Amritsar lies between Delhi and Srinagar and a little to the west over near the Indian-Pakistani border. The problem is that you can’t just drop down to Amritsar on a return from Srinagar to Delhi. You must fly back to Delhi and then return north…and a little to the west. I suspect that the post office will not allow the pilots to carry maps in the cockpit and that they must make the flight by memory. Some pilots know the way from Delhi to Srinagar and some know their way to Amritsar. Just change the crew at Delhi and the Pakistanis will be completely confused. So am I. “Incredible India!” in Shabarat’s words and I get to sleep in a hotel room for four hours, make long runs to and from the airport made more interesting by the tour agency sending out Hindi speakers that take you to the wrong airport. Anyhow if you saw the movie Gandhi, you may guess one of my reasons for wanting to go to Amritsar. Another is that it is a border town that piqued my interest. The tour agent had given me another reason.
The beautiful site of Amritsar is the Sikh place of worship, the Golden Temple. It is surrounded by a tank and the tank is encircled by a broad walkway which is enclosed in a wall of administrative offices, a place where pilgrims are fed, and shops facing inward.
This temple was the site of a shootout between the Indian governmental forces and the Sikh separatist. The temple was damaged and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards in retribution. Mob violence followed where about 3,000 people were killed, mostly Sikhs by lynchings.
The sun shown down on this day while barefoot, I joined the line of pilgrims and slowly made my way along a causeway and into the center of the complex. I heard music before I got to the building and remembered Tauheed criticism of the taped music playing over and over again at the Hindu temple in Srinagar. When I arrived inside the temple, I saw musicians playing and a cleric reading from a very large book. He read silently and we filed around the closed off center where this activity was in progress. On the second floor, people (men and women mixed) sat in the corners and prayed. Some read from the Korans they carried. There was a railing that kept one from falling from this mezzanine. Looking down onto the first floor, I could see the reader and the musicians. The place was alight with electric lights as well as sunlight coming through the open windows. I made my way back to the walkway beyond the tank’s edge to a cloister where you could get out of the sun and it was acceptable to lie on the marble floor. I took a rest. My guide had other business but met me at a prearranged place where I unsuccessfully tried to take a nap. Having had only about three or four hours of sleep the night before takes its toll. I sure wish the pilots had been allowed to carry those maps.
In the afternoon after “fooding” I walked into where some very bad things were done by some people to some other people. The British pushed through a bill, the Rowlatt Act, that became law which prohibited assembly. In 1919 an assembly was called to protest the law. This was done in an enclosed area of I’d guess ten acres. A General Dyer got wind of the meeting, called out the Gurkas and an armored vehicle, and marched into the only egress of the enclosure and set the Gurkas to shooting into the crowd. One source, The Lonely Planet Guide, states that 400 people were killed outright and 1500 were injured. The armored vehicle was not used in the massacre because the entrance lane was too narrow for it to join in. Some shots went high and struck a wall against which people huddled. There was a well nearby and 120 bodies were later taken from the well into which the people leapt. There are many sites in India which are historical or holy. This garden, since planted, lays claim to both aspects. The actions changed minds in both India and Great Brittan and while Independence would come almost thirty years later, this action was one, which even the staunchest advocates of the Raj could not put out of their minds.
In the evening my guide loaded me up in a taxi and off we went to the border station, Attari/Wagah. The place is known for two reasons. One, it is the only overland opening in the border between Pakistan and India. Two, there is a military exercise every evening, which after much fanfare, each country lowers its flag. It proves to be a time to both show off and to demonstrate that the two countries can live together side by side. So it is a mixture of a peace happening mixed with the posturing of a football game. Mercifully, they did away with the football. We got their after many of the Indians had gathered. I walked into the crowd with my guide behind me. One of the advantages of having over a period of years been raised drinking a swimming pool full of milk, is that I’m a little taller than most Indians. So I could see above the heads in front of me…well some of them. These border guards start at six feet and grow up from there. Just in case you don’t notice their height, they wear an accordion folded cockscomb on their turbans. That gives them another 10 inches which crowds seven feet. They are all young, nice looking men, and are athletes the likes of which are never seen in Texas. These guys can march faster than a horse trots and do high-kicks that would be the envy of any full back or cheer leader. One of them spotted my white hair and red complexion and I was ordered to go to the VIP section. I looked around for my guide and he was gone. Losing guides are about as easy as leaving a tip so I decided that he could find me, see that I got back to the hotel, or else there was the acacia tree option. I was only following my orders and found a place to sit on a step. There is something a little undemocratic about this but I paid attention to what was going on in the middle of the street and overlooked my privilege due to being born beyond the borders of India.
An impromptu dance was in progress on the pavement. This was accompanied by nationalistic shouts and slogans. About a dozen folks, mostly young people, danced to music coming through the PA system. Probably there were more Indians than any other nation but there were plenty of other nations. Later an Indian girl in her teens danced a traditional dance alone, at least for a while. She was joined by a young European woman, who had no idea about the dance movement, and the woman did cause a bit of distraction. She was asked to sit down which she did. Then the soldiers marched forth to the applause of the crowd. You could see through the barred gate marking the border so you could you could watch the Pakistanis if the program got too quiet on the Indian side. Each side waved a great national flag. What had been “people together” dance now became partisan. You can never find a football when you need one.
So with high stepping and quick stepping and back and forth to the gate, which was finally opened to the roaring cheers of both sides, the smartly uniformed six footers marched onto the border, the officers briefly shook hands, salutes exchanged, and then the soldiers lowered their nation’s flag slowly and in unison. The half-hour to forty-five minute choreography was worth the trip but I wondered whether this brought the two nations closer together or simply reestablished their rather artificial tribalism. I watched from Punjab (India) and as far as you could see to the west across the border, was all Punjab (Pakistan.) The flags were stowed away in the early dusk and the crowd broke up. This was no pro football crowd but was large enough to lose a short guide. I climbed up on a landing and let him find me.
The last and first light of day are shorter the nearer you get to the equator but as we drove back to Amritsar from the border, I had plenty of light to look at the depth of defensive military installations. For all the strut and hand-shaking and in concert flag lowering, the defenses go on and on for miles. The Indian-Pakistani paradox asks the twin questions, one, was the national division necessary, and two, could a greater India, which would have included all of Pakistan and Bangladesh, have survived the separatist movements without the threat of aggression by an outside force? The last act of the border ritual was once more closing the barred gate.
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The Vale of Kashmir
Indian cities do sleep and driving through the dark streets of Delhi was a quick trip to the airport with almost no traffic. The roadway was clean compared to the airport road in Mumbai. I saw a star high up above the horizon and that was a good omen. I always hope for clear weather when planning to fly. Inside the terminal which was nothing elaborate but was well scrubbed, I saw attentive adult and sleepy kids, which are what you’d expect at somewhere shortly after five in the morning. While I waited to go through the hoops and jumps of check-in and security, I looked for the dhoti men. Several women out of the hundreds wore some form of the sari but it was nearly boarding time before I saw the only man, who was probably in his sixties, wearing the wrap around garment. In another generation or two except for the country people, I suspect dhotis will be worn only by politicians. Saris will last because they show off what wants to be shown and hides pretty well what the user doesn’t want you to see. Indians are slowly getting fat and the women have always been pregnant. I had a flash of insight that I’m in a nation of 1.2 billion people and I’d see a dozen times the number of pregnant women on a July day in the U.S. than I would see on the streets of India. The Indians invented the maternity dress. And while the sari is something that bothers me at seeing all this flowing garb set in a dump of a street or sitting in close proximity of whirling sprockets on the back of a “two wheeler,” some women do look like a pleasant dream as they float across the room.
There was a heavy haze across the tarmac but a blue sky overhead. I hoped to see the mountains. Train travel is great for the up-close look at a country but a view from an airplane is a magic carpet to see the overall lay of the land. The last time I flew the world was covered with cloud and I was stuck with a channel surfer who was alternating between praying and falling asleep on my shoulder. We had a full flight but in the draw of boarding passes I got a window seat.
On the flight to Jammu we cleared the haze which was thick but not endless. This covering was different than what I usually see, in that it was capped by a white layer of cloud. The sky was its normal deep blue that you rarely see standing on the ground in temperate zones or the tropics. It’s the blue seen by mountain climbers and pilots. Towns and villages lay below with their flat roofs squared but each house at an odd angle with its neighbor. Since the buildings predate in many cases the invention of city planning…or even after planning had become common, the odd angles show either that no one paid attention to the planner or instead paid off a city official who could had enforced the planner’s decision.
When we lifted above the clouds on leaving Jammu, I could see the snow capped peaks of the Himalayan foothills. It was exciting to be flying toward “the roof of the world” but even better, I would not have to think about a bus driver’s judgment as to what catches us on hilltops or coming round the next curve when we are in the right lane. We flew on beneath a deep blue sky while below lay a few clouds, mostly haze, and the beginning of the peaks. As we proceeded, I could make out something of an abyss off the left side of the plane’s direction. The mountains ran in parallel lines but between the ridges lay a blue nothingness. Whatever was down there was buried in haze. It could be the Kashmir Valley but we didn’t seem to flying into one end and then heading for Srinagar and Lake Dahl. We were flying perpendicular to that route. So if this were not the Valley of Kashmir and if each end of this rift were closed, this great valley could hold enough water to be called a sea, rather than a lake. Later upon checking the breadth it measured 35 kilometers. We droned on, the near mountains now below us, and I still could make out nothing beneath the haze but the thought occurred to me that if this weren’t the right valley, then the “Vale of Kashmir” must really be remarkable. The poetic license here with the name is Lowell Thomas’s, who over fifty years brought a Cinerama production crew into the valley and presented an introduction to Americans of a little know corner of the Earth. I could never decide whether the word was “vale” or “veil.” This part of India is predominately Moslem and was he likening the haze to a woman’s veil? However that may be unless we banked to the left, at this speed we’d be beyond the 35 kilometers and have a new set of mountain peaks to look down on.
We banked and turned left. This was the Vale of Kashmir! The veil covered the valley floor on which held a lake with a city along its shores. I could see the washes along the mountainsides but the stream beds faded beneath the haze, not connecting to another river and that river with another along the valley floor all of which lead to a lake. But then with the pressure increasing in my ears, the haze gave way and in a few minutes, not only could I see the strands of rivers both dry and flowing braiding together to make a coherent pattern, but I could see villages and settlements and then there was a city and a corner of a lake and down we came to land at Srinagar. My neck hurt from ducking my head down and looking out my little window but what I could see as we touched down was that the mountain tops were visible through the veil. Then walking across the tarmac I found myself in a crisp spring day and that I had come to a place worth the trip.
India is said to be filled with mystery but that may be another name for confusion. Shabarat’s brother was supposed to meet me but somehow we missed. Nevertheless I found cab drivers and houseboat operators who spoke pretty good English and I enjoyed tea and conversation until I finally had to hire a cab for the run into town to find a needle, the Cathay Hotel, in the haystack of several hundred places to stay…and that’s not counting houseboats. Shabarat’s best friend, Tauheed, owned the Cathay. It had been in the family for at least three generations and it was about time to upgrade. However that may be the price was right and the manager, “Ourshed,” a phonetic spelling and I seemed to hit it off so I took the room. Shabarat’s friend was away on business, I supposed and I was hungry so they showed me a nice restaurant and I got down to basics…lunch. Ishtaq, Shabarat’s brother, who had met the plane but not me, joined me at the table and we got acquainted over curry and rice. His English was good but he was distracted by the world of his nineteen years. After lunch we walked along the street bordering the lake. Both on the lakeside as well as the business side, the street had pretty good sidewalks and since the sidewalk remained uniform, I suspect, that it was built by one contractor in one period. Beyond the low wall lay the lake and houseboats beam to beam. I asked Ishtaq whether any new houseboats were being built. I thought if might be interesting to look over the operation on the ways. He said that what you see is what you get. When these were gone, there’d be no more. Labor and materials were too costly. The boats were of different ages and conditions and what the owners would do was to patch up what gives way but as Ishtaq had told me, I saw no evidence of new boats.
After a walk we returned to the hotel and within a short time Tauheed, Shabarat’s friend, joined us. He was in his late thirties, moustached, and with a receding hair line. His hair loss bothered him and he asked if I had a remedy. A hair transplant seemed too much money and trouble but then I remembered an Upjohn treatment, which interested him. He was both intense and pensive and it was he, not Ishtaq, who would show me around the lake and city. Ishtaq was busy obtaining a passport for his sister. And so the next morning, Tauheed began our tour.
What he didn’t know was that I had walked several miles in Delhi during the days before. The first stop was a Hindu temple perched on top of a sharp pointed mountain. We drove a auto rickshaw up most of the mountain but the best was saved till last. True, the remainder of the mountain could be measured in hundreds of feet but my! what an angle of climb! Tauheed told me that when he was a school boy, the teacher would “let” them climb from lake level all the way to the temple. That should have taken a little starch out of them…but probably didn’t. Tauheed climbed gracefully enough but the pilgrims who were twice his age (my age) took the ascent slower. The walk was made of stone pavement and steps. This was not dirt, roots, and rocks route but I began feeling the hike to and through the Red Fort from the day before in Delhi catching up with me.
All the time as we climbed, I could hear a fast, tongue-tripping song, coming down from above. The tape seemed to be in a loop like an eight track. Religious music normally has all the grace of an elephant mired in a mud hole. This music had real zing. I asked Tauheed about it. He confirmed that it was religious in nature. He didn’t approve. Moslems wouldn’t have music piped out of a mosque like that, he said. That for the most part is true but the call to prayer is sung. In the U.S. we have Gospel music that sounds something like an incomplete road kill. Where did this music get the zip? I asked if this were an old Hindu hymn. He said he didn’t think so. I suspect there may be a Pentecostal reformation going on in Hindu music. Music like that might find a positive reception in the U.S. I hear snatches of it now and then from my memory and this happened three or four weeks ago.
We topped out onto a terrace to get a bird’s eye view of the city and lake but there was still a pinnacle to go. The last steps were almost like climbing a ladder and then I could see the phallus inside the small, well-lighted temple. The story I got from Tauheed, a Moslem, was that a god, who would sit on this mountain top and meditate, was surprised one day by a visitor and withdrew into this three foot high, one foot in diameter, stone. Someone had poured water or oil over the stone, which made it look as if it had experienced an orgasm. The stone phallus is common in Hindu temples and shrines. It was the stone’s polish and the light reflecting off the liquid that made this one memorable.
Tauheed’s plan was to circle the lake, which was in turn encircled with gardens from the Mogul period, some were maintained; others were not. The princes enjoyed the mountain scenery, the symmetry of their gardens, and the sound of their “river of paradise” flowing arrow straight through the garden. And according to the small paintings I’ve seen, a prince was to frolic with his ladies in some shady spot while listening to songs of his musicians. Since the gardens cover many acres and can run almost a half mile long, it looked to be plenty of room to frolic. The public benefited also because they got to build and maintain the thing. On garden two or three, I found a shade tree and while I had no lady with whom to frolic, I wouldn’t have had the energy anyway. I tried to fall asleep. My legs were ready for burial. Tauheed called his sister and while they visited for a half-hour, my legs resurrected. On garden four or five, Tauheed saw his “uncle.” An “uncle” among the Kashmiri is someone who is a distant relation or in Shabarat’s case, his “uncle” was the man who owned the shop he managed. So Uncle and two other men approached and while the hugging was going on, I introduced myself to the others. One worked for the USDA in Washington and the other was a zoologist. It amazes me how a good conversation can bring me around. I asked the zoologist about some large birds I’d seen flying with the crows. Tauheed thought they were all the same species but the bigger bird had wedge shape missing from the trailing edge of his tail. The common term the doctor said was “kite.” I’d heard of them but didn’t know what I was looking at. The man from the Department of Agriculture worked on nematodes, little round worms that raise hell with potatoes in the northwest. I subjected them to my gopher hole theory that earthworms, improved varieties of grass seed, liquid compost, and water could be dumped down gopher holes and “infect the land with life.” I blush but only for a minute. They had undoubtedly met cranks before. The idea is worth a try. There would be low evaporation of water, fertility deposited where it would do the most good (right next to the roots of living grass,) no destructive effects from ultra violet rays, and mixing the earthworms into the liquid doesn’t seem to have any bad effects on the worms…and until they worked their way to the surface, they’d get neither sunburn or be harassed by birds. Sounds good on paper. It might be fun to try. We said our good byes and I was standing straighter and walking as if I had just started the day.
As we rounded the lake, we came by a mosque where the relic of a hair from the beard of the Prophet is housed. Then evening came on and it was suppertime.
Throughout the part of the East, at least the part of where I visit, there is a social system which goes like this.
“What would you like to do?”
My answer, “I would like to do ABC.”
“We can do that but before, we must do XYZ. Come we must do X.”
“I need to do A.”
“We will do A very shortly. First we must do X,” and you do X.
The ABC in this case was to send out some maps to a friend, to visit a houseboat, and to find a consenting ATM machine. I did not want to see any scenery, visit another garden….although I did want to visit the mosque where the Prophet’s whisker is kept, if we had time. I was assured that mailing out the maps would be “no problem,” a favorite description in both Kashmir and Egypt. Having spent hours in post offices while awaiting the proper alignment of the planets, I knew better. I had airline reservations for Delhi and then to Amritsar and so there was no, “when we get around to it.” I needed to do ABC. “No problem.”
