Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  In June of that year, after some days of fruitless negotiation, Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, gave the order to dislodge Bhindranwale and his men. The army occupied Amritsar in large numbers, and black-suited commandos stormed the temple complex. They were cut down by machine-gun fire from Bhindranwale's men. Some soldiers fired from a distance, but succeeded only in killing civilians and wrecking parts of the temple. Indian army officers begged for backup, insisting they needed tanks. After initial refusals—because of the danger to civilians—permission was granted. Thirteen tanks were lined up and were met by a barrage of antitank fire and rocket launchers. Hundreds more died.

  Still, Bhindranwale was trapped, and it was only a matter of time before he ran out of ammunition. He decided to go down in a blaze of glory. In the course of the siege he had become messianic, and in one version of the events he said to his men, "Those who want to be martyrs, come with me." He emerged from his hiding place firing his machine gun, and was mowed down with fifty of his men. Six hundred men on both sides had already been shot or blown up.

  That was not the end of the business. Sikhs were furious that the Golden Temple had been desecrated by the assault, and Mrs. Gandhi was blamed. Stories circulated that Indian soldiers who occupied the temple drank alcohol there and, much worse, smoked tobacco. Sikhs have a unique horror of cigarettes. Mrs. Gandhi hunkered down, protected by a number of bodyguards. But Sikhs got their revenge four months later when, in October, Mrs. Gandhi (who had ignored several warnings) was murdered by two of her bodyguards, who were Sikhs. One morning in Delhi, on the pretext of guarding her, they pulled out their service pistols and shot her dead.

  With their obvious turbans, their full beards, and their characteristic silver bracelets, Sikh males are among the most easily identifiable believers in the world. In the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination Sikhs were singled out and set upon by Hindus—dragged from trains and buses, stabbed in bazaars, set on fire as they tried to flee in their cars. Perhaps three thousand were killed—no figures are accurate, just round numbers of a tragic event that no one has forgotten.

  "It was terrible," Amar Singh said. "So many people killed."

  "But it finished the problem of Bhindranwale, didn't it?"

  "It finished problem, yes. But danger for us lurked everywhere."

  "What did you think of Mrs. Gandhi?"

  "A nice woman," he said, but he was being polite. Even Indira Gandhi's closest friends would not have called this manipulative demagogue a nice woman.

  "Do people still talk about Khalistan?"

  "In villages, some people. Not city people."

  Nevertheless, Khalistan, "an aspirant Sikh nation," has an office in Washington, which sends out press releases, campaign information, furious rants, and images of the Khalistan flag.

  That night I was making notes in my room in a cheap hotel in Amritsar, where there are no good hotels. It occurred to me why the Golden Temple looked golder and brighter and better kept than it had when I'd first seen it. Because of the damage of the siege and the reassertion of Sikh identity, the temple had been renovated, regilded until it dazzled.

  I called Amar Singh the next day to get a ride to the railway station and to say goodbye. He mentioned the other journalists he had taken around. Besides Mark Tully, there was Satish Jacob, whom I had also met many years ago—Tully and Jacob had written the definitive account of the Blue Star operation.

  "And David Brown from the Guardian— I drove him, too. He is now in Jerusalem. I helped him."

  Amar Singh said he still listened to the BBC. He followed world news and always looked for word of journalists he had driven. I complimented him on his curiosity and helpfulness.

  "My aim is good service," he said.

  It could have sounded like a cliché, but it didn't. It was serious and sincere, and it touched me coming from this old driver who had a book and a newspaper on the front seat of his car, who lived at the periphery of journalism, who kept up with the news. That was part of the pleasure I felt being back in India again, where everyone seemed overqualified for whatever job they were doing. Though their talk could be maddening and their demands exasperating, I loved the fluency of Indians. The crowds of people seemed worse than ever, but I was pleased to be back in the Indian stew.

