The Boatman

by John Burbidge

  ‘Namaskar John sahib. Good to see you again. What seems to be the problem?’

  Before I could respond, the driver interjected with a torrent of words. Manoj appeared unfazed, so I let the two of them carry on. Then he turned to me.

  ‘He says you promised to pay him 100 rupees.’

  I told him the story. The driver butted in, ignoring me while he continued to harangue Manoj. Finally, when Manoj suggested I pay 75 rupees, I didn’t hesitate. I had learned to respect his advice on more than one occasion and now felt bad that I’d drawn him into this affair. The driver grabbed the extra 25 rupees, spat on the ground, and made a hasty exit.

  Manoj offered to carry my case upstairs but I adamantly refused. I was already indebted to him for rescuing me from a debacle of my own making and had no desire to impose on him again. Besides, I didn’t want to give the impression that he and I were anything but equals.

  While stuffing my wallet back into my shoulder bag, I glanced up at the arched façade of the three-story building before me, and was overcome by an inexplicable feeling that I had come home. And what an odd place to call home! Close to Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying and opposite the local offices of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, this imposing church served both Marathi-and Kannada-speaking congregations in a culturally diverse part of the city. Within five minutes’ walk were a mosque, a Hindu temple, and a synagogue. Set back from the street in a spacious compound, the building was protected from the passing flood of human, animal and vehicular traffic by a high iron fence. Of two sets of forbidding gates, one was permanently locked.

  As Manoj and I trudged up the stone staircase, he filled me in on recent developments.

  ‘Henry arrived two days ago. Salima is expected tomorrow and the others should be here by the weekend. Henry wants us to meet right away. Says we have no time to lose.’

  The front door was open, so we walked straight through. I was glad to put down my case, loaded with supplies that foreigners were more or less expected to bring from abroad—cheese and chocolates always high on the list. As I entered the main meeting room, heads turned in my direction and people came over to shake my hand, among them two Australians. ‘G’day’ and ‘mate’ accompanied the handshakes and backslaps. Hugging was something Americans did on occasions like this, but not Australians, and definitely not Indians. For them, cultural etiquette forbade anything more than a polite namaste or a limp handshake. Bodily contact was reserved strictly for private occasions.

  I had never enjoyed being the center of attention but at this point I welcomed the warm reception. The broad smiles with which many of my Indian coworkers greeted me reassured me about my decision to return. They were the most important reason I was here. I had come to share with them my expertise in fundraising and public relations, to support the organization’s work in villages. Their trust and respect meant a great deal to me and I had worked hard to earn it. They had especially appreciated my attempt to acquire some facility in local languages during my first stint in India.

  But the one person I had expected to see was not in the room. Just as I was about to retrieve my case from the hallway, Henry strode in from the front office, notebook under arm. He was probably no more than five years older than me but his commanding manner left no doubt that he was in charge. Tall and thickset, he had pale, mottled skin and a balding head. The excess talcum powder splattered on his safari suit spoke of his constant battle with Bombay’s oppressive climate. He was responsible for a considerable part of our global fundraising budget and took his charge seriously, but his brooding manner and propensity to launch into lectures did not endear him to his coworkers. I had met him a few years earlier, but had never dealt with him at close quarters or on a regular basis. That, as it turned out, was about to change.

  As he approached me, Henry extended his hand.

  ‘So you made it OK,’ he said.

  ‘Yes fine, thanks. The hardest part was getting here from the airport, as usual.’

  A slight smile came over his round face.

  ‘I’m hoping the others will be here by tomorrow or the day after,’ he said. ‘Either way, we should meet Friday morning. We’ve got quite a job ahead of us.’

  ‘By the way,’ he added. ‘You and I and two others are sharing the back room. Yours is the spare upper bunk.’

  Given the limited options at our living quarters, this came as good news. The back room was prized space, with its solid wooden door and attached Asian toilet. It also provided access to the rear staircase which, when the metal gate wasn’t locked at night, offered an alternative to the more public front door. This I would come to appreciate, the longer I stayed in Bombay.

