Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  “No, although some of them become very successful at this business. One of my pupils was Nazir. Now he is a big gambler, the Chief of the Prostitutes. But before he was one of my best pupils….”

  To have had an Indian childhood is to have been initiated very young into horror as well as miracle. I had only to look out of the car window to see the fingerless lepers in the streets, the poor huddled under patchwork blankets in midwinter, the old women hardly able to walk dragging pails of water or working on building sites in blinding sun. My grandmother’s shaved and colonnaded garden was full of snakes that the snake man caught and threw, hissing, into a gunnysack; a Russell’s viper I saw one morning glittering at the bottom of the garden well killed two cows and a child. One night when my parents had gone to a party I lay in their bed and listened to a howling that sounded like the misery of all India rising to the night sky. Next morning I saw a thin, brown, rabid dog being strapped to the back of a bicycle, its mouth a mop of blood and foam. Its terrible face appeared in my dreams for years.

  —Andrew Harvey, Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening

  At that moment, the cry of the muezzin outside broke the evening calm. Dr. Jaffery rustled around the room, picking up books and looking behind cushions for his mosque cap before remembering that he was already wearing it. Muttering apologies he slipped on his sandals and stumbled out. “Can you wait for five minutes?” he asked. “I must go and say my evening prayers.”

  From the balcony I watched the stream of figures in white pyjamas rushing through the pelting rain to the shelter of the mosque. Through the cloudburst I could see the old men laying out their prayer carpets under the arches, then, on a signal from the mullah, a line of bottoms rose and fell in time to the distant cries of “Allah hu Akbar!”

  Five minutes later, when Dr. Jaffery returned, he again put a cupful of milk on the samovar and we talked a little about his home life.

  “The death of my oldest brother in 1978 was the most important event in my life,” he said. “From my boyhood, I always wanted to live in a secluded place, to live like a Sufi. But since my brother’s death it has been my duty to care for my two nieces. I cannot now become a full dervish; or at least not until my nieces are educated and married. Until then their well-being must be my first concern.”

  “And after that?”

  “Afterwards I want to go on haj, to visit Mecca. Then I will retire to some ruined mosque, repair it, and busy myself with my studies.”

  “But if you wish to retire can’t you find some other member of your family to look after your nieces for you?”

  “My elder brothers were killed at Partition,” said Jaffery. “My elder sister is also a victim of those times. To this day she still hears the voices of guns. You may be sitting with her one evening, quite peacefully, when suddenly she will stand up and say: ‘Listen! Guns! They are coming from that side!’

  “In fact it was only by a miracle that my sister and I survived at all: we took shelter with our youngest brother in the Jama Masjid area. Had we been at the house of my parents we would have shared the fate of the rest of the family…” Dr. Jaffery broke off.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “My parents lived in an area that had always been traditionally Hindu. During Partition they went into hiding, and for a fortnight their good Hindu friends brought them food and water. But one day they were betrayed; a mob came in the night and burned the house down. We learned later that the traitor was a neighbour of my father’s. My father had helped him financially. This was how the man repaid him….” Dr. Jaffery shook his head.“In this city,” he said, “culture and civilization have always been very thin dresses. It does not take much for that dress to be torn off and for what lies beneath to be revealed.”

  William Dalrymple is author of numerous books, including In Xanadu, The Age of Kali, From the Holy Mountain, Lonely Planet Sacred India, and City of Djinns, from which this story was excerpted. He is married to the artist Olivia Fraser, and divides his time between London, Edinburgh, and travels in the East.

  I did not go to India in search of my soul, but just to be a foreign correspondent. But somehow from the beginning, I understood in India, as never before, that virtue lies in rushing toward each day with its joys and adventures, and even its pain, and that the only real sin is demeaning God’s gift of each day by turning away.

  —A. M. Rosenthal, “India’s Gift: The Discovery of Each Day,” The New York Times

  Predator

  PALLAVA BAGLA

  The Lady or the Tiger: must we choose?

