India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  Yet fearful though their predicament was, they did not seem awestruck nor even alarmed. They were like sightseers themselves, of their own tragedy. They yawned occasionally. They exchanged comments. They laughed at the legal jokes. And sometimes, feeling the strain of the long day, they raised their manacled wrists to their warders' shoulders and, placing their cheeks upon their hands like sleepy children, dozed through destiny for a while.

  “I will find that out for you, of course,” said the government spokesman. “It will be no problem at all. You see, it is something I am not exactly sure of myself, but we have many sources of information. Do we have your telephone number? Ah yes. I have temporarily mislaid it. Would you give it to me again? Rest assured, dear lady, I shall find out this information, together with the answers to your earlier questions, and shall telephone you for certain, if not this afternoon, then tomorrow morning first thing.

  “I don't know if you are familiar, you see, with the Bhagavad Gita? As a student of the Gandhian philosophy you would find it very beautiful: and you would find it exceedingly relevant to your article about Delhi. It is self-awareness, you see, that is the key. Oh madam, you are laughing at me! You are very wicked! But never mind, you will see, you will see! And in the meantime you may be quite sure,” he concluded with his usual charming smile and reassuring shake of the head, “that I will be telephoning you with this information, or if not I myself, then our good Mrs. Gupta is sure to. It is not very spiritual but we must do our duty!”

  There is a species of telephone operators' English, often heard in Delhi, which is not exactly an articulated language at all, but a sort of elongated blur. Indian English proper, of course, is one of India's cruellest handicaps, for it is so often imperfect of nuance and makes for an unreal relationship between host and visitor, besides often making highly intelligent people look foolish (“CHINESES GENERALS FLY BACK TO FRONT,” said a celebrated Indian headline long ago). But the elliptical, slithery kind is something else again, and has another effect on its hearers. It makes one feel oddly opaque or amorphous oneself, and seems to clothe the day's arrangements in a veil of uncertainty.

  This is proper. One should not go fighting into Delhi, chin up and clear eyed. Here hopes are meant to wither and conceptions adjust. A single brush with a noseless beggar is enough to change your social values. Just one application for an import license will alter your standards of efficiency. After a while graver mutations may occur, and you will find yourself questioning the Meaning of It All, the Reality of Time and other old Indian specialties. “You will see, you will see!” Most disconcerting of all, you may well come to feel that the pomp and circumstance of Delhi, which struck you at first as illusory display, is in fact the only reality of the place! All the rest is mirage. Everything else in the Indian presence, north, east, south, west, across the Rajasthani deserts, down to the Coromandel beaches, far away to the frontiers of Tibet, everything else is suggestion, never to be substance.

  I pick a Delhi newspaper at random. Crowd Loots Colliery. Police Kill Dacoits. Dacoits Loot Pilgrims. Students Raid Cinema. Farmers Arrested during Agitation. Teachers Boycott Examination. Police Fire on Crowd. Mizo Rebels Spotted. Peace Feelers for Naga Rebels. A State of Emergency exists in India, but one is hardly aware of it, for this is a country always in emergency, crossed perpetually by dim figures of faith and violence, prophets of revolution, priests of reaction, saints and spies and fanatics, moving here and there through a haze of hatred, idealism and despair. Experts Visit Bomb Blast Site. Police Charge Crowd. 600 Arrested. Government Minister Has Asthma.

  Sometimes these shadows reach into Delhi itself, and chaos feels uncomfortably close. While I was there the hereditary Imam of the Jama Masjid, the greatest mosque in India, was engaged in a quarrel with the government. He was even heard inciting his congregation to political dissent over the loudspeakers of his minaret during a visit to the neighborhood by Mrs. Gandhi herself. His family have been incumbents of the Imamate since the mosque was founded by Shah Jehan in 1650, and are great figures in the Muslim community: nevertheless he was arrested, and in the ensuing riots at least six people were killed (always add a zero, an Indian acquaintance nonchalantly told me, if you want the true figure) and at least six hundred locked away for safety's sake.

