Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  Tomorrow I’ll finally be off to the Rann, I told myself. I celebrated by ordering a second enormous metal tray of thali and was just finishing off my rice, dhal, vegetables, and paratha when someone started beating on my door with the urgency of a fireman in the midst of a blazing inferno.

  “Police. Open.”

  Now what? I opened the door.

  Two neatly dressed policemen stepped promptly into my room with the worried manager trailing behind, shrugging hopelessly.

  “Passport.”

  Keep calm, I told myself, don’t blow a fuse. Be like you were earlier on at the government offices.

  So I was.

  I answered all their questions, let one of them search my luggage, smiled as they meticulously inspected all my permits, and smiled again as they saluted smartly and left. The manager was very apologetic.

  “They very nervous, sir, of people going to Rann. Much trouble with drugs and weapons.”

  He couldn’t seem to stop shrugging his shoulders.

  “That’s okay. I’m just a tourist.”

  “Yes—I am knowing that, sir. But they...” His twitching shrugs completed the sentence.

  “Honestly. It’s okay. And thank you for looking after me.”

  He left, bowing and shrugging simultaneously.

  Five minutes later, another knock on the door. This was becoming an Inspector Clouseau nightmare. I opened it. And behold—another enormous tray of thali with two bottles of Thumbs Up Cola.

  “Complimentary manager,” the young boy said.

  What a nice way to end the day. Three dinners!...

  The drive north from Bhuj began as sensations of diminishing stimuli, leaving the city and then the Black Hills behind, easing further and further out into a flattening desert plain. I paused in one of the few villages on the edge of the Rann and was entertained by the headman while his wives and daughters paraded past me in brightly embroidered jackets decorated with hundreds of tiny mirrors. I watched them sewing and sifting rice in the shade of their mud huts and among the circular granaries topped with conical roofs of reed thatch. Out under the thorn-bushes beyond the village, herds of white cud-chewing cattle sat in statuesque groups, guarded by naked, gold-skinned boys.

  Further on, way out across the salty flats, a herd of over three hundred camels were being led by a group of raiskas to a market near the coast. Raiskas have a notorious reputation as fly-by-night seducers of village women as well as their more traditional roles as balladeer-historians, news carriers, and nomadic traders....

  A little later I met the old man whose brother had been lost in the Rann many years ago. After his sad tale of the terrors of the place and the spirits of “the whites” that haunted it’s barren wastes, I was anxious to drive on deeper into the blazing nothingness, past the sun-cracked skins of stone mountains, peeled off like onion layers. I wanted to see the herds of wild asses said to roam the eastern portion, the Little Rann, and the vast gatherings of flamingos living and laying their eggs in “cities” of conical mud nests way out in the whiteness. So I drove on, leaving the village far behind.

  Now there was not a tree or a shrub or even a single blade of grass anywhere. Nothing but an endless eye-searing blankness in every direction. The track was a vague incision in the salt, but beyond that was what I’d come all this way to see—nothing at all. Twenty thousand square miles of perfect flatness. No clouds, no movement, no life. Nothing.

  It was like vanishing into some vast realm beyond the mind, way beyond thoughts, beyond feelings and sensations and all the convoluted tangles of consciousness. Even beyond awareness itself. A space so colorless, so silent, and so infinite that it seemed to be its own universe. And I just simply vanished into it....

  The sun was so hot in the dry air that I almost felt cold. I noticed this odd sensation at one point, about twenty-five miles into the whiteness, when I got out of the car and walked out across the cracked surface of the salt. After a couple of hundred yards or so the heat shimmers were so violent that I could no longer see the vehicle. I couldn’t even see my own footprints due to the hardness of the salt and the intense shine radiating from it. Then I noticed the shivering, similar to the sensation of a burning fever when the hotter your body becomes the colder you feel. It may also have been flicker or two of fear. I realized that I had done something rather stupid. Two hundred yards away from my landmark was the same as a hundred miles. I didn’t know where the hell I was. I was lost!

  I remembered tales of arctic explorers caught in sudden blizzards and dying in frozen confusion a few blinding yards from their tents. A few yards in a blizzard is infinity. This was infinity.

  In retrospect the whole incident seems ridiculous, but at the time I sensed panic and the horrible reality that if I didn’t retrace my steps within the next half hour or so I’d become a raving sun-sacrificed lunatic lost in this utter nothingness. Given shade I could have waited for the sun to drop and the shimmers to dwindle. But shade was as impossible as alchemist’s gold here. There was no shade for two hundred miles.

  And then, as suddenly as they had come, the shivers ceased and I felt an unearthly calm. I was neither hot nor cold now. The purity of the silence rang like a Buddhist bell, clear and endless. Here I was in the loneliest, emptiest place on earth, smiling inwardly and outwardly, utterly at peace, as if in some sensationless limbo state between life and death.

  I burst out laughing at the zaniness of the whole predicament and my feet, without any prompting and guidance from the conscious part of me, walked me surely and certainly right back through the shimmers and the vast white silence to the car.

