“Stop,” said Nick. “Please stop.”
Anyhow, all mankind’s ideas and interests, all human aims and motives, are exhibited, fully formed, in a three-year-old child. The kid is just operating on a smaller scale and lacks the advantage of having made enormous soft-money campaign contributions to political candidates.
Speaking of whom, no one who is a parent could bear to watch the Bush/Gore debates:
“You did!”
“Did not!”
“Did too!”
“Did not either, you big booger!”
There are plenty of politicians—and business executives and other VIPs—who wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they proudly announced to the media, I made BM! and then expected to get a Tootsie-Pop for their efforts. Indeed, this is very much how Firestone and Ford handled the death-tire crisis.
Think of the actors, musicians, athletes, models, gossip-column nuisances, people with body piercings, and moron climbers of Mount Everest whose whole lives consist of being a brat on a swing set: “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! No hands!” Or, in case of the Everest climbers, no fingers.
And then there are all the adults who won’t go to sleep at night and then wind up in other people’s beds, where they don’t belong.
When Saint Augustine was formulating his doctrine of Original Sin, all he had to do was look at people as they are originally. Originally, they’re children. Saint Augustine may have had a previous job—unmentioned in his Confessions—as a preschool day-care provider. But it’s wrong to use infantile as a pejorative. It’s the other way around. What children display is adultishness. Children are, for example, perfectly adultish in their self-absorption. Tiny tots look so wise, staring at their stuffed animals. You wonder what they’re thinking. Then they learn to talk. What they’re thinking is, My Beanie Baby!
I was trying to point out the glories of a sunset to Muffin the other day. Look at all the colors, I said.
“Why?” she asked.
Because they’re so beautiful, I said.
“Why?” she asked.
Because the sun is going down, I said.
“For me?”
But children are cute when they do these things, an indication of the enormous amount of detailed thought that God put into the creation of the universe. He made children cute so we wouldn’t kill them.
Fatherhood teaches you to hate humanity—except your kids, because they’re so darn cute, and except everybody else who has kids. You bond with these people immediately no matter who they are and no matter how much you would loathe them under other circumstances—the baby-sitter’s single mother, for instance. This parent-to-parent pact is a powerful force. It caused World War II. Roosevelt had kids. Stalin had kids. Hitler didn’t have kids. Hey, what’s Adolf doing sneaking into the Safeway express line with eleven items while Uncle Joe has Svetlana wrapped around his neck screaming for M&Ms? “Screw that,” said Franklin, “I’m invading Normandy.”
It’s parent solidarity that keeps my wife from leaving me when I spend all day watching the Orioles instead of spooning strained peas, wrangling diapers, fumbling with jammie buttons, and reading The House at Pooh Corner over and over and over…
“Again!” says Muffin….until I snap. And then it was hunting season and Christopher Robin shot the stupid bear and skinned him and cooked him and ate him.
“Waaaaaaah!!! Poooooh!!!”
And I am heartbroken. I’ve just learned one more thing. I’m in love. One pout puts my emotions into a theater full of junior high school girls watching ’N Sync. One smile and I feel like Elvis in a Percodan factory. I knew nothing about being in love before. I thought it had to do with Elizabeth Hurley in a garter belt, maybe. No. True love is feeling absolute, genuine bliss at hearing the words, “I made BM! Can I have a Tootsie-Pop?”
Kids love, too. And here is another example of God’s attention to detail. He makes children just stupid enough that what they love is you. They love you with an unalloyed, complete, and trusting love. Even if you did kill Pooh.
Of course, Nick, the kind of love I knew about when I knew nothing about love is still around. This led to me becoming a father for a second time. And then you really start to learn things.
Anybody can have one kid. Having one kid is like owning a dog—albeit a dog that stays a puppy for twenty-two years and never learns to fetch anything but credit card bills and nose colds. But going from one kid to two kids is like going from owning a dog to running a zoo.
