Time and a Ticket

by Peter Benchley

  The night clerk in the hotel was a filthy, surly little man who seemed to take pleasure at the sight of us, weary and sweating. He didn't understand a word we said. After a few minutes of trying everything from French to rudimentary deaf-mute sign language, we raised our voices, somehow thinking that would make him understand, and the racket woke one of the clerk's superiors, who stumbled out of a side room, fidgeting with his necktie and brushing his hair out of his eyes. He snapped at the clerk in English, not Urdu, and suddenly the clerk's English came back to him. "May I help you?" he said, with a wicked smile.

  The heat, the vegetation, and the animal sounds from the jungle were all new to us, as we had expected them to be, but it was the hotel that first made us realize we were in the East. So far, the hotels we had stayed in had in no way reflected the culture or history of their various countries. They were cheap, clean, unimaginative and sterile. The Nile Hilton was something else again, but still not Egyptian by any stretch of the imagination. But the Hotel Palace in Karachi reeked of tradition. It was undoubtedly one of the oldest hotels in Pakistan, and its days of glory must have been during the British raj. The rooms were large and high-ceilinged. Two monstrous fans twirled slowly above the beds, discreetly supplemented by a small air-conditioner that hummed behind a curtain. A sign informed us that we could not keep our bearers in the room with us, but that the hotel would be delighted to accommodate them in their servants' quarters. After we settled in, a room boy, roused from his nap on the cool tile floor of the hall, shuffled into the room, bowed, set two thermos bottles of ice water on the low table in the living area, bowed again, and mumbled, "That is all?" He passed through the thin double doors and closed them behind him. We double-locked the doors, tested the locks, and found that with a hard pull they sprang open. We slid a bolt across the top of the doors, tested them again, and they held, though loosely. As we pondered various hiding places for our passports, a piece of white paper slid under the door. It was the standard hotel document disclaiming responsibility for lost or stolen articles. We found a desk drawer that could not be pried open from the back or from the underneath, fitted our own steel lock to it, deposited our passports and travelers checks, and went to bed. A friend in New York had told me that in India and Pakistan it was advisable to put all valuables in the bottom of one's pillowcase and sleep on them.

  I put a switchblade knife there instead, and during the night it woke me four times by sliding down the pillowcase and rapping me in the head as I rolled over.

  In the morning, Charlie got out his list of Pakistani Eisenhower Fellows and began calling. Not only did he reach the second man he tried, but the man invited us to the beach the following day.

  As we walked through the lobby, we were stopped by a dark young man in a white shirt and black slacks, who asked us in clear, unaccented English if we could use his services as a guide. We had decided to use no more guides: we had needed the old man in Egypt to explain the temples to us, and the man in Jordan to drive us around. But guides were expensive, and after a tourist agency bus tour of a city we were usually well enough oriented so that we could find our own way around. We depended on guidebooks and on friendly strangers who would give us directions. We told the man this. He smiled a condescending, you-have-a-lot-to-learn smile and said, "In Pakistan, your method will be of no use. There is no agency tour of Karachi."

  "Then we'll roam around on our own," said Charlie.

  "I would advise most strongly against that," said the man.

  "Why?"

  "You would have a miserable time. You do not speak our language, so you could not ask directions. You cannot buy a guidebook, so you wouldn't know what to look for. You dare not tell a taxi driver to take you somewhere, for he will take you all around the city trying to avoid the place you want. That way he can run up the bill. That is, if he understands you in the first place. If you find your way to the market, you will be set upon by beggars. The crowd is so thick that you can't move about easily, and so you can't escape them. If you are rough with them, you will find yourselves surrounded by an angry mob who may do nothing or who may rob and beat you. If you give something to one of them, others will push and shove to get near you and will point their stumped arms or their leprous feet at you. It will be a nightmare."

  We asked how much he charged, and he said we could get his services and all cab transportation for six dollars per half day. We very quickly agreed.

