by Paul Theroux
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But do you feel all right?’
‘I have been sick – four days in Amritsar I have been in the hospital, and in Quetta also. I was so nervous. The doctors take tests and they give me this medicine, but it does no good. I don’t sleep, I don’t eat – just maybe glass of milk and piece of bread. I fly to Amritsar from Lahore. I was so sick in Lahore – three days in hospital and in Quetta two days. I cross Baluchistan. Yazd, you know Yazd? It is a terrible place. Two nights I am there and I am on the bus two days from Teheran. I cannot sleep. Every five hours the bus stops and I take some tea and a little melon. I am sick. The people say, “Why you don’t talk – are you angry?” But I say, “No, not angry, but sick –” ’
This was the way he spoke, in long lisped passages, interrupting himself, repeating that he was sick in a voice that was monotonously apologetic. He was German and had been a sailor, a deck hand on a German ship, then a steward on a Finnish one. He had sailed for seven years and had been to the States – ‘Yes, to every country,’ he said, ‘but only for a few hours.’ He loved ships, but he couldn’t sail anymore. I asked why. ‘Hepatitis,’ he said, giving it a German pronunciation. He caught it in Indonesia and was in the hospital for weeks. He had never managed to shake it off: he still needed tests. He’d had one in Amritsar. ‘People say to me, “Your face is sick.” I know my face is sick, but I cannot eat.’
His face was ghastly, and he was trembling. ‘Are you taking any medicine?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I take this.’ He opened the leather purse he had been smoothing with his scrawny fingers and took out a cellophane envelope. He peeled the cellophane away and showed me a wad of brown sticky stuff, like a flattened plug of English toffee.
‘What is it?’
‘Opium,’ he said. ‘I take it in little balls.’
His lisp made ‘balls’ moistly vicious.
‘I am a yunk.’ He broke off a piece of opium and rolled it between his fingers, slowly making it a pellet.
‘A junkie?’
‘Yes, I take needle. See my arms.’
He locked the compartment door and pulled the curtain across the window. He rolled up his left sleeve. His arm appalled me: each vein was clearly defined by dark bruised scars of needle marks, thick welts that made the veins into black cords. He touched his arm shyly, as if it didn’t belong to him and said, ‘I cannot get heroin. In Lahore I am not feeling so well. I stay in hospital but still I am weak and nervous. The people are making noise and it is so hot. I don’t know what I can do. So I escape and I walk down the street. A Pakistani says to me he has some morphine. I go with him and he shows me. It is good – German morphine. He asks me for one hundred and fifty rupees. I give him and take an injection. That is how I get to Amritsar. But in Amritsar I get very sick and I cannot get any more of morphine. So I take this –’ He patted his right pocket and took out a cake of hashish, roughly the size of the opium blob, but dry and cracked. ‘Or I smoke this –’ He withdrew a little sack of marijuana.
I told him that with his budget of drugs he was lucky to have got into India. At the border post I had seen an Indian customs official ask a boy to drop his jeans.
‘Yes,’ said Hermann. ‘I am so nervous! The man asks me do I have pot and I say no. Do I smoke it? I say, yes, sometimes, but he doesn’t look at my luggages. If I am nervous I can hide it in secret places.’
‘Then I suppose you don’t have anything to worry about.’
‘No, I am hot and nervous always.’
‘But you can hide your drugs.’
‘I can even throw them away and buy more,’ he said. ‘But my arms! If they see my arms they know. I have to hide my arms always.’ He pushed his sleeves up and looked again at the long dark scars.
He told me how it was that he had come to India. In Hanover, he decided to cure himself of his heroin habit. He registered as an addict and entered a rehabilitation centre – he called it ‘The Release’ – where he was given 700 Deutsche marks a month and a daily glass of methadone. In return for this he helped clean the centre. He never went out; he was afraid that if he did he would meet someone who’d sell him heroin. But an odd thing happened: by staying in he rarely spent his monthly allowance, and he found that at the end of a year he had saved quite a lot of money – enough to live on in India for six months or more. So he picked up and left, just like that, on a charter flight to Teheran, where his withdrawal symptoms began.