It takes about two hours per meal to feed Muffin and Poppet, three hours to get them dressed, with an additional hour for finding lost shoes. It takes two hours to get them undressed, two more hours for bathtub, bath tantrums, and bathroom mop-up, an hour to get them into their Dr. Dentons, and three hours of reading The House at Pooh Corner to put them to sleep. By this point it’s one in the morning. And yet, in most American families, both parents work. When? And why does America’s economy do all right in spite of this?
Don’t ask me. I already get enough questions at home from Muffin. Most notably, upon the arrival of Poppet, “Why did you bring home a baby?”
Because I’m opposed to materialism. And having a family cures it. When a one-year-old careens across the living room, knocks over a Waterford crystal vase, smashes an antique Chinese ginger jar lamp, and pukes on the embroidered silk upholstery of the Chippendale settee, what is the reaction of a family man? “Get the video camera! She’s walking!”
Having kids defines fun down—just in time for middle age when having fun isn’t much fun anymore anyway. I used to think booze and sex would bring me joy. Now it’s a nap. Or a business trip to a Motel 6 in Akron. Where I can go to the john in peace. Wow, a dry towel. And twenty-six channels to myself.
It’s important to have somebody around the house who’s in trouble besides me. I rarely miss the toilet bowl. Actually—I’m informed by a reliable source that I’m married to—that’s a fib. But I rarely miss with No. 2. There’s the absolute and unconditional affection I receive—from the makers of Pampers, Play-Doh, Legos, Fruit Loops, et cetera. I get an excuse to indulge in a longtime private fantasy and build a major Barbie collection. No, scratch that.
The noblest calling in life, Nick, is to shape and form a worthy human character. Mrs. O says that’s why she wanted a family too, but so far it hasn’t worked on me. And there’s the matter of ensuring a kind of immortality. Everyone wants to live forever, and a couple of bored kids can make one rainy Saturday afternoon seem like eternity. Plus I felt I owed it to the world to become a total idiot. Smart people cause so much trouble. I’ll bet the folks who invented the atomic bomb weren’t taking care of the kids that day. If they had been, the residents of Hiroshima would have been pelted with Pampers, Play-Doh, Legos, and Fruit Loops, instead of radiation and a shock wave.
Actually, by becoming a father I’ve learned that I’m too much of a total idiot to explain anything, let alone why people have kids. In fact, I’m such a total idiot, Nick, that I’m trying to talk Mrs. O into starting on a third.
11
JULY 2001
Calm down, Dad,” said my godson Nick into the cell phone that he was holding a foot and a half from his head. Loud squawking from the device could be heard across the room.
What gives? I asked Nick, who had set the phone on the mantel and was letting his father carry on to the portrait of President Harding over the fireplace.
“My sister Ophelia,” said Nick, “has decided to drop out of college and travel through India searching for enlightenment—after my dad sent the tuition check to Mount Holyoke.”
I’m an old India hand, I said. I was there for ten days in 1998. I’d better write Ophelia a quick note.
“And I’d better tell Dad where Mom keeps the Xanax,” said Nick, returning to the phone.
Max, I said to my young assistant, would you mind typing a little something into the e-mail thing?
Dear Ophelia,
I didn’t go to India back in the sixties
when I was your age and everyone was going there to get mystical, meditate his or her head off, and achieve the perfect state of spirituality that is embodied even now in Mia Farrow. I guess I wasn’t evolved enough to follow my bliss. And, come to think of it, I didn’t have the kind of bliss, back then, that you’d care to tailgate.
In fact, I didn’t go to India until three years ago. I applaud your decision to go while you’re still young and impressionable. You may come back with mystical notions, diarrhea, amazement at the antiquity of civilization, colorful snapshots, outrage over poverty and oppression, a suitcase full of ugly dhurries and cheap brass pots—or you may come back realizing you know nothing about India or anything else. Personally, I attained reverse enlightenment. I now don’t understand the entire nature of existence. My conscious mind was overwhelmed by a sudden blinding flash of…oncoming truck radiator.
Nirvana, from the Sanskrit word meaning blow out, is the extinction of desires, passion, illusion, and the empirical self. It happens a lot in India, especially on the highways. Sometimes it’s the result of a blowout, literally. More often it’s a head-on crash.