  He was an excellent guide. He took us to Victoria Park, to the seashore, to the center of the city, and to the market, where he showed us that his warnings had been well-founded. Filthy, sick people in tatters jammed together and pushed and elbowed and called out prices for their goods. Cows lay in the streets, sleepily confident that no one would disturb them. Flies covered everything—the food, the people, and the cows, spreading dung among the bags of spices. Old men sat on the sides of the streets with their hands outstretched, groaning and rolling their eyes as we passed. A young boy whose legs had never grown but had rather twisted into gnarled stumps pushed himself along on a dolly and turned over on his back to raise a begging hand to us. Bands of children chased us through the streets, screaming shrilly, and pushed us and grabbed at our shirttails until the guide drove them away with an angry threat. They retreated for a moment, then came back, only to be shoved away again.

  The guide's name was Robbie. He had been born in Karachi, and because his father had had some money, he had been able to go to school. But his father did not have a lot of money, so he was unable to get the education required for a career in business. He had decided to be a guide because it was the most profitable career open to him. In the tourist season, he worked five or six days a week, which, when he deducted his expenses, netted him twenty-five or thirty dollars a week, a good living in Pakistan. He had two children, both girls, and because they were girls, he did not have to send them to school. He himself could teach them whatever they ought to know. If he got the time, he said, he might teach them to read. It wouldn't matter much to them either way, since their lives would be focused only on their households. His hobby was trying to perfect his English; he learned three or four new words each day.

  Robbie wanted to impress on us that he was not a typical Pakistani. He wanted to disassociate himself from his countrymen, to be thought of as a man with a sophisticated Western mind. He showed us letters he had received from satisfied customers and told us of the many interesting conversations he had had with an American zoologist on a trip they took into the wild northern country of Pakistan. He would say, "You have heard of Utica, New York?"

  "Yes."

  "Then perhaps you know Mr. Arnold Gardner. I have here a letter from him. I will show you."

  "I'm afraid we don't know Mr. Gardner."

  "Well, let me see. I have a letter from Mr. James Bergman, of New York City, New York. Sixth Avenue. Do you know Mr. Bergman?"

  When Robbie found that we did not know Mr. Bergman, or Mr. Fisher or Dr. Molloy or Dr. Williams or any of his other American clients, I think his opinion of us fell. This did not, however, prevent him from asking us to write a letter for him.

  We went to a mosque in the center of the city. It was a huge pink building, surrounded by terraces and pools and footbaths. Hundreds of Moslems wandered about the courtyard, and hundreds more knelt inside the mosque, which was designed to accommodate four thousand worshipers at once. Robbie was critical of the amount of ritual in Islam.

  "It is unrealistic," he said. "I am a Christian, and I believe in God, but I do not go through all the bowing and scraping. I go to church every Sunday, and that is all. This chanting and lying down and praying five times a day is a pagan habit, don't you think?"

  Charlie, who is a Roman Catholic, said he thought it was all right if the people wanted to do it, and that they shouldn't be criticized for performing their religious obligations.

  "You are right," said Robbie, "but it is pagan nevertheless. Pakistanis are like that. They believe in a lot of ritual. It is not a very
sophisticated religion, Islam. It is not modern."

  "Modern!" said Charlie. "What religion is modern? Judaism is old, Catholicism is old, Buddhism is old, all—"

  "Yes, but certain kinds of Protestantism are new. I am a Unitarian, and that is modern. That is a religion of today."

  "Now what do—" Charlie stopped. A very dark woman dressed in a ragged black robe was tugging at his sleeve and rolling her eyes. Charlie started to say something to her when suddenly he noticed that she had a baby strapped to her back. The baby was white—not albino, just Caucasian white—and it had long blond hair and Western features. It looked like a refugee from a New Canaan nursery. "Is that hers?" asked Charlie.

  "Yes," replied Robbie. He said something to the woman, and she spat on the ground at his feet. She walked away.

  "That's her baby?"

  "Yes, and she is an outcast because of it. It is a shame that in this day and age society still excludes people for such an unfortunate thing. It is not her fault."

  "But how can that be her baby?" I said. "I mean, even if she had married a white man, the baby would be darker than that. That baby is pure Caucasian."

