An Area of Darkness

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  He was right to be anxious. The camping ground, when we got to it, was crowded; the rocky banks of the turbulent mountain river were already lined with defecating pilgrims, and soon it would have been difficult to find an accessible washing spot that was unsullied. Hundreds of ponies, freed of their burdens, had been hobbled and turned loose on the mountainside, browsing on what they could find; some were to die on this journey. The evening light fell golden on the three snowy peaks above Sheshnag; it shot through the smoke which, rising above the camp, converted the tents into an extensive miniature mountain range, peak beyond white peak dissolving in evening mist; it fell on the two long rows of sadhus, more brilliant splashes of saffron and scarlet, who were being fed, at the Kashmir Government’s expense, in an open area that had been spared impurity. These sadhus had been gathered from every corner of India, and their feeding, I believe, was part of the Tourist Department’s public relations: officially we were all ‘tourists-cum-pilgrims’.

  Aziz did not cease to complain about the runaway ghora-wallah. I knew that he had chosen me as the instrument of his vengeance and I cannot understand why I did not rebel. His complaints and pleas wore me down; and after dinner I allowed myself to be led through the dark, cold camp, past ropes and glinting rivulets and heaven knows what other dangers, to the tent of one of the government officials accompanying the pilgrimage. I had met him the previous evening at Chandanwari, and now he greeted me warmly. I was glad for Aziz’s sake and my own at this proof of my influence. Aziz behaved like a man already satisfied. He was no longer the leader; he was only my deferential servant. By his behaviour, his interruptions, he presented me as the aggrieved party, a duped tourist; then he withdrew, leaving me to get out of the situation as best I could. My complaint was half-hearted. The official made notes. We talked about the difficulties of organizing such a pilgrimage, and he offered me a cup of coffee with the compliments of the Indian Coffee Board.

  I was in the Coffee Board’s tent, sipping coffee, when a tall white girl of striking appearance came in.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, sitting beside me. ‘I’m Laraine.’

  She was American; she was thrilled by the yatra, the pilgrimage. Her speech abounded in Hindi words.

  She attracted me. But I had grown tired of meeting young Americans in unlikely places. It was amusing, and charitable, to think that some of them were spies for the CIA or whatever it was. But there were too many of them. It seemed more likely that they were a new type of American whose privilege it was to go slumming about the world and sometimes scrounging, exacting a personal repayment for a national generosity. I had met the type in Egypt, looking for Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria, living on a few piastres a day, eating foul and willing to accept any Eastern hospitality that was going. In Greece for one day I had had to feed an unashamed beggar, a ‘teacher’, who said he never went to restaurants or hotels: ‘As long as there are doors to knack on, I knack.’ (He was almost certainly a spy, and he thought I was one too. ‘Why is it,’ he said, ‘that every goddam outa-the-way place I go, I meet Indians?’) In New Delhi I had met the type in its most developed form: this was a ‘research student’, of ineradicable grossness, who had billeted himself for six weeks in the house of a stranger, casually encountered at a wedding party. India, the world’s largest slum, had an added attraction: ‘cultural’ humility was sweet, but ‘spiritual’ humility was sweeter.

  So: No, I said, I wasn’t thrilled by the yatra. I thought the yatris had no idea of sanitation; they polluted every river we came to; I wished they would follow Gandhi’s advice about the need for a little spade.

  ‘Then you shouldn’t have come.’

  It was the only reply, and it was unanswerable. My resentment had made me speak foolishly. I sought to work the conversation back to a more normal give-and-take and tried to get her to tell me about herself.

  She had come to India, she said, for two weeks, and had already stayed six months. She was attracted to Hindu philosophy; when she left the yatra she was going to spend some time in an ashram. She was a seeker.

  Her cheekbones were high; her neck was slender. But her leanness was of the sort which holds fleshy surprises; her breasts were good and full. I did not think it was the body of someone who would be allowed to remain a seeker for long. Yet in the light of the pressure lamp her eyes conveyed uncertainty. I thought they hinted at family problems and childhood distress. This, and a certain coarseness of her skin, added a disturbing edge to her good looks.

  I would have liked to see more of her. But though we promised to look out for one another, we never met again during the pilgrimage.