  ***

  AMRITSAR CENTRAL STATION had been built in 1931; the date was carved on its red brick façade. The antique weirdness was another pleas ure of India. Entering the station, I felt I could have been walking backwards into the past, passing the big gloomy station restaurant and its overhead fans, the urchins chasing each other on the platform, the Sikh in a brown suit and blue turban, the man in dusty pajamas sleeping against a pile of burlap bags. And there were the station's hustlers, children mostly, selling bottles of soda they carried in a big bucket, or ice cream bars they hawked out of a wooden box, or with shoeshine kits slung over one skinny shoulder, all of them completely fluent in English but illiterate.

  "What does that sign say?"

  The boy was about thirteen, and I was pointing to one of the more dramatic-looking examples of railway strike graffiti.

  "I don't know. I don't go to school."

  Half-naked sadhus, holy men with metal tridents and all their possessions in one small cloth bag; groups of women looking tidy and serene amid the squalor; a man hoicking just under a No Spitting sign; fierce mustached matrons and small girls, nearly all the women in saris or Punjabi dress, all the men in turbans. It could have been the 1930s; it could have been 1973, when I had been on the Railway Bazaar trip. Superficially, nothing had changed, and it was uplifting, as though time had stood still, as though I were young again.

  "What is your bogie?" the conductor asked.

  I told him and he showed me my seat. It was a day train, the seven-hour trip to Delhi, not as fancy or as fast as the Shatabdi Express, but comfortable, on time, with a meal service, and soon rolling and bouncing through the wheat fields of the Punjab—Pakistan just a few miles to the west.

  I had thought of taking the train to Lahore, but the news from Pakistan discouraged me. Riots had recently taken place in many Pakistani cities, Lahore included, after this week's court case in which a man in neighboring Kabul, one Abdul Rahman, was put on trial for converting to Christianity. The charge was "apostasy." One of the Hadiths specified death as the punishment for a Muslim who abandons the faith. But when the man's life was spared, riots broke out, huge mobs crying "Death to Christians!"

  "Death to America!" was another shout, and "Abdul Rahman must be executed!" Meanwhile, court officials pondering the man's baptism said, "Rahman's mental health will be evaluated."

  These Koranic laws were enacted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which theoretically were our allies. But I knew it wasn't safe. The journalist Daniel Pearl had been recently abducted and beheaded in Pakistan, and Westerners were routinely harassed in the bazaars. This was the result of billions of dollars spent and many lives lost in the futile attempt by the U.S. government to prop up the governments of these countries.

  "This is a young democracy," the American secretary of state remarked when Abdul Rahman's life was on the line for his crime of apostasy, and Afghanistan needed apologists.

  So I didn't revisit Pakistan. Instead, I headed south and intended to keep going until I got to the southernmost tip of India.

  Many people boarded the train at Ludhiana, among them Kuldeep and Kumar in the seats next to me. Neither wore a turban, yet I guessed they might be Sikhs—Westernized from their residence in England, where they said they lived, both in Ilford, Essex. Kuldeep had gone to England as a ten-year-old; Kumar had been born there. Both were visiting relatives in Ludhiana. Kuldeep was the more talkative of the two.

  "Could you live here?" I asked him.

  "I'm a Punjabi, I could live here easily," he said. "But my wife was born in England. She'd find it hard to adjust in a village."

  "What would it be like for her?"

  "Maybe too quiet. But I tell you, v
illage life is good. Plenty of food, cost of living is low, no stress. I don't need nightclubs. I'd like it." He seemed a bit rueful that he was heading back to England. "This India is different from the India I left. Some people are coming back."

  "Building houses?"

  "Plenty. Big villas. Not many in Amritsar, because it's a border town. No one wants to risk living so close to Pakistan. But Ludhiana is quiet and safe. Jullundur, too. There, you see?"

  We were passing a cluster of houses in a walled compound.

  Kumar said, "We have two growing seasons. You see all this wheat?" I did, it was unmissable, green and gorgeous, silky in the sunshine. "This will be harvested in a few weeks. Then the rice will be planted, and the rains will come and fill the paddy fields."

