Chapter
Summaries
PART VI
A Passage Through
India
"…in spite of all that I had read about the
country, nothing had prepared me for it."
V. S. Naipaul
An
Area of Darkness
Chapter 28
BOMBAY:
BRITANNIA, BUREACRACY, AND BEGGARS
"To be in Bombay is to be exhausted."
V.
S. Naipaul
An
Area of Darkness
The jet has
begun its descent through the clouds over Bombay. I have a general knowledge of India: its
"teeming masses", its oppressive heat, the Gandhi legacy and the country’s
poverty. But I soon identify with V.S. Naipaul who noted in An Area of
Darkness, that, "…in spite of all that I had read about the
country, nothing had prepared me for it." And that "in the beginning the obvious
was overwhelming…"
I see the obvious even as the jet
dips down below the clouds – the poverty, the sprawling acres of mat-roofed hovels
crammed together near Santa Cruz Airport. Driving by them on a bus, I see the
slum-dwellers, thousands of them, emerging and disappearing amid the narrow, labyrinthine
alleys between the hovels, some of which were set up as local convenience stores.
Incongruously parked outside one is a shiny multi-speed bicycle.
Dickens on population -- the line
from Oliver Twist about decreasing the surplus population --
what if another life form (besides Hitler) took such a superior attitude toward people
. My impression is that India is a world of masters and servants.
So I enter Bombay
– the Gateway of India – with a distinct urge to turn around and close the gate
softly behind me. But, like Naipaul, I find there is "no ship to run back
to." My odyssey has brought me here and also Melawend, somewhere.
First, I must find
accommodation. The Y is booked solid. The Salvation Army dorms are cramped
and do not inspire a sense of security. Then two grubby but pleasant boys lead me
to a grubby but pleasant hotel (it even has room service) – within sight of the
famous Taj Mahal Hotel. From the narrow window at the foot of my coffin-shaped room I
marvel at my luck – a superb view the ship-dotted harbour and, down the seaside
promenade to the left is the imposing basalt hulk of The Gateway of India and the domed
towers of the stately Taj Mahal Hotel (where Michael Palin will stay in his parody of
Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days.
My mission takes me to City Hall
were it seems many of Bombay’s one crore (10 million)
citizens have come to see the mayor. I spend part of the time waiting in a nearby
park. A thin young man tells his sad tale adding that he needs only 102 rupees for
train fare home. Other just like him gather around, pawing my gear. Finally the
mayor if Mumbai greets me in his crowded office.
One soon discovers that Bombay is
a mash of patchwork architecture and opulent Victorian monstrosities. Walking its streets,
I slowly acclimatize to the withering heat and humidity, the incessant power outages and
the tremendous ebb and flow of humanity as I learn to sidestep sidewalk sleepers and
clutching beggars. This segment explores some of the history that transformed seven
marshy islands into this post-colonial bazaar.
But where is Melawend? I
meet India’s insane bureaucracy head-on. Naipaul survived it just clearing two
bottles of liquor through Customs. But the boys of Bombay had not dealt with the
likes of Melawend. A stern official says, "This happens rarely. Vehicles come
into India via the docks, not the airport. There are so many procedures."
Right. And that’s why the officials who have to deal with it are at the docks,
about 20 miles from the airport. The frenetic paper chase begins and so does the shuttling
of the 20-odd miles between the airport Cargo Complex and Indira Docks. Like
Naipaul, I learn that "To be in Bombay is to be exhausted."
At last, Melawend
emerges from the caverns of cargo and I start loading her for the run to New Delhi. A few
young men gather to watch. More come until the loading bay is packed with perhaps
one hundred mustachioed men who all seem to have perfect white teeth. In a laughing
jungle of arms and rubbernecking heads, I manage to tie the load down.
"Which way to Delhi? I said.
One hundred outstretched arms
pointed the same way. But it will be two and a half hours of fighting traffic and
making wrong turns before Melawend and I finally escape from Bombay – heading for the
"blast furnace" of Madhya Pradesh.
Chapter 29
O.P. AND THE TAJ
MAHAL
A lifetime’s images of the Taj Mahal beckon me onward and at first the going is
great. I ride Melawend up into the relative coolness of the parched hills of
Maharstra’s Western Ghats, where, except for a few villages, India’s hinterland
seems almost deserted. Then we descend to the vast sun-scorched plateau of Madhya
Pradesh and temperatures soar. Melawend’s faring burns to the touch but she
whizzes coolly past the parked hulks of ancient lorries, their hoods up under the few
trees. My helmet went missing between Africa and India so I am wearing only
sunglasses and a floppy Stetson hat. I feel the full blast of the hot,
sweat-sucking, dusty air. We stop at every village to chug down sugar cane juice or
bottles of pop at roadside kiosks, departing before the inevitable crowd becomes another
traffic hazard.
We weave around
countless families in ox-drawn carts and hordes of pedestrians, bicyclists, goats and
free-wandering cows – none of which have any sense of traffic. We ride behind
stinking teetering busses and lorries with ornate "Horn Please" murals painted
on their tailgates.
