The Great Railway Bazaar

by Paul Theroux

  The forests of Madhya Pradesh, where all the toothbrushes grow, looked like the woods of New Hampshire with the last faint blue range of mountains removed. It was green, uncultivated, and full of leafy bluffs and shady brooks, but as the second day wore on it grew dustier, and New Hampshire gave way to Indian heat and Indian air. Dust collected at the window and sifted in, covering my map, my pipe, my glasses and notebook, my new stock of paperbacks (Joyce’s Exiles, Browning’s poems, The Narrow Corner by Somerset Maugham). I had a fine layer of dust on my face; dust furred the mirror, made the plastic seat abrasive and the floor crunchy. The window had to be kept open a crack because of the heat, but the penalty for this breeze was a stream of choking dust from the Central Indian plains.

  At Nagpur in the afternoon, my travelling companion (an engineer with an extraordinary scar on his chest), said, ‘There are primitive people here called Gondis. They are quite strange. One woman may have four to five husbands and vicey-versy.’

  I bought four oranges at the station, made a note of a sign advertising horoscopes that read MARRY YOUR DAUGHTERS FOR ONLY RUPEES 12.50, shouted at a little man who was bullying a beggar, and read my handbook’s entry for Nagpur (so-called because it is on the River Nag):

  Among the inhabitants are many aborigines known as Gonds. Of these the hill-tribes have black skins, flat noses and thick lips. A cloth round the waist is their chief garment. The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship.

  To my relief, the whistle blew and we were on our way. The engineer read the Nagpur paper, I ate my Nagpur oranges and then had a siesta. I awoke to an odd sight, the first rain clouds I’d seen since leaving England. At dusk, near the border of the South Indian province of Andhra Pradesh, broad blue-grey clouds, dark at the edges, hung on the horizon. We were headed for them in a landscape where it had recently rained: now the little stations were splashed with mud, brown puddles had collected at level crossings, and the earth was reddened by the late monsoon. But we were not under the clouds until we reached Chandrapur, a station so small and sooty it is not on the map. There, the rain fell in torrents, and signalmen skipped along the line waving their sodden flags. The people on the platform stood watching from under large black umbrellas that shone with wetness. Some hawkers rushed into the downpour to sell bananas to the train passengers.

  A woman crawled into the rain from the shelter of the platform. She appeared to be injured: she was on all fours, moving slowly towards the train – towards me. Her spine, I saw, was twisted with meningitis; she had rags tied to her knees and woodblocks in her hands. She toiled across the tracks with painful slowness, and when she was near the door she looked up. She had a lovely smile – a girl’s beaming face on that broken body. She propped herself up and lifted her free hand at me, and waited, her face streaming with rain, her clothes soaked. While I was fishing in my pockets for money the train started up, and my futile gesture was to throw a handful of rupees on to the flooded line.

  At the next station I was accosted by another beggar. This was a boy of about ten, wearing a clean shirt and shorts. He implored with his eyes and said rapidly, ‘Please, sir, give me money. My father and mother have been at station platform for two days. They are stranded. They have no food. My father has no job, my mother’s clothes are torn. We must get to Delhi soon and if you give me one or two rupees we will be able.’

  ‘The train’s going to leave. You’d better hop off.’

  He said, ‘Please, sir, give me money. My father and mother –’

  He went on mechanically reciting. I urged him to get off the train, but it was clear that apart from his spiel he did not speak English. I walked away.

  It had grown dark, the rain was letting up, and I sat reading the engineer’s newspaper. The news was of conferences, an incredible number of gatherings in the very titles of which I heard the clack of voices, the rattle of mimeographed sheets, the squeak of folding chairs, and the eternal Indian prologue: ‘There is one question we all have to ask ourselves –’ One Nagpur conference was spending a week discussing ‘Is the Future of Zoroastrianism in Peril?’ On the same page 200 Indians were reported attending a ‘Congress of Peace-Loving Countries’, ‘Hinduism: Are We at a Crossroads?’ occupied another group, and on the back page there was an advertisement for Raymond’s Suitings (slogan: ‘You’ll have something to say in Raymond’s Suitings …’). The man wearing a Raymond suit was shown addressing a conference audience. He was squinting, making a beckoning gesture; he had something to say. His words were, ‘Communication is perception. Communication is expectations. Communication is involvement.’