The next morning Tauheed and I met and walked down to the shikars, the bumboat that would take you for a turn around the lake or out to a houseboat. Tauheed took the lake tour first. I had ABC on my mind but held off saying more. The boats are about 25 feet long, have a beam of four feet, maybe five. You flop shoeless amidships on pillows beneath a canopy, which sounds very decadent and is, thank God. I was not into to walking, climbing, even if there were a covey of PhDs at the end of the hike. The boatman sits aft on the stern, which is rather high above the water. He had a paddle with a heart shaped blade, with which he slowly stroked the water. It was quiet, once away from the road traffic, and half reclining was a restful way to look out at the world. Since I wasn’t panting or complaining and since it was quiet, I listened as Tauheed sang a song under breath. I asked him if it were a religious song. He was pious but he shook his head. “It’s a love song,” he said. Afterwards we talked to each other. We had to. There was no one else around. He would sing a song now and then and then we’d visit. We hadn’t done much of that up until now. If Ishtaq were around, they talked to each other. So we talked about family and a remedy to grow hair and other important thing of life. We traded stories of daughters; we had one apiece. And we did not talk about wives. He had his reasons; mine were that whenever the subject came up, I was questioned on why I had divorced and why I had not remarried. To be unmarried was something approaching the scandalous. Actually, relaxing on a shikar’s boat I didn’t find it all that scandalous and I wouldn’t have been there had I remarried. Life is like that. Since he was married, there was no need to go into why he hadn’t divorced. I meant to ask his thoughts on arranged marriages but maybe it was a gliding kite, not a house crow that distracted me. He told me about his inheriting the hotel. He was the third generation to own it and like most of the houseboats, it needed renovation, which he was doing a little at a time. He told me how he met Shabarat. It seems that both were casting about for another occupation and hit on AMWAY simultaneously. I asked him how it went and he said that you could make money but you had to stay on top of the operation all the time. Long hours. I’ve never met a veteran of any great length of time with AMWAY. The sales people must burn out quickly. Even though there was almost a twenty year difference between his age and Shabarat’s, he admired Shabarat for his drive and ambition. I knew from watching Shabarat how focused he could be.
Another subject I was curious about was religion. Tauheed said that Shabarat’s piety was another thing he admired about the young man. Like Islam’s forerunners, the worship of the pharos, Judaism, and Christianity, there is supposed to be an answer for all Life’s problems but Life is sloppy and doesn’t recognize the track that religion said that it would follow. What if a person with a pure heart and with pure intentions falls in love with someone on the prohibition list? Tauheed was an iron-clad Moslem. I’ve seen only one Moslem-born person who was other than a true believer and he was a nonbeliever. Nothing in between. Well, one might ask for forgiveness but when a commandment is broken, it can prove to be so much fun that you hate to give it up. I mean like killing. Now there is a real problem solver but killing makes just about everybody’s prohibition list whether being packed down from Mount Sinai or rising up out of your courthouse lawn like a mushroom after a good rain. And falling in love with the forbidden one is so positive, as it is disruptive. We talked about the strictness and certainty of Islam, not human frailties. Orwell created the term “double think.” That’s when you can imagine Adam and Eve chasing each other around a formal Garden of Eden with a snake giggling on a tree limb and picking up an old copy of National Geographic because you want to read about the discovery of Lucy. A person sometime carries his or her own dogfight within him or herself whether their world is filled with certainty or chaos. For the moment we took the discussion no farther.
And then much to my surprise, we dealt with “B!” “B” as in Boat. HB Chicago dead ahead! We slipped our shoes on for the walk from the bumboat, across the dock, to the houseboat and then again stepped out onto a carpet on the covered end deck. I could never figure out which was the bow and which was the stern. Then inside to the salon which was also carpeted and filled with fine furniture. It was “fine” because it was handmade locally, decorated beyond the 2x6 appearance of a picnic table, repaired where broken, and dusted to a polish. While I’ve seen prettier rooms, it had been a while. There was north light coming through the door. The owner showed us one of the bedrooms and I could find nothing I would complain about.
Jammu Kashmir is the northern state of India but once beyond the range, you are in Moslem India, and a jacket feels good in March and shoepacks, a fur cap, and long johns would have felt very good three months before. So this is a different India just as Hawaii or Alaska has little to do with the clichés of Manhattan and New England. The stove in every room was both comforting to see and made me a little homesick for the North.
Ajaz Khar was the manager, owner/operator and the person with whom you made arrangements. I had a dozen questions and his having been the third generation of his houseboats, he was the man with the answers.
How do you take the boats out of the water for bottom paint? You don’t. You pack the joints in the hull with grass. This grass grows out into the water and seals any openings that might occur. I didn’t understand the biology but my feet were dry. How many bedrooms on the boat? I seem to remember three so if you were a guest, you be meeting other people unless you had a party large enough to fill the Chicago. There are private bathrooms with hot water heaters. The bedrooms are dark as the sunlight coming through the windows is absorbed by the aged wooden panels, no plywood. Breakfast and supper are included and also covered is unlimited back-and-forth use of the shikars. Price per night – Rs. 3000 for one person who travels alone. That works out to about $75 a night. Ajaz will knock off 25% for long duration stays…like a month and 40% for winter. I’d bring some heavy wool socks. It gets cold but not enough ice forms to bother the growth of that grass holding the hull planking on.
Web page:www.chicagohouseboats.com,
email: chicagodallake@hotmail.com
You have to bring your own dictionary and Writer’s Market but they have 220 in the sockets in every room and internet next door in another houseboat owned by Ajaz.
Something of a nightmare awaited me for the afternoon. One of those “No problem” problems. I had loaded my pack with a few pounds that I needed to rid myself of and I bought some maps for a friend. The maps came from a local bookstore and Ishtaq and I had bought them a couple of days before. The main map was of India but I found some regional maps that I thought might be of interest to my friend. Tauheed and I had come up with a box for the trove but there was no brown paper or duct tape to strap everything together for a ride half way round the world. Kashmiris have a different answer for ‘hundred-mile-an-hour tape. They wrap a package in cloth and have it sewn shut. Then with magic marker, broad tip, you address the thing. I’d seen Shabarat go this procedure and it seemed to please the post office folks. When in Rome just let ‘em do it their way. I gave a grateful tip to the young man who stitched this mummy shroud closed. Then we can find nobody with a magic marker but my NPS Skillcraft still had a little ink. The man at the post office tells us we must go upstairs to talk to the overhead. Up and through the door and then I saw something you don’t want to see. There were five government servants bending over one printed form and all giving their opinion as to what they saw. What you want to see is a bureaucrat sitting alone at a desk piled high with paperwork. The latter means that they don’t have enough people to get the job done properly and when you approach, they’ll sign or stamp anything you hold out because they want to see the last of you. Five guys bending over the same desk reading the same form….no. It turned out that we dealt with a lady at another desk. This package didn’t rate five professionals. The first thing she had me do was cut into the shroud. It was like taking out my own stitches. Then out came my boxed calling cards, the Writer’s Market, and the maps. She got up from the desk, went to her purse, took out a piece of folded notebook paper and read, probably her own handwriting, that maps could not be sent through the mail.
I didn’t write about this but India is under a siege mentality. The Pakistanis will get you if you don’t watch out. Some theorists believe that India would have fallen apart if it had not been for the threat, real or imaginary, of Pakistan. I won’t take sides on the question. I’m just a guy looking for a place to live. But the lady politely explained that were this map intercepted by the wrong people, it could pinpoint possible targets of military interest. I politely explained that this was for an Alaskan geography teacher who would hold them up before his class and say, “India.” Then she held up the sheet of notebook paper and said that these were her orders….but if we wanted to get this shipped out by sunset, she told me, we might try DHL. I asked DHL why they could send the maps. “Oh, those are tourist maps.” Shabarat has an expression he yells on such occasions, “Incredible India!” So now I’m a half pound lighter having burned up some fat and a good deal of cash but like they say all through the East, “No problem.”
With what was left of the day, we took a three wheeler to see the mosque where they keep a hair from the Prophet’s beard. Tauheed bought some bird food for the mosque pigeons. He showed me some rice mixture with, I suspect, honey and butter. It is one of the most delicious concoctions I’ve ever eaten, and of course, I forgot the name. You can find it being sold or given away in or around mosques or Sikh temples.
The whisker is not on display and is only brought out to show to the faithful on religious holidays. I wasn’t interested in the relic but I would have liked to go inside the mosque. Prayers were going on so Tauheed and I walked around the courtyards. He explained that people prayed in the open air as much as beneath the roof of the mosque. Men prayed first, then the women prayed, and then the “eunuchs.” He said that the last group were rather shy and didn’t come often but could come if they decided to. Then he asked what I thought about eunuchs. I thought this occupation was outsourced with the end of harems but about fifteen minutes later of question and answer, I had an idea of whom he called eunuchs. These were transvestites, who rate somewhere below dogs in India. He asked me what I thought of them, which is another way of his saying that he disapproved of cross-dressers. This was a place where the simplicity of following the teachings came into play. No need to question. It states homosexuality is a sin. I’m not proselytizing so I didn’t ask whether he chose heterosexuality over homosexuality. It was his unquestioning faith that I listened to. With no question, any answer will do. And some how we’ve progressed both technologically as well as intellectually since the last ice age or is that an assumption?
After supper I needed to get my allowance. Tauheed went with me through the dark streets. There are sidewalks in Srinagar but the ATM machines were in another place and when there is no moon, you’d better take to the streets among the sweeping lights of automobiles. No problem? The first ATM machine didn’t work, neither did the second, then the third, no. About this time I realized that I was using my card that only worked during near encounters with comets and asteroids and at only a few banks in India. It was I that was the problem. That happens. Then as we made our way to another machine, my desire to stay away from traffic with the possibility of being run down from behind coming from the rear and my wanting to walk on the pavement collided. I stepped on the edge of the pavement, my foot slipped into the gutter, and down I went. I had a hard time getting up. I needed to sit. I thought I heard something break in the right side of my head. Two people came to me more quickly than Tauheed could move. One said that he was a doctor. The other had a motorcycle with its headlight burning to show that we had a problem and for the traffic to veer off. The doctor asked me if I were seeing double. He moved his finger in front of my face and I told him he waved one finger. Tauheed became a little testy and the two moved on. I appreciated their attention but his take is that they were just answering an incident with as much excitement as they could create. I listened to his argument but I still appreciated the motorcyclist and the doctor coming to my aid. And at the same time thinking that Tauheed could be right.
Then I matched card with machine and had enough cash to keep me out of jail. Nevertheless even after three or four weeks, it hurts to open my mouth to bite into a club sandwich. My arm is better and my hand has healed. Guess I need a course in walking or falling. No, I’m not taking up hang-gliding.
The next morning as I made ready to take a car to the airport, both Tauheed and Ishtaq and the hotel manager, Ourshed, came to see me off. The manager was a level head and Tauheed is fortunate to have him working for him. What came to mind was that with the misery of climbing stairs and walking miles added to the quiet of the bumboat, which led to conversation and to that you add seeing the houseboat caulked with living grass and then the post office lady with her instructions written plainly on notebook paper and add the anxiety of looking for an ATM and the fall, I had decided I really liked Tauheed. We had done a bunch and gone through a bunch and I guess that if that’s not the ingredients for friendship then it’s the pot it’s cooked in. He had all the answers except how to grow hair. I came with nothing and wonder if I’ve learned much. At least I’ve since hidden the credit card that doesn’t work. But I’m still sure of nothing. It was he who said to me, “Pray for me.” And because he became a friend, I have.
#
There was a heavy haze across the tarmac but a blue sky overhead. I hoped to see the mountains. Train travel is great for the up-close look at a country but a view from an airplane is a magic carpet to see the overall lay of the land. The last time I flew the world was covered with cloud and I was stuck with a channel surfer who was alternating between praying and falling asleep on my shoulder. We had a full flight but in the draw of boarding passes I got a window seat.
On the flight to Jammu we cleared the haze which was thick but not endless. This covering was different than what I usually see, in that it was capped by a white layer of cloud. The sky was its normal deep blue that you rarely see standing on the ground in temperate zones or the tropics. It’s the blue seen by mountain climbers and pilots. Towns and villages lay below with their flat roofs squared but each house at an odd angle with its neighbor. Since the buildings predate in many cases the invention of city planning…or even after planning had become common, the odd angles show either that no one paid attention to the planner or instead paid off a city official who could had enforced the planner’s decision.
When we lifted above the clouds on leaving Jammu, I could see the snow capped peaks of the Himalayan foothills. It was exciting to be flying toward “the roof of the world” but even better, I would not have to think about a bus driver’s judgment as to what catches us on hilltops or coming round the next curve when we are in the right lane. We flew on beneath a deep blue sky while below lay a few clouds, mostly haze, and the beginning of the peaks. As we proceeded, I could make out something of an abyss off the left side of the plane’s direction. The mountains ran in parallel lines but between the ridges lay a blue nothingness. Whatever was down there was buried in haze. It could be the Kashmir Valley but we didn’t seem to flying into one end and then heading for Srinagar and Lake Dahl. We were flying perpendicular to that route. So if this were not the Valley of Kashmir and if each end of this rift were closed, this great valley could hold enough water to be called a sea, rather than a lake. Later upon checking the breadth it measured 35 kilometers. We droned on, the near mountains now below us, and I still could make out nothing beneath the haze but the thought occurred to me that if this weren’t the right valley, then the “Vale of Kashmir” must really be remarkable. The poetic license here with the name is Lowell Thomas’s, who over fifty years brought a Cinerama production crew into the valley and presented an introduction to Americans of a little know corner of the Earth. I could never decide whether the word was “vale” or “veil.” This part of India is predominately Moslem and was he likening the haze to a woman’s veil? However that may be unless we banked to the left, at this speed we’d be beyond the 35 kilometers and have a new set of mountain peaks to look down on.
We banked and turned left. This was the Vale of Kashmir! The veil covered the valley floor on which held a lake with a city along its shores. I could see the washes along the mountainsides but the stream beds faded beneath the haze, not connecting to another river and that river with another along the valley floor all of which lead to a lake. But then with the pressure increasing in my ears, the haze gave way and in a few minutes, not only could I see the strands of rivers both dry and flowing braiding together to make a coherent pattern, but I could see villages and settlements and then there was a city and a corner of a lake and down we came to land at Srinagar. My neck hurt from ducking my head down and looking out my little window but what I could see as we touched down was that the mountain tops were visible through the veil. Then walking across the tarmac I found myself in a crisp spring day and that I had come to a place worth the trip.
India is said to be filled with mystery but that may be another name for confusion. Shabarat’s brother was supposed to meet me but somehow we missed. Nevertheless I found cab drivers and houseboat operators who spoke pretty good English and I enjoyed tea and conversation until I finally had to hire a cab for the run into town to find a needle, the Cathay Hotel, in the haystack of several hundred places to stay…and that’s not counting houseboats. Shabarat’s best friend, Tauheed, owned the Cathay. It had been in the family for at least three generations and it was about time to upgrade. However that may be the price was right and the manager, “Ourshed,” a phonetic spelling and I seemed to hit it off so I took the room. Shabarat’s friend was away on business, I supposed and I was hungry so they showed me a nice restaurant and I got down to basics…lunch. Ishtaq, Shabarat’s brother, who had met the plane but not me, joined me at the table and we got acquainted over curry and rice. His English was good but he was distracted by the world of his nineteen years. After lunch we walked along the street bordering the lake. Both on the lakeside as well as the business side, the street had pretty good sidewalks and since the sidewalk remained uniform, I suspect, that it was built by one contractor in one period. Beyond the low wall lay the lake and houseboats beam to beam. I asked Ishtaq whether any new houseboats were being built. I thought if might be interesting to look over the operation on the ways. He said that what you see is what you get. When these were gone, there’d be no more. Labor and materials were too costly. The boats were of different ages and conditions and what the owners would do was to patch up what gives way but as Ishtaq had told me, I saw no evidence of new boats.
After a walk we returned to the hotel and within a short time Tauheed, Shabarat’s friend, joined us. He was in his late thirties, moustached, and with a receding hair line. His hair loss bothered him and he asked if I had a remedy. A hair transplant seemed too much money and trouble but then I remembered an Upjohn treatment, which interested him. He was both intense and pensive and it was he, not Ishtaq, who would show me around the lake and city. Ishtaq was busy obtaining a passport for his sister. And so the next morning, Tauheed began our tour.
What he didn’t know was that I had walked several miles in Delhi during the days before. The first stop was a Hindu temple perched on top of a sharp pointed mountain. We drove a auto rickshaw up most of the mountain but the best was saved till last. True, the remainder of the mountain could be measured in hundreds of feet but my! what an angle of climb! Tauheed told me that when he was a school boy, the teacher would “let” them climb from lake level all the way to the temple. That should have taken a little starch out of them…but probably didn’t. Tauheed climbed gracefully enough but the pilgrims who were twice his age (my age) took the ascent slower. The walk was made of stone pavement and steps. This was not dirt, roots, and rocks route but I began feeling the hike to and through the Red Fort from the day before in Delhi catching up with me.
All the time as we climbed, I could hear a fast, tongue-tripping song, coming down from above. The tape seemed to be in a loop like an eight track. Religious music normally has all the grace of an elephant mired in a mud hole. This music had real zing. I asked Tauheed about it. He confirmed that it was religious in nature. He didn’t approve. Moslems wouldn’t have music piped out of a mosque like that, he said. That for the most part is true but the call to prayer is sung. In the U.S. we have Gospel music that sounds something like an incomplete road kill. Where did this music get the zip? I asked if this were an old Hindu hymn. He said he didn’t think so. I suspect there may be a Pentecostal reformation going on in Hindu music. Music like that might find a positive reception in the U.S. I hear snatches of it now and then from my memory and this happened three or four weeks ago.
