I went back out into the morning dazzle and I walked to the right around the vast temple building. Soon, scattered at my feet, near the temple’s back corner, were elegant, heart-shaped leaves with long curved points. They were scattered everywhere, and the wind blew more, green and golden, to the ground. I looked up. There was the vast tree. I didn’t need to ask or look for a plaque.
I stood for a long time, watching the gentle wind scattering the leaves. The Bo tree, though larger by far, reminded me of the balm of Gilead trees I have seen in the American desert, quivering and shimmering in the overwhelming light.
Facing the sun, I sat down with my back to the tree. My mind went blank. I tried to think about Buddha. But I had no thoughts. I tried to think about enlightenment, but no images came. The leaves scattered and I watched. There was no joy. There was even no disappointment. Just a vast neutrality. I watched the leaves fall. There was no lightning bolt of insight, no great awareness to record. The sun rose a little higher. A few more leaves fell, and soon they stopped falling as the wind stopped with the coming of the hotter part of the morning.
I never take mementos home when I travel. I carry no packages, trinkets, or works of art from place to place. Even the most temptingly beautiful sea shells and stones I have learned to leave where they lie. But the idea came to me to pick up a whole, maybe half-inch-thick, packet of the Bo tree leaves. Gently, one by one, I laid them one atop another on my hand.
Then I walked on through the garden at the back. India’s gardens are different from Western gardens. They are sparser and each plant, shrub and small tree is very individualistic. There’s little landscaping, and no decorator feeling at all about most Indian gardens. Just as each human is to be taken on their own terms, so is each plant. There is a plan, you can tell, but no cohesion.
This image of a young woman and a tree constantly recurs in Indian art, and trees are supposed to increase both desire and fertility in a woman. But the asoka also contributes to the health of men. Asoka bark is noted for its astringent and styptic properties and a lotion made from the bark is used to heal open wounds. Its flower buds, which are highly nutritious, are eaten in the last month of the year by men and women alike, to remove grief.
The very name asoka means “unsorrowing.” It is said that when her time was near, the mother of the Buddha went deep into the forest of Lumbini. There, clinging onto an asoka tree, she gave birth to the Enlightened One.
—Naveen Patnaik, The Garden of Life: An Introduction to the Healing Plants of India
When I got back to the monastery, I did not know what to do with the leaves. Though turning toward the gold of autumn, they were still fresh and succulent, and fragile. I finally decided to put them between the leaves of my Lonely Planet Nepal guidebook—Buddha, after all, born a Hindu in Lumbini, by the new drawn borders of today, would be a Nepalese. There, between the pages of the book, a few leaves, half a dozen maybe, beautifully molded, remain to this day. The others, a dozen or two, I gave away to friends, family, some to strangers, human beings all, briefly met and briefly loved. But each of those, too, those given leaves, have left their greenish-gold-brownish mold in heart-shaped patterns on the pages of my book.
One day, soon after the day I sat under the Bo tree, Teresa and I, because I felt I was as well as I would ever get in the heat, decided to take the bus to Sasaram, on our way to Varanasi.
On our last night at the Burmese monastery, the monks took us to visit their new monastery where each private room had its own flush toilet. Still under construction, it was out on a plain about three miles from town. They served us tea—that murky, spicy, sweet, boiled-with-milk-and-sugar Indian chai which I happened to love, but which makes me immediately sick. I was about to decline, but thought, for politeness sake, ah! one more stomach ache, what does it matter? and tasted it. It turned out to be, of all things, Ovaltine!—shades of Captain Midnight.
The next day, in their old car that spat and sputtered, the monks drove us, against their better judgment,“nobody takes the bus from Gaya,” (everyone takes the train, those infinitely slow monsters the British left, that for some esoteric reason the Indian national pride has become enamored with) to the bus station in Gaya. From there, we two women, squashed into a rumbling bus, headed out across the dryness of the Gangetic plain where all color had long ago been leached from the land.