  SHIVA’S FATHER HAS BEEN KILLED. MAULED BEYOND RECOGNITION, they tell me. With Shiva just turning ten, there is only despair ahead, for him, for his illiterate mother. I drive through the huge, broad-leaved forest with incredibly mixed feelings, painfully aware of the small-built ten-year-old crouching beside me. The fading summer evening settles light and eternal around us. The jeep bumps past a rough, tall, green bamboo haze, and I stop. My long-accustomed eyes have spotted a golden-yellow blur, and as I begin to stare into the bamboo clump, I know I have sighted a tiger.

  Shiva sees it too, he is scared now. The child believes that he has caught up with his father’s murderer. As the tiger emerges into full view, I can feel Shiva’s elbow, poking me, urging me on. I know the child’s fear and would be glad to allay it, but the accused feline holds me by an unseen force. Silent, huge, and so very elegant, so much in possession of himself. He moves slowly towards the jeep and I can see the muscles rippling under the gorgeous garb of black and golden-yellow. But it is those slightly slanting, beautiful eyes that keep me frozen. For want of any apt words to describe them, I can only call them “tiger-eyes.”

  The eyes of a killer? Shiva’s eyes are only unbelieving. Scared, as he stares at me. Wondering, as he waits for me to lift my gun and slay this wicked man-eater who preens himself so shamelessly before us. I cannot take my eyes off the tiger. There are many years behind me, years of loving the wilderness, its wild children and the wild code of natural justice, its inexplicable, selfless generosity. Against all that I try—I really try hard—to hate this “man-eater,” to stuff all my hatred into my hand, my mind, and my gun. I fail, and it is Shiva who begins to hate me, hard and strong.

  Through this fog of my preoccupation, the bamboo haze swings back into focus. I see the tiger’s back, receding into the slowly descending half-light. Has he sensed animosity? I wish—with a desperation alien to me—to communicate to him my harmless obeisance. I want him to know that to me he is a man-eater I cannot hate, a killer I cannot hunt, however much I try. And that I am grateful for this inadequacy in me, humbly grateful.

  Perceiving my mood, or so I hope, my tiger reappears.Very, very close to the jeep. Gently and with colossal dignity. Shiva starts and clutches me. Holding the child, I watch the tiger’s face. Each detail is so clear. I can even see the whiskers moving. There is a scar on his nose, an old wound? I will never know. It is not a haughty face, but it emanates strength, discipline, self-possession. All eight feet of him speak of wiry energy. And there are those eyes again, gold flecks dancing. Just then he blinks and turns away.

  That blink is like the end of a chapter. He—they call him Sher Khan in the village—does not come back this time. The sound of the engine revving up under my unwilling hands is strange, enveloped as we are in the varied sounds of a jungle settling in for the night. I drive away, leaving my heart and soul behind.

  Sher Khan is finally hunted down, by a man more competent, less philosophical than I am. As Shiva rejoices, Sher Khan becomes for me a grave symbol. He symbolizes the disturbed food chain, upset environmental balances, and the superficial concerns of wildlifers. I lose count of the number of times that I try to explain to Shiva the “law of diminishing returns.” My theorizing is branded as urban rubbish, but I know—in my heart—that Sher Khan’s, or his clan’s, man-eating “malady” has no cure in the muzzle of a gun. How many Sher Khans would you kill after all?

  I know the facts,
I have always known them. But, like a time-worn secret, my knowledge is useless. Only human killers are allowed the luxury called psychotherapy. Sher Khan is one of a large group of terrorized tigers. Terrorized by lethal, tiger-bone, tiger-blood, and tiger-skin poachers. Cold, unfeeling hunters who stalk the jungle by night. With weapons. Kill, cut, remove, disappear. And the tigers? Hunted, haunted, running scared. Pitiful ode to the king of the jungle. What of those “tiger-eaters” then? Why are they so free, so efficient, so confident?

  There are epitaphs, yes. To Sher Khan and the likes of him, memories of tiger-filled forests are “heartening,” say the well informed. To me, they must only be ignored if I must keep that old wound from smarting. There have been changes. Poachers do not wait for nightfall anymore. It is blatant, open, nothing to be clandestine about. Operations are more slick, sophisticated. Nobody need know anything.

