India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  The greatest annoyance that afternoon was the smoke from the steam engine. It poured through the windows, coating every surface with a fine film of soot, and the smell of burned coal— which is the smell of every Indian railway station—lingered in the compartment. It took much longer for the engine to build up speed, and the trip-hammer sound and the rhythmic puffing was transmitted through the carriages. But there was agentleness in this power, and the sounds of the thrusting wheels gave a motion to the train that was not only different from the amplified lawnmower of the electric engine, but made the steam engine seem animal in the muscular way it moved and stopped.

  After dark the compartment lights went out and the fan died. I went to bed; an hour later—it was 9.30—they came on again. I found my place in the book I was reading, but before I finished a paragraph the lights failed a second time. I cursed, switched everything off, smeared myself with insect repellent (the mosquitoes were ferocious, nimble with their budget of malaria), and slept with the sheets over my head, waking only at Trichinopoly (Tiruchirappalli) to buy a box of cigars.

  The next morning I was visited by a Buddhist monk. His head was shaved, he wore saffron robes, and he was barefoot. He was the very picture of piety, the mendicant monk with his sweaty head, going third class on the branch line to Nirvana. He was, of course, so right for the part that I guessed immediately he was an American, and it turned out he was from Baltimore. He was on his way to Kandy in Central Ceylon. He didn't like my questions.

  “What do your folks think about you becoming a Buddhist?”

  “I am looking for water,” he said obstinately.

  “Are you in a monastery or what?”

  “Look, if there's no water here, just tell me and I'll go away.”

  “I've got some good friends in Baltimore,” I said. “Ever get back there?”

  “You're bothering me,” said the monk.

  “Is that any way for a monk to talk?”

  He was really angry then. He said, “I get asked these questions a hundred times a day!”

  “I'm just curious.”

  “There are no answers,” he said, with mystifying glibness. “I'm looking for water.”

  “Keep looking.”

  “I'm dirty! I haven't slept all night; I want to wash!”

  “I'll show you where the water is if you answer one more question,” I said.

  “You're a nosy bastard, just like the rest of them,” said the Buddhist monk.

  “Second door on your right,” I said. “Don't drown.”

  I think the next ten miles were the most exciting I have ever traveled in a train. We were on the coast, moving fast along a spit of land, and on either side of the train—its whistle screaming, its chimney full of smoke—white sand had drifted into magnificent dunes; beyond these dunes were slices of green sea. Sand whipped up by the engine pattered against the carriages behind, and spray from the breakers, whose regular wash dramatized the chugging of the locomotive, was flung up to speckle the windows with crystal bubbles. It was all light and water and sand, flying about the train speeding toward the Rameswaram causeway in a high wind. The palms under the scudding clouds bowed and flashed like fans made of feathers, and here and there, up to their stupas in sand, were temples flying red flags on their crooked masts. The sand covered the track in places; it had drifted into temple doorways and wrecked the frail palm-frond huts. The wind was terrific, beating on the windows, carrying sand and spray and the whistle's hooeeee, and nearly toppling the dhows in full sail at the hump of the spangled horizon where Ceylon lay.

  “Few minutes more,” said the conductor. “I think you are sorry you took this train.”

  “No,” I said. “But I was under the impression it went to Dhanushkodi—that's what my map says.”

  “Indo-Ceylon Express formerly went to Dhanushkodi.”

  “Why doesn't it go there now?”

  “No Indo-Ceylon Express,” he said. “And Dhanushkodi blew away.”

  He explained that in 1965 a cyclone—the area is plagued with them—derailed a train, drowning forty passengers and covering Dhanushkodi with sand. He showed me what remained, sand dunes at the tip of the peninsula and the fragments of black roofs. The town had disappeared so thoroughly that not even fishermen lived there any more.

  “Rameswaram is more interesting,” said the conductor. “Nice temple, holy places, and tombs of Cain and Abel.”