  "No, it is the result of a terrible thing. You would think that medical science would have found a cure for it by now."

  "What terrible thing?"

  "When the woman was pregnant, poor soul, she drank milk after eating fish. It was inevitable. The baby had to come out like that."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Yes. It is a sad sickness. The woman knew it would happen, but she was weak. And modern society shuns her for being weak. It is a shame."

  "Are you serious? You believe that?"

  "Of course. It is a known fact. Ask anyone what happens if a pregnant woman drinks milk after eating fish. The child will come out white. It is horrible. I would rather not talk about it." Robbie turned away and started toward another part of the mosque.

  I stood there for a moment, still not sure that Robbie was serious. But he was, and he had been almost angry when I prodded him.

  Charlie nudged me forward. "Welcome," he said, "to the mysterious East."

  The Pakistani Eisenhower Fellow picked us up at our hotel at ten o'clock the next morning. He was in his early thirties, with fine, strong features and eyes so dark that I could not tell where the iris ended and the pupil began. His black hair was brushed straight back. "Good day," he said as he got out of his car. "My name is Pyarali. Did you know that Arthur Miller has remarried?"

  On the way to the beach, he said, "One of my favorite pastimes is arguing, so I hope you won't take offense at anything I say. If I seem curt or snappish, it is nothing personal."

  "Understood," I said.

  "Good. I mentioned that only because I was thinking of saying something, and I did not want you to think me rude."

  "What was it you were going to say?"

  "I think your Vice-President Johnson is a very stupid man." He added, "Perhaps not always stupid, but he was stupid when he was here."

  "How so?" said Charlie.

  "He was stupid when he asked the camel driver, Bashir Ahmed, to come to America. You remember that?"

  "What was wrong with that?"

  "I will grant you that he was only trying to be generous," said Pyarali, "but he did not stop to think. The poor people in Pakistan are not proud of being poor and illiterate. They are ashamed of it, and they feel your Mr. Johnson was being very condescending to Bashir Ahmed, that he was ridiculing him for his poverty and ignorance."

  Charlie said, "How the hell do they get that idea?"

  "He was taken to your country and shown around, and he said he had a wonderful time. Our people think he was being taken as an exhibit, a freak, a poor, stupid man from a backward country. He had never heard of all your appliances, and your papers carried amused accounts of his surprise and fascination at something as basic as a flush toilet or a washing machine. Mr. Johnson meant well, I'm sure, but he kept saying, 'Do you want to come to my country?' as if he wished to show us how life really is. It was showing off. My people do not like to be made to feel any smaller than they are. They resent the manner of your Mr. Johnson."

  "Not all Pakistanis feel that way, do they?" asked Charlie.

  "What is bad is that it was he who did it. If it had been one of your congressmen, it would not have created such a bad impression. People are used to them and expect them to act like bums."

  "Congressmen?" I said.

  "Yes. I think they are your greatest liability abroad. It is not your tourists, who have an exaggerated reputation. It is your congressmen. From all I can gather, two-thirds of the educated people in the world think all your congressmen are bums and thieves. Look. It is this sort of incident." He stopped the car and looked through his wallet until he found a newspaper clipping. He handed it to me and started the car.

  The clipping, from the foreign edition of the New York Herald Tribune, was about a congressman from one of the Middle Atlantic states who had just returned from a trip abroad. He had filed his expense account, and it indicated an expenditure of $115 per day. Of that amount, $50 was listed as "miscellaneous." When he was asked about that category, the congressman replied, "Oh, you know, cabs and tips and things." The other $65, he explained, paid for his hotel room and his meals. Dinner each night cost $20. He said he had had many obligations to discharge. He had had to take people to dinner every night.

  When he had read the clipping, Charlie said, "Okay, it's bad, and it does happen. But I don't think you can generalize from one thing like this and say all congressmen are bums."