Eventually, we came to the British built Grand Trunk Road, now one solid traffic jam lined with lorry stops and truck repair shops, across the north of the subcontinent. Wedged in by families and bundles and baskets of foodstuffs, sacks of rice and wheat, a certain amount of small livestock, we squinted through the dusty windows—and I knew, again, why I had come to India. Heaven must be like this, I thought, at least the scruffy kind of heaven in which I would like to abide forever.
Nothing appeals to my soul more than a rocking, lurching bus ride, pressed all around by hundreds of patiently beautiful Indians. As I look out at the pale landscape of rocks and stones and dryness and dust and an occasional tree—always with a bullock cart and white clad driver beneath its branches—India bewitches me. It is, to me, the rarest of opiums to move through that sacred land, whether by bus or, when I felt better, on foot. It in itself is a raison d’etre. What did I learn in Bodh Gaya where Buddha sat under the Bo tree? I got up off my bed and moved on. No more. But no less.
Besides, how else would I have found out that the most holy city in India, the sacred city of Varanasi, the “city of light,”—some say, the oldest city in the world—exists only on one side of the Ganges? Across the river it is empty sand.
Jan Haag also contributed “A Wedding in Mahabaleshwar” to Part I and “A Vision of Vijayanagar” to Part II.
In their gentle way, Indians have a way of blurring the boundaries of my sharply honed American individualism.
I once walked next to a stooped old woman on a three-day pilgrimage with thousands of others high into the Himalayas. With every painful step, she panted, “Shiva!” Sometimes she lovingly patted my hand, as if to give me, a stranger and her junior by at least thirty years, encouragement.
I remembered my thoughts before the trip. They were a jumble of worries and fears about myself. Could I make it physically? Where would I go to the bathroom? Would my period come, and how would I handle that in the midst of so many people?
With the majestic Himalayas at my feet and the tiny gnarled old woman at my side, I became very small.
I cried nonstop every one of the three days.
I left India that trip too humble to separate myself any longer from the dazzling, deep stream of life around me.
When the distances between self and living again grow great, and my ego starts to flaunt itself, I return to India.
She works her magic every time.
—Cheryl Bentley, “Enchanted”
Shifting Gears on the Grand Trunk Road
STEVE COLL
Mortal peril and rampant corruption are everyday facts of life for India’s long-haul truck drivers.
AFTER TRAMPING THROUGH MUD AND POOLS OF OIL, WE FOUND Bhajan Singh, asleep in a mosquito-infested back room beside his trucking company’s East Delhi office. He was a long, bony, bearded Sikh. A soiled white turban draped his eyes. Rousted from his nap, he led us wordlessly through the fetid night smoke spewed by East Delhi’s factories.
He climbed into the ten-ton Tata truck that was his home. He seemed less than overjoyed about my plan, concocted upon arrival in South Asia in the summer of 1989 and partially appropriated from Kipling, to saturate myself with India by taking a nine-hundred-mile truck journey from New Delhi to Calcutta along the Grand Trunk Road, which spans the breadth of northern India. Later, Bhajan Singh grumbled to my translator, a portly high-caste Brahmin with a waxed mustache who I will refer to here as Vinod, that prior to our departure the trucking company boss had pronounced it essential that we reach Calcutta uninjured, and that, furthermore, if this was not achieved, Singh would lose his job. It was hard to tell whether t
he demand ticked Singh off because he thought it an unreasonable expectation or because it meant that to keep up appearances along the way, he could not drink as much whiskey or smoke as much opium while driving as he might otherwise do.
Tata truck
“These drivers—Muslims, Jats, Sikhs—are very rough, very rude,”Vinod explained in a condescending tone that night. “They are subjugated by everyone—bosses, financiers, police, tax authorities. So they fight back.”
Anyone who has weaved through the chaos and carnage of South Asia’s phantasmagoric intercity roads might reasonably be nervous about riding shotgun in a Tata truck—a two-axle, six-wheel, top-heavy steel box that looks to drivers of oncoming cars like one of those carnivorous contraptions from the Mad Max movies. But after I climbed into the cab, the butterflies subsided. Looking down through the panoramic windshield decorated with swirling stickers depicting Sikh gurus, roses, and fish, I suddenly realized: it was not we who should be nervous about careening down the highway in this metal monster. It was everybody else on the road who should be worried about us.