  Since 1995, the California-based Fund for the Tiger has sent more than $150,000 directly into the field to protect tiger habitat and combat poaching in the wildlife reserves of India and Nepal. Virtually nothing is spent on overhead and staff, because the operation is run by one individual, Brian K. Weirum. In India, funds go to the Wildlife Protection Society of India, for decades a leader in wildlife conservation on the subcontinent. For information, go to TheFundfortheTiger.org, or email Jaibagh@aol.com.

  —JO’R and LH

  What of the likes of Sher Khan then? The tigers that dwell in the wondrous, broad-leaved jungles of majestic teak and saal, the tigers that roam the bamboo fringes and the tigers that kill villagers and forest guards. If only they knew the kind of media attention they attract. That might even be an antidote to their problems. Or should one steer clear of sarcasm as Project Tiger celebrates its entry into adulthood?

  Pallava Bagla was trained as a botanist but works as a writer, editor, and photographer. He is the India correspondent for the U.S. journal Science, a regular contributor to National Geographic News, and photographer of Trees of India.

  Tigers have always been poached.Villagers poison them to protect themselves or their livestock, and some skin smuggling has continued despite an international ban on the trade. But compared to the twin menaces of expanding population and dwindling habitat, poaching has been a relatively minor threat to the tiger’s survival. Now that has changed. If allowed to continue at its current pace, poaching will swiftly undo whatever good Project Tiger [an Indian government conservation project] has managed to do over the past two decades.

  The immediate crisis was caused by the peculiar demands of Chinese medicine. For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, tiger bones and other tiger by-products have played an important part in Chinese healing. The catalogue of physical ills which tiger bones and the elixirs brewed from them are supposed to cure includes rheumatism, convulsions, scabies, boils, dysentery, ulcers, typhoid, malaria, even prolapse of the anus. Tiger remedies are also said to alleviate fright, nervousness, and possession by devils. Ground tiger bone scattered on the roof is believed to bar demons and end nightmares for those who sleep beneath it. A “miraculous medicine” made from tiger bone and sold in Vietnam and elsewhere promises “six lovemakings a night to give birth to four sons.”

  The demands for these products is enormous, not only in China and Taiwan, but in South Korea and in Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia and some Western communities as well. A single brewery in Taiwan imports two thousand kilograms of tiger bones a year—perhaps one hundred fifty tigers’ worth—from which it brews one hundred thousand bottles of tiger-bone wine.

  —Geoffrey Ward with Diane Ward, Tiger-Wallahs: Encounters with the Men Who Tried to Save the Greatest of the Great Cats

  The Calcutta Fowl Market

  RORY NUGENT

  “Know thy poultry,” said the sage.

  IN THIS CITY WHERE STREET SIGNS ARE AS RARE AS TREES, I NEED some information. I’ve been wandering about Calcutta for a day and a half looking for a pink-headed duck, but the only people who will talk to me are shop owners and hucksters trying to sell me something. Then, by chance, I happen upon the Calcutta Tourist Office.

  Inside, a kettle boils atop a stove, and the smell of Darjeeling tea scents the air. Three men in dhotis shuffle behind brooms, whisking them in a tired rhythm. The officials behind the reception desk appear preoccupied as they thumb through stacks of paper. As I touch a guidebook, a large man lifts his gaze to my face. His drooping jowls and double chin bury the knot of his tie.

  “Do you need help?” he asks in an indifferent voice.

  “I sure do.”

  Pink-headed duck

  He nods, reaches into his coat pocket, and hands me a business card. His name is printed in Hindi and English, but appears impossible to pronounce. I decide to call him “Sir.”

  Calcutta’s lively performing-arts scene inspires the rest of the country. Its museum collections range from the whimsical to world-class. There’s always time for another opinion and tumbler of coffee. Marching bands squawk through labyrinthine New Market on yet another Bengali holiday. There’s so much activity and public living that the city, except in traffic jams, seems to be in fast forward. Wander the streets and talk with the people: Calcutta is a safe and friendly city. Cautious tourists shouldn’t skip Calcutta because of horror stories. Stay put in the comfortable, lesscrowded “downtown” (around Park St.) until you’re ready to explore further. A sense of unity, a common language, and the intense cultural life anchor Bengalis—grumbling but not exploding—to the city. If you let it, Calcutta will burrow its way into your heart, too.