I traveled from Pakistan to Calcutta, some 1,700 miles, mostly over the Grand Trunk Road. The Grand Trunk begins at the Khyber Pass, ends at the Bay of Bengal, and dates back at least to the fourth century B.C. Of the wonders on this ancient route, what made me wonder most were the traffic accidents.
For the greater part of its length, the Grand Trunk runs through the broad, flood-flat Ganges plain. The way is straight and level and would be almost two lanes wide if there were such things as lanes in India. The asphalt paving—where it isn’t absent—isn’t bad. As roads go in the developing world, this is a good one. But Indians have their own ideas about what the main thoroughfare spanning the most populous part of a nation is for. It’s a place where friends and family can meet, where they can put charpoi string beds and have a nap, and let the kids run around unsupervised. It’s a roadside café with no side to it—or tables or chairs—where the street food is smack dab on the street. It’s a rent-free event room for every local fête. And it’s a piece of agricultural machinery. Even along the Grand Trunk’s few stretches of toll-booth-cordoned “expressway,” farmers are drying grain on the macadam.
The road is a store, a warehouse, and a workshop. Outside Chandigarh a blacksmith had pitched his tent on a bridge. Under the tent flaps were several small children, the missus working the bellows, and the craftsman himself smoking a hookah and contemplating his anvil, which was placed fully in the right-of-way. The road is also convenient for bullock carts, donkey gigs, horse wagons, pack camels, and the occasional laden elephant—not convenient for taking them anywhere, just convenient. There they stand along with sheep, goats, water buffalo, and the innumerable cows (all sacred, I assume) sent to graze on the Grand Trunk. I watched several cows gobbling cardboard boxes and chewing plastic bags. No wonder the Indians won’t eat them.
The road is the trash basket, as all roads in India are. I saw a dressy middle-aged woman eat a chocolate bar on Nehru Road (the so-called Fifth Avenue of Calcutta). She threw the candy wrapper at her feet with a graceful and decisive motion. And the road is the john. You never have to wonder where the toilet is in India, you’re standing on it. The back of a long-distance bus had a sign in Hindi and an elaborate pictogram, the import of which was Don’t crap on the pavement, and wash your hands after you do.
With all this going on there’s no room left for actual traffic on the Grand Trunk. But there it is anyway, in tinny, clamorous, haywired hordes: Mahindra jeeps made with World War II Willys tooling, Ambassador sedans copied from fifties English models, motorcycles and scooters of equally antique design, obsolete Twinkie-shaped buses with trails of vomit from every window like zebra stripes, and myriad top-heavy, butt-sprung, weaving, swaying, wooden-bodied Tata trucks, their mechanicals as primitive as butter churns.
And India had just detonated an A-bomb. The thing must have had rivet heads all over it, big crescent fins, and a little porthole in the door, like Commander Cody’s spaceship in Radar Men From the Moon.
But nuclear war will be the least of your worries on the Grand Trunk, because all the Tatas, Ambassadors, Mahindras, and whatchamacallits are coming right at you, running all day with the horn on and all night with their lights off, as fast as their fart-firing, smut-burping engines will carry them.
The first time you look out the windshield at this melee, you think, India really is magical. How, except by magic, can they drive like this without killing people?
They can’t. Jeeps bust scooters, scooters plow into bicycles, bicycles cover the hoods of jeeps. Cars run into trees. Buses run into ditches, rolling over on their rounded tops until they’re mashed into unleavened chapatis of carnage. And everyone runs into pedestrians. A speed bump is called a sleeping policeman in Jamaica. I don’t know what it’s called in India. Dead person lying in the road is a guess. There’s some of both kinds of obstructions in every village, but they don’t slow traffic much. The animals get clobbered, too, including sacred cows, in accidents notable for the unswerving behavior of all participants. The car in front of us hit a cow—no change in speed or direction from the car, no change in posture or expression from the cow.