Singh jammed his gears and pulled out from the mud lot, weaving down the night road through dust and diesel smoke blasting his horn to overtake cows, taxis, camel carts, bicycles, motorcycles, three-wheeled motorized rickshaws, water buffalo, dogs, zippy Maruti economy cars, and pedestrians. The animals, objects, and people meandered backward, forward, and sideways in what seemed a continuous choreographed dance of near-miss. Singh did his bit and managed not to hit anyone.
The unlit, unlined, undivided road fell in small receding patches beneath the Tata’s headlights. Tall stands of eucalyptus trees flanked the highway on the flat stretches. Roadside restaurants with illicit bars and brothels attached flashed past. Chimneyed brick kilns loomed in the moonlight. To the sides, we could sometimes see sleeping villages nestled in the shadows. Not only did the truck have no seat belts, it had no doors, so we leaned to and fro in the rushing air, gripping our seats on the heavy bends. Eucalyptus, industrial effluent, burning dung, spices and incense assaulted our nostrils. Horns—ours, theirs, everybody’s—blasted all around.
Inside our spacious Tata cab, Singh kept his distance and projected a hard, lonely demeanor. He deferred to Vinod and myself and worried about our comfort. At the same time he bullied his assistant driver, a poor Bihari named Santosh, unmercifully. This seemed to reflect the unspoken hierarchy of our traveling party, with myself at the top by virtue of being a foreign guest, Vinod next by virtue of his Brahmin birth, which he advertised at every opportunity, then Singh, and at the bottom, Santosh, who was of a caste similar to his boss’s but earned one tenth his salary and suffered in apprenticeship. Whether one chose to see this hierarchy in terms of old identities such as caste or new identities such as economic status, there was no denying its palpable presence inside our truck. Among my three companions, groveling deference from below and spiteful bullying from above seemed to be the guiding principles.
Hunched with hooded eyes over the steering wheel, Singh spoke laconically about his past. He said he was born as a Jat Sikh, an unruly subset of India’s minority Sikh religious group, whose male members traditionally wear turbans and never cut their hair. (Jats are a peasant farming caste group that can be either Sikh or Hindu.) On the small farm in rural Punjab where Singh grew up, his status was ordained by tradition but his opportunities were defined by modernity. His ancestors had been farmers and soldiers, but after dropping out of high school, he took to trucking because the money was good. Now he was independent, even upwardly mobile. He wore a shiny gold watch and said he sent one hundred rupees a month home to Punjab to his wife, whom he wed in an arranged marriage in 1984. Those he left behind in the village were trapped now in the Sikh separatist insurgency, in which more than five thousand people, mostly Sikhs, die in shoot-outs, bomb explosions and police killings each year. In any event, apart from the war, farming bored him, Singh said. He preferred to be on the move. “I’ll drive until my body quits.”
Or until the road kills him. Daring and reckless behind the wheels of their massive vehicles, India’s truck drivers are modern heirs to the traders, conquerors, robbers, and religious seers who have traveled the Grand Trunk Road for centuries. Several hundred years before the birth of Christ, Mauryan emperors laid the first tombstone-shaped mileage markers between Kabul and Calcutta. In some ways, not much has changed on the highway since then. As ever, the road is vividly dangerous. More than one thousand truck drivers, passengers, and pedestrians die in accidents along the highway each year. Its shoulders reveal an almost surreal display of wreckage: trucks lying smashed and upside down in ditches every thirty to thirty-five miles, buses wrapped around trees, vans hanging from bridges, cars squashed like bugs. Sections of the road are controlled by bandits who hijack trucks several times a month, sometimes killing the drivers. Corrupt policemen demand bribes at every checkpoint and throw drivers in jail if they don’t oblige. And in rural areas, if a cow or pedestrian is run over, mobs of villagers attack, burn trucks, and lynch drivers in revenge—a peril of which Bhajan Singh would twice be reminded on the road ahead.
