The Great Railway Bazaar

Chapter Sixteen

I saw him at Madras Central, near the Howrah Mail, and, from the hesitant way he was standing, he looked as if he were working up the courage to board. His long hair hung like rags in the heat; his clothes were much washed and faded to pastel colours. His suitcase, a canvas affair, repeated his worn appearance and was bursting at the seams. He was a man, perhaps English, in his early thirties, for whom, I guessed, travel had become an exhausting routine: travel can be an addiction and can change the physique, like drugs, to stringy leanness. A beggar was bent beside him, coughing. The young man, paying no attention to the outstretched hand, continued to stare at the train. I avoided him. The trip to Calcutta was too long to begin making friends so soon. I noticed that when he picked up his bag to board he passed a coin to the beggar. He did it without looking at the coughing man, with embarrassed obedience, like handing over a small admission charge.

My taxi driver had been helpful. He had carried my bag, found me bedding, located my berth, and arranged for me to have a spoon included with my meals. He was about to go. I gave him five rupees – too much. He decided to stay, like an anxious bearer with nothing to bear.

'You have money?'

I told him I did.

'Be careful,' he said. 'Indians no good. They take from your pockets.'

He showed me how to lock the compartment. He glanced around, scowling at the Indians who passed down the corridor. He told me repeatedly to be careful, and he continued warning me in this vein for so long that I began to believe that my trip up the neck of Andhra Pradesh and through Orissa to Bengal was fraught with danger. Perhaps those bandy-legged Madrasis, spitting betel juice through the windows, were waiting for this man to leave so that they could pounce. And when the driver did leave I felt peculiarly exposed, vulnerable to attack. Most of the time I remained happily alone in my corner seat, and only at moments like this, when a casually met person helped me and passed on, did I feel the absence of his attention. The assisting stranger in India served only to erode my competence: his presence made me a sahib; his presence turned me into a child.

But I was glad to be moving. It was the feeling I'd had on the Direct-Orient Express, on the Frontier Mail, on the Grand Trunk Express: the size, the great length of the train, was a comfort. The bigger the train, the longer the journey, the happier I was – none of the temporary suspense produced by the annoying awareness of the local train's spots of time. On the long trips I seldom watched the stations pass – the progress of the train didn't interest me very much. I had learned to become a resident of the express, and I preferred to travel for two or three days, reading, eating in the dining car, sleeping after lunch, and bringing my journal up to date in the early evening before having my first drink and deciding where we were on my map. Train travel animated my imagination and usually gave me the solitude to order and write my thoughts: I travelled easily in two directions, along the level rails while Asia flashed changes at the window, and at the interior rim of a private world of memory and language. I cannot imagine a luckier combination.

On my way to the dining car I saw the young man hunched at the window in the passage outside his compartment, breathing the hot dark air. 'You won't find much up there,' he said as I squeezed past. I nodded, and we exchanged the glance of tolerant recognition common to solitary travellers meeting on long-distance trains. I had dinner – the vegetarian special I'd accustomed myself to – and going back I saw the fellow again in the same place. This time, he appeared to be waiting for me. He made no immediate effort to move. He said, 'How was it?'

'The usual. I don't mind – I'm a vegetarian.'

'It's not that. It's the way they eat. It runs down their arms. Puts me off my food. Did you ever see them preparing it? They kick it around, step on it, cough on it. Still, maybe you'll be lucky.'

We talked about the food; he had brought his own. Then he said, 'I saw you in Madras, with that bearer. What a hole. Calcutta's worse. Ever been there?'

I said I hadn't.

'Maybe you like that sort of thing. I think it's a ghastly place.' He took a last puff of his cigarette and flipped it out the window, the sparks scattering in the dark. 'Everywhere you look. Horrible.'

An Indian girl was coming towards us. I could have used her approach as an opportunity to pass on, but I waited and we both stepped aside to let her go by. She lowered her eyes and glided along. She had delicate shoulders, dry dusted cheeks, and gleaming hair, and she smelled of some small sweetness like that of a single crushed flower.

'Pretty girl.'

'They turn me off,' he said. 'You don't believe me.'

'If you say so.'

'I had an Indian girlfriend – prettier than her. That's why I'm going to Calcutta.'

is she there?'