He had carried his dereliction to a derelict land. He was doomed, he stank of death, and his condition was not so different from that of the unfortunates who appeared at the railway stations we passed, gathering for the light and water. There are foreigners who, knowing they are wrecked, go to India to be anonymous in her decrepitude, to age and sicken in the bustees of the East. They are people, V. S. Naipaul wrote recently, ‘who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own … who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security.’
‘I take this now.’ He popped the pellet of opium into his mouth and closed his eyes. ‘Then I take some water.’ He drank a glass of water. He had already drunk two, and I realized that the Indian water would kill him if the drugs didn’t. ‘Now I sleep. If I don’t sleep I take another opium.’
Twice during the night a match flared in the upper berth, lighting the fan on the ceiling. I heard the crackle of cellophane, the snap of the gummy opium in his fingers, and Hermann gulping water.
The signs in Amritsar Station (THIRD-CLASS EXIT, SECOND-CLASS LADIES’ WAITING ROOM, FIRST-CLASS TOILET, SWEEPERS ONLY) had given me a formal idea of Indian society. The less formal reality I saw at seven in the morning in the Northern Railways Terminal in Old Delhi. To understand the real India, the Indians say, you must go to the villages. But that is not strictly true, because the Indians have carried their villages to the railway stations. In the daytime it is not apparent – you might mistake any of these people for beggars, ticketless travellers (sign: TICKETLESS TRAVEL IS A SOCIAL EVIL), or unlicensed hawkers. At night and in the early morning the station village is complete, a community so preoccupied that the thousands of passengers arriving and departing leave it undisturbed: they detour around it. The railway dwellers possess the station, but only the new arrival notices this. He feels something is wrong because he has not learned the Indian habit of ignoring the obvious, making a detour to preserve his calm. The newcomer cannot believe he has been plunged into such intimacy so soon. In another country this would all be hidden from him, and not even a trip to a village would reveal with this clarity the pattern of life. The village in rural India tells the visitor very little except that he is required to keep his distance and limit his experience of the place to tea or a meal in a stuffy parlour. The life of the village, its interior, is denied to him.
But the station village is all interior, and the shock of this exposure made me hurry away. I didn’t feel I had any right to watch people bathing under a low faucet – naked among the incoming tide of office workers; men sleeping late on their charpoys or tucking up their turbans; women with nose rings and cracked yellow feet cooking stews of begged vegetables over smoky fires, suckling infants, folding bedrolls; children pissing on their toes; little girls, in oversized frocks falling from their shoulders, fetching water in tin cans from the third-class toilet; and, near a newspaper vendor, a man lying on his back, holding a baby up to admire and tickling it. Hard work, poor pleasures, and the scrimmage of appetite. This village has no walls. I distracted myself with the signs, GWALIOR SUITINGS, RASHMI SUPERB COATINGS, and the film poster of plump faces that was never out of view, BOBBY (‘A Story of Modern Love’). I was moving so quickly I lost Hermann. He had drugged himself for the arrival: crowds made him nervous. He floated down the platform and then sank from view.
I wondered whether I would find any of this Indian candour familiar enough to ignore. I was told that I should not draw any conclusions from Delhi: Delhi wasn’t India – not the real India. Well, I said, I had no intentio
n of staying in Delhi. I wanted to go to Simla, Nagpur, Ceylon – to wherever there was a train.
‘There is no train to Ceylon.’
‘There’s one on the map.’ I unrolled my map and traced the black line from Madras to Colombo.
‘Acha,’ said the man. He wore a colourful hand-loomed shirt and he waggled his head from side to side, the Indian gesture – like a man trying to shake water out of his ears – that means he is listening with approval. But the man, of course, was an American. Americans in India practise these affectations to endear themselves to Indians, who seem so embarrassed by these easily parodied mannerisms that (at the American embassy at least) the liaison men say ‘We’re locking you into that programme,’ while the American looking on says ‘Acha’ and giggles mirthlessly.