We topped out onto a terrace to get a bird’s eye view of the city and lake but there was still a pinnacle to go. The last steps were almost like climbing a ladder and then I could see the phallus inside the small, well-lighted temple. The story I got from Tauheed, a Moslem, was that a god, who would sit on this mountain top and meditate, was surprised one day by a visitor and withdrew into this three foot high, one foot in diameter, stone. Someone had poured water or oil over the stone, which made it look as if it had experienced an orgasm. The stone phallus is common in Hindu temples and shrines. It was the stone’s polish and the light reflecting off the liquid that made this one memorable.
Tauheed’s plan was to circle the lake, which was in turn encircled with gardens from the Mogul period, some were maintained; others were not. The princes enjoyed the mountain scenery, the symmetry of their gardens, and the sound of their “river of paradise” flowing arrow straight through the garden. And according to the small paintings I’ve seen, a prince was to frolic with his ladies in some shady spot while listening to songs of his musicians. Since the gardens cover many acres and can run almost a half mile long, it looked to be plenty of room to frolic. The public benefited also because they got to build and maintain the thing. On garden two or three, I found a shade tree and while I had no lady with whom to frolic, I wouldn’t have had the energy anyway. I tried to fall asleep. My legs were ready for burial. Tauheed called his sister and while they visited for a half-hour, my legs resurrected. On garden four or five, Tauheed saw his “uncle.” An “uncle” among the Kashmiri is someone who is a distant relation or in Shabarat’s case, his “uncle” was the man who owned the shop he managed. So Uncle and two other men approached and while the hugging was going on, I introduced myself to the others. One worked for the USDA in Washington and the other was a zoologist. It amazes me how a good conversation can bring me around. I asked the zoologist about some large birds I’d seen flying with the crows. Tauheed thought they were all the same species but the bigger bird had wedge shape missing from the trailing edge of his tail. The common term the doctor said was “kite.” I’d heard of them but didn’t know what I was looking at. The man from the Department of Agriculture worked on nematodes, little round worms that raise hell with potatoes in the northwest. I subjected them to my gopher hole theory that earthworms, improved varieties of grass seed, liquid compost, and water could be dumped down gopher holes and “infect the land with life.” I blush but only for a minute. They had undoubtedly met cranks before. The idea is worth a try. There would be low evaporation of water, fertility deposited where it would do the most good (right next to the roots of living grass,) no destructive effects from ultra violet rays, and mixing the earthworms into the liquid doesn’t seem to have any bad effects on the worms…and until they worked their way to the surface, they’d get neither sunburn or be harassed by birds. Sounds good on paper. It might be fun to try. We said our good byes and I was standing straighter and walking as if I had just started the day.
As we rounded the lake, we came by a mosque where the relic of a hair from the beard of the Prophet is housed. Then evening came on and it was suppertime.
Throughout the part of the East, at least the part of where I visit, there is a social system which goes like this.
“What would you like to do?”
My answer, “I would like to do ABC.”
“We can do that but before, we must do XYZ. Come we must do X.”
“I need to do A.”
“We will do A very shortly. First we must do X,” and you do X.
The ABC in this case was to send out some maps to a friend, to visit a houseboat, and to find a consenting ATM machine. I did not want to see any scenery, visit another garden….although I did want to visit the mosque where the Prophet’s whisker is kept, if we had time. I was assured that mailing out the maps would be “no problem,” a favorite description in both Kashmir and Egypt. Having spent hours in post offices while awaiting the proper alignment of the planets, I knew better. I had airline reservations for Delhi and then to Amritsar and so there was no, “when we get around to it.” I needed to do ABC. “No problem.”
The next morning Tauheed and I met and walked down to the shikars, the bumboat that would take you for a turn around the lake or out to a houseboat. Tauheed took the lake tour first. I had ABC on my mind but held off saying more. The boats are about 25 feet long, have a beam of four feet, maybe five. You flop shoeless amidships on pillows beneath a canopy, which sounds very decadent and is, thank God. I was not into to walking, climbing, even if there were a covey of PhDs at the end of the hike. The boatman sits aft on the stern, which is rather high above the water. He had a paddle with a heart shaped blade, with which he slowly stroked the water. It was quiet, once away from the road traffic, and half reclining was a restful way to look out at the world. Since I wasn’t panting or complaining and since it was quiet, I listened as Tauheed sang a song under breath. I asked him if it were a religious song. He was pious but he shook his head. “It’s a love song,” he said. Afterwards we talked to each other. We had to. There was no one else around. He would sing a song now and then and then we’d visit. We hadn’t done much of that up until now. If Ishtaq were around, they talked to each other. So we talked about family and a remedy to grow hair and other important thing of life. We traded stories of daughters; we had one apiece. And we did not talk about wives. He had his reasons; mine were that whenever the subject came up, I was questioned on why I had divorced and why I had not remarried. To be unmarried was something approaching the scandalous. Actually, relaxing on a shikar’s boat I didn’t find it all that scandalous and I wouldn’t have been there had I remarried. Life is like that. Since he was married, there was no need to go into why he hadn’t divorced. I meant to ask his thoughts on arranged marriages but maybe it was a gliding kite, not a house crow that distracted me. He told me about his inheriting the hotel. He was the third generation to own it and like most of the houseboats, it needed renovation, which he was doing a little at a time. He told me how he met Shabarat. It seems that both were casting about for another occupation and hit on AMWAY simultaneously. I asked him how it went and he said that you could make money but you had to stay on top of the operation all the time. Long hours. I’ve never met a veteran of any great length of time with AMWAY. The sales people must burn out quickly. Even though there was almost a twenty year difference between his age and Shabarat’s, he admired Shabarat for his drive and ambition. I knew from watching Shabarat how focused he could be.
Another subject I was curious about was religion. Tauheed said that Shabarat’s piety was another thing he admired about the young man. Like Islam’s forerunners, the worship of the pharos, Judaism, and Christianity, there is supposed to be an answer for all Life’s problems but Life is sloppy and doesn’t recognize the track that religion said that it would follow. What if a person with a pure heart and with pure intentions falls in love with someone on the prohibition list? Tauheed was an iron-clad Moslem. I’ve seen only one Moslem-born person who was other than a true believer and he was a nonbeliever. Nothing in between. Well, one might ask for forgiveness but when a commandment is broken, it can prove to be so much fun that you hate to give it up. I mean like killing. Now there is a real problem solver but killing makes just about everybody’s prohibition list whether being packed down from Mount Sinai or rising up out of your courthouse lawn like a mushroom after a good rain. And falling in love with the forbidden one is so positive, as it is disruptive. We talked about the strictness and certainty of Islam, not human frailties. Orwell created the term “double think.” That’s when you can imagine Adam and Eve chasing each other around a formal Garden of Eden with a snake giggling on a tree limb and picking up an old copy of National Geographic because you want to read about the discovery of Lucy. A person sometime carries his or her own dogfight within him or herself whether their world is filled with certainty or chaos. For the moment we took the discussion no farther.
And then much to my surprise, we dealt with “B!” “B” as in Boat. HB Chicago dead ahead! We slipped our shoes on for the walk from the bumboat, across the dock, to the houseboat and then again stepped out onto a carpet on the covered end deck. I could never figure out which was the bow and which was the stern. Then inside to the salon which was also carpeted and filled with fine furniture. It was “fine” because it was handmade locally, decorated beyond the 2x6 appearance of a picnic table, repaired where broken, and dusted to a polish. While I’ve seen prettier rooms, it had been a while. There was north light coming through the door. The owner showed us one of the bedrooms and I could find nothing I would complain about.
Jammu Kashmir is the northern state of India but once beyond the range, you are in Moslem India, and a jacket feels good in March and shoepacks, a fur cap, and long johns would have felt very good three months before. So this is a different India just as Hawaii or Alaska has little to do with the clichés of Manhattan and New England. The stove in every room was both comforting to see and made me a little homesick for the North.
Ajaz Khar was the manager, owner/operator and the person with whom you made arrangements. I had a dozen questions and his having been the third generation of his houseboats, he was the man with the answers.
How do you take the boats out of the water for bottom paint? You don’t. You pack the joints in the hull with grass. This grass grows out into the water and seals any openings that might occur. I didn’t understand the biology but my feet were dry. How many bedrooms on the boat? I seem to remember three so if you were a guest, you be meeting other people unless you had a party large enough to fill the Chicago. There are private bathrooms with hot water heaters. The bedrooms are dark as the sunlight coming through the windows is absorbed by the aged wooden panels, no plywood. Breakfast and supper are included and also covered is unlimited back-and-forth use of the shikars. Price per night – Rs. 3000 for one person who travels alone. That works out to about $75 a night. Ajaz will knock off 25% for long duration stays…like a month and 40% for winter. I’d bring some heavy wool socks. It gets cold but not enough ice forms to bother the growth of that grass holding the hull planking on.
Web page:www.chicagohouseboats.com,
email: chicagodallake@hotmail.com
You have to bring your own dictionary and Writer’s Market but they have 220 in the sockets in every room and internet next door in another houseboat owned by Ajaz.
Something of a nightmare awaited me for the afternoon. One of those “No problem” problems. I had loaded my pack with a few pounds that I needed to rid myself of and I bought some maps for a friend. The maps came from a local bookstore and Ishtaq and I had bought them a couple of days before. The main map was of India but I found some regional maps that I thought might be of interest to my friend. Tauheed and I had come up with a box for the trove but there was no brown paper or duct tape to strap everything together for a ride half way round the world. Kashmiris have a different answer for ‘hundred-mile-an-hour tape. They wrap a package in cloth and have it sewn shut. Then with magic marker, broad tip, you address the thing. I’d seen Shabarat go this procedure and it seemed to please the post office folks. When in Rome just let ‘em do it their way. I gave a grateful tip to the young man who stitched this mummy shroud closed. Then we can find nobody with a magic marker but my NPS Skillcraft still had a little ink. The man at the post office tells us we must go upstairs to talk to the overhead. Up and through the door and then I saw something you don’t want to see. There were five government servants bending over one printed form and all giving their opinion as to what they saw. What you want to see is a bureaucrat sitting alone at a desk piled high with paperwork. The latter means that they don’t have enough people to get the job done properly and when you approach, they’ll sign or stamp anything you hold out because they want to see the last of you. Five guys bending over the same desk reading the same form….no. It turned out that we dealt with a lady at another desk. This package didn’t rate five professionals. The first thing she had me do was cut into the shroud. It was like taking out my own stitches. Then out came my boxed calling cards, the Writer’s Market, and the maps. She got up from the desk, went to her purse, took out a piece of folded notebook paper and read, probably her own handwriting, that maps could not be sent through the mail.
I didn’t write about this but India is under a siege mentality. The Pakistanis will get you if you don’t watch out. Some theorists believe that India would have fallen apart if it had not been for the threat, real or imaginary, of Pakistan. I won’t take sides on the question. I’m just a guy looking for a place to live. But the lady politely explained that were this map intercepted by the wrong people, it could pinpoint possible targets of military interest. I politely explained that this was for an Alaskan geography teacher who would hold them up before his class and say, “India.” Then she held up the sheet of notebook paper and said that these were her orders….but if we wanted to get this shipped out by sunset, she told me, we might try DHL. I asked DHL why they could send the maps. “Oh, those are tourist maps.” Shabarat has an expression he yells on such occasions, “Incredible India!” So now I’m a half pound lighter having burned up some fat and a good deal of cash but like they say all through the East, “No problem.”
With what was left of the day, we took a three wheeler to see the mosque where they keep a hair from the Prophet’s beard. Tauheed bought some bird food for the mosque pigeons. He showed me some rice mixture with, I suspect, honey and butter. It is one of the most delicious concoctions I’ve ever eaten, and of course, I forgot the name. You can find it being sold or given away in or around mosques or Sikh temples.
The whisker is not on display and is only brought out to show to the faithful on religious holidays. I wasn’t interested in the relic but I would have liked to go inside the mosque. Prayers were going on so Tauheed and I walked around the courtyards. He explained that people prayed in the open air as much as beneath the roof of the mosque. Men prayed first, then the women prayed, and then the “eunuchs.” He said that the last group were rather shy and didn’t come often but could come if they decided to. Then he asked what I thought about eunuchs. I thought this occupation was outsourced with the end of harems but about fifteen minutes later of question and answer, I had an idea of whom he called eunuchs. These were transvestites, who rate somewhere below dogs in India. He asked me what I thought of them, which is another way of his saying that he disapproved of cross-dressers. This was a place where the simplicity of following the teachings came into play. No need to question. It states homosexuality is a sin. I’m not proselytizing so I didn’t ask whether he chose heterosexuality over homosexuality. It was his unquestioning faith that I listened to. With no question, any answer will do. And some how we’ve progressed both technologically as well as intellectually since the last ice age or is that an assumption?
After supper I needed to get my allowance. Tauheed went with me through the dark streets. There are sidewalks in Srinagar but the ATM machines were in another place and when there is no moon, you’d better take to the streets among the sweeping lights of automobiles. No problem? The first ATM machine didn’t work, neither did the second, then the third, no. About this time I realized that I was using my card that only worked during near encounters with comets and asteroids and at only a few banks in India. It was I that was the problem. That happens. Then as we made our way to another machine, my desire to stay away from traffic with the possibility of being run down from behind coming from the rear and my wanting to walk on the pavement collided. I stepped on the edge of the pavement, my foot slipped into the gutter, and down I went. I had a hard time getting up. I needed to sit. I thought I heard something break in the right side of my head. Two people came to me more quickly than Tauheed could move. One said that he was a doctor. The other had a motorcycle with its headlight burning to show that we had a problem and for the traffic to veer off. The doctor asked me if I were seeing double. He moved his finger in front of my face and I told him he waved one finger. Tauheed became a little testy and the two moved on. I appreciated their attention but his take is that they were just answering an incident with as much excitement as they could create. I listened to his argument but I still appreciated the motorcyclist and the doctor coming to my aid. And at the same time thinking that Tauheed could be right.
Then I matched card with machine and had enough cash to keep me out of jail. Nevertheless even after three or four weeks, it hurts to open my mouth to bite into a club sandwich. My arm is better and my hand has healed. Guess I need a course in walking or falling. No, I’m not taking up hang-gliding.
The next morning as I made ready to take a car to the airport, both Tauheed and Ishtaq and the hotel manager, Ourshed, came to see me off. The manager was a level head and Tauheed is fortunate to have him working for him. What came to mind was that with the misery of climbing stairs and walking miles added to the quiet of the bumboat, which led to conversation and to that you add seeing the houseboat caulked with living grass and then the post office lady with her instructions written plainly on notebook paper and add the anxiety of looking for an ATM and the fall, I had decided I really liked Tauheed. We had done a bunch and gone through a bunch and I guess that if that’s not the ingredients for friendship then it’s the pot it’s cooked in. He had all the answers except how to grow hair. I came with nothing and wonder if I’ve learned much. At least I’ve since hidden the credit card that doesn’t work. But I’m still sure of nothing. It was he who said to me, “Pray for me.” And because he became a friend, I have.
#
Mussoorie
There is a great plain running from east (Kolkata) to the northwest in the neighborhood of Delhi. The snowmelt runs down to the Bengali side of India from the Himalayas. I’ve read that the invaders from central Asia came along the same route, consequently, the cultures took the same path. And since the railroads work well across the flat ground, this is a traveler’s favorite route. Kolkata, Patna, Varanasi, Lucknow, Agra, Delhi (New and Old.) I had visited most of those places and was feeling the bite of time. It was late March and I had to do my “day abroad” about the first week in April. My list of places to visit was Mussoorie, Shimla, Srinagar, and I added Amritsar, since “it was on the way.” As the train rocked along the right of way, I decided on another stopover, Lucknow. Kipling wrote about the glorious city in Kim but Lonely Planet panned it saying that the glory had long ago faded. What was important historically was that this was the site of the Residency, the focal point during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. There are a number of stories as to the causes but the effects were even better known. The British were cut off from the outside and it took months before a rescue could be completed. An outcome was that the British Crown and her government took over the governing of India from the East Indian Company and railroad building went into high gear. The great cities were no longer isolated and with the railroads, India became a different country. The railroad is still heavily subsidized and at least one observer reckoned that a third of India’s population rides along these tracks at any given moment. That’s a tad high but cheap travel is a good excuse to drop by for a visit from a hundred miles away rather making a phone call. Now after all that, the conductor wouldn’t change my ticket for a Lucknow stop over! Bad planning on my part. There is a good chance, I’ll be back.
This express stops and goes no farther at Derah Dun. This is where you leave the track for a road and hopefully a bus driver who will die at some later date. Since I’m playing catch up on this writing, the trip of ascending into the foothills is somewhat vague. I do remember a lady named Lulu. I know no one of that name and since I can’t find her name and address, she’s going to be Lulu until I do find something to the contrary. Lulu was surely to the contrary.
I met Lulu on the bus going to Mussoorie. She spoke English as well as anybody. It seems that she came from a Christian family of missionaries. I think it was her father who was the one who answered the call and so while she sat behind me on the bus, we conversed during the climb up the mountain. She said that she’d show me a hotel when we got there. The place was called the Starz Hotel, which is probably a take off on Stars’ Hotel. I took a look and felt how heavy they pack was and wondered which of us was taking leave of their senses. The Starz could refer to one or two stars. It really wasn’t that grand but with the infusion of a hundred thousand dollars, it might match up to what the original designed called for. What I didn’t know was that I was expected to bring the hundred thousand dollars. So I was about to walk out when they dropped the price per night to a number I could count to and then Lulu suggested that we order lunch. She did the ordering and out came enough food to feed a round table of six of us with food left over. Lulu had the extra food doggy bagged and told me that she “would open her heart to me.”