  I thought I had misheard him. I asked him to repeat the names. I had not misheard.

  The story is that when Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden they went to Ceylon (Dhanushkodi is the beginning of the seven islands across the Palk Strait known as “Adam's Bridge”). Christ went there; so did Buddha and Rama, and so, probably, did Father Divine, Joseph Smith, and Mary Baker Eddy. Cain and Abel ended up in Rameswaram, which might be the true Land of Nod, east of Eden. Their tombs are not signposted. They are in the care of the local Muslims, and in this town of Hindus, the majority of whom are high-caste Brahmins, I had some difficulty locating a Muslim. The driver of the horse-drawn cab (there are no cars in Rameswaram) thought there might be a Muslim at the ferry landing. I said that was too far to go: the tombs were somewhere near the railway station. The driver said the Hindu temple was the holiest in India. I said I wanted to see the tombs of Cain and Abel. We found a ruminant Muslim in a dusty shop on a side street. He said he would show me the tombs if I promised not to defile them with my camera. I promised.

  The tombs were identical: parallel blocks of crumbling stone on which lizards darted and the green twine of tropical weeds had knotted. I tried to appear reverential, but could not suppress my disappointment at seeing what looked like the incomplete foundations of some folly concocted by a treasonous clerk in the Public Works Department of the local mosque. And the tombs were indistinguishable.

  “Cain?” I said, pointing to the right one. I pointed to the left. “Abel?”

  The Muslim didn't know.

  The Hindu temple, founded by Rama (on his way to Lanka, Ceylon, to rescue Sita), was an impressive labyrinth, nearly a mile of subterranean corridors, garishly lit and painted. The traveler J. J. Aubertin, who visited the Rameswaram temple (but not the tombs of Cain and Abel: maybe they weren't there in 1890?) mentions the “blasphemous” and “ugly” dances of the nautch girls in his book, Wanderings and Wonderings (1892). I looked. I saw no nautch girls. Five aged women were gravely laundering their shrouds in the sacred pool at the center of the temple. In India, I had decided, one could determine the sacredness of water by its degree of stagnation. The holiest was bright green, like this.

  It was a three-hour trip across the Palk Strait on the old Scottish steamer, the T.S.S. Ramanujam (formerly the Irwin), from Rameswaram to Talaimannar at the top of Ceylon. Like everyone else I had met in India, the ship's second mate told me I was a fool to go to Ceylon. But his reason was better than others I'd heard: there was a cholera epidemic in Jaffna and it appeared to be spreading to Colombo. “It's your funeral,” he said cheerfully. He held the Ceylonese in complete contempt, nor was he very happy with Indians. I pointed out that this must have been rather inconvenient for him since he was an Indian himself.

  “Yes, but I'm a Catholic,” he said. He was from Mangalore on the Malabar Coast and his name was Llewellyn. We smoked my Trichinopoly cigars on the deck, until Talaimannar appeared, a row of lights dimmed to faint sequins by what Llewellyn said was the first rain of the monsoon.

  MARK TWAIN

  (1835–1910)

  Mark Twain, the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in Missouri. His childhood on the banks of the Mississippi was made famous by such groundbreaking works of American literature as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). One of his first serious commissions as a journalist was to write comic travel letters, and his first bestselling book was Innocents Abroad (1869), which consisted of letters Twain wrote from Europe for the readers of the New York Tribune. He subsequently descri
bed his stagecoach journey across America in Roughing It (1872). For someone who now seems such a quintessentially American writer, Twain spent seventeen years of life abroad, traveling and lecturing. And for someone so commonly associated with humor, he had a dark vision of the contemporary world. He denounced American efforts to acquire the Philippines in 1898; he was one of the earliest critics of Belgian imperialism in the Congo. In 1895, financial difficulties forced Twain into accepting a commission for round-the-world travel. India bewildered Twain; it was like no other place he had ever seen. He made his usual jokes: He once learned, he said, all the 108 names of the Hindu god Vishnu by heart; sadly, he had forgotten all of them except John W. However, as the excerpt from Following the Equator (1897) shows, he was also curious about how the servants coped and was thrilled to be able to discuss Huck Finn with a Muslim prince.

  from FOLLO WING THE EQUATOR

  CHAPTER III

  By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity.

