*
Some days passed before I decided to go back to the village. The journey began badly. There was some trouble about transport and it was not until the middle of the afternoon that we were able to leave. Our progress was slow. It was market day at the junction settlement and the road was dangerous with carts, now occupying the right-hand lane, now changing without warning to the left, their manoeuvres obscured by clouds of dust. Dust was thick and constant; it obliterated trees, fields, villages. There were traffic jams, the carts inextricably snarled, the drivers then as passive as their bullocks.
At the junction it was simple chaos. I breathed dust. There was dust in my hair, dust down my shirt, dust, nauseatingly, on my fingernails. We halted and waited for the traffic to clear. Then our driver disappeared, taking the ignition key. It was useless to look for him: that would only have meant groping about in the dust. We sat in the jeep and occasionally sounded the horn. Half an hour later the driver returned. His eyelashes, moustache and oiled hair were blond with dust, but his smile was wet and triumphant: he had managed to buy some vegetables. It was late afternoon when we got on to the embankment; and the sun was setting, converting the dust into clouds of pure gold, so that each person walked in a golden aura, when we arrived at the village. No terror attached to the land now, no surprise. I felt I knew it well. Yet some anxiety remained: the village held Ramachandra.
He was waiting for me. He was without the cloak he had worn to the hotel. He wore only a dhoti and sacred thread, and I could scarcely bear to look at his emaciated, brittle body. As soon as he saw me he held himself in an attitude of ecstatic awe: shaved shining head thrown back, eyes staring, foam-flecked mouth resolutely closed, both sticks of arms raised. We already had an audience, and he was demonstrating his possession of me. It was seconds before he relaxed.
‘He says God has sent you to him,’ my IAS friend said.
‘We’ll see.’
The IAS man converted this into a formal greeting. ‘
Would you like something to eat in his poor hut?’
‘No.’
‘You must at least have some water.’
‘I am not thirsty.’
‘You are rejecting his hospitality because he is a poor man.’
‘He can take it that way.’
‘A mouthful of food.’
‘Tell him it is late. Tell him you have to investigate that embezzlement of the National Defence Fund you were telling me about.’
‘He says God has sent you to him today.’ I don’t think
‘I can keep this up much longer. Ask him what he wanted to see me about.’
‘He says he won’t tell you until you eat something in his poor hut.’
‘Tell him good-bye.’
‘He believes you might appreciate a little privacy.’
He led us through his hut into a small paved courtyard, where his wife, she who had held on to my Veldtschoen and wept, squatted in one corner, her head decorously covered, and made a pretence of scouring some brass vessels.
Ramachandra paced up and down. Then: wouldn’t I eat?
The IAS man interpreted my silence.
It was really quite remarkable, Ramachandra said, that I had come to the village just at that time. He was, as it happened, in a little trouble. He was thinking of starting a little piece of litigation, but the litigation he had just concluded had cost him two hundred rupees and he was short of cash.
‘But that solves his problems. He can simply forget the new litigation.’
‘How can he forget it? This new litigation concerns you.’
‘Me?’
‘It is about your grandfather’s land, the land that produced the rice he gave you. That is why God sent you here. Your grandfather’s land is now only nineteen acres, and some of that will be lost if he can’t get this new litigation started. If that happens, who will look after your grandfather’s shrines?’
I urged Ramachandra to forget litigation and the shrines and to concentrate on the nineteen acres. That was a lot of land, nineteen acres more than I had, and he could get much help from the government. He knew, he knew, he said indulgently. But his body – he turned his long bony back to me, and the movement was not without pride – was wasted; he devoted himself to religious austerities; he spent four hours a day looking after the shrines. And there was this litigation he wanted to get started. Besides, what could be got out of nineteen acres?
Our discussion remained circular. The IAS man didn’t help; he softened all my sharpness into courtesy. Outright refusal didn’t release me: it only enabled Ramachandra to start afresh. Release would come only when I left. And this I at last did, suddenly, followed out to the grove by many men and all the boys of the village.
Ramachandra kept up with me, smiling, bidding me farewell, proclaiming his possession of me till the last. One man, clearly his rival, sturdier, handsomer, more dignified, presented me with a letter and withdrew; the ink on the envelope was still wet. A boy ran out to the jeep, tucking his shirt into his trousers, and asked for a lift into the town. While Ramachandra had been outlining his plans for litigation, while the letter was being written, this boy had hurriedly bathed, dressed and prepared his bundle; his clothes were fresh, his hair still wet. My visit had thrown the brahmins into a frenzy of activity. Too much had been assumed; I felt overwhelmed; I wished to extricate myself at once.
‘Shall we take him on?’ the IAS man asked, nodding towards the boy.
‘No, let the idler walk.’
We drove off. I did not wave. The headlamps of the jeep shot two separate beams into the day’s slowly settling dust which, made turbulent again by our passage, blotted out the scattered lights of the village.
So it ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.
*‘You gave my love meaning.
You awoke my sleeping heart.
My beauty is you, my lover,
my jewels are you.’
The translation is by my friend Aley Hasan of the BBC Indian Section.