Have I used the term “Americanist?” An Americanist is someone who decides that what you would really like to do is to sponsor their going to America where they will get a job and find happiness. All you have to do is take care of the paperwork and guarantee their solvency, look after their expenses until the first pay check, and should these plans not work out, you provide the ticket home just as you bought the ticket over…with the understanding that they will pay you back. As an Americanist, Lulu promised more. Noting my gray hair, she decided that I needed someone to look after me and since she spoke Hindi, she would be my nursemaid or mistress or tour guide or…. India has many, many Americanists. They are not all of a particular religious sect that believes in levitation. All faiths are represented so my guess is that it has something to do with Bollywood. Nothing else I can think of is such a complete divorce from reality but Lulu was surely the most imaginative of the Americanists to date. She went away with her sacks of food to see her friend and would call me to show me the town tomorrow morning.
She had a habit common to many people east or west and exhibited it the next morning when she called to tell me to say that she was not going to be able to show me around. I explained that I really wasn’t interested in the tour, that I had been over “fooded,” not only when she ordered in Hindi but at breakfast as well and mentally toting up my bill, I had just used up a week’s worth of travel allowance on a night and two meals at the hotel. All this time she was explaining that it was Good Friday and that she wanted to attend church. She did ask the blessing over the banquet we’d been served. By the time she would have called again, I was down the road wondering if she were a shill for the establishment. Checking out was not a quiet affair. And so I went looking for an acacia tree and found the Pik-Nik Hotel for about $7.50 a night, clean, had hot water, and a place I could den up as to get ahead of the story, I was about to come down with a prize winning cold. That afternoon before coming down with this bug, I walked along Camel Back Road to look at the Himalayas.
Mussoorie is on a sharp ridge even more pronounced than Kodaikanal. The elevation is about the same, somewhere between 7,200 and 8,000 feet depending on where you are standing. Most of Mussoorie seemed to lie on the south side of the ridge; Camel Back Road lay on the north, the side where you would see the Himalayas in the distance.
The Himalayas did not show. I found that they seldom showed except in winter and this was spring and although there were no leaves on anything, the local snow had melted. I walked along the bends and curves of the road. What really drew on my attention were the houses and how they were built on such a steep grade in many places exceeding 45 degrees. The designers simply built two and three story foundations on the valley side. Everything was made of stone. I can guess that the drainage system on the uphill side must have been both sophisticated and well maintained. We lose hillsides complete with houses in Sitka. Some sections of California downhill rides in houses are a televised spectator sport. Some of these houses had been here probably for a hundred years and they were right where they were built. On some the roofs were flat and this served as a driveway and car park. I suspect the houses were pretty on the inside and surely the valley and the ranges out in front of the houses were spectacular.
I passed the cemetery with a small chapel complete with transept and buttresses and then met a German couple coming from the other direction and we visited for probably an hour before continuing on. This would be my last healthy afternoon in Mussoorie. I was already feeling a tickle in the back of my nasal cavity. So now coming round a break in the ridge, I took a rest on a park bench. The street sellers peddled food here and the macaques decided to join the noshers. What an obnoxious bunch but at the same time, I guess I could spend the day watching monkeys. There was a big fellow sitting on a fence about ten or fifteen feet away. He had found something to eat but as if practicing, he’d throw a bluff at me a time or two a minute. I wasn’t after his food nor did I have any worth his extortion. I guess when you are the alpha male, you need to keep in up the habit of saying, Boo!
A friend in the States, who had told me about Mussoorie, had taught at Woodstock, a private school here and it is somehow related to Kodaikanal International School. I hadn’t seen the school and so asked a very international looking group of students where it was. Like the Himalayas, it didn’t show. There was a long cab ride out of town and evening was coming on. I found a place to eat, amused a kid with magic tricks, and his uncle who lived in Southern California joined us and we had a good talk about possibly finding an apartment here. It takes an investment in time to feel at home in a place and while Mussoorie seemed a nice enough place, the snow on steep streets really didn’t call to me. We said our good byes and I went back to the Pik-Nik Hotel to nurse a runny nose for the next few days. At $7.50 a night, I could afford to be sick for a while but April wasn’t all that far away and I needed to be somewhere else.
One place I considered for my Day of Exile was Lassa. Since China/Indian relations are still chilly, having had a couple of wars, the way the Lassa thing is done is first you fly to Katmandu and then from there over the mountains to Tibet. It was a thought but by this time I was thinking about the Nile and so shelved the Tibetan idea for another trip and another year.
Sick or healthy, you still have to eat. I found an upscale place called the Four Seasons that made a reasonable breakfast and an evening meal. This second-story restaurant became my watering hole. One evening after dark while having supper, I heard chanting from the street below. The voices were in unison; they had practiced. The waiters and I went to an open window and stuck our heads out. The street below was filled with smartly dressed Tibetans, marching and chanting slogans, “What do you want?” “Freedom!” Everything was very orderly, faces were scrubbed, hair combed, clothes clean, but the message was certain. “Free Tibet!” All over the world you see a bumper sticker campaign but with Tibet beneath the paw of China, I’ve never expected much. The next morning the pictures and news from the rioting in Lassa came over CNN, Asian Desk. Something was to be different this time. At least the Olympic sports fans would be distracted momentarily from the games.
And so I felt miserable. Just an hour away from the bed was enough to wear me out. I did try to keep up with the email but that came to a close. Beware of cyber cafes with an attached pool hall! The kats from a strenuous game of eight ball, take a break and play video games. As long as there is some respect for the other customers….. The young manager showed me the machine I was to use and when whoops of victory and defeat rose behind me, I waited until the noise died down and continued writing. Then the louts from the pool room smoked beneath the no smoking sign. As a former smoker, I’m really not a born-again fundamentalist non-smoker but the rowdiness was really becoming distracting. I was in the middle of a note to Harvey Brandt when the manager asked me to give up my computer, so that the boys could use the gaming software. I said, no, that I’d be here for a while. He looked peeved. I was being uncooperative. And then I told him how uncooperative I could be. First I raised hell about the noise, then the smoking, then his distraction of asking me to move and then like an unimaginative jazz musician, having established a theme, I played variations back and forth. So by now I couldn’t think what I was going to write to Harvey and signed off. The manager simply couldn’t understand why I was so upset. I was too sick to look for another c-café and so there was a news blackout from the hill station where it snows buckets in the winter. I’ve seen many winters and many buckets of snow. Mussoorie is a nice enough place if you get there before the summer crowds as I did. You can’t see the Himalayas but if you want to see mountains, try the pass in Nepal at the town of Dahman. There’s a haze there too but look above the haze. Look up. And you thought you knew what mountains looked like!
#
This express stops and goes no farther at Derah Dun. This is where you leave the track for a road and hopefully a bus driver who will die at some later date. Since I’m playing catch up on this writing, the trip of ascending into the foothills is somewhat vague. I do remember a lady named Lulu. I know no one of that name and since I can’t find her name and address, she’s going to be Lulu until I do find something to the contrary. Lulu was surely to the contrary.
I met Lulu on the bus going to Mussoorie. She spoke English as well as anybody. It seems that she came from a Christian family of missionaries. I think it was her father who was the one who answered the call and so while she sat behind me on the bus, we conversed during the climb up the mountain. She said that she’d show me a hotel when we got there. The place was called the Starz Hotel, which is probably a take off on Stars’ Hotel. I took a look and felt how heavy they pack was and wondered which of us was taking leave of their senses. The Starz could refer to one or two stars. It really wasn’t that grand but with the infusion of a hundred thousand dollars, it might match up to what the original designed called for. What I didn’t know was that I was expected to bring the hundred thousand dollars. So I was about to walk out when they dropped the price per night to a number I could count to and then Lulu suggested that we order lunch. She did the ordering and out came enough food to feed a round table of six of us with food left over. Lulu had the extra food doggy bagged and told me that she “would open her heart to me.”
Have I used the term “Americanist?” An Americanist is someone who decides that what you would really like to do is to sponsor their going to America where they will get a job and find happiness. All you have to do is take care of the paperwork and guarantee their solvency, look after their expenses until the first pay check, and should these plans not work out, you provide the ticket home just as you bought the ticket over…with the understanding that they will pay you back. As an Americanist, Lulu promised more. Noting my gray hair, she decided that I needed someone to look after me and since she spoke Hindi, she would be my nursemaid or mistress or tour guide or…. India has many, many Americanists. They are not all of a particular religious sect that believes in levitation. All faiths are represented so my guess is that it has something to do with Bollywood. Nothing else I can think of is such a complete divorce from reality but Lulu was surely the most imaginative of the Americanists to date. She went away with her sacks of food to see her friend and would call me to show me the town tomorrow morning.
She had a habit common to many people east or west and exhibited it the next morning when she called to tell me to say that she was not going to be able to show me around. I explained that I really wasn’t interested in the tour, that I had been over “fooded,” not only when she ordered in Hindi but at breakfast as well and mentally toting up my bill, I had just used up a week’s worth of travel allowance on a night and two meals at the hotel. All this time she was explaining that it was Good Friday and that she wanted to attend church. She did ask the blessing over the banquet we’d been served. By the time she would have called again, I was down the road wondering if she were a shill for the establishment. Checking out was not a quiet affair. And so I went looking for an acacia tree and found the Pik-Nik Hotel for about $7.50 a night, clean, had hot water, and a place I could den up as to get ahead of the story, I was about to come down with a prize winning cold. That afternoon before coming down with this bug, I walked along Camel Back Road to look at the Himalayas.
Mussoorie is on a sharp ridge even more pronounced than Kodaikanal. The elevation is about the same, somewhere between 7,200 and 8,000 feet depending on where you are standing. Most of Mussoorie seemed to lie on the south side of the ridge; Camel Back Road lay on the north, the side where you would see the Himalayas in the distance.
The Himalayas did not show. I found that they seldom showed except in winter and this was spring and although there were no leaves on anything, the local snow had melted. I walked along the bends and curves of the road. What really drew on my attention were the houses and how they were built on such a steep grade in many places exceeding 45 degrees. The designers simply built two and three story foundations on the valley side. Everything was made of stone. I can guess that the drainage system on the uphill side must have been both sophisticated and well maintained. We lose hillsides complete with houses in Sitka. Some sections of California downhill rides in houses are a televised spectator sport. Some of these houses had been here probably for a hundred years and they were right where they were built. On some the roofs were flat and this served as a driveway and car park. I suspect the houses were pretty on the inside and surely the valley and the ranges out in front of the houses were spectacular.
I passed the cemetery with a small chapel complete with transept and buttresses and then met a German couple coming from the other direction and we visited for probably an hour before continuing on. This would be my last healthy afternoon in Mussoorie. I was already feeling a tickle in the back of my nasal cavity. So now coming round a break in the ridge, I took a rest on a park bench. The street sellers peddled food here and the macaques decided to join the noshers. What an obnoxious bunch but at the same time, I guess I could spend the day watching monkeys. There was a big fellow sitting on a fence about ten or fifteen feet away. He had found something to eat but as if practicing, he’d throw a bluff at me a time or two a minute. I wasn’t after his food nor did I have any worth his extortion. I guess when you are the alpha male, you need to keep in up the habit of saying, Boo!
A friend in the States, who had told me about Mussoorie, had taught at Woodstock, a private school here and it is somehow related to Kodaikanal International School. I hadn’t seen the school and so asked a very international looking group of students where it was. Like the Himalayas, it didn’t show. There was a long cab ride out of town and evening was coming on. I found a place to eat, amused a kid with magic tricks, and his uncle who lived in Southern California joined us and we had a good talk about possibly finding an apartment here. It takes an investment in time to feel at home in a place and while Mussoorie seemed a nice enough place, the snow on steep streets really didn’t call to me. We said our good byes and I went back to the Pik-Nik Hotel to nurse a runny nose for the next few days. At $7.50 a night, I could afford to be sick for a while but April wasn’t all that far away and I needed to be somewhere else.
One place I considered for my Day of Exile was Lassa. Since China/Indian relations are still chilly, having had a couple of wars, the way the Lassa thing is done is first you fly to Katmandu and then from there over the mountains to Tibet. It was a thought but by this time I was thinking about the Nile and so shelved the Tibetan idea for another trip and another year.
Sick or healthy, you still have to eat. I found an upscale place called the Four Seasons that made a reasonable breakfast and an evening meal. This second-story restaurant became my watering hole. One evening after dark while having supper, I heard chanting from the street below. The voices were in unison; they had practiced. The waiters and I went to an open window and stuck our heads out. The street below was filled with smartly dressed Tibetans, marching and chanting slogans, “What do you want?” “Freedom!” Everything was very orderly, faces were scrubbed, hair combed, clothes clean, but the message was certain. “Free Tibet!” All over the world you see a bumper sticker campaign but with Tibet beneath the paw of China, I’ve never expected much. The next morning the pictures and news from the rioting in Lassa came over CNN, Asian Desk. Something was to be different this time. At least the Olympic sports fans would be distracted momentarily from the games.
And so I felt miserable. Just an hour away from the bed was enough to wear me out. I did try to keep up with the email but that came to a close. Beware of cyber cafes with an attached pool hall! The kats from a strenuous game of eight ball, take a break and play video games. As long as there is some respect for the other customers….. The young manager showed me the machine I was to use and when whoops of victory and defeat rose behind me, I waited until the noise died down and continued writing. Then the louts from the pool room smoked beneath the no smoking sign. As a former smoker, I’m really not a born-again fundamentalist non-smoker but the rowdiness was really becoming distracting. I was in the middle of a note to Harvey Brandt when the manager asked me to give up my computer, so that the boys could use the gaming software. I said, no, that I’d be here for a while. He looked peeved. I was being uncooperative. And then I told him how uncooperative I could be. First I raised hell about the noise, then the smoking, then his distraction of asking me to move and then like an unimaginative jazz musician, having established a theme, I played variations back and forth. So by now I couldn’t think what I was going to write to Harvey and signed off. The manager simply couldn’t understand why I was so upset. I was too sick to look for another c-café and so there was a news blackout from the hill station where it snows buckets in the winter. I’ve seen many winters and many buckets of snow. Mussoorie is a nice enough place if you get there before the summer crowds as I did. You can’t see the Himalayas but if you want to see mountains, try the pass in Nepal at the town of Dahman. There’s a haze there too but look above the haze. Look up. And you thought you knew what mountains looked like!
#
On Leaving Kolkata
The auto rickshaw driver and I made our way through the twilight and tight traffic on the bridge into a tighter matrix of vehicles that had turned off the main road so as to reach the Howdah railway station. We moved slowly, a half a foot, a foot and a half. To the left of traffic and between this flow and the next, there stood a concrete block, which supported a pair of poles, which in turned supported a large sign. I would never have paid attention to it except for a little boy of about two years old who sat on the block, legs dangling down. He wept from as deeply in his gut as you can bring up a cry. His clothes were dirty, his hair closely cropped, and he was very much alone, something I had not seen before. Babies ride on their mother’s hip. What was this kid doing out here alone?
At the time I decided that the mother had stepped away for some reason but the answer wasn’t good enough. If it were, I’d probably forgotten the boy by now. The question comes back in the quiet time, when emergencies have emerged and been dealt with, when another “something new” has become part of the fabric of memory. What was this kid doing out there, sitting on a block of concrete in the last minutes of a faded day?
When I was small, my parents left me to run an errand, to do this or that. I remember that the longest time you could put into words was, “She’ll be back in a little while.” Once my grandmother thought I was old enough to sit in a barber chair while she took care of some other business. Mother took me to be photo studio and left me there with the photographer. He told me, “She’ll be back in a little while.”
If this boy was the sympathy half of a begging team, he might have been left because he had grown old enough to walk and not be carried. He might have been replaced by a younger brother or sister. If that were so, what must the mother be going through at that moment. The baby was left on a concrete block between two steel poles in place of bulrushes. A pharos’s daughter might not be along for a while, if ever.
The idea that the mother had just stepped away lodged in my head and we drove on but the memory of tears falling makes the question restless and come again for an answer. Somewhere out there in the always-in-motion sea of bobbing heads, there was a woman, who was dieing while she kept in step with the crowd.
#
At the time I decided that the mother had stepped away for some reason but the answer wasn’t good enough. If it were, I’d probably forgotten the boy by now. The question comes back in the quiet time, when emergencies have emerged and been dealt with, when another “something new” has become part of the fabric of memory. What was this kid doing out there, sitting on a block of concrete in the last minutes of a faded day?
When I was small, my parents left me to run an errand, to do this or that. I remember that the longest time you could put into words was, “She’ll be back in a little while.” Once my grandmother thought I was old enough to sit in a barber chair while she took care of some other business. Mother took me to be photo studio and left me there with the photographer. He told me, “She’ll be back in a little while.”
If this boy was the sympathy half of a begging team, he might have been left because he had grown old enough to walk and not be carried. He might have been replaced by a younger brother or sister. If that were so, what must the mother be going through at that moment. The baby was left on a concrete block between two steel poles in place of bulrushes. A pharos’s daughter might not be along for a while, if ever.
The idea that the mother had just stepped away lodged in my head and we drove on but the memory of tears falling makes the question restless and come again for an answer. Somewhere out there in the always-in-motion sea of bobbing heads, there was a woman, who was dieing while she kept in step with the crowd.