  Another man's, I mean.

  —Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

  You soon find your long-ago dreams of India rising in a sort of vague and luscious moonlight above the horizon rim of your opaque consciousness, and softly lighting up a thousand forgotten details which were parts of a vision that had once been vivid to you when you were a boy, and steeped your spirit in tales of the East. The barbaric gorgeousness, for instance; and the princely titles, the sumptuous titles, the sounding titles—how good they taste in the mouth! The Nizam of Hyderabad; the Maharajah of Travancore; the Nabob of Jubbulpore; the Begum of Bhopal; the Nawab of Mysore; the Ranee of Gulnare; the Ahkoond of Swat; the Rao of Rohilkund; the Gaikwar of Baroda. Indeed, it is a country that runs richly to name. The great god Vishnu has 108—108 special ones—108 peculiarly holy ones—names just for Sunday use only. I learned the whole of Vishnu's 108 by heart once, but they wouldn't stay; I don't remember any of them now but John W.

  And the romances connected with those princely native houses—to this day they are always turning up, just as in the old, old times. They were sweating out a romance in an English court in Bombay a while before we were there. In this case a native prince, sixteen and a half years old, who had been enjoying his titles and dignities and estates unmolested for fourteen years, is suddenly hauled into court on the charge that he is rightfully no prince at all, but a pauper peasant; that the real prince died when two and one-half years old; that the death was concealed, and a peasant child smuggled into the royal cradle, and that this present incumbent was that smuggled substitute. This is the very material that so many oriental tales have been made of.

  The case of that great prince, the Gaikwar of Baroda, is a reversal of the theme. When that throne fell vacant, no heir could be found for some time, but at last one was found in the person of a peasant child who was making mud pies in a village street, and having an innocent good time. But his pedigree was straight; he was the true prince, and he has reigned ever since, with none to dispute his right.

  Lately there was another hunt for an heir to another princely house, and one was found who was circumstanced about as the Gaikwar had been. His fathers were traced back, in humble life, along a branch of the ancestral tree to the point where it joined the stem fourteen generations ago, and his heirship was thereby squarely established. The tracing was done by means of the records of one of the great Hindu shrines, where princes on pilgrimage record their names and the date of their visit. This is to keep the prince's religious account straight, and his spiritual person safe; but the record has the added value of keeping the pedigree authentic, too.

  When I think of Bombay now, at this distance of time, I seem to have a kaleidoscope at my eye; and I hear the clash of the glass bits as the splendid figures change, and fall apart, and flash into new forms, figure after figure, and with the birth of each new form I feel my skin crinkle and my nerve-web tingle with a new thrill of wonder and delight. These remembered pictures float past me in a sequence of contrasts; following the same order always, and always whirling by and disappearing with the swiftness of a dream, leaving me with the sense that the actuality was the experience of an hour, at most, whereas it really covered days, I think.

  The series begins with the hiring of a “bearer”—native manservant—a person who should be selected with some care, because as long as he is in your employ he will be about as near to you as your clothes.

  In India your day may be said to begin with the “bearer's” knock on the bedroom door, accompanied by a formula of words—a formula which is intended to mean that the bath is ready. It doesn't really seem to mean anything at all. But that is because you are not used to “bearer” English. You will presently understand.