  That, however, was not the last of Laraine.

  *

  Ridiculously, the next morning I allowed Aziz to persuade me to complain to the government official again about the missing ghora-wallah. Aziz wanted blood, and his faith in the power of officials was boundless. He was almost triumphant when we started out. We had gone less than a mile, however, Aziz serene on his pony, when our bedding bundle rolled off the untended pony and tumbled down a precipice. Our cavalcade had to stop; Aziz had to walk the pony back and then down; the pony had to be reloaded and urged up again. He was raging when, half an hour later, he rejoined us. ‘Swine!’ he said. ‘Bloody swine man!’ And all the way to Panchtarni he alternately brooded and raged.

  At Sheshnag we had been at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet. A gradual climb of two thousand feet brought us to the Mahagunas Pass, and a world of bleached grey stone: the snows were only temporarily absent. The mountains were grained like wood; and each mountain was grained at a different angle. From here it was an easy descent to the Panchtarni Plain, an abrupt, unbroken levelling-out between the mountains, a mile long, a quarter of a mile wide, down which a keen wind blew and shallow streams raged, white over grey rocks. Colour had grown austere and arctic, and the word ‘plain’ was like a definition of lunar geography.

  At the edge of the wet, pale plain, and unprotected from the wind, an unburdened, unhobbled pony stood shivering to death, his Kashmiri master standing sad-eyed beside him, doing nothing, offering only his presence, both removed from the bustle of the camp, the last full camp of the pilgrimage. The talk among porters and pony men was already of the swift journey back, and even Aziz, infected in spite of his brooding, was saying like an old Amarnath hand, ‘Tomorrow I go straight back to Chandanwari.’ In that ‘I’ he included us all.

  It was mid-afternoon when we pitched our tents. After Aziz had given us tea he left us, saying he was going to have a look round. Something was on his mind. When he returned, less than half an hour later, his look of preoccupation had disappeared; he was all smiles.

  ‘How you liking, sir?’

  ‘I am liking very much.’

  ‘Pony dead.’

  ‘Pony dead!’

  ‘Sweeper come just now take him away.’ At twelve thousand feet, and from a devout Muslim, caste. ‘Why you not write Mr Butt letter, sir? Tell him how much you like. Post Office here with yatra. You post letter here.’

  ‘No paper, no envelope.’

  ‘I buy.’

  He had already bought: it was an Inland Letter form that he was pulling out from one of the pockets of Ali Mohammed’s jacket.

  I wrote to Mr Butt, postcard sentiments. I was about to seal the letter when Aziz said, ‘You put this in, sir.’ It was a dirty scrap of paper, possibly an envelope flap, on which one sentence of Urdu had been written with a ballpoint pen.

  ‘You can’t put anything inside these letters, Aziz.’

  At once he tore the Urdu note into tiny pieces, which he let fall to the ground, and he referred no more to it. I don’t believe he posted the letter I wrote; at least Mr Butt never received it. The note was secret, that was clear. It would have been less secret if the Urdu writer had known the name of the person to whom it was addressed; the addressing was therefore my job. This must have been the plan he had been devising all day. Yet he had abandoned it so easily. Was it only a taste for mystificatio
n? Even if it was, it had very nearly enabled Aziz, an illiterate, to send a secret message to someone ninety miles away. I was disturbed. Did I fully know Aziz? Did he respond to affection like mine, or was his loyalty only to an employer?

  The pilgrims, when they were on the march, could have formed a line ten to fifteen miles long. For hours, then, the line must have moved, unbroken, from camp to camp. Even as the sun was going down over the grey, whistling plain where a pony had died, where ponies every year died, the pilgrims continued to come down the mountains and across the plain, a thin wriggling line of colour rapidly merging into the darkness there, here in the lights of the camp revealed as a slow, silent march of Kashmiri pony men, skull-capped, with dusty feet in disintegrating straw sandals, Gujjars whose studded leather shoes, curiously small and elegant, curling back at the tips, matched the sharpness of their fine features, and ladies riding side-saddle muffled against the dust during the day, now muffled against the cold.