After two tiring days, we reach
Agra and I decide to splurge on a nice hotel. The manager of the Hotel Mumtaz seems
very receptive, but perhaps it had been comic pity when I later see myself in a mirror
– the hot dirty run had given he the look of recently exhumed zombie who had been
buried without the benefit of a coffin.
Just as Niagara Falls hyperbole
had filled Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe with eager anticipation, so do I feel
when arrival at the Taj Mahal is imminent the next morning. Still exhausted and
somewhat ill from questionable drinks along the previous day’s run, I welcome the
sight of local guides across the street from the hotel – pedal rickshaw drivers
lounging in the shade. One steps forward quicker than the others.
"Good morning sir," he
says. "Welcome. Where are you from?"
I tell him.
"Canada. Very nice."
He is short, dark and sinewy and
has long ears and the red ochre mark of a Hindu on his forehead between deep, penetrating
eyes. He wears the traditional dhoti, and has gold rings on his
right hand. He leads me to his rusty but clean rig. It’s black tubing, riveted
and patterned tin and black upholstery. The tires are bald.
"Where are you wanting to go
– Taj Mahal? Agra Fort? Jami Masjid? I take you, as you like. Very
cheap."
"The Taj Mahal. How
much?"
"Money?" he said.
"No problem."
I wonder if he is related to
Farage back at the Pyramids.
"You pay me later, as you
like." He pats the torn passenger seat. "Come. I take you Taj Mahal, very
nice. You stay all day, as you like. I wait. No waiting charge."
And so I have met O.P. –
that’s what he calls himself – and we go the Taj. And like Niagara Falls,
the Taj defies superlatives. Signs along the path to the mausoleum defy the tourist:
"No cameras beyond this point." This is repeated by a sign that is closer, and
yet another where you take off your shoes to climb the steps to the marble terrace.
Cameras and camcorders are busily employed everywhere.
Now come the
sensations of the Taj: the coolness of the marble; the hand-felt texture of finely-carved
stone; the white glare, the echo beneath the massive dome – and all the scalloped
archways and passageways, evoking the sudden appearance of Indiana Jones.
I indulge in my own photographic
self-rendition of the celluloid archaeologist. I sidestep dozing bulls outside the
massive red wall that surrounds the Taj and make my way down to the Yamuna River. On
the fertile bed of the low river, a family rests in a straw tent amid a crop of
melons. I employ the father in some promotional photography and then spend the
rest of the day studying the subtleties of this colossal monument to love. This
segment will be inlaid with anecdotes about the Taj Mahal’s creation.
The time comes for another
regretful departure. I am undergoing change by oppressive, impressive India, learning
tolerance and gratitude for things once taken for granted – such as the bounty common
in North America. Yet it is still with an unsettling mixture of wonder and
trepidation as Melawend and I depart for India’s capital city.
Chapter 30
DIPLOMACY IN DELHI
With my city map and hostel guide lost, Melawend and I make our way into the
sprawling congested metropolis and, after some ordeals, settle in the youth hostel in the
quietness of Chanakyapuri, the diplomatic enclave.
Unlike the youth hostel in
Nairobi, most guests here are native Indian, journalists and students mixed with foreign
shoestring travelers. Among the students, I meet Sashi, a nursing student from
Bangalore who is in Delhi on a tour of its hospitals. With one of Sashi’s
friends we try out some of the sidewalk dhabas (street
kitchens). Walking back to the hostel, we are suddenly ushered off the street by
armed soldiers as Rajiv Gandi’s motorcade soon speeds by. On another evening,
we shop in a dark open bazaar where there is sold everything from shoes to condoms with
pictures of nude western girls on the box. One of Sashi’s fellow students asks
me: "Have you had an Indian girl yet?’
Through Sashi, I learn about
"kitchen accidents" in which young wives are burned alive allegedly on purpose
for not fulfilling dowry demands of the husband's family. I learn more about India's
supposedly dying caste system. Sashi speaks with guarded words but I come to the
conclusion that Indian society is a fetid den of inequity, especially toward its women.
The embassy has arranged a meeting with Delhi’s mayor but city hall is
located on what surely must be one of the world’s most congested streets –
Chandi Chowk – a compacted, buzzing hive of crumbling shops and tenements swarmed by
pedestrians, bicyclists, pedicabs, scooters, auto-rickshaws, cars, cows – you name
it. In the sudden quiet of his modest office, Mayor Mahinder Singh Saathi, a round
friendly Sikh, shares tea and biscuits and talks with me about world peace.
Delhi drivers are the worst yet encountered. Around
Connaught Circus, they make their own lanes and rules, changing them rapidly. On one
of the marked four-lane roads radiating from the circle, a Sikh in a new Maruti van
barrels out of a side street, races across the busy thoroughfare, across our path.
Melawend and I slam into the van broadside. In the aftermath, the driver and the van
disappear. A pressing crowd has gathered around my badly bruised Melawend and me.
Many of them are laughing. They don’t understand why I am making such a fuss.
"What is there to be
done?" someone says to me.
Later, an Indian explains:
"They simply saw it as your karma."
Indeed. And maybe the woman
passenger in England that first day was right when she said, "Someone is watching
over you."
