India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  I wanted to know whether the details of the rituals were absolutely fixed, or whether there were disputes between pujaris – as, long ago in Trinidad, there were disputes between pundits, sometimes about small things: the correct form of Hindu salutation, for example.

  The pujari said, ‘In recent times the pujaris have been taking shortcuts, especially with the marriage ceremony. They think a six-hour ceremony is too long.’ He didn’t like the shortcuts. ‘There is no meaning to it. I feel that once you start taking shortcuts it all goes down the drain.’

  That was another point. How much of that complicated Hindu theology – evolved layer upon layer over millennia – had already gone down the drain in Bombay? For me, in Trinidad, only two generations away from India – though the Hindu epics still had a charge – whole segments of Hindu theology had been lost; later, parts of it were to be recovered, but only as art-history. Without its setting and its earth, Hindu theology seemed to blow away, as it had blown away after centuries from the cultures of Java and Cambodia and Siam: irrecoverable now, the emotions and the elaboration of belief that had supported the building of Angkor.

  The pujari said he always took care to explain the verses he chanted. He had also bought some books published by the Arya Samaj – the reforming Hindu movement, more active earlier in the century than now. The Arya Samaj books explained the significance of some of the ceremonies he performed, and helped him to explain them to devotees.

  Did he himself sometimes have trouble with the theology?

  ‘I’ve grown up with it. It’s part of me.’

  ‘Bhavani Shankar. The friend of Shiva, the reincarnation of Yama. These are difficult ideas by themselves. When you run them together, they become harder.’

  He said again, ‘You pray to Bhavani Shankar so that the soul merges with the Lord.’ Speaking then of the various deities, he said, ‘To understand God, each one has his own way. In our math we have given him that persona, Bhavani Shankar. The math has been there for 300 years, and the deity has been there for centuries.’

  ‘Is the deity there very different from Ganpati at Pali?’ This was Mr Patil’s deity, the bringer of good fortune, the bestower of confidence.

  The pujari said, ‘In my eyes all deities are the same. Ganpati is actually the deity I like most, because Ganpati is the Lord of Learning.’

  ‘Isn’t that Saraswati?’

  ‘Ganpati’s other name is Vidia-Dhiraj. The Lord of Wisdom. When it comes to God, there is no end to learning. You probe deeper, and you always get more. Once you are in the profession, you don’t feel like giving it up. It is my livelihood, but at the same time through it my search for knowledge goes on. My faith has been so built up over the years, is so strong, that it wouldn’t be the same if I did something else, if I was working in a bank, for instance.’

  The pujari’s younger brother worked in a bank. This brother had been trained as a pujari, too, but he had also gone to the local college. This was what was happening now to young men of the pujari class, the pujari said. They were turning away from their traditional work. One man, for instance, a fully trained pujari from the temple, was writing the accounts in a hotel in Bombay, near the airport. The younger generation didn’t want to go into the profession. The pujari didn’t blame his brother for working in a bank. Everybody didn’t have the same kind of faith; and even if the brother had decided to come to Bombay and be a pujari, he would have had a lot of trouble finding accommodation.

  ‘How much does your brother get in the bank?’

  ‘Twelve hundred rupees a month.’

  ‘That’s about what you get.’ And perhaps a good deal less, if the pujari’s daily gifts of food, and other things like cloth, were taken into account.

  In the beginning, the pujari said, it had depressed and worried him that he hadn’t had a chance to study properly at the modern college in his temple town. He used to feel he was going to have a hard time making a living. But he no longer worried about the education he had missed, especially now that he was earning almost as much as his younger brother, who had gone right through the college and had ended up in a bank. Sometimes kindly people told him he should be thinking of some additional, modern occupation, just in case. Even if he was earning almost as much as his brother, that still wasn’t a great deal in Bombay.