  It happened that I was wandering around the purlieus of the mosque on the day of the arrest, and bleak was the sensation of déjà vu with which I watched the riot police, brandishing their guns and batons, heavily clambering out of their trucks. But more ominous still, I thought, was the spectacle of the mosque itself a few days later. They slapped a curfew on the area, and when I next passed its outskirts, along the crammed and filthy pavements of Netaji Subhash Marg, where the beggar families crouch day and night beneath their sacking shelters and the teeming junk bazaars crowd around the Chadni Chowk— when I looked across to the Jama Masjid, I saw its great shape there silent and eerily deserted—gone the milling figures of the faithful on its steps, gone the stir of commerce and devotion that habitually surrounds it, empty all the stalls and shops, the kebab restaurants, the fortune-tellers, the silversmiths, the tanners and the cobblers. All were empty, and the mosque looked like some immense captive champion, brooding there in solitary confinement.

  Yet even this all-too-real reality seemed a deception upon the composure of Delhi. I never feel insecure there, even when the riot police are storming by. The only citizens who frighten me are those damned monkeys, so beguiling of motion, so threatening of grimace. Delhi people treat these beasts with distinct circumspection, crossing roads to avoid them or bribing them with peanuts to go away, and in this, it seemed to me, poor Indians behave toward monkeys much as Europeans behave toward poor Indians—especially as, the monkey god Hanuman being an important figure of the Hindu pantheon, some element of conscience is presumably involved. This disconcerting parallel gave me an unexpected sense of membership, and every time a monkey bared its teeth at me I felt like saying, “Wait, friend, wait—I'm the European, it's the poor Indian you want!”

  For the Indian sense of hierarchy, which so contributes to the bafflement of India, provides for each rank of society a kind of comradeship; and in Delhi especially, which is like a shadow play of India, one senses the hidden force of it. The Untouchables of the capital—Harijans, Children of God, as Gandhi called them—live in well-defined colonies on the edge of the city. Though I knew better intellectually, emotionally I somehow expected, when I drove out there one afternoon, to find them a people made morose and hangdog by their status. In fact they turned out to be a very jolly lot, welcoming and wreathed in smiles, and looking at least as cheerful as the average member of the Socio-Economic Research Unit, say. Why not? They might be Harijans to the world outside, but they were doubtless Brahmins to each other.

  In the same way Delhi, preoccupied with its own diurnal round of consequence and command, is paradoxically protected against that dust storm of controversy, threat and misfortune which hangs always, dark and ill-defined, over the Indian horizons. That blur or slither of Delhi, which begins as a mystery and develops into an irritation, becomes in the end a kind of reassurance. After trying three times, you give up gratefully. After expostulating once or twice, it is a pleasure to accede. You think you can change the system? Try it, try it, and when the elaborations of Delhi have caught up with you, when you realize the tortuous significances of the old method, when it has been explained to you that only Mrs. Gupta is qualified to take the money, that Mr. Mukerjee is prevented by custom from working beside Mr. Mukhtar Singh and that Mr. Mohammed will not of course be at work on Fridays, when it dawns upon you gradually that it has been done more or less this way, come conqueror, come liberation, since the early Middle Ages, with a relieved and affectionate smile you will probably agree that perhaps it had better be left as it is.

  As it is! India is always as it is! I never despair in Delhi, for I feel always all around me the fortification of a profound apathy. The capital is essentially apathetic to the natio
n: the nation is aloof to the capital. By the end of the century there will be, at the present rate of increase, nearly 1,000 million people in India, and I think it very likely that there will have been a revolution of one complexion or another. But the traveler who returns to Delhi then will find the city much the same, I swear, will respond to much the same emotions, indulge in just the same conjectures, bog down in just the same philosophical quagmires, and reach, if he is anything like me, about the same affectionate and inconclusive conclusions.

  “You see? You see? Did I not say so? You are thinking metaphysically, as I foretold!” Well, perhaps. But the government spokesman proved his point better himself, for neither he nor Mrs. Gupta ever did ring.