  "This whole place is connected, too," Kuldeep said. "Those farmers look like rustics and hicks, but they all have cell phones. Hardly anyone uses a land line."

  "What do they worry about?" I asked.

  "They worry about democracy, as I do," he said. "The scheduled classes, for example."

  By scheduled classes he meant the lowest castes in India—the Dalits, the so-called Untouchables, whom Mahatma Gandhi called Harijans, Children of God. What Kuldeep was questioning was a system that had its American parallel not only in affirmative action programs for minorities, but also in the stubborn resistance by the rest of the populace to the preferential fast track.

  "They are now better-off than we are. They have so many advantages. These advantages were written into the law, to lift them up, and these laws have never been taken off the books. It's becoming a problem."

  "How many people are we talking about?"

  "A big group—maybe thirty percent of the population."

  "What else worries you?"

  "The north-south divide—lots of friction. The Punjab and Haryana are feeding the whole country," Kuldeep said. "So much of the country's water comes from here. And what are we getting for it?"

  Interesting, this man from Ilford, Essex, growing passionate and indignant about resources in the Punjab. He did not live here, but this was where his heart was.

  "The pity of India is the bad roads—bad for so many reasons. We are not keeping pace with other countries with respect to roads. Corruption, mismanagement. It can take hours for a simple journey. Everything else is going ahead, but not road building."

  Kumar said, "And there's the population. Look at this."

  The railway car was full—more than full: all the seats were taken, many people were standing, luggage was piled to the ceiling, and every time we rounded a sharp bend or stopped suddenly, passengers toppled and fell. The platforms of passing stations were jammed. People hung out the windows. People jostled, and there may have been passengers on the roof—it was a common occurrence. Everyone was civil, but there was no escape from the mob.

  And for all the talk of modernity, the train was in tough shape—very dirty, broken seats, filthy toilets, loose wires tangled in the passageways, chipped paint, and the usual stinks.

  Yet, amid the chaos and the crowds, life went on, the conductors punching tickets, passengers making phone calls, food sellers squeezing from car to car, calling out, "Cutlet! Cutlet!" or "Ess krim! Ess krim!" or "Jews! Mungo jews!" or "Chicken rice!" or "Pani! Vutta! Pani! Vutta! Buttle vutta."

  "What's your biggest worry?"

  "The division between rich and poor is growing," Kuldeep said. "It's huge at the moment and it's getting worse. Many people have everything, but also many people have nothing. How to fix?"

  To change the subject, he said he was looking forward to the England-India cricket match in Delhi. "It's tomorrow. You should go."

  "Maybe I will," I said. "Who should I be watching?"

  "The bowler, Harbhajan Singh. They call him Bhaji—he's great."

  That was when I was certain Kuldeep was a Sikh. He had no beard, no turban, no steel bracelet. He had been Anglicized, but still he rooted for India, still was loyal to his race and religion: he mentioned the only Sikh player on the team.

  Stretching my legs on the platform between coaches, taking the air, I struck up a conversation with Mohinder Singh. He was a businessman, living in Ludhiana, but on his way to Delhi. I mentioned that I had just come from Uzbekistan.

  "We sell lots of woolen goods from Ludhiana to the Stans—Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan," he said. "Pullovers, scarves, mittens. They buy from us. We export everywhere. Bike parts. Ludhiana was in the Guinness Book of Records as one of the largest makers of bikes. Because of the successful bike industry, the motorcycle company Hero Honda located here."

  Jullundur was also a big maker and exporter of sports equipment. Soccer balls, cricket bats, cricket balls, hockey sticks. For religious reasons, many Hindus will not make anything involving leather, which they deem unclean. Sikhs, with no such sanction, have cornered the market.

  He said, "Lots of agricultural land is being converted into housing colonies. There's a big housing boom in the Punjab. Not just locals but nonresident Indians from Canada and the U.K. investing in real estate. Small farmers sell up their land and use the money to send a son to the U.K. or Canada, to emigrate and make a go of it. Hoping he will succeed and send money back."

  He asked me if I had been in India before. I told him that I had last been in Punjab thirty-three years ago.