  Since acquiring the premises a few years earlier, our staff had transformed a comfortable, single-family residence into a living and working space for about 30 people, much of it divided dormitory-style by two-meter-high plywood walls that left a gap below the ceiling. These ensured enough visual but no aural privacy. Loose cloth curtains substituted for doors. We lived like the majority of Indians, for whom privacy was an alien concept and a luxury only the rich could afford. Operating in such a confined space called for major adjustments for those of us who were new to India but for our local staff it wasn’t an issue; it was just like being a part of a large, extended family living under the same roof.

  While traveling from village to village during my last assignment, I had come to regard the Bombay quarters as palatial. Compared to our makeshift living conditions, they were indeed. I had resented the fact that it possessed a refrigerator to supply cold water, that everyone had his or her own bed, that the residents could just pop out and buy a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate or a packet of Britannia biscuits whenever they felt like it. Now that I had come to live here, however, my whole attitude towards the place began to change.

  After we had exchanged greetings, swapped news and gossip, and I had shared treats, the hubbub died down and people resumed their routines. I had only a day or two to myself and so decided to make the most of that time. After depositing my suitcase in the back room and hanging my shirts and trousers in the remaining space on the clothes rack, I stuffed a few rupees in my pocket and headed down the back stairs and out onto Sankli Street.

  Passing through the gate, I glanced down and recognized Charlie on the pavement. There was something deeply comforting yet horribly disturbing about him. Missing an ear, part of his nose, and the fingers of one hand, Charlie was our resident leper. Like a sentry at his post, he knew the importance of location. His three possessions were a straw mat, a worn-out, grey woolen blanket, and a metal bowl that doubled as an eating utensil and his main tool of trade. I watched him fold the blanket using his knees, arm stubs and head. He was said to be a ‘good earning’ beggar who belonged to a union, in contrast to the tormented souls commonly seen on the streets of Bombay, who are controlled by a hierarchy of thugs. Day in and day out, fine weather or foul, Charlie was there. Around festivals, he would receive new clothes and during the monsoon someone would move him and his belongings to higher ground.

  ‘Namaste, Charlie bhai. Kaisa hai?’ I greeted him. I wasn’t sure he would recognize me after two years, but I should have known better. I don’t know how long he had been watching people pass through that gate, but he seemed to have developed a computer-like memory for faces and names, especially of the legion of foreigners who had come and gone over the years.

  As our gazes met, Charlie’s eyes lit up and a broad grin stretched across his gnarled face. He waved his stump of an arm in an earnest gesture of welcome. Way down inside me something melted. A connection had been made that I couldn’t explain. It felt good, terribly good.

  ‘Theek hai,’ he replied, rolling his head from side to side in classic Indian fashion. Like most unschooled foreigners, I had been puzzled by the right-left-right head roll when I first ran into it. Was it a yes, a no, or something in between? I gradually came to appreciate its assuring affirmation, albeit couched in a kind of mute
d ambivalence. But there was nothing ambivalent about Charlie. His radiating presence made me feel that traveling more than half way around the world to get here was worth every centimeter.

  ‘Aaj achha hai?’

  ‘Bahut achha,’ he replied affirmatively.

  Most of my exchanges with Charlie were brief, reflecting more my poor language skills than his conversational ability. But it wasn’t the length of our dialogues or their limited content that mattered. What was important was the fact that two human beings from such disparate and unrelated worlds could still acknowledge one another. In a country where social intercourse is so rigidly governed by ironclad traditions, this felt like a radical act.

  If Charlie occupied the front lines, Parvati assumed the rear guard. I soon discovered that she would appear every morning at our back door to keep an eagle eye on our garbage bins. With wrinkles carved like ancient ravines into her folded skin and a stooped back brought on by years of relentless physical labor, she had aged way beyond her years. What was her story, I wondered. Was she a widow cast out by her family? Had she been forced to leave her village because of a scandal? Was she related to one of the church members? I’d watch her climb the three flights of steps, her frayed green sari tucked up between her spindly legs, to make sure she had the first pickings of the treasures we so mindlessly threw away. As she descended with overflowing bins poised uneasily on her shoulder, I feared that she would collapse under their weight. Step by step, she would haul first one, then the other bin, down to a concrete enclosure at the rear of the compound and meticulously sort through their contents.