  V. S. NAIPAUL

  (1932–)

  In 1962, V. S. Naipaul first traveled to India, the land that his ancestors had left as indentured laborers in the late nineteenth century. Naipaul took with him the conventional ideas of India—the India people then knew as the land of Gandhi and Nehru, the India of the glittering classical past, which had been meticulously dredged up by European Indologists in the nineteenth century. He took with him his own childhood memories of an old India, the Brahmanic world of rituals and myths that had been carefully preserved in Trinidad, where he spent the first eighteen years of his life. But the poverty and wretchedness Naipaul encountered in India revived all the fears and insecurities he had known as a child. An anguished, often angry, perception of Indian realities drives An Area of Darkness, the book he wrote about his yearlong travels in India. Its sentences surge forward with a kind of nervous urgency, examining, refining, rejecting. But there are moments of calm and acceptance; and in the long section in the middle of the book where Naipaul describes his stay in Kashmir, you see the writer yield to an almost childlike wonder for his surroundings.

  from AN AREA OF DARKNESS

  HOTEL LIWARD

  Prop: Flush System M. S. Butt

  The sign came later, almost at the end of our stay. “I am honest man,” the owner of the C-class houseboat had said, as we stood before the white bucket in one of the mildewed and tainted rooms of his rotting hulk. “And flush system, this is not honest.” But Mr. Butt, showing us his still small sheaf of recommendations in the sitting room of the Liward Hotel, and pointing to the group of photographs on the pea-green walls, had said with a different emphasis, “Before flush.” We looked at the laughing faces. At least a similar betrayal could not be ours. The sign, dispelling conjecture, was placed high on the pitched roof and lit by three bulbs, and could be seen even from Shankaracharya Hill.

  It seemed an unlikely amenity. The hotel stood in the lake, at one end of a plot of ground about eighty feet long by thirty wide. It was a rough two-storeyed structure with ochre concrete walls, green and chocolate woodwork, and a roof of unpainted corrugated iron. It had seven rooms altogether, one of which was the dining room. It was in reality two buildings. One stood squarely in the angle of the plot, two walls flush with the water; it had two rooms up and two rooms down. A narrow wooden gallery went right around the top floor; around two sides of the lower floor, and hanging directly above the water, there was another gallery. The other building had one room down and two up, the second of which was a many-sided semicircular wooden projection supported on wooden poles. A wooden staircase led to the corridor that linked the two buildings; and the whole structure was capped by a pitched corrugated-iron roof of complex angular design.

  It had a rough-and-ready air, which was supported by our first glimpse of Mr. Butt, cautiously approaching the landing stage to welcome us. He wore the Kashmiri fur cap, an abbreviation of the Russian. His long-tailed Indian-style shirt hung out of his loose trousers and dangled below his brown jacket. This suggested unreliability; the thick frames of his spectacles suggested abstraction; and he held a hammer in one hand. Beside him was a very small man, bare-footed, with a dingy grey pullover tight above flapping white cotton trousers gathered in at the waist by a string. A touch of quaintness, something of the Shakespearean mechanic, was given him by his sagging woollen nightcap. So misleading can first impressions be: this was Aziz. And flush was not yet finally installed. Pipes and bowls had been laid, but cisterns were yet to be unwrapped.

  “One day,” Aziz said in English. “Two days.”

  “I like flush,” Mr. Butt said.

  We read the recommendations. Two Americans had been exceedingly warm; an Indian lady had praised the hotel for providing the “secrecy” needed by honeymoon couples.

  “Before flush,” Mr. Butt said.

  With this his English was virtually exhausted, and thereafter we dealt with him through Aziz.

  We bargained. Fear made me passionate; it also, I realized later, made me unnaturally convincing. My annoyance was real; when I turned to walk away I was really walking away; when I was prevailed upon to return—easy, since the boatman refused to ferry me back to the road—my fatigue was genuine. So we agreed. I was to take the room next to the semicircular sitting room, of which I was also to have exclusive use. And I needed a reading lamp.

  “Ten-twelve rupees, what is that?” Aziz said.

  And, I would need a writing table.

  He showed me a low stool.

  With my hands I sketched out my larger requirements.

  He showed me an old weathered table lying out on the lawn.

  “We paint,” he said.

  I rocked the table with a finger.

  Aziz sketched out two timber braces and Mr. Butt, understanding and smiling, lifted his hammer.

  “We fix,” Aziz said.