  They came into a camp where the tension of adventure, so high only that morning, had already slackened. The adventure was nearly over; the restlessness was the restlessness of anticipated breaking-up and return. Many of the pilgrims had turned in early; they wished to be up for the four o’clock dash to the cave the next morning. The posters in the tent of the Indian Coffee Board were tarnished: they would be needed for only a few hours more. There were fewer wanderers about the camp than at Sheshnag or Chandanwari. No one gazed at the silver rods which for a century had been sent on the pilgrimage by the Kashmir royal house and were displayed in a lighted tent at the head of the camp; that wonder had been seen before. The crowd around the pundit in the second tent was small and settled, a sifting of the crowds of the two previous nights. From Karan Singh’s essay, I imagine that during our night halts he had been reciting from the Amarkatha, a Sanskrit account of the pilgrimage ‘believed to have been related by Lord Shiva himself to his consort Parvati in the Amarnath Cave’. He was a man of ferocious, magazine-illustration handsomeness, exactly filling his role: he had a wavy black beard, long hair, large bright eyes, and remained bare-shouldered even in the bitter cold. Tonight in his windy tent he was chanting, his eyes closed, his fingers delicately bunched on his knees. Just beyond the yellow of his pressure lamp, light was silver: the moon, almost full. Rock was as white as raging water; the wind blew; the camp went stiller.

  The path to the cave was a narrow ledge cut diagonally, ever rising, ever curving, into the mountains beyond Panchtarni. Pilgrims were already returned from the cave when we started in bright sunlight the next morning; and men with red Public Works Department armbands stood at dangerous corners, controlling the two-way traffic. The foreheads of the returning pilgrims were marked with sandalwood paste. Their faces were bright with ecstasy. They had seen the god; they were exuberant and aggressive. They were unwilling to give way. They shouted, ‘Jai Shiva Shankar!’ and the cave-bound pilgrims, as subdued as a cinema queue when the earlier, fulfilled audience streams out, replied softly, ‘Jai Shiva Shankar!’

  ‘You!’ a sandalwood-smeared young man shouted to me in English. ‘You say, “Jai Shiva Shankar!” ’

  ‘Jai Shiva Shankar!’

  My promptness confused him. ‘All right. Good.’ And he passed on. ‘Jai Shiva Shankar!’

  Down the steep mountainside yellow flowers presently appeared in profusion, and everyone was reminded that fresh flowers were an acceptable offering to the god. Since four o’clock that morning, though, pilgrims had been passing this way: few flowers remained within easy reach, and it seemed that for many the faded flowers bought from the camp bazaar would have to serve. Then we came upon Kashmiris squatting in safe recesses before bunches of the yellow flowers, which silently, with averted eyes, they offered for sale.

  We began to descend again, and from bright sunlight we turned off into the cold shadow of a long narrow valley. The valley might have been the bed of a recent river. Its base was littered with brown rubble and its sides, curving steeply, carried what looked like black tidemarks. But this was not rubble or grey shingle; this was old snow, gone the colour and texture of earth. Down one side of the valley the line of pilgrims, going and coming, stretched; and there, far away, they were crossing the ice bed, mere specks, robbed of all but the brightest colour, distinguishable only by their movement from the rubbled surface of the snow. Here was a mountain, there a valley and a river: the geography of these ranges was simple, easily grasped. But one had brought to them the scale of a smaller, managed world, and it was only at times like these, seeing a line of men swiftly diminished within what seemed a small space, that one realized what distances these Himalayas held.

  Now indeed, in that valley, India had become all symbol. We on the path rode on ponies. But there, on the brown snow below, in the shadow of mountains that denied life, walked pilgrims from the plains, supporting themselves on staffs (bought from Kashmiri roadside vendors at Pahalgam): a broken line merging at the end of the valley into that other line which, across the snow-bed, no goal in sight, disappeared into the grey-brown mountains and became of their texture. The god existed: the faces and cries of the returning pilgrims carried this reassurance. I wished I was of their spirit. I wished that something of their joy awaited me at the end.