I was being locked into a programme: lectures in Jaipur, Bombay, Calcutta, Colombo. Wherever, I said, there was a train.
‘There is no train to Colombo.’
‘We’ll see,’ I said, and then listened to one of those strange conversations I later found so common as to be the mainstay of American small talk in India: The American on His Bowels. After the usual greetings and pauses these people would report on the vagaries of their digestive tracts. Their passion was graceless and they were as hard to silence as whoopee cushions.
‘I had a bad night,’ one embassy man said. ‘The German ambassador gave a party. Delicious meal – it always is. All kinds of wine, umpteen courses, the works. But, God, I was up at five this morning, sick as a dog. Tummy upset.’
‘It’s a funny thing,’ said another man. ‘You have a good meal at some dirty little place and you know you’re going to pay for it. I just came back from Madras. I was fine – and I had some pretty risky meals. Then I go to some diplomatic thing and I’m doubled up for days. So there’s no telling where you’ll get it.’
‘Tell Paul about Harris.’
‘Harris! Listen,’ said the man, ‘there was a fella here. Harris. Press Section. Went to the doctor. Guess why? He was constipated. Constipated! In India! It got around the embassy. People used to see him and laugh like hell.’
‘I’ve been fine lately,’ said a junior officer, holding his end up, as it were. ‘Knock on wood. I’ve had some severe – I mean, really bad times. But I figured it out. What I usually do is have yogurt. I drink tons of the stuff. I figure the bacteria in yogurt keeps down the bacteria in lousy food. Kind of an equalizing thing.’
There was another man. He looked pale, but he said he was bearing up. Kind of a bowel thing. Up all night. Cramps. Delhi belly. Food goes right through you. He said, ‘I had it in spades. Bacillary. Ever have bacillary? No? It knocked me flat. For six days I couldn’t do a thing. Running back and forth, practically living in the john.’
Each time the subject came up, I wanted to take the speaker by his hand-loomed shirt, and, shaking him, say, ‘Now listen to me! There is absolutely nothing wrong with your bowels!’
9. The Kalka Mail for Simla
IN spite of my dishevelled appearance, it was thought by some in Delhi to be beneath my dignity to stand in line for my ticket north to Simla, though perhaps this was a tactful way of suggesting that if I did stand in line I might be mistaken for an Untouchable and set alight (these Harijan combustions are reported daily in Indian newspapers). The American official who claimed his stomach was collapsing with dysentery introduced me to Mr Nath, who said, ‘Don’t sweat. We’ll take care of everything.’ I had heard that one before. Mr Nath rang his deputy, Mr Sheth, who told his secretary to ring a travel agent. At four o’clock there was no sign of the ticket. I saw Mr Sheth. He offered me tea. I refused his tea and went to the travel agent. This was Mr Sud. He had delegated the ticket-buying to one of his clerks. The clerk was summoned. He didn’t have the ticket; he had sent a messenger, a low-caste Tamil whose role in life, it seemed, was to lengthen lines at ticket windows. An Indian story: and still no ticket. Mr Nath and Mr Sud accompanied me to the ticket office, and there we stood (‘Are you sure you don’t want a nice cup of tea?’) watching this damned messenger, ten feet from the window, holding my application. Bustling Indians began cutting in front of him.
‘Now you see,’ said Mr Nath, ‘with your own eyes why things are so backwards over here. But don’t worry. There are always seats for VIPs.’ He explained that compartments for VIPs and senior government officials were reserved on every train until two hours before departure time, in case someone of importance might wish to travel at the last minute. Apparently a waiting list was drawn up every day for each of India’s 10,000 trains.
‘Mr Nath,’ I said, ‘I’m not a VIP.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. He puffed his pipe and moved his eyes from the messenger to me. I think he saw my point because his next words were, ‘Also we could try money.’
‘Baksheesh,’ I said. Mr Nath made a face.
Mr Sud said, ‘Why don’t you fly?’
‘Planes make me throw up.’
‘I think we’ve waited long enough,’ said Mr Nath. ‘We’ll see the man in charge and explain the situation. Let me do the talking.’
