He’d drifted between English and Hindi until all of us knew the substance of his complaint. Every one of my fellow passengers looked at me with frowns or head-shakes of disapproval. The fiercest glance of reproof, of course, came from the elderly man for whom I’d surrendered my seat. He glared at me malevolently during the entire four hours. When at last he rose to leave, and I resumed my seat, he muttered such a vile curse that the other passengers sputtered into guffaws of laughter, and a couple of them commiserated with me by patting my shoulder and back.
Through the sleepy night, and into the rose-petal dawn, the train rattled on. I watched and listened, literally rubbing shoulders with the people of the interior towns and villages. And I learned more, during those fourteen constricted and largely silent hours in the crowded economy-class section, communicating without language, than I could’ve learned in a month of travelling first class.
No discovery pleased me more, on that first excursion from the city, than the full translation of the famous Indian head-wiggle. The weeks I’d spent in Bombay with Prabaker had taught me that the shaking or wiggling of the head from side to side—that most characteristic of Indian expressive gestures—was the equivalent of a forward nod of the head, meaning Yes. I’d also discerned the subtler senses of I agree with you, and Yes, I would like that. What I learned, on the train, was that a universal message attached to the gesture, when it was used as a greeting, which made it uniquely useful.
Most of those who entered the open carriage greeted the other seated or standing men with a little wiggle of the head. The gesture always drew a reciprocal wag of the head from at least one, and sometimes several of the passengers. I watched it happen at station after station, knowing that the newcomers couldn’t be indicating Yes, or I agree with you with the head-wiggle because nothing had been said, and there was no exchange other than the gesture itself. Gradually, I realised that the wiggle of the head was a signal to others that carried an amiable and disarming message: I’m a peaceful man. I don’t mean any harm.
Moved by admiration and no small envy for the marvellous gesture, I resolved to try it myself. The train stopped at a small rural station. A stranger joined our group in the carriage. When our eyes met for the first time, I gave the little wiggle of my head, and a smile. The result was astounding. The man beamed a smile at me so huge that it was half the brilliance of Prabaker’s own, and set to such energetic head waggling in return that I was, at first, a little alarmed. By journey’s end, however, I’d had enough practice to perform the movement as casually as others in the carriage did, and to convey the gentle message of the gesture. It was the first truly Indian expression my body learned, and it was the beginning of a transformation that has ruled my life, in all the long years since that journey of crowded hearts.
We left the railway at Jalgaon, a regional centre that boasted wide streets of commerce and bustle. It was nine o’clock, and the morning rush was in rumble, roll, rattle, and swing. Raw materials—iron, glass, wood, textiles, and plastic—were being unloaded from the train as we left the station. A range of products, from pottery to clothing to handwoven tatami mats, was arriving at the station for dispatch to the cities.
The aroma of fresh, highly spiced food stirred my appetite, but Prabaker urged me on to the bus terminal. In fact, the terminal was simply a vast open patch of rough ground that served as a staging area for dozens of long-distance coaches. We drifted from bus to bus for half an hour, carrying our bulky luggage. I couldn’t read the Hindi and Marathi texts on the front and side of each bus. Prabaker could read the signs, but still he felt it necessary to ask every driver about his destination.
‘Doesn’t it tell you where every bus is going, on the front of the bus?’ I demanded, irritated by the delay.
‘Yes, Lin. See, this one says Aurangabad, and that one says Ajanta, and that one says Chalisgao, and that one says —’
‘Yeah, yeah. So … why do we have to ask every driver where he’s going?’
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, genuinely surprised by the question. ‘Because not every sign is a truly sign.’
‘What do you mean, not a truly sign?’
He stopped, putting down his share of the luggage, and offered me a smile of indulgent patience.
‘Well, Lin, you see, some of those driving fellows are going to places that is nobody wants to go to. Little places, they are, with a few people only. So, they put a sign for a more popular place.’
‘You’re telling me that they put a sign up saying they’re going to a big town, where lots of people want to go, but they’re really going somewhere else, where nobody wants to go?’
‘That’s right, Lin,’ he beamed.
‘Why?’
‘You see, because those people who come to them, to go to the popular place, well, maybe the driver can convince them to go to the not-popular place. It’s for business, Lin. It’s a business thing.’
‘That’s crazy,’ I said, exasperated.
‘You must have it a bit of sympathies for these fellows, Lin. If they put the truly sign on their bus, no-one will talk to them, in the whole day, and they will be very lonely.’
‘Oh, well, now I understand,’ I muttered, sarcastically. ‘We wouldn’t want them to feel lonely.’
‘I know, Lin,’ Prabaker smiled. ‘You have a very good hearts in your bodies.’
When at last we did board a bus, it seemed that ours was one of the popular destinations. The driver and his assistant interrogated the passengers, to determine precisely where each man or woman intended to set down, before allowing them to enter the bus. Those travelling the furthest were then directed to fill the rear seats. The rapidly accumulating piles of luggage, children, and livestock filled the aisle to shoulder height, and eventually three passengers crowded into every seat designed for two.