But it’s the lurching, hurtling Tata trucks that put the pepper in the marsala and make the curry of Indian driving scare you coming and going the way dinner does. The Tatas are almost as wide as they are long and somewhat higher than either. They blunder down the road, taking their half out of the middle, brakeless, lampless, on treadless tires, moving dog-fashion with the rear wheels headed in a direction the front wheels aren’t. Tatas fall off bridges, fall into culverts, fall over embankments, and sometimes Tatas just fall—flopping on their sides without warning. But usually Tatas collide, usually with each other and in every possible way. Two Tatas going in opposite directions ahead of us snagged rear wheels and pulled each other’s axles off. And they crash not just in twos but threes and fours, leaving great smoking piles of vaguely truck-shaped wreckage. What little space is left on the road is occupied by one or two surviving drivers camping out until the next collision comes. Inspecting one of these catastrophes, I found the splintered bodywork decorated with a little metal plaque: LUCKY ENGINEERING.
In one day of travel, going about 265 miles from Varanasi to the border of West Bengal, I tallied twenty-five horrendous Tata wrecks. And I was scrupulous in my scoring. Fender-bends didn’t count; neither did old abandoned wrecks or broken-down Tatas. Probable loss of life was needed to make the list. If you saw just one of these pileups on I-95 you’d pull into the next rest stop with clutch foot shivering and hand palsied upon the shift knob and say, Next time we fly. In India you shout to your car mates, “That’s number nineteen! I’m winning the truck-wreck pool for today!”
Approaching the Indian border from Pakistan—even from a distance, Ophelia—it was clear that the land of the unfathomable was nigh. We went down the only connecting road between the two countries, and for once there was nothing on the Grand Trunk. Not even military fortifications were visible, just one company of crack Pakistani Rangers in their jammies because it was naptime. No one was going to or fro. They can’t. Pakistani and Indian nationals are only allowed to cross the border by train, said my tourist guidebook. This utter lack of customs traffic has not prevented the establishment of fully staffed customs posts on both sides of the boundary.
Getting out of Pakistan was a normal Third World procedure. The officials were asleep, lying on the unused concrete baggage-inspection counters like corpses in a morgue—a morgue posted with a surprising number of regulations for its customers. The number-one man roused the number-two man, who explained the entire system of Pakistani tariff regulation and passport control by rubbing his thumb against his forefinger. He then gave a performance in mime of documents being pounded with a rubber stamp.
“Fifty dollars,” said the number-two man. I opened my wallet, foolishly revealing two fifty-dollar bills. �
��One hundred dollars,” he said.
Things were very different on the Indian side of the border. Here they had not just an unused baggage-inspection counter but an unused metal detector, an unused X-ray machine, and an unused pit with an unused ramp over it to inspect the chassis and frames of the vehicles that don’t use this border crossing.
Our party consisted of eight people representing four nationalities, in two Land Rovers, with a satellite phone, several computers, and a trailer filled with food, camping gear, and spare parts. The rules concerning entry of such persons and things into India occupy a book large enough to contain the collected works of Stephen King and The (unabridged) Oxford English Dictionary.
Ophelia, if you’re going to be confounded by India, you can’t simply go as a tourist. Tourism is a pointless activity. Pointless activity is a highly developed craft in India. You could spend months touring the country, busy doing screw-all. Meanwhile the Indians are busy doing screw-all of their own. You could accidentally come back thinking you’d caught the spirit of the place. If you intend to be completely baffled, you have to try to accomplish something.
Any goal will do. I was tagging along on one leg of a press junket. The Rover corporation was sending two of its then-new Discovery II products on a drive around the world. The aim of this section of the trip was to traverse India. Then the Land Rovers would be put in a cargo container and shipped to Australia for the next section. The expedition had been meticulously planned. All documentation was in order. The Land Rovers had already passed the customs inspection of twelve nations, including Bulgaria and Iran, without hindrance, delay, or more than moderate palm-greasing.
The Indian officials heard this explained and clucked and wagged their heads in sympathy for the hundreds of brother customs agents from London to the deserts of Baluchistan who had lost an opportunity to look up thousands of items in a great big book. Everything had to come out of the cars and trailers. Everything had to go through the metal detector, even though the detector didn’t seem to be plugged in. And everything had to come back through the X-ray machine, which the customs agents weren’t watching because they were too busy looking up items in a great big book.
The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.) Page 26