#
Kolkata III
Kolkata III
Breakfast on Sudder Street in the open air place, where I’d been eating. I had a new waiter. He seemed like a pretty good fellow. The little café had two aisles and the two waiters worked an aisle apiece. Things did not go smoothly. With over 1500 languages in India, it doesn’t take the Almighty to confuse workers. Whatever it was, breakfast was not quick in coming. Two Oriental ladies left before the food reached them. I’d have left had I been in a hurry but my empty belly and overly tired legs told me no. Voices raised behind the counter but my new waiter gave as much as he took. I’d be back for supper and for my meals the next day. It may have been the new man’s weekend; I didn’t see him around after that meal.
This would be an easy day. The National Museum is at the corner of Chowringhee and Sudder so I strolled down and entered the huge building. One day a museum will put on an exhibit of how museums have exhibited what they have to show but do it historically. Probably the earliest museums were temples where the handiwork of the god(s) was displayed. One story I read when I was a boy was about some Greek sailors, who explored the west coast of Africa. They captured a hairy black woman, who after a time took the ship and a few sailors apart. It was decided that she needed killing and afterwards they skinned her and preserved the hide. Upon returning to Greece, they presented the wonder as a temple alter cover. The modern take on this tale is that the sailors tangled with a female chimpanzee and that the taking and preserving of the skin was the beginning of the art of taxidermy. Take as much salt as is needed with that story but the display of the skin on the alter would qualify as a museum exhibit. About twenty-five hundred years later, I prowled a museum in Lafayette, Indiana during the winter of 1943-44. They displayed a mammoth tooth in the proximity of the biggest rattlesnake skin ever taken in Gillespie County, Texas (it must have been at least ten feet long and the snake was [my guess] 80 years,) and not far away from the snake skin was a water-cooled, .30 caliber machine gun. The National Museum of India is a little more sophisticated. There are display cases filled and labeled long before I was born with a sign saying “Echinoderms.” You see twenty to forty fossil examples with no more explanation and then you can go on to the coelenterates. No effort is made to relate the display to the visitor. Times have changed but for anyone interested in the historical art of display, this museum is a must-see. There are many museum guards; none armed with feather dusters.
That evening I again walked to the south side of the Victoria Memorial to find my hosts of the day before. They seemed pleased to see that I remembered to join them and we traded some ideas before the sun settled down into a time to adjourn. I planned on leaving the following day for a hill station in the north and I wouldn’t see them again in all likelihood. So when we said our good byes, it was farewell. Not what a person wants to do but that is the way things happen.
I walked around the great marble building for the last time and started off across the grass to the north turning a few degrees to the east where I thought the end of Suddar Street might intersect Chowringhee. After having gone maybe a half mile, I looked back over my shoulder. The memorial, now surrounded by early street lights, took on the copper and reds of the last of the day. Calcutta or Kolkata, regardless how you spell
or pronounce it, has a breath of its own and I may well walk across the Maidan in a year or two years from now. Whether I return or not, I carry its special memory with me.
#
Breakfast on Sudder Street in the open air place, where I’d been eating. I had a new waiter. He seemed like a pretty good fellow. The little café had two aisles and the two waiters worked an aisle apiece. Things did not go smoothly. With over 1500 languages in India, it doesn’t take the Almighty to confuse workers. Whatever it was, breakfast was not quick in coming. Two Oriental ladies left before the food reached them. I’d have left had I been in a hurry but my empty belly and overly tired legs told me no. Voices raised behind the counter but my new waiter gave as much as he took. I’d be back for supper and for my meals the next day. It may have been the new man’s weekend; I didn’t see him around after that meal.
This would be an easy day. The National Museum is at the corner of Chowringhee and Sudder so I strolled down and entered the huge building. One day a museum will put on an exhibit of how museums have exhibited what they have to show but do it historically. Probably the earliest museums were temples where the handiwork of the god(s) was displayed. One story I read when I was a boy was about some Greek sailors, who explored the west coast of Africa. They captured a hairy black woman, who after a time took the ship and a few sailors apart. It was decided that she needed killing and afterwards they skinned her and preserved the hide. Upon returning to Greece, they presented the wonder as a temple alter cover. The modern take on this tale is that the sailors tangled with a female chimpanzee and that the taking and preserving of the skin was the beginning of the art of taxidermy. Take as much salt as is needed with that story but the display of the skin on the alter would qualify as a museum exhibit. About twenty-five hundred years later, I prowled a museum in Lafayette, Indiana during the winter of 1943-44. They displayed a mammoth tooth in the proximity of the biggest rattlesnake skin ever taken in Gillespie County, Texas (it must have been at least ten feet long and the snake was [my guess] 80 years,) and not far away from the snake skin was a water-cooled, .30 caliber machine gun. The National Museum of India is a little more sophisticated. There are display cases filled and labeled long before I was born with a sign saying “Echinoderms.” You see twenty to forty fossil examples with no more explanation and then you can go on to the coelenterates. No effort is made to relate the display to the visitor. Times have changed but for anyone interested in the historical art of display, this museum is a must-see. There are many museum guards; none armed with feather dusters.
That evening I again walked to the south side of the Victoria Memorial to find my hosts of the day before. They seemed pleased to see that I remembered to join them and we traded some ideas before the sun settled down into a time to adjourn. I planned on leaving the following day for a hill station in the north and I wouldn’t see them again in all likelihood. So when we said our good byes, it was farewell. Not what a person wants to do but that is the way things happen.
I walked around the great marble building for the last time and started off across the grass to the north turning a few degrees to the east where I thought the end of Suddar Street might intersect Chowringhee. After having gone maybe a half mile, I looked back over my shoulder. The memorial, now surrounded by early street lights, took on the copper and reds of the last of the day. Calcutta or Kolkata, regardless how you spell
or pronounce it, has a breath of its own and I may well walk across the Maidan in a year or two years from now. Whether I return or not, I carry its special memory with me.
#
Monday, April 14, 2008
Kolkata II
The next morning I walked south to Park Street, looking for the Oxford Bookshop, the Barnes and Noble of India. It falls short but most of the bookshops I had come across were pretty informal affairs heavily into self-help books. Napoleon Hill is big as is the U.S. spy counter spy stuff. Many books have titles like A Thousand Useful Facts, the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, or A Study Guide for Successful Applicants in the Postal Service. There are some classics in fiction, both East and West but nothing to really tempt me. Of course my problem is that a backpacker can’t carry books…but I can look.
Park Street is a shopping street for the more affluent. I stopped in a coffee shop for a sweet roll and there was enough peeled paint and grunge to remind me where I was. But the street is upscale nevertheless.
The Oxford Bookshop comes in two pieces separated by another shop. The children’s books are in the one with the toilet and the larger store has the security guard who looked after my pack containing toilet paper, The Lonely Planet, and my bottle of water. What titles I perused I can’t remember but there was enough in the shop to cause me to be systematic in looking over titles because I didn’t want to miss anything. I found a book of putdowns and got tired of standing so like at Barnes and Noble’s, I found an overstuffed chair and read. Dorothy Parker and Mark Twain had star billing at the end of the book. Oscar Wilde was well represented but Gore Vidal had one of the more incisive comments, which went something like, Andy Warhole was a genius with an IQ of 60. When Dorothy Parker was told that Calvin Coolidge died, she asked, “How do they know?” India is an odd paradox. Here’s a country that produced Kama Sutra and they disallow kissing on the movie screen. But I found a book showing a different sexual position and scenario for the 365 days of the year. I’ll leave it to your imagination what they programmed for leap year.
But then there were other places to go and so I reclaimed my pack and again made my way south along Chowringhee and across to the Maidan. A country mile of grass separated me from the Victorial Memorial but I kept walking. The building is covered in white marble and surrounded with formal gardens. I believe that it was begun in Victoria’s reign but completed in about 1920 and so while Victoria, Edward, and George V were remembered, only the latter monarch saw the great building. The queen sits on her throne out and away from the front of the building at about the same distance as Edward sits his horse at the back of the building. Both of these statues are of bronze. Inside and facing each other from the length of a transept stand King George and Queen Mary in white marble. While people in many countries obliterate their unhappy past by pulling down statuary, India has chosen to maintain its visual connection with the past. In the U.S. we did some name changing after the revolution (King’s College became Columbia University, etc) but the Indians, wisely I think, kept these visual reminders of their past. The exhibit throughout the lower floor focused on the founding and building of Calcutta with both national points of view well balanced. Attendance was surely heavy enough to justify whatever public funds that were spent.
I exited the building from the front (north end) and walked around to see how they presented King Edward. He looked down from the back of his horse and having looked him over, I decided I needed to find a “public facility.” This is not the kind of place where one takes a sudden interest in the base of trees. The Maidan, yes; the Victoria Memorial grounds, no. Several men sat on a bench that I walked by and one of them decided to be helpful. He followed me about twenty paces and asked if he could be of service. His English was perfect as was one of the others, who sat on the bench. I forgot about my immediate need and we visited. After the “where are you from” questions, we talked about the U.S, our education, and occupations, and as always they sounded me out about George Bush.
It’s said that the Arabs invented zero, which means that the Arabs probably learned it from the Indians. Travel is broadening and the Arab sailors surely paid attention when encountering the Indian fiefdoms. But I haven’t found a person who supports anything that Bush has done. It’s not a 20% approval rating. We are back to zero.
The men were about my age, which is convenient since I don’t have to explain so much to them. Their memory of events during our lives are as good as mine. They were all retired and met every afternoon to talk over current events. I hadn’t read The Hindu lately so I played catch up. After an hour, I really had to go and so they gave me directions to the restroom as well as an invitation to meet with them the next day. The sun was dimming in the dust and smoke and I had a long walk across the Maidan, where I kept an eye out for snake charmers, and then I hiked up the Chowringhee to Sudder Street, dodged through the street construction, had a good supper and stretched out on my bed. As I dozed a little I though how my memory played tricks on me again. The men in the park told me that both the zoo and the Temple of Kali were on this side of the river, not the Howdah. They also told me that the zoo no longer had its white tigers and that non Hindus were not allowed to see Kali as I had during the time before. I’d have bet money on their being in Howdah….which made me wonder if on some street corner that I had not rounded in the last two day there might be a stand of cactus, where if a fellow were to buy a bag of peanuts that he just might coax out a hungry rat that would bite his finger! I drew my hand back, punching my elbow against the wall and that woke me up! I rubbed my elbow wondering what I’d been dreaming. After a while I rolled over and again fell asleep.
#
Park Street is a shopping street for the more affluent. I stopped in a coffee shop for a sweet roll and there was enough peeled paint and grunge to remind me where I was. But the street is upscale nevertheless.
The Oxford Bookshop comes in two pieces separated by another shop. The children’s books are in the one with the toilet and the larger store has the security guard who looked after my pack containing toilet paper, The Lonely Planet, and my bottle of water. What titles I perused I can’t remember but there was enough in the shop to cause me to be systematic in looking over titles because I didn’t want to miss anything. I found a book of putdowns and got tired of standing so like at Barnes and Noble’s, I found an overstuffed chair and read. Dorothy Parker and Mark Twain had star billing at the end of the book. Oscar Wilde was well represented but Gore Vidal had one of the more incisive comments, which went something like, Andy Warhole was a genius with an IQ of 60. When Dorothy Parker was told that Calvin Coolidge died, she asked, “How do they know?” India is an odd paradox. Here’s a country that produced Kama Sutra and they disallow kissing on the movie screen. But I found a book showing a different sexual position and scenario for the 365 days of the year. I’ll leave it to your imagination what they programmed for leap year.
But then there were other places to go and so I reclaimed my pack and again made my way south along Chowringhee and across to the Maidan. A country mile of grass separated me from the Victorial Memorial but I kept walking. The building is covered in white marble and surrounded with formal gardens. I believe that it was begun in Victoria’s reign but completed in about 1920 and so while Victoria, Edward, and George V were remembered, only the latter monarch saw the great building. The queen sits on her throne out and away from the front of the building at about the same distance as Edward sits his horse at the back of the building. Both of these statues are of bronze. Inside and facing each other from the length of a transept stand King George and Queen Mary in white marble. While people in many countries obliterate their unhappy past by pulling down statuary, India has chosen to maintain its visual connection with the past. In the U.S. we did some name changing after the revolution (King’s College became Columbia University, etc) but the Indians, wisely I think, kept these visual reminders of their past. The exhibit throughout the lower floor focused on the founding and building of Calcutta with both national points of view well balanced. Attendance was surely heavy enough to justify whatever public funds that were spent.
I exited the building from the front (north end) and walked around to see how they presented King Edward. He looked down from the back of his horse and having looked him over, I decided I needed to find a “public facility.” This is not the kind of place where one takes a sudden interest in the base of trees. The Maidan, yes; the Victoria Memorial grounds, no. Several men sat on a bench that I walked by and one of them decided to be helpful. He followed me about twenty paces and asked if he could be of service. His English was perfect as was one of the others, who sat on the bench. I forgot about my immediate need and we visited. After the “where are you from” questions, we talked about the U.S, our education, and occupations, and as always they sounded me out about George Bush.
It’s said that the Arabs invented zero, which means that the Arabs probably learned it from the Indians. Travel is broadening and the Arab sailors surely paid attention when encountering the Indian fiefdoms. But I haven’t found a person who supports anything that Bush has done. It’s not a 20% approval rating. We are back to zero.
The men were about my age, which is convenient since I don’t have to explain so much to them. Their memory of events during our lives are as good as mine. They were all retired and met every afternoon to talk over current events. I hadn’t read The Hindu lately so I played catch up. After an hour, I really had to go and so they gave me directions to the restroom as well as an invitation to meet with them the next day. The sun was dimming in the dust and smoke and I had a long walk across the Maidan, where I kept an eye out for snake charmers, and then I hiked up the Chowringhee to Sudder Street, dodged through the street construction, had a good supper and stretched out on my bed. As I dozed a little I though how my memory played tricks on me again. The men in the park told me that both the zoo and the Temple of Kali were on this side of the river, not the Howdah. They also told me that the zoo no longer had its white tigers and that non Hindus were not allowed to see Kali as I had during the time before. I’d have bet money on their being in Howdah….which made me wonder if on some street corner that I had not rounded in the last two day there might be a stand of cactus, where if a fellow were to buy a bag of peanuts that he just might coax out a hungry rat that would bite his finger! I drew my hand back, punching my elbow against the wall and that woke me up! I rubbed my elbow wondering what I’d been dreaming. After a while I rolled over and again fell asleep.
#
Kolkata
The big advantage in arriving in an Indian city during the dark hours of morning is that there is no traffic. The downside is that the driver pushes his rig to its bone rattling limits. I think the last time I crossed the great bridge over the Hooglia, I was riding in a rickshaw and my driver was taking it a step at a time. But after the taxi driver made some twists and turns, I saw a park off to our right. “The Maidan?” The driver said yes. Too dark to look for cactus so on to Sudder Street. There were a bunch of no star hotels there and the one I looked for was the Maria. About the time you think the world is filled with Hindus and Moslems, the Christians pop up again. It could have been that a Portuguese ship’s passenger overslept at Goa and found himself on the Bay of Bengal side of India. For a no star, it was adequate. The Lonely Planet said that the hotel had a pale green courtyard. That’s where I’d find hot water for the ablution in the morning. The notice gave the hours when the heater was turned on. I stretched out on the bed beneath the ceiling fan and left the details for the morrow.
In daylight I found a clean looking café with an English menu, which got my feeding contract very quickly. I looked out the open front of the cafe and watched a neighborhood that had gone to bed sometime before four in the morning. Sudder Street was undergoing road and sewer upgrade and was the only busted up street I found in the city. I’m sure Madurai has it’s virtues but I just happened to be watching the on-coming traffic, jumping a hole in the road, and smelling something that even the dogs and the house crows would not clean up. As I said the Gandhi Museum looked to be a maintained building. The grass was mowed. But at least in the foreign ear, to say that Kolkata looked good after Madurai is a damning statement. Well Kolkata does look good! And before nightfall, I had included it on my list of places to spend at least part of the year should I retire in India.
Sudder Street is alive with people coming and going and selling and begging and just living. I’ve had a friend who after staying at the Chelsea for a month told me about the energy he felt in New York. Want energy? Try Sudder Street. Locals and foreigners walk along dodging each other and the traffic that plug the street. One day the street will be rebuilt and movement will become smoother. The street runs east and west, which means that it will always have a shaded side where you can dodge the sun. The street dead ends in Chowringhee Road by the Indian National Museum. Chowringhee is Main Street in Calcutta. Now both the city and the street has had a name change but what was, still is at least along the Hooglia, and I suspect my feelings for the city comes from my being able to connect now with what I experienced four decades back. Calcutta was our first glimpse of India and I seemed to have revisited those memories more times then I realized.
The Kelty Traveler, the type of pack I carry, is two packs in one. The larger holds my sleeping bag and coat, along with outer clothing. Then zipped on to this pack is a smaller one where I carry pills, toothbrush and underwear. This second and smaller pack makes a good day pack if you dump the contents and stow life’s daily necessities, one copy of the Lonely Planet’s India, a plastic bottle of mineral water, and a roll of toilet paper. The latter is becoming more popular in India but you only find it in the hotels with stars. Since I rarely stay in such places, I buy a roll in the shops, the little places tucked beneath larger buildings. Sudder Street is lined with the little shops all the way out to Chowringhee Road.