Because I had an aisle seat, I was required to take my turn at passing various items, from bundles to babies, backwards over the loaded aisle. The young farmer who passed the first item to me hesitated for a moment, staring into my grey eyes. When I wiggled my head from side to side, and smiled, he grinned in return and handed the bundle to me. By the time the bus rolled out of the busy terminal, I was accepting smiles and head-wiggles from every man in sight, and waggling and wiggling at them in return.
The sign behind the driver’s head, in large red letters in Marathi and English, said that the bus was strictly licensed to seat forty-eight passengers. No-one seemed concerned that we were seventy passengers, and two or three tons of cargo. The old Bedford bus swayed on its exhausted springs like a tugboat in a storm tide. Creaks and groans and squeaks issued from the top, sides, and floor of the bus, and the brakes squealed alarmingly with every application. Nevertheless, when the bus left the city limits, the driver managed to crank it up to eighty or ninety kilometres per hour. Given the narrow road, the precipitous fall on the low side, the frequent columns of people and animals that lined the high side, the titanic mass of our swaying ark of a bus, and the vertiginous hostility with which the driver negotiated every curve, the speed was sufficient to relieve me of the need to sleep or relax on the ride.
During the following three hours of that perilous acceleration, we rose to the peak of a ridge of mountains marking the edge of a vast plateau, known as the Deccan, and descended once more to fertile plains within the rim of the plateau. With prayers of gratitude, and a new appreciation for the fragile gift of life, we left that first bus at a small, dusty, deserted stop that was marked only by a tattered flag flapping from the branch of a slender tree. Within an hour a second bus stopped.
‘Gora kaun hain?’ the driver asked, when we climbed aboard the step. Who’s the white guy?
‘Maza mitra ahey,’ Prabaker answered with contrived nonchalance, trying in vain to disguise his pride. He’s my friend.
The exchange was in Marathi, the language of Maharashtra State, which has Bombay as its capital. I didn’t understand much of it then, but the same questions and answers were repeated so often d
uring those village months that I learned most of the phrases, with some variations, by heart.
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘He’s visiting my family.’
‘Where’s he from?’
‘New Zealand,’ Prabaker replied.
‘New Zealand?’
‘Yes. New Zealand. In Europe.’
‘Plenty of money in New Zealand?’
‘Yes, yes. Plenty. They’re all rich, white people there.’
‘Does he speak Marathi?’
‘No.’
‘Hindi?’
‘No. Only English.’
‘Only English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘They don’t speak Hindi in his country.’
‘They don’t speak Hindi there?’
‘No.’
‘No Marathi? No Hindi?’
‘No. Only English.’
‘Holy Father! The poor fool.’
‘Yes.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Thirty.’
‘He looks older.’
‘They all do. All the Europeans look older and angrier than they really are. It’s a white thing.’
‘Is he married?’
‘No.’
‘Not married? Thirty, and not married? What’s wrong with him?’
‘He’s European. A lot of them get married only when they’re old.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘Yes.’
‘What job does he do?’
‘He’s a teacher.’
‘A teacher is good.’
‘Yes.’
‘Does he have a mother and a father?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where are they?’
‘In his native place. New Zealand.’
‘Why isn’t he with them?’
‘He’s travelling. He’s looking at the whole world.’
‘Why?’
‘Europeans do that. They work for a while, and then they travel around, lonely, for a while, with no family, until they get old, and then they get married, and become very serious.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘Yes.’
‘He must be lonely, without his mummy and his daddy, and with no wife and children.’
‘Yes. But the Europeans don’t mind. They get a lot of practice being lonely.’
‘He has a big strong body.’
‘Yes.’
‘A very strong body.’
‘Yes.’
‘Make sure you feed him properly, and give him plenty of milk.’
‘Yes.’
‘Buffalo milk.’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘And make sure he doesn’t learn any bad words. Don’t teach him any swearing. There are plenty of arseholes and bastards around who will teach him the wrong sisterfucking words. Keep him away from mother-fuckers like that.’
‘I will.’
‘And don’t let anyone take advantage of him. He doesn’t look too bright. Keep an eye on him.’
‘He’s brighter than he looks, but yes, I will look after him.’
It troubled none of the other passengers on the bus that the conversation of several minutes had taken place before we could board the bus and move off. The driver and Prabaker had made sure to speak at a volume adequate to the task of including everyone in the bus. Indeed, once we were under way, the driver sought to include even those outside the bus in the novelty of the experience. Whenever he spied men and women strolling on the road, he sounded the horn to draw their attention, gesticulated with his thumb to indicate the foreigner in the rear of the bus, and slowed to a crawl, so that each pedestrian could examine me with satisfactory thoroughness.
With such democratic rationing of the astounding new attraction, the journey of one hour took closer to two, and we arrived at the dusty road to Sunder village in the late afternoon. The bus groaned and heaved away, leaving us in a silence so profound that the breeze against my ears was like a child’s sleepy whisper. We’d passed countless fields of maize and banana groves in the last hour of the bus ride, and then on foot we trudged along the dirt road between endless rows of millet plants. Almost fully grown, the plants were well over head-height, and in a few minutes of the walk we were deep within a thick-walled labyrinth. The wide sky shrank to a small arc of blue, and the way ahead or behind us dissolved into curves of green and gold, like curtains drawn across the living stage of the world.
