Strung out in line ahead, each engaged with our thoughts, we plodded towards Balawali – first through a waste of dried mud in which cows and goats nibbled at some miserable sprouts of vegetation; then through fields of winter wheat and an orchard of guava trees. Finally we reached the high spur of the railway which carried the line out to the bridge. At the foot of it there was a pond half-choked with lotus plants, in which laundry men were walloping the washing, each on his personal stone.
We climbed the embankment and stumbled along the tracks until we reached the railway station. It was a small place, little more than a halt, its principal raison d’être being the glass factory. On a wall there was a notice in English which read:
GOODS SHED REMAINS OPEN FOR THE RECEIPT AND DELIVERY OF GOODS AND LIVESTOCK FROM 10 A.M. TO 4 P.M. ON SUNDAYS, INDEPENDENCE AND REPUBLIC DAYS, WHICH ARE DIES-NON, IT WILL REMAIN OPEN FOR THE DELIVERY OF LIVESTOCK AND CINEMATOGRAPHY.
Standing at the platform was a giant, brand-new, seventy-five-ton crane, built by a firm in Dusseldorf. It formed part of a breakdown train which seemed capable of dealing with the most spectacular disasters and in the excitement engendered by its arrival our own went practically unnoticed.
The stationmaster was a gentle, kindly man but the news he gave us was not good.
‘Now this lorry that you are ordering from Hardwar can never arrive here,’ he said. ‘And I am telling you the reasons. The first reason is that there is no bridge for motors, and the second reason is that if the driver, knowing that there is no bridge, is crossing the river at Hardwar and coming by jungle route, then he will never arrive, because he will be lost. So your lorry is not arriving. This is two reasons why you should continue in boat to Raoli, which is by Bijnor. There is another reason. Now I am telling you that there are no boats at Balawali of any kind, so I am advising you to continue down Ganga to Bridge of Boats at Raoli. It is only eighteen and a half miles,’ he went on apparently unconscious of the effect he was having on his audience. ‘That is the place to which your lorry is now going and I am telegraphing to Laksar on other side of Ganga and telling them to relay message to Hardwar to this effect.’
While this agreeable and practical man went off to implement his suggestion, we sat apathetically under a corrugated iron canopy in front of the station entrance and let the flies swarm over us. Of the four of us, two, Wanda and myself, were convinced that however well-intentioned the stationmaster was, his message would never get through and if it did, that it would be so mangled in the process that it would be unintelligible to its recipients. Both of us had been born and brought up in a world in which incompetence and disaster were hand in glove with one another. Of the others, G., who still believed in mankind’s capacity to organise itself, believed that the message would arrive. The only one of us who looked completely happy was Karam Chand, who didn’t care. All that this meant to him was that for the moment he was reprieved from returning to Hardwar.
Both Wanda and myself were worried about the Irrigation Engineer at Hardwar. We had borrowed his boat on the understanding that we would return it to him at the end of the second day, by which time we had presumed that we would have reached the Balawali Bridge and been able to find another one in which to continue our journey. It was now the afternoon of the fourth day. The Irrigation Engineer had been more than reluctant to lend us his boat in the first place. By now he must be thinking us a trio of villains who had obtained his boat by false pretences. He would have other preoccupations too. Behind every official – and this is not something peculiar to India alone, but displays itself there in its most refined and demonic form – there is his shadow who is waiting to supplant him, together with a whole horde of attendant relations, who are themselves like a shadow cabinet preparing him, egging him on and sustaining him during the long period of waiting. It often takes years before such efforts are successful; sometimes they never are. In this particular instance the business of the boat might, in the hands of a cunning and unscrupulous plotter, be the cause of untold trouble to the Irrigation Engineer. It might even bring about his downfall. To cover himself he might even now be setting in motion machinery for our apprehension. Only G. seemed confident that there was no cause for alarm.
‘Chief Irrigation Engineer is not worrying about his boat,’ he said cheerfully. ‘He asked me who would be responsible for it and I have told him that you are holding yourself entirely responsible.’
I found precious little comfort in this. Neither was the immediate prospect one to elevate the spirits. Across the square from the station there was a refreshment house, a terrible-looking place full of flies. Next to us, squatting on the brick pavement, a hairy old man was gnawing sugar cane and spitting the butts out round him; horrid curs whose tails looked as if they had been worried by rats lay, comatose, in the sun, all except one whose hindparts appeared to be paralysed, which was dragging itself towards us leaving a trail behind it in the dust. To our right a man was asleep, flat on his back on a disused well-head. His head hung down over the outer edge and flies were walking in and out his open mouth. The only redeeming figure in this scene of squalor was a man on a ladder who was thatching a roof and at the same time singing at the top of his voice. He gave an impression of cheerfulness and energy that was so much at variance with his surroundings, that he seemed the figure of industrious man conquering sloth in some mediaeval allegory.
In such circumstances, although we were hungry and thirsty, it was not difficult to resist G.’s suggestion that we should eat in the shop across the way; but while he was there himself ordering tea, the stationmaster reappeared and invited us into the waiting-room where he had a delicious spread laid out for us – tea, cauliflower fried in light crisp batter made from gram flour, golden-coloured ring-shaped sweets filled with syrup and translucent sweets like large musket balls, made with milk, sugar, flour and a pinch of bicarbonate of soda. It would have been difficult to imagine a meal more nicely balanced between sweetness and lightness for persons as exhausted as we were.
‘You were very wise not to eat at teashop,’ he said. ‘This teashop is a dirty, filthy place.’ And he despatched a small boy to fetch G. from it. When we thanked him for what he had done for us all he said was ‘It is nothing. It is my duty.’
Still trying to imagine what an official of British Railways would have done with a party of Indians under similar circumstances, we took leave of the stationmaster after ascertaining that it would be a waste of time if we waited for a reply to the message he had sent up the line, and set off across the tracks and down a dusty lane flanked by low red brick constructions, the houses in which the workers at the glass factory lived, every bit as dreary as their counterparts in the Midlands. At the end of it there was a little shop, very dark inside, which sold Sunlight soap, matches, bidis, exercise books, oranges and things in sacks that looked like dog biscuits.
To us, ill-prepared for civilisation by the lonely, untainted country we had passed through, Balawali seemed a sad place. Nothing we had seen on the way had prepared us for its particular kind of squalor. It was redeemed by its situation on the splendid river and by the huge, red-painted bridge which spanned it, over which long freight trains rumbled, whistling mournfully as only Indian trains can, as if they were drawing attention to the condition of humanity.
On the way back to the boat a violent wind rose and the air was filled with flying sand. The sandbanks shimmered in the heat and on them the solitary figure of a fisherman working in a little compound that he had made from his nets which were flailing about in the wind, only accentuated the loneliness of this part of the Ganges.