'She's in Bangalore. Ever been there? It's not too bad, but I'm glad to be away from it – I mean, from her. Am I keeping you?'

it's still early.' So he was fleeing the girl. I wondered why, but I wanted a simple answer. He invited me into his compartment to tell me. Most men, alone, stay up late, lamenting the absence of women. He gave me a shot of Indian gin. It stung my lips but tasted like nothing at all.

He said: 'She was the daughter of a man I had to see. I don't know about you, but the first time I came to India I more or less ignored Indian girls. Yes, I found them pretty, but the funny thing about a woman's beauty is that if you're absolutely sure you can't go to bed with her you begin to notice something calculated in her prettiness. I mean, her beauty is completely ineffectual. So she looks plainer, and gets uninteresting until she's invisible. If she has a good figure you see her as sinister rather than just plain, waiting for you to make a move that'll land you in jail. You can really develop a hate for these Indian women with their good looks and their useless virtue. That's why I prefer Muslim countries. They cover up their women and they don't make any bones about it. No one would be silly enough to tamper with a woman wearing one of those veils. It's unthinkable. I mean, they don't even look like women – they look like furniture covered up to keep the dust off. Veils are supposed to be sexy. Veils aren't sexy – what's sexy about something four feet high with a sheet over it?

'That's how I felt about Indian girls. They were so unapproachable they might as well have had sheets over their heads. The prettier they were the farther away I stayed. I wasn't interested because I knew they weren't. You see what I mean? I stopped noticing them. I barely noticed the daughter of this man I had to see. She was padding back and forth, bringing food, tea, the family album, doing the Indian thing. Their name was Bapna, and when the old man left the room the girl spoke up for the first time, asked me where I was staying. I told her.

'It was about three-thirty in the afternoon. The old man came back. He seemed a bit nervous, but finally got to the point. He said if I was going back to the hotel would I be kind enough to give Primila and her friend a lift? They were going to a film, but it was a long bus ride and they might not get there in time.

'I said I'd be glad to. The houseboy went and found a taxi. While we were driving into the city, Primila and her friend were talking to the driver, giving him directions and sort of arguing with him about the best route. I said, "Are you school chums?" This made them giggle and pull their saris over their mouths. They were each twenty-two and embarrassed to be mistaken for schoolgirls.

'Then the taxi stopped. The friend got out and Primila and I drove away. "Where's this film of yours?" I said. She said it was near my hotel. I asked her what time it started. "It runs all day."

'I was just making conversation, and I found that after a few minutes I was talking about a painting I'd bought from a dealer the previous day, a fairly good one, Lakshmi and Vishnu intertwined on a lotus blossom. Primila was so quiet, I became quite talkative. It happens – a person's reticence makes me talk an awful lot, kind of compensating.

'At the hotel I said, "I hope you don't have far to walk." She said the cinema was right around the corner. I asked her if she had ever been in the hotel before and when she said not I felt sorry for her, as if she'd been excluded from the place because she didn't have the money. I said, "Want to look it over?" She said yes. We went in. I showed her the restaurants and bars, the newsstand, the curio shop where I'd bought my painting. She was quite interested, walking beside me, taking it all in like a person in a museum.

'What I think I should have told you first is that about six months ago I was in Madras. I had some time to kill, so one afternoon I visited a palmist, Swami Sundram. He was a leathery old man and his house in Mylapore didn't have the usual charts and religious pictures and not even many cushions. He sat at a roll-top desk with a pencil and a piece of paper, in a kind of library stacked with mouldy books. He looked at my palm, line by line, then did a diagram on the paper and made notes, circling and underlining them as he went along. He didn't say a word for ten minutes or so, though he often paused as he was writing to press his forehead, like a person trying to remember something.

'Finally, he said, "You have been very sick, pains in the stomach, muscle pains, and trouble passing motion." I almost laughed -1 mean, you don't have to be a palmist to tell someone in India he's had stomach trouble. He told me one or two other things, but I said, "Look, I know what's happened to me – what I want to know is what's going to happen."

'He said, "I see an Indian girl. Classical face, maybe a dancer. You are alone with her."

'"Is that all?" I said.