Flight
TO BE PACKED, after a year’s journey, before dinner; to have dinner; to be at the airline office at ten, to see the decorative little fountain failed, the wing-shaped counter empty, the tiled turquoise basin of the fountain empty and wetly littered, the lights dim, the glossy magazines disarrayed and disregarded, the Punjabi emigrants sitting disconsolately with their bundles in a corner near the weighing machine; to be at the airport at eleven for an aircraft that leaves at midnight; and then to wait until after three in the morning, intermittently experiencing the horrors of an Indian public lavatory, is to know anxiety, exasperation and a creeping stupor. There comes a point at which the night is written off, and one waits for morning. The minutes lengthen; last night recedes far beyond last night. Lucidity grows intense but blinkered. The actions of minutes before are dim and isolated, and a cause of muted wonder when remembered. So even at the airport India faded; so during these hours its reality was wiped away, until more than space and time lay between it and me.
Paper fell into my lap in the aircraft. Long blond hair and a pair of big blue eyes appeared above the seat in front of me, and tiny feet pattered against the small of my back. ‘Children!’ cried the American next to me, awakening from middle-aged, safety-belted sleep. ‘Where do they take on all these children? Why are all these children travelling? What’s my crazy luck that every time I go to sleep on a plane and wake up I see children? Shall I tell you a funny thing a friend of mine said to a child on a plane? He said, “Sonny, why don’t you go outside and play?” Little girl, why don’t you take your pretty paper and go outside and play?’ Eyes and hair sank below the dark blue seat. ‘That child behind me is going to get hurt. The little bastard is kicking my kidneys in. Sir! Madam! Will you please control your child? It … is … annoying my wife.’ She, the wife, lay relaxed beside him, her skirt riding up above a middle-aged slackly-stockinged knee. There was a smile on her face; she was asleep.
<
br /> No sleep for me. Only a continuing stupor, heightened by the roar of the engines. I made frequent trips to the lavatory to refresh myself with the airline’s eau-de-cologne. The Punjabis at the rear were wakeful, in a ripe smell: one or two had already been sick on the blue carpet. Lights were low. The night was long. We were flying against time, into a receding morning. Yet light was coming; and when at daybreak we reached Beirut it was like arriving, after a magical journey, with all its attendant torment, in a fresh, glittering world. Rain had fallen; the tarmac was glazed and cool. Beyond it was a city which one knew to be a city, full of men as whole as these who, in airport dungarees, now wheeled gangways and drove up in electric lorries to unload luggage: labourers, menials, yet arrogant in their gait, their big bodies and their skills. India was part of the night: a dead world, a long journey.
Rome, the airport, morning still. The Boeings and Caravelles lying this way and that, like toys. And within the airport building a uniformed girl paced up and down the concourse. She wore a jockey-cap hat, to me a new fashion; she wore boots, also new to me. She was extravagantly made up: she required to be noticed. How could I explain, how could I admit as reasonable, even to myself, my distaste, my sense of the insubstantiality and wrongness of the new world to which I had been so swiftly transported? This life confirmed that other death; yet that death rendered this fraudulent.
In the late afternoon I was in Madrid, most elegant of cities. Here I was to spend two or three days. I had been last in this city as a student, ten years before. Here I might have taken up my old life. I was a tourist, free, with money. But a whole experience had just occurred; India had ended only twenty-four hours before. It was a journey that ought not to have been made; it had broken my life in two. ‘Write me as soon as you get to Europe,’ an Indian friend had said. ‘I want your freshest impressions.’ I forget now what I wrote. It was violent and incoherent; but, like everything I wrote about India, it exorcized nothing.
In my last week in Delhi I had spent some time in the cloth shops, and I had arrived in Madrid with a jacket-length of material in an untied brown parcel printed with Hindi characters. This was the gift of an architect I had known for a short time. Two or three days after we met he had made a declaration of his affection and loyalty, and I had reciprocated. This was part of the sweetness of India; it went with everything else. He had driven me to the airport and had put up with my outbursts at news of the aircraft’s delay. We had coffee; then, before he left, he gave me the parcel. ‘Promise me you will have it stitched into a jacket as soon as you get to Europe,’ he said.
I did so now; and above all the confused impressions of a year, then, was this fresh memory of a friend and his gift of Indian cloth.
Some days later in London, facing as for the first time a culture whose point, going by the advertisements and shop-windows, appeared to be home-making, the creation of separate warm cells; walking down streets of such cells past gardens left derelict by the hard winter and trying, in vain, to summon up a positive response to this city where I had lived and worked; facing my own emptiness, my feeling of being physically lost, I had a dream.
An oblong of stiff new cloth lay before me, and I had the knowledge that if only out of this I could cut a smaller oblong of specific measurements, a specific section of this cloth, then the cloth would begin to unravel of itself, and the unravelling would spread from the cloth to the table to the house to all matter, until the whole trick was undone. Those were the words that were with me as I flattened the cloth and studied it for the clues which I knew existed, which I desired above everything else to find, but which I knew I never would.
The world is illusion, the Hindus say. We talk of despair, but true despair lies too deep for formulation. It was only now, as my experience of India defined itself more properly against my own homelessness, that I saw how close in the past year I had been to the total Indian negation, how much it had become the basis of thought and feeling. And already, with this awareness, in a world where illusion could only be a concept and not something felt in the bones, it was slipping away from me. I felt it as something true which I could never adequately express and never seize again.
February 1962–February 1964
An Area of Darkness Page 29