  The more I watched her doing this, the more I marveled at Parvati. While my heart longed to relieve her of her burdensome existence, my head taunted me with other thoughts. Long before it had become the standard practice it is today, Parvati taught me the value of recycling and reusing. This was underscored for me several months later when I went to the peanut-wallah three doors down and bought several hundred grams of nuts. As I unwrapped the package, I was shocked to find our funding team’s tally sheet for the previous month’s donations. At first I felt horrified at how thoughtlessly we were sharing our private business with outsiders, but soon realized that thanks to Parvati several people were benefiting from our waste.

  On this particular morning, she had already come and gone and I bid Charlie farewell and proceeded down Sankli Street. My first stop was Shah’s pharmacy, adjacent to our compound. ‘Pharmacy’ was somewhat deceptive, considering the limitless range of goods and services offered by this father-and-sons business, which had been operating in the same three-by-ten meter space since 1933. Shah’s great sales pitch was ‘if we don’t have what you want, we can get it by five o’clock.’ And they did; how, is a question better not asked. Everything from mosquito coils to videos to taxis to the airport at three in the morning could be had at Shah’s. The polished teak and glass cabinets contained an eclectic array of food and household goods that probably hadn’t changed much since the shop had first opened. Bottles of Rose’s lime juice stood side by side with jars of Epsom salts, children’s toys, and mouse traps. I tried to picture the days when British memsahibs would have dropped by to buy a half-kilo of Darjeeling second-flush tea. Gazing at the back of the store, with the rows of burlap bags bursting at the seams with rice, dal and flour, I was struck how more than three centuries of British presence had not changed some things.

  Most of my visits to Shah’s were for drugs to combat my recurring bouts of dysentery and diarrhea. A quick visit would produce instant medication. Like most street pharmacies in India, Shah’s never made the distinction between ‘prescription’ and ‘over-the-counter’ drugs. Moreover, the two Shah brothers would always offer a few words of advice on how to take the medication. I never dared ask what pharmaceutical training they had and I wasn’t too concerned. Clutching a bottle of tetracycline or metronidazole, I was relieved at not having to go through the hassle and expense of procuring such medicines abroad.

  But today I didn’t need to buy anything. I chatted with the younger brother, whom I had always found the more approachable of the two. We had barely exchanged greetings when he asked the one question I dreaded.

  ‘So, did you get married?’

  I cleared my throat, while trying to come up with a good excuse why I was not.

  ‘No such luck.’

  ‘Luck? What has luck got to do with it?’

  In a culture where marriage is a duty, the details of which are primarily the responsibility of parents, my answer came as a complete cop-out.

  ‘And you?’ I asked.

  ‘In three months’ time. It’s all arranged. I’ll send you an invitation.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, with no intention to accept.

  As I turned to walk out of the shop, I was overcome by the aroma of fresh chapattis baking on a hot plate. After stepping out, I noticed Saleena, wife of Ali the banana-wallah, cooking their first and probably only meal of the day on their kerosene burner, on the steps of the building that bore the illustrious, if not pretentious, name of Caswanji Mansions. The steps were their home, for which they no doubt paid a sizable fee to the building’s owner, not to mention protection money to the local goondas who controlled the accommodation business in this part of town.

  Like Charlie, Ali was a permanent fixture in Sankli Street, but his site was even more strategically chosen, where five roads came together to form one of the busiest intersections in Bombay. As I neared the corner, Ali was leaning on the side of his cart that was laden with overripe bananas. Nearly toothless and with a protruding belly that spilled over his waistline, he was clad in a faded green-checkered lungi and a grimy singlet. Originally from Lucknow, Ali was like millions of others who had moved to Bombay to escape the tyranny of being a landless laborer and to try to eke out an existence. By default rather than design, bananas had become his specialty. He didn’t boast many worldly possessions but there was one that he was fiercely proud of—an ancient, secondhand Philips radio. I empathized with his attachment to it as my own most valued possession in India was a hand-held shortwave radio. This little instrument had been a lifeline that had kept me from losing touch with reality, especially when I lived in isolated villages.