  The Rann is still with me now. In times of silence I return to its silence; in a strange way I find it comforting and reassuring. We should all carry a Rann somewhere in our minds. A place of refuge and utter peace. A place of the mind but far beyond the mind.

  I never did see the asses or the flamingoes or anything else out there. If I’d taken a camel rather than a car I could have continued further and deeper but, as it was, I was hampered by thick mud below the salty crust about thirty miles in. The monsoon had been late that year and the Rann had not yet been thoroughly baked by the sun to make it safe for my way of traveling. But that was fine. I’d found what I’d come looking for. Absolute nothingness.

  David Yeadon also contributed “A Bath for Fifteen Million People” to Part I and “Love Has Teeth” to Part II. These stories were excerpted from his book The Back of Beyond: Travels to the Wild Places of the Earth.

  What have you gained if you have not gained yourself, the immortal, the infinite? What have you gained if you have never tasted in your life the deep longing for deliverance and supreme emancipation? And what have you gained if you have not tasted the joy of self-surrender, if your heart has not longed to make of you a flute in the hands of Krishna, that master musician of the universe, and if you have not been able to sweeten all your miseries with a touch of God?

  —Dr. S. N. Dasgupta, quoted by Tim Malyon, “The Seeking of Emptiness,” World Magazine

  PART FOUR

  IN THE SHADOWS

  The Boys’ School

  BRIDGET MCCOY

  Misogyny is strong in India, raising the question: Are women the lowest caste of all?

  LONELY PLANET’S GUIDE TO INDIA CONTAINED A CRYPTIC PRECAUTION for women travelers. In Bharatpur, near Agra, it warned against passing near a boys’ school alone when the students were being let out. There was no explanation or anecdotal material. Simply this warning. Experience told me that their advice was rarely frivolous or unfounded. However, today I was not to be deterred.

  India had posed difficulties from the start. During a twelve hour bus trip from the Nepal border, we had only stopped twice. And even then, there were no bathroom facilities. I had to squat in the fields, and had bled on my clothes.

  In Varanasi we saw very few women on the streets, certainly not the number of women merchants we had encountered in Nepal. And there continued to be no public conveni
ences for women. Higher caste women only relieve themselves in their own houses, and low caste women must use gutters and alleyways like the rest of the poor in India. A Westerner who wants privacy must find a hotel or restaurant that caters to Westerners, or hold back nature.

  After spending the morning viewing the museum at Ramnagar Fort, I was desparate to pee, but, as usual, there were no public toilet facilities. I discovered the unofficial toilets on the vast stairs that ran behind the castle down to the river. Climbing giant stone steps to reach a discreet, hidden spot at the top, I felt dried human excrement crunch under my feet. It covered every inch of the stairway. Richard distracted the kids who were intent on following me.

  While lack of bathroom facilities is inconvenient and embarrassing, it is not ego threatening. Richard made a young friend one evening who offered to show us Varanasi by moonlight. Or rather he offered to show Richard. I trailed along like a shadow, a complete nonentity as far as this fellow was concerned. I might as well have been dressed in black and veiled. He led us through the narrow alleys of the old city, up the cobblestone streets and down steep steps, picking our way through the spots made slick by cow manure and urine until we reached the ghats. He took Richard by the hand, fussed over and protected him lest he slip or get lost. I could have fallen in a great hole, and I don’t think he would have noticed.

  I ndian women, who suffer both sexual frustration and the humiliation of abuse in intimate relations, are routinely told that they live on pedestals, adored as goddesses by men. Psychiatrists and women’s rights activists say otherwise—that most young women merely bear up until they can gain stature by producing a son—but the fantasy persists.

  —Barbara Crossette, India: Facing the Twenty-First Century

  Traveling west to Khajuraho and Agra I found a more contemporary and less sexist India. These places attract many Indian tourists as well as foreigners. The bus and train stations offered public conveniences for both sexes, and I saw contemporary, cosmopolitan Indian women dressed in modern, less constricting fashions. Still, there were places where I was leered at or physically accosted without warning. In the old part of Agra a man on a bicycle squeezed my arm roughly as he sped by. I was furious, but had no recourse. And only twenty-five feet down the street a boy of ten or so imitated him.

  I was careful not to provoke these incidents, dressing modestly and traveling with my husband. Probably the best explanation came from a young man we met in Delhi who asked “Isn’t it true that American women like to have lots of sex with a lot of different men?” I was seen as a whore by virtue of nationality.

  On the bus from Fahtepur Sikri I was seated next to a man and his youngest daughter. He showed us a pen from Denmark, a picture of a pinup who lost her clothes as you turned it upside down. His hand brushed my breast as he reached out to exhibit the pen to Richard while his wife and two older daughters twittered in the seat in front of us. I was left wondering about the experience.

  A kindly soul on the train to Jaisalmer was full of similar misconceptions. He was a gray-headed father of four daughters and grandfather to three. He struck up a conversation with us. He said that his “Auntie” lived in the United States and worked for the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. She had told her nephew that all women in the United States are married to three or four men.