  It was then that I felt they were playing and that I had become part of their play. We were in the middle of the lake. Beyond the alert kingfishers, the fantastic hoopoes pecking in the garden, beyond the reeds and willows and poplars, our view unbroken by houseboats, there were the snow-capped mountains. Before me a nightcapped man, hopping about restlessly, and at the end of the garden a new wooden shed, his home, unpainted and warm against the gloom of low-hanging willows. He was a man skilled in his own way with hammer and other implements, anxious to please, magically improvising, providing everything. The nightcap did not belong to a Shakespearean mechanic; it had a fairytale, Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White-and-the-seven-dwarfs air.

  “You pay advance and you sign agreement for three months.”

  Even this did not break the spell. Mr. Butt wrote no English. Aziz was illiterate. I had to make out my own receipt. I had to write and sign our agreement in the back of a large, serious looking but erratically filled ledger which lay on a dusty shelf in the dining room.

  “You write three months?” Aziz asked.

  I hadn't. I was playing safe. But how had he guessed?

  “You write three months.”

  The day before we were to move in we paid a surprise visit. Nothing appeared to have changed. Mr. Butt waited at the landing stage, dressed as before and as seemingly abstracted. The table that was to have been painted and braced remained unpainted and unbraced on the lawn. There was no sign of a reading lamp. “Second coat,” Aziz had said, placing his hand on the partition that divided bathroom from bedroom. But no second coat had been given, and the bright blue paint lay as thin and as scabrous on the new, knot-darkened wood. Dutifully, not saying a word, Mr. Butt examined with us, stopping when we stopped, looking where we looked, as though he wasn't sure what, in spite of his knowledge, he might find. The bathroom was as we had left it: the lavatory bowl in position, still in its gummed paper taping, the pipes laid, the cistern absent.

  “Finish,” I said. “Finish. Give back deposit. We go. No stay here.”

  He made no reply and we went down the steps. Then across the garden, from the warm wooden shack, embowered in willows, Aziz came tripping, nightcapped and pullovered. Blue paint spotted his pullover—a new skill revealed—and there was a large spot on the tip of his nose. He was carrying, as if about to offer it to us, a lavatory cistern.

  “Two minutes,” he said. “Three minutes. I fix.”


  One of Snow White's own men in a woollen nightcap: it was impossible to abandon him.

  Three days later we moved in. And it had all been done. It was as if all the folk at the bottom of the garden had lent a hand with broom and brush and saw and hammer. The table had been massively braced and tremendously nailed together; it was covered with an already peeling skin of bright blue paint. A large bulb, fringed at the top with a small semi-spherical metal shade, was attached to a stunted flexible arm which rested on a chromium-plated disc and was linked by incalculable tangled yards of flex—I had specified length and maneuverability—to the electric point: this was the lamp. In the bathroom the lavatory cistern had been put in place. Aziz, like a magician, pulled the chain; and the flush flushed.

  “Mr. Butt he say,” Aziz said, when the waters subsided, “this is not his hotel. This is your hotel.”

  There were others beside Aziz and Mr. Butt. There was the sweeper boy in flopping garments of requisite filth. There was Ali Mohammed. He was a small man of about forty with a cadaverous face made still more so by ill-fitting dentures. His duty was to entice tourists to the hotel, and his official dress consisted of a striped blue Indian-style suit of loose trousers and lapel-less jacket, shoes, a Kashmiri fur cap and a silver watch and chain. So twice a day he came out of the hut at the bottom of the garden and, standing with his bicycle in the shikara,was paddled past the tailor's one-roomed wooden shack, high and crooked above the water, past the poplars and the willows, past the houseboats, past Nehru Park, to the ghat and the lake boulevard, to cycle to the Tourist Reception Center and stand in the shade of chenars outside the entrance, with the tonga-wallahs, houseboat-owners or their agents, below the hoarding with Mr. Nehru's portrait. And there was the khansamah, the cook. He was older than Aziz or Ali Mohammed, and more nobly built. He was a small man, but he was given height by the rightness of his proportions, his carriage, his long-tailed shirt and the loose trousers that tapered down to his well-made feet. He was a brooder. His regular features were tormented by nervousness and irritability. He often came out of the kitchen and stood for minutes on the veranda of the hut, gazing at the lake, his bare feet beating the floorboards.