ran next to the sea wall there were hundreds more -just bodies, no bundles or carts, nothing to distinguish one from another, no evidence of life. It is sometimes thought that these sleepers in the Bombay streets are a recent phenomenon; but Mark Twain saw them. He was on his way to a midnight betrothal ceremony:

We seemed to move through a city of the dead. There was hardly a suggestion of life in those still and vacant streets. Even the crows were silent. But everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives – hundreds and hundreds. They lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, heads and all. Their attitude and rigidity counterfeited death.

That was in 1896. They are more numerous today, and there is another difference. The ones I saw had no blankets. Hunger -pace Pudd'nhead Wilson – is also the handmaid of death.