  “Oh, no,” Richard and I protested, “that’s not true.”

  “Oh, not at the same time,” replied our friend,“but Auntie says all American women have three or four husbands, one right after the other. But Auntie tells the Americans she has only one husband for life.”

  “No, this is an exaggeration,” we both reiterated, probably to no avail. Misconceptions about the United States are rampant, fed by U.S. movies full of gratuitous violence and sex.

  He asked very direct questions. Were my tubes tied? What kind of birth control do we use? The old fellow was pleasant and amusing, but by this time I had become somewhat wary of all men. When he offered me a handful of the crunchy snack food that was sitting on a paper on his lap, I was suspicious of his motives.

  I had become sensitized to physical contact between sexes, since it is so strictly prohibited here. I had difficulty reading people’s intentions towards me, had often found myself off balance, becoming more guarded.

  After a few weeks in northern India, the country was beginning to wear on me heavily. I have always been an independent woman. I have traveled alone, camped alone, backpacked alone without fear in my own country. I have always been a proud woman, certain of my own invulnerability. Now, traveling with a man, I felt more physically vulnerable than I ever did in the United States. I was like the experimental monkey who received random and erratic shocks. My stress was much greater because I had no idea when the next assault would occur.

  These events strained my relationship with Richard as well. He wanted to help by championing my cause and challenging my antagonizers. One day I was ogled and grabbed at by a group of teenage male students as I bicycled past in a park. Richard whirled his bike around and pulled up in front of them, blocking their path.

  “How would you like it if I treated your wives, mothers, sisters like this?”

  The group twittered with nervous embarrassment. Even the teacher stood dumb. They looked at their feet and avoided eye contact until a spokesman muttered an apology.

  I was grateful that Richard had spoken up for me. I hadn’t known how to deal with this affront, and would have kept going. Yet I realized later that I was furious that I needed him to fight my battles. He had become guilty by gender association. My champion was haplessly part of the group that was conspiring to strip me of my power. When I explained this to Richard, he was surprised but empathic. Now I had managed to put him in a bind as well. Or India had put us in a bind, leaving us both puzzled by a culture that we didn’t understand on many levels.

  Of course I met men who treated me kindly, courteously, and respectfully. The old tailor in Delhi who sewed my Punjabi suit took great pains to maintain decorum as he fitted my new outfit. The singer in Jaipur with the beautiful dancing hands smiled at me guilelessly.

  In Jaipur a young man named Madho befriended us. We rented bicycles and pedaled into the center of town. Stopped in a busy intersection, Madho suddenly rushed after two adolescent boys and confronted them angrily. We were astonished. A moment later he returned to us and pointed to the built-in lock that passed through the rear tire spokes on my bicycle. One of the boys had engaged it as a prank. If I had moved, I would have tipped over in the midst of heavy traffic. Madho had run after the boy because he thought he was trying to steal the key as well.

  “Ugly,” Richard said.

  Madho agreed. He understood that men his age treated women cruelly. It was not his way. Twenty-one years old, he told us that he would never marry. He didn’t want the sort of relationship that his father had with his mother. She always came last he told us. It is wrong for a man to love his children but not his wife. His parents had given him a sense of hopelessness about his own prospects.

  Some of his despair arose from Madho’s own relationship with his mother which lacked communication and touching. Although they occupied the same space, there was no contact. He took two fingers and drew parallel lines passing and moving off in opposite directions.

  Female infanticide is commonly practiced, said the social investigator in Rajasthan, where traditional antifeminism is more solidly entrenched than elsewhere. In other northern states including Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and the Punjab girl children were permitted to survive, although with reluctance. Dr. Surander Jaitly of Banaras Hindu University, who questioned a number of village women, found a sinister predominance of women who had lost daughters through accidents (“they fell down”), but never a son. Lakshmi Lincom of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences found that if a girl avoided outright infanticide she could expect discrimination right from the cradle, being weaned before a boy and liable to suffer from malnutrition. She would be taken out of school and introduced
to child labor much earlier than her brothers, and was four times more likely than them to be employed in the rural hardslogging labor that comes so close to the definition of slavery.

  —Norman Lewis, A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India

  The Indian pyschotherapist Sudhir Kakar points out that the male child is totally indulged and protected by his mother in the first four or five years of life. These ties are abruptly cut when the child is turned over to a stern father for initiation into the male world. Kakar contends that these circumstances create an individual who is self-centered, distrustful, and disrepectful of women, the result of having been so violently torn from an overly-indulgent maternal haven.

  So when I encountered the boys’ school as it was letting out, I decided to keep walking. What could I possibly fear from a group of thirteen-year-olds? I was in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong country. An Occidental woman looking ahead to the twenty-first century confronted by an India that was clinging to the past.

  The boys saw me and rushed out to the street. “Hey, lady, kiss my penis,” taunted one of them. The rest of them took up the chant, “Hey, lady, kiss my penis.”