Delhi’s
central streets are jammed with political rallies for the upcoming elections. Rajiv
Gandhi’s poster is everywhere. I escape by taking an eight-hour bus tour of the
city. It takes many sites including the Qutab Minar, "Delhi’s most
spectacular monument", and the Red Fort. It takes in the former home of
Indira Gandhi and the plexiglass box that covers the sidewalk markings that outline the
where her body fell to assassin’s bullets – 36 years after Mahatma Gandhi was
slain and followed years later by her son, Rajiv.
Meanwhile, back at the youth
hostel, the few western travelers come and go. Among them is Rodney, the timid American
who talks about sex in Bangkok. Penny and Melanie, two buxom British girls, tell of
being groped in Egypt and gawked at by natives in Goa while sunbathing topless with male
companions. They talk about their dilemma – having wanted all-over tans,
knowing their boyfriends back home would not approve as they favouring the girls'
"white bits" as some proof of chastity away from the roost. And there is
the Indian doctor who asks about life in Canada, focusing mainly on Canadian women.
An hour after we meet, he says, "Can you sponsor me now?"
With visas secured and
sponsorship unattained, it is time to leave New Delhi. Rambha, a lovely
meteorologist from Kathmandu has we my appetite for the cool beauty of Nepal. First,
Melawend and I face the roads of India again, anxious for the final Indian destination
– the holy city of Varanasi on the banks of the sacred Ganges.
Chapter 31
HOLY GHATS OF THE GANGA MA
Police hassle Melawend and I on
the way out of Delhi.
"You are wrong," an
officer says as he points to Melawend’s large load. He holds out his hand, palm up.
"You pay one hundred rupees fine."
Paul Theroux has a wonderful
traveler’s motto: "Grin like a dog and wander aimlessly." But sometimes the
traveler has to bite back. The rupees remain in my pocket.
It’s another pop-guzzling
run, weaving and beeping through bursting communities. We ride too long that first
day. The sun has set and I face a darkening road reminiscent of the nerve-wracking
run to Luxor. Melawend is low on gas. We stop. A young man from the
crowd that gathers (the crowds are always men and boys) siphons gas for me and warns me
not to stop anywhere before Kanpur – about 100 miles further on – because of
bandits. But the going is too treacherous. Melawend and I spend the night at a
truck stop; me on a rope bed beside the road, Melawend in a shed with an upturned rope bed
for concealment. It’s typical: friendly drivers, pungent food, the ubiquitous
high-pitched girl singing on a radio, silhouettes around parked trucks, the Brahman bull,
the pregnant dog, the hot dry air under a canopy of trees and stars.
We arrive in
Varanasi, one of the holiest of Hindu cities. We are met and led through the old town to
the Hotel India by Akbar, the pedicab-wallah who becomes my steadfast chauffeur, guide and
friend.
At dawn the next morning, Akbar
takes me through the old part of the city – crammed and cruddy and the air full of
the rrrringggg, rrrringggg from the bells of rigs of other pedicab
wallahs. We roll to the famous ghats where pilgrims come to bathe and pray and
cleanse their souls or to die on the west bank of the Ganga Ma – Mother Ganges.
A boatman rows me along the bank where women bathe discretely and dhobi-wallahs (people
who wash clothes) beat wet clothes against rock slabs. And what do I see - boys
frolicking in the river on inner tubes – shades of Ontario's Sherkston quarry!
The boatman takes me past old houses at anchor. A bony, white, sunburned man with a
tangled mane of black hair emerges from one.
"Bad people," the boatman says. "Hippies.
Drugs."
A bald round man treading water
with his young daughter clutching his neck in tow says, "What is your good
name?" The boat drifts by crumbling temples, the painted images of Shiva and
the burning ghats where dogs paw the ashes for bones.
Across from my
hotel, I laugh with poor people who laugh at me as a water buffalo empties its bowels at
my feet as I photograph the herd. The woman and her two daughters will scoop up the
excrement to preserve as fuel. Except for their dirty clothes and matted hair and
their life circumstances, the two girls remind me that I have two daughters back home.
A Hindu pedicab-wallah cons me
into believing Akbar has accepted another fare that morning and so begins to take me into
town. An angry Akbar catches up and I join him in condemnation of the hustler. Later, when
Akbar is not around, the Hindu says,"You do not want him. He is Muslim."
This episode deals further with India’s religious strife that will soon rip violently
through Delhi.
Since Egypt, I have observed that
one of the biggest detriments to progress in the Third World is the lack or deplorable
condition of infrastructure. For me in Varanasi, it’s something westerners
often take for granted – the telephone system. In four days, a secretary at the
dusty archaic branch of a major bank can’t make a sustained phone connection with the
main branch in Delhi to approve a Visa advance. Akbar leads me through dark alleys
to the mattress-floored rooms of silk dealers until a deal is finally struck for brocade
and a cash advance - Cairo revisited.
In the eleventh hour, an affluent
family offers to help me win sponsorship, but it will take time. The monsoons are
imminent and I have heard the heavy rains often wash out sections of Nepal’s roads.
Again, there is a reluctant leaving, but Nepal offers a cool change from the heat and
hassle of India.