  ‘But,’ the pujari said, ‘the first thing people ask you if you go for a job is, “Are you a graduate? Have you done this course or that course? Do you have any job experience?” So the best thing for me is to continue in this profession.’

  ‘You talk as though you’ve looked for other jobs.’

  ‘I haven’t. But I’ve seen a lot of graduates sitting at home because they have no employment.’

  Even if he didn’t want to think of a back-up profession, it must have occurred to him that travelling in Bombay was going to get worse, and that it would take him longer and longer to get from puja to puja. Shouldn’t he, then, be thinking of doing something on the lines of the Electric Pujari, to safeguard his future?

  He talked as though he had considered it. ‘I don’t believe in that.’ He meant preparing his own puja cassettes. ‘You are too busy fast-forwarding and rewinding.’ He used the English words. ‘Your concentration is disturbed. The whole purpose of doing the puja is lost.’

  I said that in a temple ashram a pujari could be poor, and not lose dignity. Even now, it was probably all right in Bombay, being a poor pujari. Was it always going to be like that? Bombay was changing all the time; there was a lot more money around now. Wasn’t there the risk that, as a poor pujari, he might start to fall in people’s esteem?

  ‘Let others have material wealth. I have peace of mind.’ In fact, he said, smiling, he wasn’t doing badly. He wasn’t a paying guest nowadays. He had just bought an apartment of his own, a ‘one-roomed kitchen’, as they called it in Bombay, an apartment like the one where we were talking. Three hundred and ninety-three square feet, 75,000 rupees.

  I made a simple calculation. He had been in Bombay six years, and he said he made 1000 rupees a month. So the apartment cost more than his entire earnings for the six years. Did he have a mortgage?

  He said, with his sweet smile, ‘No. Savings.’

  Savings! So he had been living more or less on the gifts he got as a pujari, and had hardly been spending what he picked up in puja fees.

  He said, ‘I paid by instalments. Because I am a pujari, the contractor gave me special consideration. He is a man of my community.’

  ‘Not many people have that kind of luck in Bombay.’

  He said simply, ‘I accept it as a divine favour.’

  It turned out that he had even begun to think of getting married. It wasn’t going to be easy for the woman he married, since he would be out all day travelling to do his pujas. So he was thinking that it would be nice if he could have a working wife – he used the English words – and that, of course, would help with the expenses and all that side of life which I appeared to be so concerned about.

  Did he have pleasures?

  It wasn’t a good question. There was no division in his mind between work and pleasure. He was a pujari; he served God; that wasn’t a matter of work and hours. Still, he set himself to thinking. And his gentle black eyes were bright and smiling as he thought. Pleasure, pleasure – what might pass as pleasure?

  He said, ‘I like decorating the shrine.’

  He looked inwards always. But – we were in Bombay, a city of many faiths and races and conflicts. How did he see the city? What did he feel when, for instance, he saw the tourists around the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal Hotel? What did he feel about the crowds, the people among whom he – in his pujari’s garb – would almost certainly stand out?

  ‘I’m indifferent to it. I have my work. It keeps me busy. I don’t have the time to go visiting. I don’t have the time to look around me.’

  He had been in Bombay six years, and was going to be there as far ahead as he could see. But the only person he still loo
ked up to and revered was the head of the Chitrapur Saraswat brahmin community.

  He looked inwards and was serene; he shut out the rest of the world. Or, as might be said, he allowed other people to keep the world going. It wasn’t a way of looking which his fellows in the community had (some of them in the Gulf, among Muslims). But it made him a good pujari.

  Subroto – who came from Bengal, and worked in Bombay in the art department of an advertising agency, but was reconciled to living in the city as a paying guest, the buying or renting of an apartment of his own being too far beyond him – Subroto took me one afternoon to meet a friend of his, a film writer who had fallen on hard times. Hard times in Bombay meant hard times. For the film writer it meant a fall almost to the level of his potential audience, the people who (as the writer himself was to say) filled the sweaty, broken-down cinemas, and looked to the screen for release.