  A beggar’s skinny hand appeared at my compartment door, a bruised forearm, a ragged sleeve. Then the doomed cry, ‘Sahib!’

  At Sirpur, just over the border of Andhra Pradesh, the train ground to a halt. Twenty minutes later we were still there. Sirpur is insignificant: the platform is uncovered, the station has two rooms, and there are cows on the verandah. Grass tufts grow out of the ledge of the booking-office window. It smelled of rain and wood smoke and cow dung; it was little more than a hut, dignified with the usual railway signs, of which the most hopeful was TRAINS RUNNING LATE ARE LIKELY TO MAKE UP TIME. Passengers on the Grand Trunk Express began to get out. They promenaded, belching in little groups, grateful for the exercise.

  ‘The engine has packed up,’ one man told me. ‘They are sending for new one. Delay of two hours.’

  Another man said, ‘If there was a cabinet minister on this train they would have an engine in ten minutes’ time.’

  The Tamils were raving on the platform. A native of Sirpur wandered out of the darkness with a sack of roasted chickpeas. He was set upon by the Tamils, who bought all the chickpeas and demanded more. A mob of Tamils gathered at the stationmaster’s window to howl at a man tapping out Morse code with a little key.

  I decided to look for a beer, but just outside the station I was in darkness so complete I had second thoughts. The smell of rain on the vegetation gave a humid richness to the air that was almost sweet. There were cows lying on the road: they were white; I could see them clearly. Using the cows as road markers I walked along until I saw a small orange light about fifty yards away. I headed towards it and came to a little hut, a low poky shack with mud walls and a canvas roof. There was a kerosene lantern on the doorway and another inside lighting the surprised faces of a half a dozen tea-drinkers, two of whom recognized me from the train.

  ‘What do you want?’ one said. ‘I will ask for it.’

  ‘Can I buy a bottle of beer here?’

  This was translated. There was laughter. I knew the answer.

  ‘About two kilometres down the road’ – the man pointed into the blackness – ‘there is a bar. You can get beer there.’

  ‘How will I find it?’

  ‘A car,’ he said. He spoke again to the man serving tea. ‘But there is no car here. Have some tea.’

  We stood in the hut, drinking milky tea out of cracked glasses. A joss stick was lit. No one said a word. The train passengers looked at the villagers; the villagers averted their eyes. The canvas ceiling drooped; the tables were worn shiny; the joss stick filled the room with stinking perfume. The train passengers grew uncomfortable and, in their discomfort, took an exaggerated interest in the calendar, the faded colour prints of Shiva and Ganpati. The lanterns flickered in the dead silence as our shadows leaped on the walls.

  The Indian who had translated my question said under his breath, ‘This is the real India!’

  We did not go far that night. The relief engine was late, there were more delays, the Tamils were cursing: damn, blast, ruddy, bloody. The train broke down throughout the night; it slowed, it stopped, the engine died and then I could hear, among the curses, loud crickets. We arrived at Vijayawada five hours behind time in a dark rainy dawn. I bought an apple at a stall, but before I could take a bite out of it a boy limped over to me, stuck his hand
out and began to cry. I gave him that apple and bought another, which I hid until I got into the train.

  The south was unexpectedly cool and lush: the greenness of the countryside matched the green on the map, the sea-level colour of this area. Because it was still early, and because Indian villagers seem to think of railway tracks as the margin of their world, there were people crouched all along the line, shitting. At first I thought they were simply squatting comfortably to watch the train go by, then I noticed the bright yellow hanks under them. I saw one man; he portended a hundred more, all facing the train for the diversion it offered, unhurriedly fouling the track. They were shitting when the train pulled in; they were still at it when the train pulled out. One curious group – a man, a boy, and a pig – were in a row, each shitting in his own way. A dignified man with his dhoti drawn up squatted a little distance from the tracks. He watched the train go by and he looked as if he would be there for some time: he held a large black umbrella over his head and a newspaper on his knees. Indeed, he seemed the perfect symbol for what a man in Delhi had called ‘The Turd World’.