  Where he gets his English is his own secret. There is nothing like it elsewhere in the earth; or even in paradise, perhaps, but the other place is probably full of it. You hire him as soon as you touch Indian soil; for no matter what your sex is, you cannot do without him. He is messenger, valet, chambermaid, table-waiter, lady's maid, courier—he is everything. He carries a coarse linen clothes-bag and a quilt; he sleeps on the stone floor outside your chamber door, and gets his meals you do not know where nor when; you only know that he is not fed on the premises, either when you are in a hotel or when you are a guest in a private house. His wages are large—from an Indian point of view—and he feeds and clothes himself out of them. We had three of him in two and a half months. The first one's rate was thirty rupees a month—that is to say, twenty-seven cents a day; the rate of the others, Rs. 40 (40 rupees) a month. A princely sum; for the native switchman on a railway and the native servant in a private family get only Rs. 7 per month, and the farmhand only four. The two former feed and clothe themselves and their families on their $1.90 per month; but I cannot believe that the farmhand has to feed himself on his $1.08. I think the farm probably feeds him, and that the whole of his wages, except a trifle for the priest, goes to the support of his family. That is, to the feeding of his family; for they live in a mud hut, handmade, and, doubtless, rent-free, and they wear no clothes; at least, nothing more than a rag. And not much of a rag at that, in the case of the males. However, these are handsome times for the farmhand; he was not always the child of luxury that he is now. The Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces, in a recent official utterance wherein he was rebuking a native deputation for complaining of hard times, reminded them that they could easily remember when a farm-hand's wages were only half a rupee (former value) a month— that is to say, less than a cent a day; nearly $2.90 a year. If such a wage-earner had a good deal of family—and they all have that, for God is very good to these poor natives in some ways—he would save a profit of fifteen cents, clean and clear, out of his year's toil; I mean a frugal, thrifty person would, not one given to display and ostentation. And if he owed $13.50 and took good care of his health, he could pay it off in ninety years. Then he could hold up his head and look his creditors in the face again.

  Think of these facts and what they mean. India does not consist of cities. There are no cities in India—to speak of. Its stupendous population consists of farm laborers. India is one vast farm—one almost interminable stretch of fields with mud fences between. Think of the above facts; and consider what an incredible aggregate of poverty they place before you.

  The first Bearer that applied waited below and sent up his recommendations. That was the first morning in Bombay. We read them over; carefully, cautiously, thoughtfully. There was not a fault to find with them—except one; they were all from Americans. Is that a slur? If it is, it is a deserved one. In my experience, an American's recommendation of a servant is not usually valuable. We are too good-natured a race; we hate to say the unpleasant thing; we shrink from speaking the unkind truth about a poor fellow whose bread depends upon our verdict; so we speak of his good points only, thus not scrupling to tell a lie—a silent lie—for in not mentioning his bad ones we as good as say he hasn't any. The only difference that I know of between a silent lie and a sp
oken one is, that the silent lie is a less respectable one than the other. And it can deceive, whereas the other can't—as a rule. We not only tell the silent lie as to a servant's faults, but we sin in another way: we overprice his merits; for when it comes to writing recommendations of servants we are a nation of gushers. And we have not the French-man's excuse. In France you must give the departing servant a good recommendation; and you must conceal his faults; you have no choice. If you mention his faults for the protection of the next candidate for his services, he can sue you for damages; and the court will award them, too; and, moreover, the judge will give you a sharp dressing-down from the bench for trying to destroy a poor man's character and rob him of his bread. I do not state this on my own authority, I got it from a French physician of fame and repute—a man who was born in Paris, and had practiced there all his life. And he said that he spoke not merely from common knowledge, but from exasperating personal experience.

  As I was saying, the Bearer's recommendations were all from American tourists; and St. Peter would have admitted him to the fields of the blessed on them—I mean if he is as unfamiliar with our people and our ways as I suppose he is. According to these recommendations, Manuel X was supreme in all the arts connected with his complex trade; and these manifold arts were mentioned—and praised—in detail. His English was spoken of in terms of warm admiration—admiration verging upon rapture. I took pleased note of that, and hoped that some of it might be true.