  —Mary Orr, “India Sketches”

  He motions for me to sit as I unfold a city map, the best one I could find. Yesterday, while searching bookstores, I discovered that maps of Calcutta are surprisingly inaccurate, missing streets, out of scale, and improperly oriented. Locals joke that the maps are a strategic ploy engineered by the army to confuse invading Pakistani generals.

  “Ah, here we are,” the official says, puncturing the map, obliterating lower Park Street with the tip of his pencil.

  He proceeds to point out the usual tourist attractions, which are all clearly marked: the Botanical Gardens, Howrah Bridge, Victoria Memorial, Calcutta Museum, and other places that hold little appeal for me. Finally he asks where I want to go.

  “Well, Sir, I’m trying to find the fowl market.”

  He swallows hard and tugs a jacket button.

  I repeat my request. He looks even more surprised. Shaking his head disapprovingly, he grabs a legal pad.

  “Name,” he demands, narrowing his jet-black eyes.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Name and passport.” He’s breathing heavily now. I hand over the document.

  “Why do you want to go there?” he asks. “The market is not—umm, how shall I say—it is not very clean.”

  I have to smile. Calcutta is anything and everything but clean. Built atop a swamp the Mogul emperor Aurangzeb gladly rented to the English in the seventeenth century, it may be the dirtiest metropolis on earth. Several feet of backfill have not been enough to bury all the muck on which Britain floated its empire.

  The 1991 census lists the city population at ten million, but an official at the West Bengal Welfare Department laughs at that figure, considering it absurdly low. For every person living in a building, at least two people live on the streets. If he’s right, Calcutta qualifies as the most populous city in the world.

  The official finished jotting down information from my passport and resumes his warning. “What I meant to say is that the fowl market is not a safe place. I cannot recommend it.”

  I say nothing, which makes him nervous and even more suspicious. As I soon learn, people sitting behind state desks interpret reticence as disagreement.

  “You must answer me. Why do you want to go to the fowl market?” he says loudly, glancing about the room to make sure his colleagues are watching. If I’m arrested, he wants the others to know that he tried to discourage me.

  “I’m l
ooking for the pink-headed duck, Sir…a very rare bird.”

  He scribbles something and begins tapping his head with the pencil. “Who? Do you have an address?”

  I explain that the pink-headed duck has no address, at least not a permanent one. Though half a dozen or so appeared each year in the Calcutta fowl market when Victoria ruled as empress, the bird hasn’t been sighted for 50 years. And Calcutta, hub of the Raj, once the center of the pink duck trade, is the logical place to begin my search. I hope I’ll find an old-timer in the fowl market who is familiar with the duck and can point me in the right direction.

  The official covers his face with his meaty hands, muttering something I can’t understand. I imagine him imploring Vishnu, the Hindu god of preservation, for protection. To calm him, I pull out a 1979 edition of Salim Ali’s The Book of Indian Birds. The author is well known throughout India, and the book is published by the Bombay Natural History Society, keeper of all records concerning the pink-headed duck. I try to pass it to him, but he jerks his hand away and purses his lips. On page nineteen is a color illustration of the pink-headed duck. Pointing to it, I explain that the pink-headed duck is one of India’s greatest treasures, a spectacularly plumed bird, and the rarest, most elusive duck in the world. This intrigues him, and he scrutinizes the plate. The bird’s Hindi name is gulab-sir, but ornithologists refer to it as Rhodonessa caryophyllacea. The last confirmed sighting was in 1935 by a sportsman hunting in the Darbhanga area of Bihar. Unfortunately, he recognized the prize only after wresting it from the mouth of his retriever. Every attempt to breed the duck in captivity failed; in fact, within days of being caged, the birds appeared listless and refused food, defying the intentions of their captors. Without their freedom, pink-headed ducks, it seems, would rather be dead.