  Yet a special joy had been with me throughout the pilgrimage and during all my time in Kashmir. It was the joy of being among mountains; it was the special joy of being among the Himalayas. I felt linked to them; I liked speaking the name. India, the Himalayas: they went together. In so many of the brightly coloured religious pictures in my grandmother’s house I had seen these mountains, cones of white against simple, cold blue. They had become part of the India of my fantasy. It would have astonished me then, in a Trinidad achingly remote from places that seemed worthwhile and real because fully known, to be told that one day I would walk among the originals of those mountains. The pictures I knew to be wrong; their message was no message to me; but in that corner of the mind which continues child-like their truth remained a possibility. And it was partly with that sense of the unattainable given by those pictures, such as, after a lifetime it seemed, I had seen again in Indian bazaars and among the dusty stock of pavement booksellers, that I looked upon these mountains. To be among them was fleetingly, and with a truer sense of their unattainability, to claim them again. To reject the legend of the thousand-headed Sheshnag was easy. But the fact of the legend established the lake as mine. It was mine, but it was something I had lost, something on which I would soon have to turn my back again. Was it fanciful to think of these Himalayas, so well charted and perhaps once better known, as the Indian symbol of loss, mountains to which, on their burning plains, they looked back with yearning, and to which they could now return only in pilgrimages, legends and pictures?

  At the end of the valley, where the ice, less protected, was partly broken, one remembered picture came to life: a sadhu, wearing only a leopard skin, walking barefooted on Himalayan snow, almost in sight of the god he sought. He held his trident like a spear, and from the trident a gauze-like pennant fluttered. He walked apart, like one to whom the journey was familiar. He was a young man of complete, disquieting beauty. His skin had been burned black and was smeared with white ash; his hair was reddish-blond; but this only made unnatural the perfection of his features, the tilt of his head, the fineness of his limbs, the light assurance of his walk, the delicate play of muscles down his back and abdomen. Some days before the pilgrimage I had seen him in Srinagar, resting in the shade of a chenar, languid genitals arrogantly exposed. He had seemed out of place, an idler, an aboriginal come to town. His ash-smeared nudity, implying an indifference to the body, had made his beauty sinister. Now he lent his nobility to all the pilgrims: his goal was theirs.

  Out of the shadow of the valley the broad pyramidal slope of Amarnath burst upon us, rock-strewn, quivering white in sunlight; and the cave to which it led rose black and still, taller and wider than I had imagined it, yet now, after so much expectation, oddly obvious, like
a cave in a simple religious picture. It dwarfed the pilgrims seething at its mouth; again men were needed to give scale to a too simple geography. At the foot of the slope pilgrims, preparing for the final ascent, bathed in the clear, holy waters of the Amarvati stream and rubbed their bodies with its sand. On his own pilgrimage Karan Singh had compromised here, as he had done at Sheshnag: ‘Here again I adopted the unorthodox course of getting the water carried in buckets to the tent, but this time I did not get it warmed up and bathed with the ice cold water. It was clear and warm, however, so the cold bath did not cause any inconvenience.’

  Sunlight, white-rock, water, bare bodies, brilliant garments: it was a scene of pastoral at thirteen thousand feet. Just above, however, was turmoil. Beyond the stream there were few restraining khaki-clad policemen, few men with red Public Works Department armbands; and after their placid ablutions the pilgrims scrambled up to the cave and joined the purified, frenzied crowd fighting to get a view of the god and to make their offerings. The cave was about a hundred and twenty feet wide, a hundred feet high, and a hundred feet deep. It was not big enough. Within the cave, damp and dripping, a steep ramp led to the inner sanctum, the abode of the god. This was protected by a tall iron railing, with a gate that opened outwards. The crowd pressed forward; the gate could hardly be opened; whenever it was, the whole ramp seethed and there were cries from those who feared they might be pushed off the ramp: it was a long drop from the gloom of the cave to the white sunlit slope up which more and more pilgrims were coming. The newcomers, barefooted, carrying fresh or faded flowers, wedged themselves into the crowd and hoped to be taken forward by the general movement. Individual advance or retreat was impossible; a woman was sobbing with terror. I climbed up and held on to the iron railing: I could see only crowd and a low rock vault blackened by damp or incense. I climbed down again. Up the slope and from far down the ice-bed of the valley pilgrims steadily approached. They were like pebbles, they were like sand: a stippling of colour which, receding, grew finer. For hours, perhaps for all that day, there would be no slackening of the throng on the ramp.