  "You would like more?" said Pyarali. "How about your Southern Democrat congressman, the one that got so drunk before his arrival in Spain that he had to be given oxygen on the plane and helped off by two aides. They wanted to leave him on the plane until he sobered up, but there was a welcoming committee there to meet him. He said he was ill. I'm sure he was! I would be, after a bottle of whisky.

  "And about your counterpart funds. We keep money on deposit for your officials, as you do for ours, but not so they can stuff their own pockets. A group of congressmen came over here on an around-the-world 'inspection tour' of something or other, and they practically bought out all the good stores. They bought jewels, silks, gold, everything. There is the 'miscellaneous.' And these are the people who run the United States of America! These are the men the people of the United States elect to office. It does not endear me to the American people when these men come here and are loud, offensive, bossy, smoking their cigars and spending money, not even their money, like water. When they leave, they say in their parting speeches how much they have learned about the people of Pakistan. The only time they ever see the people is from the windows of their cars as they drive to and from the airport.

  "I know what the problems are," continued Pyarali. "They are twofold. First, there are no moral qualifications at all for becoming a member of the governing body of the United States. In fact, a man needs very few qualifications, period."

  "What does he have to be?" I said.

  "You have to have been a citizen of the United States for seven years, must be a resident of the state from which you're elected, and must be twenty-five years of age. The second problem is that the only people who can change the rules, who can stop the spending and can tighten the qualifications for election to Congress, are the members of Congress themselves. Most of them were elected to support parochial causes, like cotton prices or the prevention of birth control, and don't know or care much about anything else. And they are not going to deprive themselves of anything, much less of the privileges they have granted themselves in Congress."

  Pyarali turned the car onto a dirt road leading to the beach. "Finished," he said. "I am sorry to make such a long speech. But I ask you, I ask the United States, to do yourselves one favor: if you are going to elect these men, please keep them to yourselves, don't send them to us. You expend such great efforts to win the approval of the other countries of the world, and then you destroy
all your good work by sending these awful men to check up on it. It is political suicide!"

  Charlie and I heard the same speech time and again thereafter, from people all over the world. A few months after we had returned to the United States, I received a letter from a man we had met in India. It was a short note attached to a newspaper clipping. The note said, "An American friend passing through Delhi left a newspaper at our house. It was the NYHT, 20 September of this year. I enclose a piece of it." The clipping was datelined Boston.

  LEGISLATOR—IN JAIL—NOMINATED

  Former State Rep. Charles Ianello, who won renomination to his seat from his cell in Boston's Deer Island jail, hinted yesterday he may try for higher public office.

  At a press conference in the jail, Ianello, 54, said he had a higher office in mind, but would not disclose his plans except to say it was not a state-wide office.

  He was renominated for his seat in the Massachusetts House in the Democratic primary. In Boston's 8th ward, the Democratic nomination is tantamount to election.

  Ianello is serving a one-year sentence for theft of $983 in state funds. A contracting firm controlled by his family was paid for sidewalk work that was never done.

  On the bottom of the clipping, the man had written, "Is this the Democracy you're trying to make the world safe for?"

  Pyarali had a small beach house on the shore of the Arabian Sea. There were other such weekend retreats to the left and right, some prefabricated, some fashioned of canvas and wood, and one of aluminum. A man walked a camel by the house and indicated that we could ride it for two rupees. Remembering the woman in Giza, we declined.

  We swam and then had lunch on the porch. During lunch, I saw a man walking along the beach with a bear and a dog. I asked Pyarali what the man was selling. "I will show you," he said. "It is a pretty sight." He clapped his hands twice, and the man led the bear and the dog to the house. There was a short exchange between Pyarali and the man, and Pyarali gave him two or three rupees. The dog lay down in the sand. The man pulled the string that led to a brass ring in the bear's nose, and the bear stood on his hind legs. The bear's teeth and claws had been removed, and his slobbering mouth looked ridiculous with nothing but pink gums and flapping jowls. The man began to sing a high, nasal song, and he hit the bear lightly on top of the head in rhythm to his tune. Each time he tapped the bear's head, he pulled on the string, which made the bear jump and grunt. It was supposed to appear that the bear was dancing.