  The writer lived in an apartment block in Mahim in mid-town Bombay, near a vegetable market that gave off warm rotting smells. In this apartment block there were 10 apartments to a floor, as in Nandini’s block; but the block wasn’t as well kept as Nandini’s. As Subroto and I went up the concrete steps we had glimpses, through open doors, of clutter in small rooms, and sometimes of figures stretched out in afternoon rest on beds or on the floor; and my fancy was ready – in the general atmosphere of the place – to work up these figures and postures into more sinister tableaux.

  We came to the floor we wanted, and followed a verandah or gallery, very bright in the afternoon sun, to where it opened into a room freshly painted and almost bare. This room, of slanted sunlight and shadow, had two beds against opposite walls, two folding chairs, and three pieces of basketwork on one wall as the chastest kind of decoration, a touch of home, perhaps a touch of Bengal. In that setting, with its clear and sharp details, the details almost of improvised stage properties, there was my host the writer, a tall man in white Bengali costume, a man in his forties, handsome, ironic, with the hint of a suppressed rage, a man to whom my heart at once went out.

  I realized a little while later that the room, so plain and without disorder, would have been specially prepared for our visit. It was the only room in the apartment. Two people lived and slept in that room. There was an adjoining kitchen area, beyond a doorway with a curtain.

  The writer said: ‘Calcutta is where I studied. I keep on drifting back. It’s my home town, mentally. It’s where I feel comfortable. That’s where I feel things are happening all the time, and that’s where I acquired the ambition of being a film writer. It is difficult for a film writer to survive – I knew that, and for 11 years I was a cost accountant. That was the time efforts were being made to make India a very big industrial country. A lot of building was going on in many parts of the country, and I was a cost accountant in the construction industry. I got shifted from one place to another and went all over the country, and often stayed in wild and empty places. I became a nomad, and have remained that way since.

  ‘One fine day I just got up and went away from my job. It happened here, in Bombay. I had come to Bombay with my firm. Bombay was becoming a very industrial city at that time, in the late 60s. And I went away from my job here and I got involved in a lot of theatre activity. I used to read a lot in my time off when I was with the building industry; in some of the places where we were you had nothing else to do. And when I came to Bombay I found that a lot of the friends I had here, people I had met elsewhere, were theatre people.

  ‘In the 70s a lot of theatre people became film people. There was a government Film Finance Corporation. Money was up for grabs. So a lot of my friends grabbed this money and joined the movement, and a lot of good films were made. But then these good films didn’t get released. They made the seminars, they made the festivals, and a lot of very long articles were written about them. But unfortunately the films themselves were never seen because they were never released.

  ‘I will tell you how I managed when I left the building firm. I was living on the roof of a high-rise building with two friends, under the water-tank. We bribed the watchman. That’s how we lived for one year. The best view in town, and free. This was in 1969. I was twenty-seven. The only thing we could afford was country liquor. The deal with the watchman was like this: we would bring a bottle one night, and he would bring a bottle the next night. The result was that we became drunkards up there. We had no option. The watchman wouldn’t allow us a free evening to ourselves – that was part of the deal.

  ‘The watchman was from Nepal, and he told us frightening stories about Nepal. He told us he walked for 27 days to get from his village to the Indian border, and he was starving for those 27 days. He came here to get a job, and when he got his first pay packet he went to a restaurant and ate so much food he came down with dysentery. When he got drunk he used to say, “Everybody should be shot!” And we would agree with him.

  ‘We were making up stories, trying to write screenplays. Then one of our friends got some money. And he made a film. Three of us had collaborated on the screenplay, and when the film came out my name was not on the credits. This was my first lesson in art cinema. We were very emotional and foolish. Instead of beating the hell out of the director, we said, “I’m not going to work with you again.” Which suited him.

  ‘Let me tell you how I got into the commercial side.