The British laid out and built the city but surely not in one project. Bit by bit they put it together. Chowringhee Road is the big north/south road, wide and bordered on the east by large buildings that front on a broad sidewalk. Since I was here before, the officials have looked the other way and allowed stands to be set up on the sidewalk. Even with these impediments to walking, there is still room to move along quickly without breaking stride - no holes or creative sidewalk construction. One west side of the boulevard has a sidewalk, at least for stretches but this is the Maidan, a park of probably a half-mile wide and a mile and a half or two miles long. As I said, Calcutta was not built in a day and this was a site of one or more Indian neighborhoods. The British razed the site and created a large common complete with carriage paths, trees, and several square miles of grass. Unfortunately, the Maidan was restricted to Raj only but today it’s a place for kite flyers, picnickers, bicycle riders, snake charmers, and a certain peanut merchant who set near a stand of prickly pear. At the south end of the Maidan stands the Victoria Memorial, a graceful pile of marble, which Kolkata kept as a historical museum. When I was here before, the memorial exhibited paintings and memorabilia of the Raj. The exhibit presently on display is the history of Kolkata, including the both Indian and British history. But I’m getting ahead of myself. My first day in Kolkata was to look for the peanut merchant, who has occupied a corner of my memory just as surely as he occupied the northwest corner of the Maidan. So I walked north and then finding anyone with gray hair waiting to cross the avenue, I fell in step with them, reasoning that if they’ve lived this long without being hit, they’ll make it through the day with my pacing them a yard away.
The East Indian Trading Company used the Hooglia to float their ships into this area, bringing in merchandise and taking away Bengali raw materials. This patch of ground became their headquarters. The story goes that the area gets its name though the meandering of language from the Temple of Kali well south of the Maidan. At the north end of the Maidan, the British built their government houses. The Residency is used by the West Bengali governor, which seems more heavily guarded than the White House. I had walked nearly to India’s IRS headquarters before I reached the corner I remembered. Any similarity between what I found and what I remembered was zip. Here was a well planted lush patch of ground with trees and gardens. What I remember was a rather barren patch of grass with the prickly pears being about the tallest plant around. Beggars crying, “Baksheesh!” crawled along the paths, each competing with the other. I had not heard “baksheesh” since I’ve been in India. Beggars are still here but not in the number that there were then. Then beyond this din, I saw the prickly pear surrounded by men with their backs to the street. When I walked closer, I saw the peanut merchant, squatting on his haunches, twisting cones of newspaper and filling them with peanuts. He sold peanuts as fast as he could load the cones. He dressed in slacks and a short sleeved shirt. His hair was combed and he looked healthy, wealthy, and a step well ahead of the beggars. He seemed delighted to see my wife and I. He stopped twisting cones. He snapped his fingers and took a peanut and held it close to the ground. Out of the prickly pear ran a good-sized (and well-fed) rat. The merchant switched the peanut to the other hand, grabbed the rat by the base of the tail, flipped the rat into the air. The rat did a full flip and landed safely in the merchant’s palm. The man gave the rat the peanut and the rat ran back into the pear patch to enjoy his wage. The bystanders were not so skilled and so simply hand-fed the more untalented rats that ran out of the stand of pear.
I didn’t expect to find the man and I was told by Bengalis, while at Kodaikanal, that the rats had all been exterminated. The Communists had taken over the state government and with the new administration, change had come about. Possibly they exterminated the prickly pear. So the Communist are still in the government and the rats are gone but there has been a technical revolution since I was last here. The computers operators have needed problem solvers and the private schools and colleges have provided them. Pour coffee in your laptop keyboard and you’ll be visiting with some of these graduates, who now make up this new middle class. The peanut merchant did not go onto Bangalore and the call centers. But it could be that his children did. It is the originality and inventiveness of India (the merchant being an example) that has always pleased me about the country and people.
But back to my not so steady hand and my coffee drinking laptop, dealing with Dell does have its compensation. One being that the Bengali, who was on the other end of the line, told me that one could find a nice apartment in Kolkata in a good neighborhood (Victoria Memorial area) for about $135 a month. Although I didn’t run down any apartments from the want ads, I mentioned this price to other Bengalis and they agreed. That area has great baronial mansions from the mid 19th century. You may remember from “Shelter” my description of the marvelous bathtub with its other century plumbing. A person, who finds comfort in simple things like a dry bed and a functioning ceiling fan, could stand some posh (port out, starboard home) rooms. I’d leave an apartment search for another visit.
I walked toward the river and through the court buildings. Gentlemen along with ladies of the court strode by hurriedly either off to the courtroom, the office, or to lunch. While the buildings look to be from the time of the British, the barristers have not kept the periwig tradition….at least not outside the court. They are robed and wear bibs and narrow ribbon ties. It was lunch time and so I didn’t stop. I was on my way to the Strand and to walk along to look at the river. No, the view is blocked by a barricade and shops. So I kept walking north to a church called St. Johns. The building is under the protection of the national government much like our National Registry. Tucked away in the back part of the church property is the grave of Job Charnock, Calcutta’s British founder along with an obelisk, which is a memorial to those who died in the Black Hole of Calcutta, the site of which was at Fort William, still a walk farther north.
There is a tank in Tank Square which was used as the city water supply in the early days of the town’s founding. The square would be renamed after Lord Dalhousie, lieutenant-governed during the earlier part of the 20th century. The building directly north of the tank and square is called the Writers’ Building. It stands today filled with bureaucrats just it did in the 18th century when the East India Company governed India. In this building there was an attempt (they killed the wrong man) on Dalhousie’s life. After Independence the historians reinterpreted this moment in history and decided that the square should be renamed for the plotters, who are now seen as striking a blow for freedom, rather than bungling a murder. The present official name of the square is BBD Bagh with each of the assassins (Binoy, Badal, and Dinesh) remembered by one initial of his name. The facts, if known, are fixed but interpretation is as lose and free as watercolor splashed on wet paper.
To the west of the square is the Main Post Office, which like all the other buildings is huge, big enough to cover the site of Fort William. The fort fell to an attack by the nawob Siraj-ud-Daula in 1756 and it was there in a small room that the British prisoners were packed. The room had no ventilation. In the morning the door was opened and the living staggered out, the forty dead were carried out, and the site has come down through time known as the Black Hole of Calcutta. For a little modern interpretation, I’ve had Indians tell me that none of it ever happened.
I kept walking north and wound this way and that until I was turned around, which is another way of saying lost. Where I did find myself was in a neighborhood of Christians and talking to a young man name John, who could hold his own in an English conversation. We talked about his studies and hopes and it was one of those pleasant moments when you remember really why you came back to India. I stood on the street and he hung out the window gave me instructions to where I wanted to go, the Bengal Buddhist Association. A few turns later I was in the courtyard of the building where Bobbi and I spent the nights and days of our stay in early 1967. We were perfectly comfortable but I do remember the courage it took for me to face those cold water showers in the cool of the early January mornings. I considered asking for a cell but I was settled in the Hotel Maria and was now thinking about how I’d like to stretch out on my bed there. So I said my good byes to the nice lady, who seemed to be in charge, and made my way back to Chowringhee Road, this time walking south.
The sun dropped and became dim though the dust and smoke and I hurried on toward the Maidan. Time a little after five when what do I see in the rush hour traffic but a herd of forty or fifty goats trotting up the street. I wondered where they had been at about 2:30 and whether the herdsman had been planning a rush hour move. The traffic is always on the move on Chowringhee but I couldn’t believe anyone would drive animals on this road at this time of day.
When you walk you get hungry and when you eat you get sleepy and before long I was curled up in bed with the ceiling fan slowly turning overhead. My bones and muscles ached but I had gone looking for a personal memory that was long gone. The merchant was as likely as not still in the world of the living. I sincerely hoped that he was as comfortable as I on this March night.
#
In daylight I found a clean looking café with an English menu, which got my feeding contract very quickly. I looked out the open front of the cafe and watched a neighborhood that had gone to bed sometime before four in the morning. Sudder Street was undergoing road and sewer upgrade and was the only busted up street I found in the city. I’m sure Madurai has it’s virtues but I just happened to be watching the on-coming traffic, jumping a hole in the road, and smelling something that even the dogs and the house crows would not clean up. As I said the Gandhi Museum looked to be a maintained building. The grass was mowed. But at least in the foreign ear, to say that Kolkata looked good after Madurai is a damning statement. Well Kolkata does look good! And before nightfall, I had included it on my list of places to spend at least part of the year should I retire in India.
Sudder Street is alive with people coming and going and selling and begging and just living. I’ve had a friend who after staying at the Chelsea for a month told me about the energy he felt in New York. Want energy? Try Sudder Street. Locals and foreigners walk along dodging each other and the traffic that plug the street. One day the street will be rebuilt and movement will become smoother. The street runs east and west, which means that it will always have a shaded side where you can dodge the sun. The street dead ends in Chowringhee Road by the Indian National Museum. Chowringhee is Main Street in Calcutta. Now both the city and the street has had a name change but what was, still is at least along the Hooglia, and I suspect my feelings for the city comes from my being able to connect now with what I experienced four decades back. Calcutta was our first glimpse of India and I seemed to have revisited those memories more times then I realized.
The Kelty Traveler, the type of pack I carry, is two packs in one. The larger holds my sleeping bag and coat, along with outer clothing. Then zipped on to this pack is a smaller one where I carry pills, toothbrush and underwear. This second and smaller pack makes a good day pack if you dump the contents and stow life’s daily necessities, one copy of the Lonely Planet’s India, a plastic bottle of mineral water, and a roll of toilet paper. The latter is becoming more popular in India but you only find it in the hotels with stars. Since I rarely stay in such places, I buy a roll in the shops, the little places tucked beneath larger buildings. Sudder Street is lined with the little shops all the way out to Chowringhee Road.
The British laid out and built the city but surely not in one project. Bit by bit they put it together. Chowringhee Road is the big north/south road, wide and bordered on the east by large buildings that front on a broad sidewalk. Since I was here before, the officials have looked the other way and allowed stands to be set up on the sidewalk. Even with these impediments to walking, there is still room to move along quickly without breaking stride - no holes or creative sidewalk construction. One west side of the boulevard has a sidewalk, at least for stretches but this is the Maidan, a park of probably a half-mile wide and a mile and a half or two miles long. As I said, Calcutta was not built in a day and this was a site of one or more Indian neighborhoods. The British razed the site and created a large common complete with carriage paths, trees, and several square miles of grass. Unfortunately, the Maidan was restricted to Raj only but today it’s a place for kite flyers, picnickers, bicycle riders, snake charmers, and a certain peanut merchant who set near a stand of prickly pear. At the south end of the Maidan stands the Victoria Memorial, a graceful pile of marble, which Kolkata kept as a historical museum. When I was here before, the memorial exhibited paintings and memorabilia of the Raj. The exhibit presently on display is the history of Kolkata, including the both Indian and British history. But I’m getting ahead of myself. My first day in Kolkata was to look for the peanut merchant, who has occupied a corner of my memory just as surely as he occupied the northwest corner of the Maidan. So I walked north and then finding anyone with gray hair waiting to cross the avenue, I fell in step with them, reasoning that if they’ve lived this long without being hit, they’ll make it through the day with my pacing them a yard away.
The East Indian Trading Company used the Hooglia to float their ships into this area, bringing in merchandise and taking away Bengali raw materials. This patch of ground became their headquarters. The story goes that the area gets its name though the meandering of language from the Temple of Kali well south of the Maidan. At the north end of the Maidan, the British built their government houses. The Residency is used by the West Bengali governor, which seems more heavily guarded than the White House. I had walked nearly to India’s IRS headquarters before I reached the corner I remembered. Any similarity between what I found and what I remembered was zip. Here was a well planted lush patch of ground with trees and gardens. What I remember was a rather barren patch of grass with the prickly pears being about the tallest plant around. Beggars crying, “Baksheesh!” crawled along the paths, each competing with the other. I had not heard “baksheesh” since I’ve been in India. Beggars are still here but not in the number that there were then. Then beyond this din, I saw the prickly pear surrounded by men with their backs to the street. When I walked closer, I saw the peanut merchant, squatting on his haunches, twisting cones of newspaper and filling them with peanuts. He sold peanuts as fast as he could load the cones. He dressed in slacks and a short sleeved shirt. His hair was combed and he looked healthy, wealthy, and a step well ahead of the beggars. He seemed delighted to see my wife and I. He stopped twisting cones. He snapped his fingers and took a peanut and held it close to the ground. Out of the prickly pear ran a good-sized (and well-fed) rat. The merchant switched the peanut to the other hand, grabbed the rat by the base of the tail, flipped the rat into the air. The rat did a full flip and landed safely in the merchant’s palm. The man gave the rat the peanut and the rat ran back into the pear patch to enjoy his wage. The bystanders were not so skilled and so simply hand-fed the more untalented rats that ran out of the stand of pear.
I didn’t expect to find the man and I was told by Bengalis, while at Kodaikanal, that the rats had all been exterminated. The Communists had taken over the state government and with the new administration, change had come about. Possibly they exterminated the prickly pear. So the Communist are still in the government and the rats are gone but there has been a technical revolution since I was last here. The computers operators have needed problem solvers and the private schools and colleges have provided them. Pour coffee in your laptop keyboard and you’ll be visiting with some of these graduates, who now make up this new middle class. The peanut merchant did not go onto Bangalore and the call centers. But it could be that his children did. It is the originality and inventiveness of India (the merchant being an example) that has always pleased me about the country and people.
But back to my not so steady hand and my coffee drinking laptop, dealing with Dell does have its compensation. One being that the Bengali, who was on the other end of the line, told me that one could find a nice apartment in Kolkata in a good neighborhood (Victoria Memorial area) for about $135 a month. Although I didn’t run down any apartments from the want ads, I mentioned this price to other Bengalis and they agreed. That area has great baronial mansions from the mid 19th century. You may remember from “Shelter” my description of the marvelous bathtub with its other century plumbing. A person, who finds comfort in simple things like a dry bed and a functioning ceiling fan, could stand some posh (port out, starboard home) rooms. I’d leave an apartment search for another visit.
I walked toward the river and through the court buildings. Gentlemen along with ladies of the court strode by hurriedly either off to the courtroom, the office, or to lunch. While the buildings look to be from the time of the British, the barristers have not kept the periwig tradition….at least not outside the court. They are robed and wear bibs and narrow ribbon ties. It was lunch time and so I didn’t stop. I was on my way to the Strand and to walk along to look at the river. No, the view is blocked by a barricade and shops. So I kept walking north to a church called St. Johns. The building is under the protection of the national government much like our National Registry. Tucked away in the back part of the church property is the grave of Job Charnock, Calcutta’s British founder along with an obelisk, which is a memorial to those who died in the Black Hole of Calcutta, the site of which was at Fort William, still a walk farther north.
There is a tank in Tank Square which was used as the city water supply in the early days of the town’s founding. The square would be renamed after Lord Dalhousie, lieutenant-governed during the earlier part of the 20th century. The building directly north of the tank and square is called the Writers’ Building. It stands today filled with bureaucrats just it did in the 18th century when the East India Company governed India. In this building there was an attempt (they killed the wrong man) on Dalhousie’s life. After Independence the historians reinterpreted this moment in history and decided that the square should be renamed for the plotters, who are now seen as striking a blow for freedom, rather than bungling a murder. The present official name of the square is BBD Bagh with each of the assassins (Binoy, Badal, and Dinesh) remembered by one initial of his name. The facts, if known, are fixed but interpretation is as lose and free as watercolor splashed on wet paper.
To the west of the square is the Main Post Office, which like all the other buildings is huge, big enough to cover the site of Fort William. The fort fell to an attack by the nawob Siraj-ud-Daula in 1756 and it was there in a small room that the British prisoners were packed. The room had no ventilation. In the morning the door was opened and the living staggered out, the forty dead were carried out, and the site has come down through time known as the Black Hole of Calcutta. For a little modern interpretation, I’ve had Indians tell me that none of it ever happened.
I kept walking north and wound this way and that until I was turned around, which is another way of saying lost. Where I did find myself was in a neighborhood of Christians and talking to a young man name John, who could hold his own in an English conversation. We talked about his studies and hopes and it was one of those pleasant moments when you remember really why you came back to India. I stood on the street and he hung out the window gave me instructions to where I wanted to go, the Bengal Buddhist Association. A few turns later I was in the courtyard of the building where Bobbi and I spent the nights and days of our stay in early 1967. We were perfectly comfortable but I do remember the courage it took for me to face those cold water showers in the cool of the early January mornings. I considered asking for a cell but I was settled in the Hotel Maria and was now thinking about how I’d like to stretch out on my bed there. So I said my good byes to the nice lady, who seemed to be in charge, and made my way back to Chowringhee Road, this time walking south.
The sun dropped and became dim though the dust and smoke and I hurried on toward the Maidan. Time a little after five when what do I see in the rush hour traffic but a herd of forty or fifty goats trotting up the street. I wondered where they had been at about 2:30 and whether the herdsman had been planning a rush hour move. The traffic is always on the move on Chowringhee but I couldn’t believe anyone would drive animals on this road at this time of day.
When you walk you get hungry and when you eat you get sleepy and before long I was curled up in bed with the ceiling fan slowly turning overhead. My bones and muscles ached but I had gone looking for a personal memory that was long gone. The merchant was as likely as not still in the world of the living. I sincerely hoped that he was as comfortable as I on this March night.