  For the last leg of the journey the train veered to the coast and followed the low-lying shore along the Bay of Bengal. The fields were flooded, but men ploughed the water – teams of black buffaloes dragged them through the paddy fields. The rivers were swollen with fast red currents that brimmed to the lip of the banks. This southeastern part of Andhra Pradesh was the most fertile I had seen in India; and it was striking in another way, the people so black, the earth such a deep red brown, the green so green. Still the rain came down, more heavily as we neared Madras.

  I asked my travelling companion about his scar. He said he had been stabbed in Assam by some dacoits who took him for a Bengali. He had gone to the door and three men jumped him and began ripping at his heart with daggers. He fell back, and they fled. ‘The blood came out – I was on my back, but spouts of it shot up from my heart, high over my face, and splashed over me.’ He called to his five-year-old son to get cloths to stanch the flow. The child did as he was told, but his hands were so small and he was so eager that his hand sank into the wound. The father was brought to the hospital at Siliguri, but it took a year for the wound to heal, and by the time he was released he had no money and no job. He described himself as ‘a fairly typical Indian engineer’.

  We had a conversation about his job. He had something to do with hydraulics. It was not a long conversation. Most Indians I met had jobs that defied analysis or even comment. They were salesmen canvassing for firms that made seamless tubes, plastic washers, or bleaching agents; they marketed bench marks or hasps for manila folders. Once I met a Sikh who made rubber goods, but nothing simple like tyres or contraceptives; he made rubber bushings and casings. I said I didn’t understand. He explained: ‘Casings – rubber ones – for lugged sprockets.’

  It was my inability to understand these occupations that led these Indian railway conversations into anecdotes of the oddest sort. The engineer, seeing that my grasp of hydraulics was slender, told me a story about a yogi who neither ate nor drank a thing in his life. ‘What did he live on?’ I asked. It seemed a fair question. ‘Air only,’ he said, ‘because he did not want to contaminate the body with food and drink.’ The yogi lived to a ripe old age – over seventy. Mr Gopal, the liaison man, had been stumped by my ignorance of liaising. His story concerned a monkey and a tiger who always travelled together. No one could understand why the tiger didn’t gobble up the monkey, but a man watched them closely (from behind a tree, unseen) and realized that the tiger was blind: the monkey guided the tiger from place to place. I had heard a story about a man in Bombay who walked on water, and another about a man who taught himself to fly using wings from palm leaves; the canvasser for seamless tubes told me about a bridge of monkeys from Ceylon to Dhanushkodi, across the Palk Strait. I saw these tall stories as a flight from the concrete, the Indian imagination requiring something more than the prosy details of the ledger. So Mr Bhardwaj, the accountant, believed in astrology; Mr Radia, maker of dry-cell batteries, improvised (he said) philosophical songs; and an otherwise completely rational man I met in Bombay claimed that many Indians were addicted to the bite of a cobra: ‘You stick out your tongue, cobra bites tongue, and venom makes you wonderful.’

  A few miles out of Madras, an English missionary found me clutching the window, gasping in the heat that had just descended on the train. He ignored my condition. He said he was absolutely livid. He was glad to hear that I was (as I told him) a journalist: he had a story for me.

  ‘Some Americans,’ he said, ‘who call themselves Christians are paying four rupees a head – and that’s a lot of money in Madras – to people they baptize. Why? I’ll tell you. To put up their conversion figures, so they can get more money from their parishes back home. They do more harm than good. When you go back to the States I hope you mention it.’

  ‘Gladly,’ I said. Will whoever is responsible for these corrupt missionaries who offer baptismal bribes please persuade them that they are doing more harm than good?

  Then we were at Madras Central and rickshaw-wallahs were flying at me like bats, repeating, ‘Where you going? Where you going?’

  They laughed when I told them Ceylon.

  This was what I imagined: somewhere past the brick and plaster mansions of Madras, arrayed along Mount Road like so many yellowing wedding cakes, was the Bay of Bengal, on which I would find a breezy sea-front restaurant, palm trees, flapping tableclothes. I would sit facing the water, have a fish dinner and five beers and watch the dancing lights of the little Tamil fishing smacks. Then I would go to bed and be up early for the train to Rameswaram, that village on the tip of India’s nose.