' "Not all," he said. "I see her dancing for you."

'Well, naturally, I thought of what Swami Sundram had said when I was with Primila at the hotel. I asked her if she was a dancer, and she said no. Then out on the verandah she said, "I used to do classical dancing when I was younger, if that's what you mean. But all Indian girls do that." I suggested tea. She said yes. I said we could have a drink instead. She said "As you say." I ordered a gin and tonic. She said she wanted rum. I couldn't believe it. "Real rum?" I said. She giggled, like in the taxi, but didn't change her mind. When our drinks came we touched glasses and she went silent again.

'I was barely conscious of talking about my painting, but there wasn't very much to talk about, and I found I was having trouble describing the thing. Several times, I said, "You should see it." She said, "I'd like to," and that annoyed me because it meant I'd have to go upstairs, dig it out, and bring it down. It was in a sealed wrapper because of the dust. I was sorry I'd mentioned it – I'd only done it to keep the conversation going. I could have been having a nice drink alone – relaxing. I need to be alone after seeing people, sort of put myself back together. Lunch with old Bapna had tired me out. I didn't say anything more.

' "Do you have it with you?" she said. I told her it was upstairs and I felt as if I was getting into a corner because I couldn't refuse to show her. "Would you like to see it?" "Very much," she said. I said all right, but that it would be a lot easier if she came upstairs. She said fine. "When you finish your drink," I said. But she had finished her drink. I gulped mine down and we went upstairs. In the room she said, "I hate air conditioners." I gave the thing a kick and it shut off.

'We looked at the painting, sitting on the bed – it was the only place to sit – and as she pointed out what was good about it, how the figures were so well done, she reached over and picked it up from my lap. Has a girl ever lifted something from your lap? It gave me a thrill -I felt a surprising voltage in my groin from the light pressure of her hand.

'She showed me a detail of the picture, and when I looked closer I took her hand, and from the way she let me hold her hand I knew I could kiss her. They don't show kissing in Indian films. I know why. Because in India there is no such intimacy as a kiss that is not followed by a screw. A tiny particle of affection in India stands for passion, but what amazed me was that the whole thing was her idea, not mine. I had gone to the room with her against my will!

'I kissed her, and I was so surprised by her eagerness I practically fainted with excitement. I was really happy, and that sort of glee goes against the sex urge, but glee is more temporary than sex, and in a minute or so I was on her. She stayed for about two hours.

'The effect of this on me was incredible, like a conversion. Every woman I saw after that was attractive, and I saw each one as a possible lay. They really turned me on – I couldn't take my eyes off them. I saw them as coy, clever, geniuses of sexuality who had managed to disguise it all with that busy efficiency Indian women have. I was so assured by what I knew, I didn't bother to make a pass at any of them. But most of all I began to see some sense in what Swami Sundram had said: "She will dance for you." Obviously Primila was the girl he meant. I saw her a few more times and I really fell for her – I think even old Bapna suspected something was going on because he asked me a lot of questions about my family, and what sort of work did I do, and what were my plans? Primila talked a lot about leaving India and one day she turned up in a blouse and slacks. She looked insolent in Western clothes, but, as I say, I was beginning to love her and I imagined having one of those fantastic Indian weddings. Primila said she had always wanted to go to England – she had read so much about it, that sort of thing. I could see what was happening.

'Swami Sundram predicted it, I suppose, so the next chance I got I went to Madras, and to be absolutely sure he wouldn't recognize me I shaved off my beard and wore different clothes. This time I had to wait outside his house until he finished with another customer, and when I got inside he went through the same business of the diagrams and the notes. I didn't let on that I'd been there before. Then he said, "Head pains. I see many head pains, something like headache." I told him to go on. "You are expecting an important letter," he said. He pressed his temples. "You will receive this letter soon." I asked him if that was all. "No," he said, "you have a large mole on your penis." "No, I don't," I said. But he stuck to his story. He said, "You most certainly do." It amazed me that he should keep telling me that I had a mole on my penis while I was denying it and could even prove how wrong he was. He seemed rather irritated that I should contradict him. I paid him and left.