  Ali’s grasp of English was about as good as my taxi-driver Hindi, but between the two of us we usually managed to concoct a conversation. The link was cricket. So often in India, my interest in the game opened doors and forged relationships like nothing else. With Ali, it was the common bond that brought us together across vast and otherwise unbridgeable chasms. Be it any international cricket match, Ali would be the first to update me with the latest score in his potpourri of Hindi, Urdu and English.

  This morning, I crept up behind him and prepared to ask the price of bananas.

  ‘Kele kitne paise hai?’

  When he heard my voice he spun around, and as he realized who it was, his eyes nearly burst out of their sockets. A smile as wide as the Bay of Bengal covered his face as he extended his hand to shake mine.

  ‘Mr. John! You come back to India!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Assalamu alaikum, Ali.’

  ‘Wa alaikum assalam.’

  He turned to his cart and cast his eyes over the rather dubious collection of yesterday-looking bananas. Choosing the best one, he placed it firmly in my hands.

  ‘You have it,’ he said in the demanding kind of way Indians tend to give a gift.

  ‘Shukriya.’

  As I searched my imagination—and vocabulary—for something else to say, Ali jumped in.

  ‘Kitne baje?’ he asked, motioning to his wrist.

  ‘Sadhe aath baje,’ I reported.

  I had hardly finished telling him the time when he took off in another direction.

  ‘Stralia bahut achha team hai.’

  ‘Kabhi kabhi. Bharat ki jai!’ I replied, knowing the Indian tendency to belittle their own players when they aren’t doing well. This was all it took for Ali to launch into a tirade against Indian cr
icket that left me floundering, and without a clue about how to rein in this runaway monologue. When he finally paused to catch his breath, I asked him how his business was going.

  ‘Ah, Mr. John. You rich man. Me poor man.’

  If he only knew how pathetically poor I was, trying to live on our monthly stipend of 100 rupees. For the average foreigner, even those working in similar fields to my own, this was a laughable amount of spending money. It would barely have bought a three-course meal in a half-decent Bombay restaurant. Ali would never have believed me if I told him, so there was little point trying. To him, anyone who came from abroad must be rich. The fact that I grew up on one side of the Indian Ocean and Ali on the other was one of those things over which neither of us had any control. Like most Indians I met, Ali could never grasp how a country the size of Australia could house so few people. Many would remind me with irksome regularity that India’s population grew by one Australia every year.

  Ali, Charlie, Parvati, the Shahs and several others formed a strange collection of souls who acted like a buffer for me between our cloistered community life and the rough-and-tumble of the wider world. For them, I was probably little more than an oddity who inserted himself into their quotidian lives at indeterminate intervals. For me, the longer I stayed in India, the more they became solid pillars in my ever-fluctuating and highly mobile life. A part of me longed to be just like them, to have well-defined daily routines that rotated around the need to earn a living and take care of my basic needs. But, I had chosen a different path.

  Like all other adults at our Bombay center, I was assigned a supporting role to our village-based staff who worked all over Maharashtra and a few other parts of India. Our job was to help downtrodden communities devise and carry out economic and social development projects that would allow them to break out of centuries-old deprivation. Unlike many non-governmental organizations, ours did not introduce funds or technical skills in the first instance. We brought a process and a commitment. After selecting a village, we would meet with a large cross-section of residents and conduct a participatory planning process that produced a blueprint for the village’s future. We would then send in a team of Indian and foreign staff to live in the village and assist the people to put their plans into action. It was a novel approach for its time, and one fraught with difficulties. There were some successes and many disappointments. Most of those who came from other countries to participate in this ambitious undertaking would leave with the feeling that they were the ones who had undergone ‘development,’ rather than the communities they had come to serve. But few, if any, would have had quite the same take on this as I did.