In some ways, the Grand Trunk depicts what is unsettled and unfinished in South Asia. The road is the backbone of commerce in the northern subcontinent, and commerce is perhaps the most powerful force churning up change in the region these days—raising expectations, dashing expectations, rearranging old caste, class, political, and religious orders. V. S. Naipaul traveled around India recently and described what he saw and heard as “a million mutinies now.” At least half a million of them concern money.
We paid our first bribe almost immediately. An inspector waved us down and demanded tax papers. In India’s Nehruvian, “mixed socialist” economy, taxes on commercial goods are supposed to be paid by truckers at every state and city border. The system is partly a legacy of the old European feudal idea, carried abroad by the European colonialists, that whoever controls the road—bandit, prince, thug, foreign imperialist—takes his tribute. In India, the tax goes back to the nineteenth century. More recently, the Nehruvian state has claimed authority but has shared its booty with the bandits and thugs, some of whom are in its employ, others of whom just rush in where the state has left a void. Modern truckers, like the traders of old, have adapted nicely to the system, foraging inexorably toward profit wherever it can be found. Since following the official rules and paying all the official taxes would bankrupt most transporters and bring commerce to a halt, the trucking companies have developed an intricate, shifting system of bribes paid to bureaucrats and police to keep the wheels turning. Private tribute has been substituted for public tribute. The Nehruvian state may be going broke as a consequence, but its employees and their allies are doing rather well.
Our first inspector glanced at the truck’s papers and asked for a modest five rupees. Santosh, the assistant driver, slipped him the note while leaning out the doorless cab into the enveloping darkness. Bhajan Singh didn’t even bother to slow the truck as Santosh handed out the cash.
In the 130 years or so since the Mutiny—the last 90 years of the British Raj and the first 40 years of independence begin increasingly to appear as part of the same historical period—the idea of freedom has gone everywhere in India. Independence was worked for by people more or less at the top; the freedom it brought has worked its way down. People everywhere have ideas now of who they are and what they owe themselves. The process quickened with the economic development that came after independence; what was hidden in 1962, or not easy to see, what perhaps was only in a state of becoming, has become clearer. The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million little mutinies.
—V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now
Some miles on, a policeman waved us down with a flashlight. Singh leaned out and shouted the name of his t
rucking company, whereupon the policeman stepped aside and waved us through. “The boss pays him eight hundred rupees per month for all vehicles,” Singh explained, driving on.“If you are a newcomer, it would cost one hundred rupees—for nothing, just so he will not inspect.”
Vinod elaborated. “The trucking companies all pay about forty thousand to fifty thousand rupees to the police per month, handled from the home office, so they do not check for sales tax. He pays because he can’t afford not to. There are massive systemic bribes to avoid sales-tax checks. That’s why we’re waved through.… A friend of mine in Agra has become a multimillionaire mostly because his savings are on sales tax. Bogus permits let you save. That is where the money lies. Freight is nothing.”
Besides keeping an eye on me and translating,Vinod had another purpose in traveling to Calcutta. His regular job was as a repo man who chased down truck drivers who defaulted on loan payments. If a driver “absconded,” in the Indian phraseology, Vinod tracked him down and tried to get the truck back. Two absconders were believed to be hiding out somewhere in Calcutta and Vinod intended to find them. Normally a few threats and shoves were enough to get the job done, he said. But sometimes he had to go to court. He explained his craft, telling a story about a repo man he knew, whom I will refer to here as Rajiv. Once, traveling by rail to a provincial capital where two repossessed trucks were tied up in seemingly endless litigation, Rajiv found himself by chance in a first-class compartment with two senior judges from the relevant court. Sensing opportunity, he broke out a bottle of whiskey, poured generously, and then explained his legal predicament, gently asking the esteemed judges if they had any advice for a man in his position. The judges cited a few vague statutes. Later, asleep, Rajiv felt himself being shaken awake by one of them, who summoned him to the corridor. The judge handed Rajiv a slip of paper containing the name of an attorney in the provincial capital and told him to contact the lawyer. Within a week, he had funneled a fifty-thousand-rupee payment through the lawyer to the judge and he had his trucks.
Travelers' Tales India Page 45