'That was yesterday. I didn't go back to Bangalore. I bought a ticket to Calcutta. I'm leaving – flying to Bangkok. If I hadn't seen that Swami I might be married now, or at least betrothed – it's the same thing. She was a nice girl, but I must have bad karma, and I don't have a mole on my penis. I looked.

'Pass the bottle,' he said. He took a swig and said, 'Never go back to a palmist.'

Through Berhampur and Khurda to Cuttack where children splashed, diving around buffaloes submerged to their nostrils in the wide Mahanadi River. This was the northeast corner of Orissa, smallpox capital of the world – Balasore, the very name suggesting some itching illness. The station signboards were captions to images I saw from the train: Tuleswar, a woman carrying a red clay water jar on her head, bringing contagion to a far-off village; Duntan, a defecating Bengali posed like Rodin's Thinker; Kharagpur, a man twisting the tail of his buffalo to make him go faster; Panskura, a crowd of children in school uniforms running along the tracks to their shantytown for lunch; and then the impacted precincts of Budge-Budge, where what I first took to be the poignant sight of an old man leading a small boy through the detritus of a train yard was a blind man with a devilish face squeezing the arm of the frightened child who was his guide.

The travellers on the Howrah Mail had a look of fatigued solemnity. They paid no attention to the hawkers and vendors who became more frequent as we neared Calcutta, getting on at suburban stations to make a circuit of the open carriages. A man gets on with a teapot, balancing a row of nesting clay cups on his arm. He squawks, urging tea on the passengers, waving the teapot in each person's face, and gets off: no sale. He is followed by a man with a jar of candy and a spoon. The candy man bangs his jar with the spoon and begins a monotonous spiel. Everyone is shown the jar, and the man continues to pound his spoon all the way to the door, where another enters with a tray of fountain pens. The pen man babbles and, as he does so, he demonstrates how the cap is unscrewed, how the nib is poised, how the clip works; he twirls the pen and holds it for everyone to see; he does everything but write with it, and when he has finished he leaves, having sold nothing. More get on with things to sell: buns, roasted chickpeas, plastic combs, lengths of ribbon, soiled pamphlets; nothing is sold.

At some stations Indians dived through the windows for seats, but when the seats were filled they squashed themselves at the door, maintaining only an emotional contact with the railway car. They were suspended from the ceiling on straps, stacked against the wall like cord-wood, heaped on the benches holding their knees together, and outside the Howrah Mail they clung to the fittings with such agility, they seemed magnetized.

Near Howrah Station throngs of Biharis were throwing themselves into the greasy Hooghly River from sanctified ghats. Their festival, Chhat, was enlivening Calcutta, and it offered a chance for the Biharis to make a show of strength against the Bengalis, whose own Kali festival had sealed many streets with the chamber of horrors that is a Kali shrine: the goggle-eyed goddess twice life-size, with her necklace of human heads, sticking out a tongue as bright as a raspberry popsicle and trampling the mortally wounded corpse of her husband. Behind Kali, plaster tableaux showed four doomed men, the first impaled on a bloody spear, the second having his neck wrung by a skeleton, the third flattened by a hag who is simultaneously severing the fourth's head. It was all a challenge to the Biharis, whose own processions involved tall mobile shrines draped in yellow cloth, carts loaded with women seated among heaps of banana offerings, looking deeply pious, and little troupes of transvestites dancing to bugle calls and drums.

'There go the Biharis, off to throw their bananas in the Hooghly,' said Mr Chatterjee, from the chair car. A Bengali, Mr Chatterjee wasn't sure of the purpose of the Chhat festival, but thought it might have something to do with the harvest. I said I didn't think the Calcutta harvest would be very large. He agreed, but said the Biharis enjoyed their annual chance to snarl Bengali traffic. At the head of every procession a black grinning

boy, dressed as a girl, made the jerky movements of a dancer with his wrists and leaped in the air, his genitals whipping about in his crimson sari. From time to time, the young girls (who might have been boys) behind him dropped to the ground and prostrated themselves in the garbage-strewn streets.