  He asked, "What do you think is the biggest difference?"

  I said, "What you're doing now. Talking about progress and praising India's economy. Confidence and self-esteem. I never heard that before."

  He agreed, saying, "And phones. When we lived in Simla, my father was a paramilitary. Twenty years ago it was almost impossible to have a telephone. I remember the day we were notified that we could have a telephone. We rejoiced!"

  "How long had you waited?"

  "Two years!" he said. "Now it isn't a mark of status. Even rickshaw wallahs have mobile phones."

  We were watching the Punjab go past from the breezy passageway of the express train. With its fields of wheat, the women in shawls and the men in turbans, bicycles on the dusty roads, the countryside was unchanged from what I had seen all those years before. But Mohinder Singh's confident mood and the good humor of Kuldeep and Kumar were something new. My memory of India was of people looking to the past. What struck me now was meeting Indians who looked to the future.

  I said, "What do you think is India's problem?"

  Mohinder Singh said, "Crux of India's problem is overpopulation. As soon as we build any kind of infrastructure it becomes inadequate because of," he shrugged, "we have too many people."

  ***

  BUT AFTER ALL THE TALK in the Shan-e-Punjab (Glory of the Punjab) Express of the success of India, the wealth of Punjab, the national renewal, all the optimists got off the train in the darkness at New Delhi Station to find the old India stubbornly clinging to life. A thousand passengers disembarked, burdened by bags, suitcases, sacks, children, old grannies, and jerry cans of ghee, to find thousands more waiting for onward trains under the glaring lights—brighter in India than anywhere else I've been, the dazzling light that prevents you from seeing things.

  The permanent residents of the station lay stretched out under sheets and blankets. Mark Twain, who saw such crowds of travelers and squatters, includes a satirical two-page description of a big-city railway station in India in Following the Equator (1897). And then he loses his jollity; he is baffled and disturbed by the squatters: "These silent crowds sat there with their humble bundles and baskets and small household gear about them, and patiently waited—for what?" The squatters were still there, still waiting, the scene unchanged, Twain's words as true now as they had been a century ago. The people were sleeping, hundreds of them, completely covered, big and small, some like corpses in body bags, some like campers, some like mummies; lying in family groups under the lights at the Ajmeri Gate side of the station.

  All the optimists from Punjab who got off the train with me walked past these hordes of homeless sleepers, beggars, squatters. The
distressing scene, another fact of Indian life, was so obvious no one mentioned it, or even glanced at it.

  In this dry season the Delhi air was a settled cloud of dust, of smoke, of car fumes, a fog of eye-stinging grit, and most of all a sweetish stink of too many people, the emanation of their outdoor habits that clots your nostrils. It is not a city smell but a suggestion of deforestation and desert and pulverized brick and wood-fueled cooking fires, the odor of humanity, which is also an odor of death. Even in the pitch-darkness of one of the frequent Delhi power cuts, you would know you were in an overpopulated place that existed in a crisis of old-fangledness.

  I stayed in the Delhi hotel where I'd stayed before. It was now luxurious. In a mood of self-pitying nostalgia I remembered how, long ago, I had tried to phone my wife in London from here and had met only frustration—her faint and evasive voice, not much warmth, and then a rising tide of static. "Speak louder," the hotel operator said over a sound like crashing surf on the line. Phoning was no problem these days. As the man had said, "Even rickshaw wallahs have mobile phones." From my window I could see that the dust cloud of the night had resolved itself into a grainy fog that hovered over the great horizontal city—no skyscrapers but many tombs, domes, monuments, mosques, temples, riverside forts, ancient walls, and obelisks, wreathed in the vapor that had a human smell.

  I got a box and filled it with my coat and gloves, my fleece vest, the icons I'd bought, and my maps of Georgia and Turkmenistan. I sent the stuff home, unburdening myself. Changing trains, I had found summertime; no more cold weather until Japan. With a lighter bag, just a change of clothes in it, and my small briefcase of papers, I was eager to move on.