  ‘Take me to the beach,’ I said to the taxi driver. He was an unshaven, wild-haired Tamil with his shirt torn open. He had the look of the feral child in the psychology textbook: feral children, mangled demented Mowglis, abound in South India. It is said they are suckled by wolves.

  ‘Beach Road?’

  ‘That sounds like the place.’ I explained that I wanted to eat a fish.

  ‘Twenty rupees.’

  ‘I’ll give you five.’

  ‘Okay, fifteen. Get in.’

  We drove about two hundred yards and I realized that I was very hungry: turning vegetarian had confused my stomach with what seemed an imperfect substitute for real food. Vegetables subdued my appetite, but a craving – a carnivorous emotion – remained.

  ‘You like English girls?’ The taxi driver was turning the steering wheel with his wrists, as a wolf might, given the opportunity to drive a taxi.

  ‘Very much,’ I said.

  ‘I find you English girl.’

  ‘Really?’ It seemed an unlikely place to find an English whore – Madras, a city without any apparent prosperity. In Bombay I might have believed it: the sleek Indian businessmen, running in and out of the Taj Mahal Hotel, oozing wealth, and driving at top speed past the sleepers on the sidewalk – they were certainly whore fodder. And in Delhi, city of conferees and delegates, I was told there were lots of European hookers cruising through the lobbies of the plush hotels, promising pleasure with a cheery swing of their hips. But in Madras?

  The driver spun in his seat and crossed his heart, two slashes with his long nails. ‘English girl.’

  ‘Keep your eyes on the road!’

  ‘Twenty-five rupees.’

  Three dollars and twenty-five cents.

  ‘Pretty girl?’

  ‘English girl,’ he said. ‘You want?’

  I thought this over. It wasn’t the girl but the situation that attracted me. An English girl in Madras, whoring for peanuts. I wondered where she lived, and how, and for how long; what had brought her to the godforsaken place? I saw her as a castaway, a fugitive, like Lena in Conrad’s Victory fleeing a tuneless travelling orchestra in Surabaya. I had once met an English whore in Singapore. She said she was making a fortune. But it wasn’t just the money: she preferred Chinese and Indian men to the English
, who were not so quick and, worse, usually wanted to spank her.

  The driver noticed my silence and slowed down. In the heavy traffic he turned around once again. His cracked teeth, stained with betel juice, were red and gleaming in the lights from the car behind us. He said, ‘Beach or girl?’

  ‘Beach,’ I said.

  He drove for a few minutes more. Surely she was Anglo-Indian – ‘English’ was a euphemism.

  ‘Girl,’ I said.

  ‘Beach or girl?’

  ‘Girl, girl, for Heaven’s sake.’ It was as if he were trying to make me confess to an especially vicious impulse.

  He swung the car around dangerously and sped in the opposite direction, babbling, ‘Good – nice girls – you like – little house – about two miles – five girls –’

  ‘English girls?’

  ‘English girls.’

  The luminous certitude had gone out of his voice, but still he nodded, perhaps trying to calm me.

  We drove for twenty minutes. We went through streets where kerosene lamps burned at stalls, and past brightly lit textile shops in which clerks in striped pyjamas shook out bolts of yellow cloth and sequined saris. I sat back and watched Madras go by, teeth and eyes in dark alleys, night-time shoppers with full baskets, and endless doorways distinguished by memorable signboards, SANGADA LUNCH HOME, VISHNU SHOE CLINIC, and the dark funereal THOUSAND LIGHTS RESTAURANT.

  He turned corners, choosing the narrowest unlighted lanes, and then we stayed on dirt roads. I suspected he was going to rob me, and when we came to the darkest part of a bumpy track – we were in the country now – and he pulled over and switched off the lights, I was certain he was a con man: his next move would be to stick a knife in my ribs. How stupid I’d been to believe his fatuous story about the twenty-five-rupee English girl! We were far from Madras, on a deserted road, beside a faintly gleaming swamp where frogs whistled and gulped. The taxi driver jerked his head. I jumped. He blew his nose into his fingers and flung the result out the window.