I’d been preoccupied for some time, nagged by something that it seemed I should’ve known or realised. The thought, half submerged, troubled me for the best part of an hour before it swam into the field of vision of my mind’s eye. No telegraph poles. No power poles. For most of that hour I’d seen no sign of electric power—not even distant power lines.
‘Is there electricity in your village?’
‘Oh, no,’ Prabaker grinned.
‘No electricity?’
‘No. None.’
There was silence, for a time, as I slowly turned off all the appliances I’d come to regard as essential. No electric light. No electric kettle. No television. No hi-fi. No radio. No music. I didn’t even have a Walkman with me. How would I live without music?
‘What am I going to do without music?’ I asked, aware of how pathetic I sounded, but unable to suppress the whine of disappointment in my voice.
‘There will be music full, baba,’ he answered cheerfully. ‘I will sing. Everybody will sing. We will sing and sing and sing.’
‘Oh. Well. Now I feel all right.’
‘And you will sing, too, Lin.’
‘Don’t count on it, Prabu.’
‘In the village, everybody sings,’ he said with sudden seriousness.
‘U-huh.’
‘Yes. Everybody.’
‘Let’s cross that bridge and chorus when we come to it. How much further is it to the village?’
‘Oh, just a little bit almost not too very far. And you know, now we have water in our village also.’
‘What do you mean, now you have water?’
‘What I mean is, there is one tap in the village now.’
‘One tap. For the whole village.’
‘Yes. And the water is coming out of it for one whole hour, at two o’clock in every afternoon.’
‘One whole hour per day …’
‘Oh, yes. Well, on most days. Some days it is only coming for half an hour. Some days it is not coming out at all. Then we go back and scrape the green stuff off the top of the water in the well, and we are no problem for water. Ah! Look! Here is my father!’
Ahead of us, on the rambling and weedy path, was an ox-cart. The ox, a huge curve-horned beast, the colour of café latte, was shackled to a tall, basket-shaped cart mounted on two wooden, steel-rimmed wheels. The wheels were narrow but high, reaching to my shoulder. Smoking a beedie cigarette and sitting on the ox-bow yoke, his legs dangling free, was Prabaker’s father.
Kishan Mango Kharre was a tiny man, shorter even than Prabaker, with very close-cropped grey hair, a short, grey moustache, and a prominent paunch on his otherwise slender frame. He wore the white cap, cotton kurtah shirt, and dhoti of the farmer caste. The dhoti is technically described as a loincloth, but the term robs the garment of its serene and graceful elegance. It can be gathered up to become work shorts for labour in the fields, or loosened to become pantaloon-style trousers with the ankles free. The dhoti itself is always moving, and it follows the human contour in every act from running to sitting still. It captures every breeze at noon, and keeps out the dawn chill. It’s modest and practical, yet flattering and attractive at the same time. Gandhi gave the dhoti prominence on his trips to Europe, in the struggle for Indian independence from England. With all due respect to the Mahatma, however, it’s not until you live and work with India’s farmers that you fully appreciate the gentle and ennobling beauty of that simple wrap of fabric.
Prabaker dropped his bags and ran forward. His father sprang from his seat on the
yoke, and they embraced shyly. The older man’s smile was the only smile I’ve ever seen that rivalled Prabaker’s own. It was a vast smile, using the whole of the face, as if he’d been frozen in the middle of a belly laugh. When Prabaker turned to face me, beside his father, subjecting me to a double dose of the gigantic smile—the original, and its slightly grander genetic copy—the effect was so overwhelming that I found myself grinning helplessly in return.
‘Lin, this is my father, Kishan Mango Kharre. And father, this is Mr. Lin. I am happy, too much happy, that you are meeting each other’s good selves.’
We shook hands, and stared into one another’s eyes. Prabaker and his father had the same almost perfectly round face and the same upturned, button nose. However, where Prabaker’s face was completely open, guileless, and unlined, his father’s face was deeply wrinkled; and when he wasn’t smiling, there was a weary shadow that closed over his eyes. It was as if he’d sealed shut some doors in himself, and stood guard over them, with his eyes alone. There was pride in his face, but he was sad, and tired, and worried. It took me a long time to realise that all farmers, everywhere, are just as tired, worried, proud, and sad: that the soil you turn and the seed you sow are all you really have, when you live and work the Earth. And sometimes, much too often, there’s nothing more than that—the silent, secret, heartbreaking joy God puts into things that bloom and grow—to help you face the fear of hunger and the dread of evil.
‘My father is a very success man,’ Prabaker beamed, proudly, his arm around the older man’s shoulders. I spoke very little Marathi, and Kishan spoke no English, so Prabaker repeated everything in both languages. Hearing the phrase in his own language, Kishan lifted his shirt with a graceful, artless flourish, and patted at his hairy pot-belly. His eyes glittered as he spoke to me, waggling his head all the while in what seemed to be an unnervingly seductive leer.
‘What did he say?’
‘He wants you to pat his tummies,’ Prabaker explained, grinning.
Shantaram: A Novel Page 14