The holy mob, the stink of sanctity, the legitimate noise: everything in Indian life seemed to sanction excess, and even politics had the puja flavour. While these religious festivals were going their bellowing way, the Socialist Unity Centre was organizing a bundh – a total work stoppage – and their preliminary rallies on the maidan with their flags and posters, processions and speeches, were practically indistinguishable from the displays of mass piety on Chowringhee's sidewalks and at the sloshing ghats. This aspect of Calcutta is the first that meets the traveller's eye, but the one that stays longest in the mind; it is an atmosphere of organized disturbance, everyone occupied in carrying out some programme or other, so much so that those stricken thousands one sees uniformly – uniformly, because space is scarce – lying or sitting on the sidewalk have the look of nonviolent protesters having a long afternoon of dedicated satyagraha ('clinging to truth'). I imagined another group in an ambiguous posture when I read, in a Calcutta newspaper, 'The leftist leaders also decided to resort to mass squatting…'

From the outside, Howrah Station looks like a secretariat, with its not quite square towers and many clocks – each showing a different time – and its impenetrable brickwork. The British buildings in India look as if they have been designed to withstand a siege – there are hornworks and cannon emplacements and watchtowers on the unlikeliest structures. So Howrah Station looked like a fortified version of a mammoth circumlocution office, an impression that buying a ticket there only confirms. But inside it is high and smoky from the fires of the people who occupy it; the ceiling is black, the floor is wet and filthy, and it is dark – the long shafts of sun streaming from the topmost windows lose their light in dust on the way down.

'It's much better than it was,' said Mr Chatterjee, seeing me craning my neck. 'You should have seen it before they cleaned it up.'

His remark was unanswerable. Yet at every pillar squatters huddled amid the rubbish they had created: broken glass, bits of wood and paper, straw, and tin cans. Some infants slept against their parents; others were curled up like changelings in dusty corners. Families sought refuge beside pillars, under counters and luggage carts: the hugeness of the station intimidated them with space and drove them to the walls. Their children prowled in the open spaces, combining their scavenging with play. They are the tiny children of tiny parents, and it's amazing how, in India, it is possible to see two kinds of people in the process of evolution, side by side, one fairly tall, quick, and responsive, the other, whose evolution is reduction, small, stricken, and cringing. They are two races whose common ground is the railway station, and though they come quite close (an urchin lies on his back near the ticket window watching the legs of the people in line) they do not meet.

I walked outside, into the midday chaos at the western end of the Howrah Bridge. In Simla, rickshaws were retained for their quaintness: people posed in them. In Calcutta, rickshaws, pulled by skinny running men in tattered clothes, are a necessary form of transport, cheap, and easy to steer in narrow back lanes. They are a crude symbol of Indian society, but in India all symbols are crude: the homeless people sleeping in the doorway of the mansion, the commuter running to his train accidentally trampling a station sleeper, the thin rickshaw-wallah hauhng his plump passengers. Ponies harnessed to stagecoaches laboured over cobblestones; men pushed bicycles loaded with hay bales and firewood. I had never seen so many different forms of transport: wagons, scooters, old cars, carts and sledges, and odd, old-fashioned horse-drawn vehicles that might have been barouches. In one cart, their white flippers limp, dead sea turtles were stacked, on another cart was a dead buffalo, and in a third an entire family with their belongings – children, parrot cage, pots and pans. All these vehicles, and people surging among them. Then there was panic, and the people scattered as a tottering tram car marked tolly-gunge swayed down the bridge. Mr Chatterjee said, 'Too much of people!'

Mr Chatterjee walked across the bridge with me. He was a Bengali, and Bengalis were the most alert people I had met in India. But they were also irritable, talkative, dogmatic, arrogant, and humourless, holding forth with malicious skill on virtually every subject except the future of Calcutta. Any mention of that brought them up short. But Mr Chatterjee had views. He had been reading an article about Calcutta's prospects. Calcutta had been very unlucky: Chicago had had a great fire, San Francisco an earthquake, and London a plague as well as a fire. But nothing had happened to Calcutta to give planners a chance to redesign it. You had to admit, he said, it had vitality. The problem of pavement dwellers (he put the figure at a quarter of a million) had been 'somewhat over-dramatized', and when you considered that these pavement dwellers were almost exclusively engaged in ragpicking you could see how Calcutta's garbage was 'most intensively recycled'. It seemed an unusual choice of words, and it strayed close to claptrap: vitality in a place where people lay dead in the gutter ('But everyone dies eventually,' said Mr C), the overdramatized quarter of a million, the recycling ragpickers. We passed a man who leaned at us and put his hand out. He was a monster. Half his face was missing; it looked as if it had been clumsily guillotined – he had no nose, no lips, no chin, and clamped in his teeth, which were perpetually exposed, was the bruised plug of his tongue. Mr Chatter-jee saw my shock. 'Oh, him). He is always here!'