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The Howdah Express
Amazing as it may sound, my plan on being on the train the following night didn’t work out. The express only ran once a week and only because I was a foreigner and assumed to be an ignoramus was I allowed to buy a ticket on such short notice. The lady, who sold the ticket to me, was covered and like all railroad employees, was about a blink of the eye from being rude. She gave me the price of the ticket and must have heard me gasp. It would be a giggle in American money but I’m thinking in rupees. Then I remembered that I was probably a year or two older than she.
“You have senior citizen discounts, don’t you? Do they work for foreigners?”
She said that they did and I told her that I was old, very old. Then she smiled. I sat back in my chair (emergency cases wait in an office, not in line with normal people) and was happy to hear I’d just saved 30%.
In traveling by train in India unless you are playing the game of “I can go farther on a nickel than you can,” which I played in ’67 and rode third class, consider a second class sleeper, AC, two tiered. That means that you have a cushioned seat and backrest, air conditioning, and no more than three traveling companions and if you get the other side of the car, you are with one other person and have something of a private little curtained-off compartment. Another thing which seems to be considered is your age. Seventy-one years got me a lower bunk. But a main reason for my asking for a second-class car was that since it costs a bit more, the people, who can afford a little luxury, purchase that ticket. And those folks, being a little better off, have better educations, which include skill in English - doctors, accountants, engineers, and railway officials.
Along with the 30% discount for being older than the lady, she told me that the train would not leave tonight but tomorrow night. I liked the Pearls Hotel, knew where I could buy passable food, and remembered that there was a Gandhi museum here. Also there was a blog to write. I saved the museum for that afternoon and after a long auto-rickshaw ride out, which just happened to go by a bank, which shall remain unnamed. I heard the ATM machine’s stomach growl but I ignored it.
The museum was a nice looking building with a statue out front of Gandhi striding along with walking stick in hand. I made the long ride back as it was a government holiday. People work in India. It’s just that they do it when I’m not looking.
There was no Kodai Road rush and sqush on boarding…well a little. Finding that I couldn’t find the proper number on the proper car, I got aboard and found a top bunk. You are supposed to climb up and down by the rungs at the end of the bunk. I figured out an original way of climbing up and used it when the conductor called me down from my perch. The trouble began when I felt that I was going past a point of no return and went into a fall. I alighted on the conductor’s foot. I apologized for the damage and he limped off to lead me to my car.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I discovered that my double paned window was totally fogged. There were lines of cocoanut palms and small tracks of land outside the ruined window. Actually it wasn’t ruined. It just needed a vent hole to let the water vapor out but in India that translates “ruined.” Occasionally I could make out a silhouette of a temple but the east side of India looked to be a smear.
As I said, I traveled with people with educations and some skill in English. One was an American citizen who had been 13 years in the States. We talked about Partition and while that history has long ago flowed on to the sea, many people question the virtue in their leaders at the time. He said in effect that Nehru and Jenna both wanted to be prime minister and while Gandhi wanted to preserve greater India, the country was divided to suit the two politicians. Another view has it that if there were no Pakistan, there would be no India. Since they go to war with each other, each serves as a unifier for the other. Kashmir would like to reclaim the land they believe is theirs and then become independent and the Sikhs want a country of their own just to give two examples of a possible unraveling.
Another traveler in his late thirties with a muscle beach build and wearing a little too much gold, lived on his cell phone and took vacations to his laptop. He was as aggressive as a wild elephant but docile enough if ignored. He was a tech specialist and had been sent to Atlanta recently by his company. He had a photo collection on his computer which he proudly showed us. As with my thinking in rupees while buying my ticket, looking at his pics made me realize that India had rubbed off on me in other ways. He had taken pictures of empty streets that looked clean enough to eat off. I never thought I’d admire an empty street but I was as surprised to see them as were the others in the compartment.
The second night going north, I fell asleep thinking, why would a train ever arrive at its terminus at 3:40 A.M. but then I heard the car go silent and rubbed my face, grabbed my pack and briefcase, and walked out into the great Howdah Station. I was right across the river from Kolkata. With luck, tomorrow I would find the stand of cactus where 41 years a bright young man looked over his options and combined selling peanuts with the novelty of hand feeding the peanuts to the dwellers of the stand of cactus….a good sized populations of rats.
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“You have senior citizen discounts, don’t you? Do they work for foreigners?”
She said that they did and I told her that I was old, very old. Then she smiled. I sat back in my chair (emergency cases wait in an office, not in line with normal people) and was happy to hear I’d just saved 30%.
In traveling by train in India unless you are playing the game of “I can go farther on a nickel than you can,” which I played in ’67 and rode third class, consider a second class sleeper, AC, two tiered. That means that you have a cushioned seat and backrest, air conditioning, and no more than three traveling companions and if you get the other side of the car, you are with one other person and have something of a private little curtained-off compartment. Another thing which seems to be considered is your age. Seventy-one years got me a lower bunk. But a main reason for my asking for a second-class car was that since it costs a bit more, the people, who can afford a little luxury, purchase that ticket. And those folks, being a little better off, have better educations, which include skill in English - doctors, accountants, engineers, and railway officials.
Along with the 30% discount for being older than the lady, she told me that the train would not leave tonight but tomorrow night. I liked the Pearls Hotel, knew where I could buy passable food, and remembered that there was a Gandhi museum here. Also there was a blog to write. I saved the museum for that afternoon and after a long auto-rickshaw ride out, which just happened to go by a bank, which shall remain unnamed. I heard the ATM machine’s stomach growl but I ignored it.
The museum was a nice looking building with a statue out front of Gandhi striding along with walking stick in hand. I made the long ride back as it was a government holiday. People work in India. It’s just that they do it when I’m not looking.
There was no Kodai Road rush and sqush on boarding…well a little. Finding that I couldn’t find the proper number on the proper car, I got aboard and found a top bunk. You are supposed to climb up and down by the rungs at the end of the bunk. I figured out an original way of climbing up and used it when the conductor called me down from my perch. The trouble began when I felt that I was going past a point of no return and went into a fall. I alighted on the conductor’s foot. I apologized for the damage and he limped off to lead me to my car.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I discovered that my double paned window was totally fogged. There were lines of cocoanut palms and small tracks of land outside the ruined window. Actually it wasn’t ruined. It just needed a vent hole to let the water vapor out but in India that translates “ruined.” Occasionally I could make out a silhouette of a temple but the east side of India looked to be a smear.
As I said, I traveled with people with educations and some skill in English. One was an American citizen who had been 13 years in the States. We talked about Partition and while that history has long ago flowed on to the sea, many people question the virtue in their leaders at the time. He said in effect that Nehru and Jenna both wanted to be prime minister and while Gandhi wanted to preserve greater India, the country was divided to suit the two politicians. Another view has it that if there were no Pakistan, there would be no India. Since they go to war with each other, each serves as a unifier for the other. Kashmir would like to reclaim the land they believe is theirs and then become independent and the Sikhs want a country of their own just to give two examples of a possible unraveling.
Another traveler in his late thirties with a muscle beach build and wearing a little too much gold, lived on his cell phone and took vacations to his laptop. He was as aggressive as a wild elephant but docile enough if ignored. He was a tech specialist and had been sent to Atlanta recently by his company. He had a photo collection on his computer which he proudly showed us. As with my thinking in rupees while buying my ticket, looking at his pics made me realize that India had rubbed off on me in other ways. He had taken pictures of empty streets that looked clean enough to eat off. I never thought I’d admire an empty street but I was as surprised to see them as were the others in the compartment.
The second night going north, I fell asleep thinking, why would a train ever arrive at its terminus at 3:40 A.M. but then I heard the car go silent and rubbed my face, grabbed my pack and briefcase, and walked out into the great Howdah Station. I was right across the river from Kolkata. With luck, tomorrow I would find the stand of cactus where 41 years a bright young man looked over his options and combined selling peanuts with the novelty of hand feeding the peanuts to the dwellers of the stand of cactus….a good sized populations of rats.
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Dindigul to the South?
Since I was in such a well publicized town, I did look out the window although until we arrived at the “bus stand,” I can’t remember anything which would distinguish the cityscape from any other town. But then there was the bus stand. This was a corral of several acres surrounded by food stands. The bullpen in the middle was a collection of busses pulling forward and backing up and blocking another bus and getting honked at by several other busses that want to block other busses that planned on parking. I got waved at by the conductor, grabbed my briefcase and pack and jumped to the ground. The only thing I lacked was the direction to my next bus. One reason people, who speak only one language, stay home is because they don’t speak Tamil or Hindi or the 1500 other languages of India. No problem. As a rule someone always speaks English. This was the exception to the rule. Every bus’s home port and destination was written in Tamil. It was hot. I was still feeling less than I would have liked to. And I’m at sea as to which of the twenty-five to fifty busses to take. First thing I did was get in the shade and drop my pack. I looked around as if I know what I’m doing and after repeating Kodai Road a couple of dozen times to nice people, who have no idea what I’m saying, one guy grunts and points. I trundle over to ask if this is my bus and it indeed is! So within a half hour I am on the road again. No bumps to speak of and I arrive in Kodai Road. I’m still unsteady from that downhill trip. I grabbed my pack and jumped off the bus. The people yelled at me and I turned round to see the conductor holding up my briefcase, which among other things held this computer. Then the down the road I walk through shops and traffic and people who look like they are wondering what I’m doing here. I’m looking for a train station with a train called the Howdah Express that just might come roaring through this evening and where I can lay my body down to the cradle-rock of a sleeper car, rather than the jerk and swerve of a bus. I could see the track. Where there is a track, there is a station and somebody to sell me a ticket north.
One ticket seller spoke good English. The train didn’t stop here until tomorrow. I asked about a hotel. He said they didn’t have hotels, just hills. Remember I had just been sick. What is he suggesting? My mind wasn’t functioning. I’m not going to sleep under a tree. His advice was to go south to Madurai. “I want to go North!” If I went to Madurai I could catch the Howdah Express there. Memories of Diwali were still fresh and I didn’t want to do it but the thought of sleeping under an acacia tree didn’t appeal either so I bought a ticket to somewhere I didn’t want to go.
I really did feel rough so just drank some water and stayed in the shade. I found a doctor to talk to, who was on his way to Madurai and catching the same train. We spent an hour visiting and then the train came. I followed him along the platform, thinking we have another hour sitting together talking about the passing scenery. Then I saw something wasn’t as I had expected. People sat on the car steps with their feet sticking out. There were several of us who tried to pick our way past them but when looking into the carriage, you could see people sitting on every square foot of the floor. Nobody moved! About that time the doctor looked around at me and I could see a lot of white in his eye. He waved me on to a more distant car and pulled himself into the wad of people who blocked the car door. Minutes had gone by as I trundled along looking at feet sticking out the car doorways. How long would the train stop? I moved fast and all I saw was feet, feet, and sometime a head sticking out the car entrances. I was moving fast while those around me began to run. They did not carry a full pack and a brief case and they were a foot shorter and many inches less around than I and they ran not boarding. The train was going to leave without my boarding and I was going to go looking for an acacia tree.
I don’t know how I got on the train. Partly I smiled and talked to everyone as if this were a high school reunion and there has got to be just a little space left for me in the backseat of that ’52 Ford. And too when you weigh between 250 and 300 pounds with luggage, probably the possibility of being stepped on carries some authority. I did get on.
And then I looked into the carriage. The inside of the car was paved and painted with people. Not happy people. And I was about as welcome as an over-weight one horned Indian rhinoceros. I have never felt so big! But I wiggled and joked my way about ten or twelve feet into the car. I set down on my pack and a grandmother pushed it back toward me. Her grandchild was underneath. Somebody waved to me to stow my briefcase in the overhead….and there wasn’t much room there either but if it fell, the computer wouldn’t be damaged. Surely it would land safely on someone. I was standing when the train started up and the sickness was wearing off, and we were gently moving in the right direction, and I was on the train. Damn, I felt almost human!
So I grab onto the overhead luggage bin and lean my head on my arms and when I stop giving a prayer of thanksgiving, I open my eyes and I’m looking straight down into the grandchild’s eyes. I was probably the first Alaskan, who was on a journey around the world that the three-year old, had ever seen. And furthermore, I was the biggest person with the most luggage of anyone in the car.
I reached in my pocket, took out a rupee, and holding it in my left hand, I began polishing it with my right index finger. I had the attention of the grandchild and about twenty other people. I transferred the rupee into my right hand, turned a little to my left and lowered my hand to the level of grandmother and child both of whom sat on the floor. Then I slowly opened my hand and the money was gone. The kid had watched and so had the other twenty people. Everybody including Grandma, except the child, smiled. I decided at that point that they wouldn’t push me out one of the open windows after all. I relaxed and hung onto the overhead baggage, closed my eyes, and wondered if the inventor of the steam locomotive had been canonized yet. I know the inventor of the bus is roasting in hell.
We came to a stop in the Madurai station. But that was all because then a very Indian thing happened. Since this was not the end of the line for this train, people wanted to board. Since this was a district center, people wanted to get off. At times like this, you watch and keep quiet. Let the other people yell. I couldn’t move but it looked like I would watch a fight break out about five feet to the starboard from where I stood. I thought about that burnt-out car in Bombay. I thought about my former wife’s anxiety about crowds and I wondered if the train would pull out of the station with an ongoing riot in this car. That’s what the police are for.
I had seen them in several stations. The ones that looked like officers could usually speak a little English and when they shouted and walked like they were going somewhere and brandished that wooden cane they carry, people did listen. They must have been out the door prodding people with those sticks. We had been jammed together not moving for nearly fifteen minutes by now. It seems that the train doesn’t leave with a riot in progress after all.
All I could do is stand and watch two guys read each other off and finally an old lady began poking me in the ribs and waving me out of the way. Where “out of the way” was I wasn’t sure but I pretended. She wiggled passed me and I followed her like a wallet. By the time I got to the door, the guards were punching someone else and I was able to walk across the platform. P.S. the difference between the two guys never went past venting anger. That’s probably an Indian thing as well. Too many possibilities to start a fight. Let’s just yell and let it go at that.
So through the station and out in the taxi approach and into the afternoon and across four lanes of traffic, for once, I knew where I was going…almost. I looked down one lane and couldn’t see the Pearl Hotel but found it at the next corner. Not bad. It had only moved one block since I had been in Kodaikanal. They did have a room and it was comfortable and clean and after supper, I lay in bed planning on getting up early so as to be at the station by eight a.m. to get an “emergency” ticket in second class AC two tier for the following night to Kolkata. The bed felt good. The overhead fan whispered and I fell asleep.
#
One ticket seller spoke good English. The train didn’t stop here until tomorrow. I asked about a hotel. He said they didn’t have hotels, just hills. Remember I had just been sick. What is he suggesting? My mind wasn’t functioning. I’m not going to sleep under a tree. His advice was to go south to Madurai. “I want to go North!” If I went to Madurai I could catch the Howdah Express there. Memories of Diwali were still fresh and I didn’t want to do it but the thought of sleeping under an acacia tree didn’t appeal either so I bought a ticket to somewhere I didn’t want to go.
I really did feel rough so just drank some water and stayed in the shade. I found a doctor to talk to, who was on his way to Madurai and catching the same train. We spent an hour visiting and then the train came. I followed him along the platform, thinking we have another hour sitting together talking about the passing scenery. Then I saw something wasn’t as I had expected. People sat on the car steps with their feet sticking out. There were several of us who tried to pick our way past them but when looking into the carriage, you could see people sitting on every square foot of the floor. Nobody moved! About that time the doctor looked around at me and I could see a lot of white in his eye. He waved me on to a more distant car and pulled himself into the wad of people who blocked the car door. Minutes had gone by as I trundled along looking at feet sticking out the car doorways. How long would the train stop? I moved fast and all I saw was feet, feet, and sometime a head sticking out the car entrances. I was moving fast while those around me began to run. They did not carry a full pack and a brief case and they were a foot shorter and many inches less around than I and they ran not boarding. The train was going to leave without my boarding and I was going to go looking for an acacia tree.
I don’t know how I got on the train. Partly I smiled and talked to everyone as if this were a high school reunion and there has got to be just a little space left for me in the backseat of that ’52 Ford. And too when you weigh between 250 and 300 pounds with luggage, probably the possibility of being stepped on carries some authority. I did get on.
And then I looked into the carriage. The inside of the car was paved and painted with people. Not happy people. And I was about as welcome as an over-weight one horned Indian rhinoceros. I have never felt so big! But I wiggled and joked my way about ten or twelve feet into the car. I set down on my pack and a grandmother pushed it back toward me. Her grandchild was underneath. Somebody waved to me to stow my briefcase in the overhead….and there wasn’t much room there either but if it fell, the computer wouldn’t be damaged. Surely it would land safely on someone. I was standing when the train started up and the sickness was wearing off, and we were gently moving in the right direction, and I was on the train. Damn, I felt almost human!
So I grab onto the overhead luggage bin and lean my head on my arms and when I stop giving a prayer of thanksgiving, I open my eyes and I’m looking straight down into the grandchild’s eyes. I was probably the first Alaskan, who was on a journey around the world that the three-year old, had ever seen. And furthermore, I was the biggest person with the most luggage of anyone in the car.
I reached in my pocket, took out a rupee, and holding it in my left hand, I began polishing it with my right index finger. I had the attention of the grandchild and about twenty other people. I transferred the rupee into my right hand, turned a little to my left and lowered my hand to the level of grandmother and child both of whom sat on the floor. Then I slowly opened my hand and the money was gone. The kid had watched and so had the other twenty people. Everybody including Grandma, except the child, smiled. I decided at that point that they wouldn’t push me out one of the open windows after all. I relaxed and hung onto the overhead baggage, closed my eyes, and wondered if the inventor of the steam locomotive had been canonized yet. I know the inventor of the bus is roasting in hell.