We walked around the barrier to ‘where the ticket manager sat, squinting irritably at a ledger. He did not look up. He said, ‘Yes, what is it?’ Mr Nath pointed his pipe stem at me and, with the pomposity Indians assume when they speak to each other in English, introduced me as a distinguished American writer who was getting a bad impression of Indian Railways.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said.
‘It is imperative that we do our utmost to ensure –’
‘Tourist?’ said the ticket manager.
I said yes.
He snapped his fingers. ‘Passport.’
I handed it over. He wrote a new application and dismissed us. The application went back to the messenger, who had wormed his way to the window.
‘It’s a priority matter,’ said Mr Nath crossly. ‘You are a tourist. You have come all this way, so you have priority. We want to give favourable impression. If I want to travel with my family – wife, small children, maybe my mother too – they say, “Oh, no, there is a tourist here. Priority matter!” ’ He grinned without pleasure. ‘That is the situation. But you have your ticket – that’s the important thing, isn’t it?’
The elderly Indian in the compartment was sitting cross-legged on his berth reading a copy of Filmfare. Seeing me enter, he took off his glasses, smiled, then returned to his magazine. I went to a large wooden cupboard and smacked it with my hand, trying to open it. I wanted to hang up my jacket. I got my fingers into the louvred front and tugged. The Indian took off his glasses again, and this time he closed the magazine.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘you will break the air conditioner.’
‘This is an air conditioner?’ It was a tall box the height of the room, four feet wide, varnished, silent, and warm.
He nodded. ‘It has been modernized. This carriage is fifty years old.’
‘Nineteen twenty?’
‘About that,’ he said. ‘The cooling system was very interesting then. Every compartment had its own unit. That is a unit. It worked very well.’
‘I didn’t realize there were air conditioners in the twenties,’ I said.
‘They used ice,’ he said. He explained that blocks of ice were slipped into lockers under the floor – it was done from the outside so that the passengers’ sleep would not be disturbed. Fans in the cupboard I had tried to open blew air over the ice and into the compartment. Every three hours or so the ice was renewed. (I imagined an Englishman snoring in his berth while at the platform of some outlying station Indians with bright eyes pushed cakes of ice into the lockers.) But the system had been converted: a refrigerating device had been installed under the blowers. Just as he finished speaking there was a whirr from behind the louvres and a loud and prolonged whoosh!
‘When did they stop using ice?’
‘About four years ago,’ he said. He yawned. ‘You will excuse me if I go to bed?’
The trai
n started up, and the wood panelling of this old sleeping car groaned and creaked; the floor shuddered, the metal marauder-proof windows clattered in their frames, and the whooshing from the tall cupboard went on all night. The Kalka Mail was full of Bengalis, on their way to Simla for a festival, the Kali puja. Bengalis, whose complexion resembles that of the black goddess of destruction they worship, and who have the same sharp hook to their noses, have the misfortune to live at the opposite end of the country from the most favoured Kali temple. Kali is usually depicted wearing a necklace of human skulls, sticking her maroon tongue out, and trampling a human corpse. But the Bengalis were smiling sweetly all along the train, with their baskets of food and neatly woven garlands of flowers.
I was asleep when the train reached Kalka at dawn, but the elderly Indian obligingly woke me up. He was dressed and seated at the drop-leaf table, having a cup of tea and reading the Chandigarh Tribune. He poured his tea into the cup, blew on it, poured half a cup into the saucer, blew on it, and then, making a pedestal of his fingers, drank the tea from the saucer, lapping it like a cat.
‘You will want to read this,’ he said. ‘Your vice president has resigned.’
He showed me the paper, and there was the glad news, sharing the front page with an item about a Mr Dikshit. It seemed a happy combination, Dikshit and Agnew, though I am sure Mr Dikshit’s political life had been blameless. As for Agnew’s, the Indian laughed derisively when I translated the amount he had extorted into rupees. Even the black-market rate turned him into a cut-price punk. The Indian was in stitches.