Before he left me at the Barabazar, Mr Chatterjee said, 'I love this city.' We exchanged addresses and we parted, I to a hotel, Mr Chatterjee to Strand Road, where the Hooghly was silting up so badly, soon all that would float on it would be the ashes of cremated Bengalis.

I stayed in Calcutta for four days, giving lectures, seeing the sights, and losing my lecture fees at the Royal Calcutta Turf Club on the Saturday I decided to leave. On the first day the city seemed like a corpse on which the Indians were feeding like flies; then I saw its features more clearly, the obelisks and pyramids in Park Street Cemetery, the decayed mansions with friezes and columns, and the fountains in the courtyards of these places: nymphs and sprites blowing on dry conches, who, like the people living under them in gunny sacks, are missing legs and arms; the gong of trams at night; and the flaring lamps lighting the wild cows pushing their snouts into rubbish piles, vying with the scrabbling Indians for something edible. The high mock-Moghul tenements

hustled it, and crushed it, and stuck brick-and-mortar elbows into it, and kept the air from it, and stood perpetually between it and the light…

You groped your way for an hour through lanes and bye-ways, and court-yards and passages; and you never once emerged upon anything that might be reasonably called a street. A kind of resigned distraction came over the stranger as he trod those devious mazes, and, giving himself up for lost, went in and out and round about and quietly turned back again when he came to a dead wall or was stopped by an iron railing, and felt that the means of escape might possibly present themselves in their own good time, but to anticipate them was hopeless…

Among the narrow thoroughfares at hand, there lingered, here and there, an ancient doorway of carved oak, from which, of old, the sounds of revelry and feasting often came; but now these mansions, only used for storehouses, were dark and dull, and, being filled with wool, and cotton, and the like – such heavy merchandise as stifles sound and stops the throat of echo – had an air of palpable deadness… In the throats and maws of dark no-thoroughfares… wholesale dealers in grocery-ware had perfect little towns of their own; and, deep among the foundations of these buildings, the ground was undermined and burrowed out into stables, where cart-horses, troubled by rats, might be heard on a quiet Sunday rattling their halters, as disturbed spirits in tales of haunted houses are said to clank their chains…

Then there were steeples, towers, belfries, shining vanes, and masts of ships: a very forest. Gables, housetops, garret-windows, wilderness upon wilderness. Smoke and noise enough for all the world at once.

There is more, and it is all good, but I think I have quoted enough to show that the best description of Calcutta is Todgers' corner of London in Chapter IX of Martin Chuzzlewit. But having decided that Calcutta was Dickensian (perhaps more Dickensian than London ever was), and knowing that I could not share either the excitement of the Bengalis, who agreed with the enormous billboard put up by the State Bank of India (Calcutta is forever), or, what is more curious, the chummy regard of the Americans I met there for this vast and yet incomplete city that I felt would someday undo them, I decided to leave it and so leave India.

I was on my way when I saw the hopping man in the crowd on Chowringhee. He was very strange: in a city of mutilated people only the truly monstrous looked odd. This man had one leg – the other was amputated at the thigh – but he did not carry a crutch. He had a greasy bundle in one hand. He hopped past me with his mouth open, pumping on his shoulders. I went after him, and he turned into Middleton Street, hopping very fast on one muscular leg, like a man on a pogo stick, his head rising above the crowd, then descending into it. I couldn't run because of the other people, black darting clerks, swamis with umbrellas, armless beggars working their stumps at me, women proffering drugged babies, strolling families, men seeming to block the sidewalk with their wide flapping trousers and swinging arms. The hopping man was in the distance. I gained on him -I saw his head clearly – then lost him. On one leg he had outrun me, so I never found out how he did it. But afterwards, whenever I thought of India, I saw him -hop, hop, hop – moving nimbly through those millions.