We came to a stop in the Madurai station. But that was all because then a very Indian thing happened. Since this was not the end of the line for this train, people wanted to board. Since this was a district center, people wanted to get off. At times like this, you watch and keep quiet. Let the other people yell. I couldn’t move but it looked like I would watch a fight break out about five feet to the starboard from where I stood. I thought about that burnt-out car in Bombay. I thought about my former wife’s anxiety about crowds and I wondered if the train would pull out of the station with an ongoing riot in this car. That’s what the police are for.
I had seen them in several stations. The ones that looked like officers could usually speak a little English and when they shouted and walked like they were going somewhere and brandished that wooden cane they carry, people did listen. They must have been out the door prodding people with those sticks. We had been jammed together not moving for nearly fifteen minutes by now. It seems that the train doesn’t leave with a riot in progress after all.
All I could do is stand and watch two guys read each other off and finally an old lady began poking me in the ribs and waving me out of the way. Where “out of the way” was I wasn’t sure but I pretended. She wiggled passed me and I followed her like a wallet. By the time I got to the door, the guards were punching someone else and I was able to walk across the platform. P.S. the difference between the two guys never went past venting anger. That’s probably an Indian thing as well. Too many possibilities to start a fight. Let’s just yell and let it go at that.
So through the station and out in the taxi approach and into the afternoon and across four lanes of traffic, for once, I knew where I was going…almost. I looked down one lane and couldn’t see the Pearl Hotel but found it at the next corner. Not bad. It had only moved one block since I had been in Kodaikanal. They did have a room and it was comfortable and clean and after supper, I lay in bed planning on getting up early so as to be at the station by eight a.m. to get an “emergency” ticket in second class AC two tier for the following night to Kolkata. The bed felt good. The overhead fan whispered and I fell asleep.
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Downhill
When we hit the bump that lifted me out of my seat in the back of the bus, I turned to the fellow next to me and asked, “Dindigul?” He nodded. No question about it; that was a Dindigul bump. The town lies between Madurai, a city famous for the Sri Meenakshi Temple, the Gandhi Museum, and an ATM machine that swallowed my credit card and Kodaikanal that I finally pried myself loose from only a couple of miserable hours earlier. Dindigul has a special ill fame. There is a photographer, A.Shaikmomideed, who lives there, who publishes a photo a day in the Hindu. The pictures are of a bridge with no railing, a hole in the sidewalk due to a collapsed sewer below or just an unusually tall pile of rubbish in the street. Some days he points out that the municipality might consider another type of barrier other than a culvert pipe upended as warning to drivers that should you get a wheel down this hole, you’ll get yourself another wheel or perhaps another vehicle. To give the readers a break, the photographer sometimes shows a fellow riding a bicycle with a load of a dozen five gallon water containers. Since the pic is sometime in color and the containers’ colors run round the rainbow, it makes for an attractive picture, but he points out that it would be safer if you could see the man. Then there is the question of how many cows can dance on a pick-up bed. This may or may not be the guy you want living in your town. Dindigul looks like any other town in the flats. It’s dirty and crowded and it has holes in the street and it has a jammed up traffic, both foot and vehicular, the question is so what’s the fuss? I suppose that the Hindu just wants you to remember that this is not the way a public thoroughfare should be maintained. As for causes political corruption is one guess as to the source of the difficulty and the other is that there are too few maintainers for the number of roads. But since I do read the Hindu, you can see why I knew exactly where we were. My difficulty was that even near Death’s door, I really didn’t think, I was supposed to be in Dindigul. That wasn’t the plan. Neither was being near Death’s door.
I’d been planning to leave Kodaikanal for weeks. Each time the Talking Library met, I’d tell anyone who asked, “I’ll be on my way in a week or ten days.” Well it seemed to keep snowing in the Himalayas and hanging lose in Delhi or Calcutta wasn’t high on my list so I waited until time (even for someone who was retired) was running out. India has a rule that all long term visa holders must leave the country every six months. My six month anniversary of my blistering hot ride from the Mumbai airport to the overly warm Victoria Railway Terminal was approaching in early April. Since entering India I had decided on Plan Two, which would be to go look at some of the rest of the world, and early April would be a good time to launch that idea.
I waited until my calling cards arrived and the dhobi wallah had returned my laundry and another trip or two to the ATM machine for travel money then I told “Ma,” the night clerk at the hotel, that it was time to total up the balance of my bill. I gave him his nickname based on the first syllable of his first name, because like all good south Indian names, it is long…like the photographer’s, like the poets. Ma’s wife’s had a baby in these last weeks and he told me that they had narrowed the boy’s name down to four choices. Each name had about the number of letters that one would find in the alphabet. I countered with a suggestion of John, Bill, Fred, or Pete. He didn’t buy. I didn’t think of Al or Art. The length of names may have something to do why more young Indians don’t go to college. How would you like to fill out in triplicate those college forms with a name containing twenty-five or thirty letters?
So I went round telling everybody good by and planned to get out of town before anyone could ask, “You still here?”
I checked in with the travel agent and he told me that the downhill bus would be leaving at 4:30 PM. Ma said he knew of a better schedule, the “Yellow Bus.” By the way when coming to Kodaikanal, I rode the “Pink Bus.” The Pink Bus was further distinguishable by eight foot wide flower (hibiscus?) blossoms painted on the side. The blossoms were so out of scale that I thought stamens might really be giant tuberculosis bacillus. But since both Ma and the travel agent work across the street from the bus stand, I was open to suggestions.
The Cloud Street Café has been closed for a couple of weeks so I went down to the Carlton Hotel and said good bye to the waiters and manager. I missed one waiter called Michael (now that doesn’t take that long to spell although you normally have to be a Christian to have a name that length) but as I left, I met him on the street coming to work.
What I wasn’t planning on was when Ma gave me my wake-up call that morning, he gave me a gift wrapped present. That took me back a little. He and I had been talking about a book he was reading in Tamil and he told me it was about an ancient king of south India. The king’s name might well have had one of those four names he is planning for the kid. The gift was a very romantic statue of a young hero carrying a beautiful heroin away in chariot drawn by a galloping horse. I strongly suspect that these two figure into the story he was reading and both of them and the horse have long names.
The day before I bounced over the Dindigul bump, I’d spent trying to remember how I got my stuff into my pack and brief case and that is when I left one book behind and discovered either that I had become weaker living in Kodaikanal or that I had somehow packed about ten pounds more in my gear. And now I had a breakable statue. Ma is one of those people who will do anything for you. I left him more money than he really thought he’d need with daughter Rachel’s address and asked him if he might mail it on to me. Then after some photographs, we went looking for the “yellow bus.” The idea was that instead of taking the 4:30 to Kodai Road, a town with a train station where the Howdah Express stops, I would take this earlier bus, make a change in a town with a lot of letters in it, and then continue on to Kodai Road. I didn’t have to worry about remembering the town’s name; the conductor knew where to drop me off. Ma wouldn’t allow me to pay for my ticket to the changing point. And so we said our good byes and the bus rolled down the hill road for me continue a journey, which has been halted for four months at a very nice town on a sharp ridge in the forests of Tamil-Nadu.
We spiraled down through the supportive farms for Kodaikanal. All the food that I’d been eating had been grown on these lower slopes. Then the farms became more scattered and the forest rose above the road and threw shade over the bus. While the bus driver slowed on the corners when we met a truck or another bus, he lost points with me by turning on the DVD player and in three monitors we had some Bollywood thriller and with plenty of loud. So down the road we went to the sounds of punches in the face, supposed village dance numbers with full orchestra, and sobs from the women and snickers from the meanies. I sat by the window right over the right rear tire where I could count the bumps in the road but only one of those bumps would lift me out of my seat. All the windows in the bus were open and so there was fresh air and scents from the forest and occasional farm…and the overheating brakes. And then I noted a rare sensation. I was getting a touch of motion sickness.
Bollywood’s volume, which had driven me to the back of the bus to begin with, had been lowered but it seemed to be the trees and vegetation whirling before me out the window that brought on the nausea. The sicker I felt, the less nervous I was about the driving. The driver had gray hair and even though the yellow bus had a hammered out right front “fender,” you don’t age well by getting killed. I decided that the bus was alright although there was the matter of the brakes but I certainly was not alright. The open window, while barred to keep non-paying passengers from climbing in, was a source of fresh air and that was about the best I could hope for.
I think it had been over thirty years since I felt like this. When going to sea, on the first day or two, I could sometime feel rocky. If you are a sailor, you give the condition some thought. The two ways to avoid motion sickness are one, get in motion and stay there before you leave on a trip. I guess life had just been too quiet in Kodaikanal. Two, always travel on a full stomach. Eat before you leave. The people at the Carlton had served up a full breakfast but I needed to be more active than I had been. All I had going for me now was the open window.
We made short stops from time to time to let somebody off. I thought about getting out and puking in someone’s fine village but with two people sitting between and the aisle, I relied on hope. Finally, that wasn’t enough and I got most of my head out between the bars and let fly. There were some ladies sitting in the very back of the bus. I heard their windows slam shut. I was ashamed but this had nothing to do with will. When vomiting out of the right side of an Indian bus, watch forward, you have a little bit of leeway. If you see a truck or another bus coming toward you, pull your head back in. You can work your way between the bars again after the passing takes place, otherwise you may get your name in The Hindu. Well time passed and I wiped my face as best I could. Months before I met a young American woman who referred to toilet paper is “white gold.” It does come in handy for more than its primary purpose.
Of course I felt better but I don’t dwell on thinking about what “feeling worse” might entail. I did keep my face right by that source of fresh air. In time we left the mountains and with straighter roads, we picked up speed but I still didn’t feel well enough to get scared. There was one truck loaded (overloaded) with something which made the profile look like a mushroom. He had come from Dindigul. I wondered if Mr. A. Shaikmohdeen got a picture of him before the truck left town. I braced for a side-swipe; we missed.
The date was March 6th which means that fresh moving air lowers the apparent temperature a few degrees (wind chill factor to my friends) and I noticed that weather that might have passed for winter in south India had hurried north. The more I thought of it, hurrying north was a splendid idea. I’m sure I could acclimatize and Tamil-Nadu and Kerala are two beautiful places to live but I like a little chill. I enjoy wearing a jacket like the one that I was removing.
We passed through several villages and then we entered a small city, one big enough to support a questionable city government and a freelance photographer. When we hit the bump, I was disappointed that I didn’t see Mr. Shaidmohdeem snap a pic of our back wheel in the air. Up ahead lay the bus terminal and another trial to be told at another time.
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I’d been planning to leave Kodaikanal for weeks. Each time the Talking Library met, I’d tell anyone who asked, “I’ll be on my way in a week or ten days.” Well it seemed to keep snowing in the Himalayas and hanging lose in Delhi or Calcutta wasn’t high on my list so I waited until time (even for someone who was retired) was running out. India has a rule that all long term visa holders must leave the country every six months. My six month anniversary of my blistering hot ride from the Mumbai airport to the overly warm Victoria Railway Terminal was approaching in early April. Since entering India I had decided on Plan Two, which would be to go look at some of the rest of the world, and early April would be a good time to launch that idea.
I waited until my calling cards arrived and the dhobi wallah had returned my laundry and another trip or two to the ATM machine for travel money then I told “Ma,” the night clerk at the hotel, that it was time to total up the balance of my bill. I gave him his nickname based on the first syllable of his first name, because like all good south Indian names, it is long…like the photographer’s, like the poets. Ma’s wife’s had a baby in these last weeks and he told me that they had narrowed the boy’s name down to four choices. Each name had about the number of letters that one would find in the alphabet. I countered with a suggestion of John, Bill, Fred, or Pete. He didn’t buy. I didn’t think of Al or Art. The length of names may have something to do why more young Indians don’t go to college. How would you like to fill out in triplicate those college forms with a name containing twenty-five or thirty letters?
So I went round telling everybody good by and planned to get out of town before anyone could ask, “You still here?”
I checked in with the travel agent and he told me that the downhill bus would be leaving at 4:30 PM. Ma said he knew of a better schedule, the “Yellow Bus.” By the way when coming to Kodaikanal, I rode the “Pink Bus.” The Pink Bus was further distinguishable by eight foot wide flower (hibiscus?) blossoms painted on the side. The blossoms were so out of scale that I thought stamens might really be giant tuberculosis bacillus. But since both Ma and the travel agent work across the street from the bus stand, I was open to suggestions.
The Cloud Street Café has been closed for a couple of weeks so I went down to the Carlton Hotel and said good bye to the waiters and manager. I missed one waiter called Michael (now that doesn’t take that long to spell although you normally have to be a Christian to have a name that length) but as I left, I met him on the street coming to work.
What I wasn’t planning on was when Ma gave me my wake-up call that morning, he gave me a gift wrapped present. That took me back a little. He and I had been talking about a book he was reading in Tamil and he told me it was about an ancient king of south India. The king’s name might well have had one of those four names he is planning for the kid. The gift was a very romantic statue of a young hero carrying a beautiful heroin away in chariot drawn by a galloping horse. I strongly suspect that these two figure into the story he was reading and both of them and the horse have long names.
The day before I bounced over the Dindigul bump, I’d spent trying to remember how I got my stuff into my pack and brief case and that is when I left one book behind and discovered either that I had become weaker living in Kodaikanal or that I had somehow packed about ten pounds more in my gear. And now I had a breakable statue. Ma is one of those people who will do anything for you. I left him more money than he really thought he’d need with daughter Rachel’s address and asked him if he might mail it on to me. Then after some photographs, we went looking for the “yellow bus.” The idea was that instead of taking the 4:30 to Kodai Road, a town with a train station where the Howdah Express stops, I would take this earlier bus, make a change in a town with a lot of letters in it, and then continue on to Kodai Road. I didn’t have to worry about remembering the town’s name; the conductor knew where to drop me off. Ma wouldn’t allow me to pay for my ticket to the changing point. And so we said our good byes and the bus rolled down the hill road for me continue a journey, which has been halted for four months at a very nice town on a sharp ridge in the forests of Tamil-Nadu.
We spiraled down through the supportive farms for Kodaikanal. All the food that I’d been eating had been grown on these lower slopes. Then the farms became more scattered and the forest rose above the road and threw shade over the bus. While the bus driver slowed on the corners when we met a truck or another bus, he lost points with me by turning on the DVD player and in three monitors we had some Bollywood thriller and with plenty of loud. So down the road we went to the sounds of punches in the face, supposed village dance numbers with full orchestra, and sobs from the women and snickers from the meanies. I sat by the window right over the right rear tire where I could count the bumps in the road but only one of those bumps would lift me out of my seat. All the windows in the bus were open and so there was fresh air and scents from the forest and occasional farm…and the overheating brakes. And then I noted a rare sensation. I was getting a touch of motion sickness.
Bollywood’s volume, which had driven me to the back of the bus to begin with, had been lowered but it seemed to be the trees and vegetation whirling before me out the window that brought on the nausea. The sicker I felt, the less nervous I was about the driving. The driver had gray hair and even though the yellow bus had a hammered out right front “fender,” you don’t age well by getting killed. I decided that the bus was alright although there was the matter of the brakes but I certainly was not alright. The open window, while barred to keep non-paying passengers from climbing in, was a source of fresh air and that was about the best I could hope for.
I think it had been over thirty years since I felt like this. When going to sea, on the first day or two, I could sometime feel rocky. If you are a sailor, you give the condition some thought. The two ways to avoid motion sickness are one, get in motion and stay there before you leave on a trip. I guess life had just been too quiet in Kodaikanal. Two, always travel on a full stomach. Eat before you leave. The people at the Carlton had served up a full breakfast but I needed to be more active than I had been. All I had going for me now was the open window.
We made short stops from time to time to let somebody off. I thought about getting out and puking in someone’s fine village but with two people sitting between and the aisle, I relied on hope. Finally, that wasn’t enough and I got most of my head out between the bars and let fly. There were some ladies sitting in the very back of the bus. I heard their windows slam shut. I was ashamed but this had nothing to do with will. When vomiting out of the right side of an Indian bus, watch forward, you have a little bit of leeway. If you see a truck or another bus coming toward you, pull your head back in. You can work your way between the bars again after the passing takes place, otherwise you may get your name in The Hindu. Well time passed and I wiped my face as best I could. Months before I met a young American woman who referred to toilet paper is “white gold.” It does come in handy for more than its primary purpose.
Of course I felt better but I don’t dwell on thinking about what “feeling worse” might entail. I did keep my face right by that source of fresh air. In time we left the mountains and with straighter roads, we picked up speed but I still didn’t feel well enough to get scared. There was one truck loaded (overloaded) with something which made the profile look like a mushroom. He had come from Dindigul. I wondered if Mr. A. Shaikmohdeen got a picture of him before the truck left town. I braced for a side-swipe; we missed.
The date was March 6th which means that fresh moving air lowers the apparent temperature a few degrees (wind chill factor to my friends) and I noticed that weather that might have passed for winter in south India had hurried north. The more I thought of it, hurrying north was a splendid idea. I’m sure I could acclimatize and Tamil-Nadu and Kerala are two beautiful places to live but I like a little chill. I enjoy wearing a jacket like the one that I was removing.
We passed through several villages and then we entered a small city, one big enough to support a questionable city government and a freelance photographer. When we hit the bump, I was disappointed that I didn’t see Mr. Shaidmohdeem snap a pic of our back wheel in the air. Up ahead lay the bus terminal and another trial to be told at another time.
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