  ‘At that time whole villages in the Punjab were migrating. Many of them were being smuggled into England. Very few of them had valid passports and what not. There was a very famous actor in the commercial cinema who said he wanted to make a film about these Indian emigrants. The actor was very famous. In fact, he was at his peak.

  ‘By that time I had left the top of the high-rise and the Nepalese watchman, and I was staying in a boarding house. Two of us were sharing a room. We never had a room to ourselves in those days. My friend was working for this famous actor, and this actor was looking for a bright young man. And that’s something else you’ll learn: they’re always looking for bright young men. I apparently fitted the slot. I was young enough, and the famous man thought I was bright enough.

  ‘The only other option I had at that time was to go back to construction work. The Gulf was opening up at that time, and my old firm were threatening to send me to the Gulf. I was actually still under contract to that company, and had been under contract when I walked out on them – for this great freedom to be a writer.

  ‘So word got to the actor, and the great man sent for me. His office was in Santa Cruz, near the airport. Santa Cruz was part rich, part very slummy. The actor’s office had become part of the slums. In the 30 years since he’d built his offices there, the green had gone and the slums had come. Slum all around, and in the middle there was this ramshackle office building. And I found that the interior of the building had nothing to do with what was outside – it was plush, carpeted, centrally air-conditioned. Nothing to do with the outside. I had walked into the dream factory.

  ‘The office was big – colossal. I had to walk through two rooms to get to the actor’s private chamber. And that was huge. What struck me were the books on the walls. Those editions of the Nobel prizewinners in 30 volumes. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was on the other side, and there were marvellous globes and expensive coffee-table books about animals and flowers. The screenplays of all the so-called film classics of the West were on the other side. Right above his head, in fact.

  ‘He started talking about this film about Indian emigrants. He gave me the outline of the plot. I said – ’

  I broke in to ask the writer, ‘What was the outline?’

  Two lines. Just two lines. I said, “It’s a very brilliant idea.” He looked at me with sparkling eyes and he said, “That’s a very intelligent remark to make.”

  ‘Let me tell you a little about this famous actor. He was perennially young. He is perennially young. He was about fifty then, perhaps fifty-one, fifty-two.

  ‘ “So,” he said. “Let’s try to do the line-up.” ’

  I a
sked, ‘He wanted that straight away?’

  ‘He wanted it right off. That was my first lesson in this new course. How to write a film script for commercial films.

  ‘I was very excited. I thought it was the biggest thing to happen to me, as I picked my way back through the slums outside. I went back to my boarding house. That was in the middle of one of the ugliest slums in Bombay, one of the ugliest of those so-called fishing villages. I burned the proverbial midnight oil that night. Luckily, my roommate was a Punjabi. He knew what the emigrants were like, and he gave me some ideas of their characteristics. I wrote a couple of scenes.

  ‘I took them in to the office the next day. The actor read the scenes in front of me – four scenes in seven pages – and he clapped his hands and said, “This is wonderful! Let me just look at these pages. I will work out some ‘lines’ and we will talk about it tomorrow.”

  ‘The next day came, and he said, “I’ve thought out everything.” And for three hours he told me a story – the story of the film we were supposed to be working on. It was a horrifying experience. It had nothing to do with the village or the humiliations of the emigrants. It was like every other commercial story – it was about spies and shootouts and gangs. It was pretty awful.

  ‘So I looked at him. And at that moment it flashed through my head: “If I tell him it’s a very good story, I’ve got a job.” So I told him, “It’s a very good story.” And he paid me on the spot. Advance money. A contract was made. It was quite favourable to me. He gave me 5001 rupees that morning. It’s an Indian custom, that extra one rupee. Even if it’s a million rupees, they will pay you that extra one rupee. It’s for good luck. Though actually I think the one rupee was my payment for saying it was a good story, and the other 5000 rupees was for my good luck in thinking I should say it. So I thought, “Keep on saying it’s a good story.”