16 November. Y.W.C.A. Hostel, Bombay.
Somewhere Apa Pant has remarked that air-travellers arrive in two instalments and for me this is Disembodied Day, that dreamlike interval before the mind has caught up with the body; and because a natural parsimony compels me to eat all the meals served en route the body in question feels so overfed I wish it could have been left behind, too.
Oddly enough, Rachel seems immune to jet-lag, despite having had less than three hours’ sleep. I chose to stay in this hostel for her sake, thinking it would serve as a not too unfamiliar half-way house between Europe and Asia. But such solicitude was soon proved needless and I last saw her disappearing up the street with two new-found Indian friends. It seems she has gone to lunch with someone; I felt too exhausted to find out exactly with whom or where.
Of course even I was buoyed up, for the first few hours after our landing at 7.00 a.m., by the simple fact of being back in India. Emerging from the cool plane into warm, dense air (72 °F., according to official information) I was instantly overwhelmed by that celebrated odour of India which I had last smelt many hundreds of miles away, in Delhi. It seemed to symbolise the profound – if not always apparent – unity of this country. And it is not inappropriate that one’s first response to India should involve that sensual experience least amenable to analysis or description.
Outside the airport buildings the scores of waiting taxi-wallahs made little effort to capture us – no doubt they understand by now the financial implications of a rucksack – and with the roar of jets in the background we walked for the next forty minutes through scenes of poverty, filth and squalor which make exaggeration impossible. On flat stretches of wasteland dozens of men were performing their morning duty, unselfconsciously squatting, with rusty tins of water to hand and sometimes a hopeful pig in the background. The Hindu opening his bowels must be the world’s greatest mass-manifestation of the ostrich-mentality. Your average Hindu is an extremely modest man, but because he can’t see you, having his gaze fixed on the ground, he will serenely evacuate while hundreds of people pass to and fro near by.
So we proceeded, with bougainvillaea gloriously flourishing on one side of the highway and the stench of fresh excrement drifting to us from the other. All around were uncountable thousands of homes – many no bigger than small tents – constructed of bamboo matting, or driftwood, or beaten kerosene tins. Between and in these shelters people seethed like so many ants, and diseased pi-dogs nosed through stinking muck, and shrivelled-looking cattle were being driven on to the dusty, grey-green wasteland to eat Shiva-alone-knows what. After some time Rachel observed dispassionately, ‘I must say this place seems rather shattered’ – a tolerably graphic description of the outskirts of Bombay. Yet I was not overcome by that nauseated depression which similar scenes induced ten years ago. Perhaps I am no longer quite sure that India’s dire poverty is worse than the dire affluence through which we had been driving twelve hours earlier in London.
Outside one sagging bamboo shelter at the edge of the road a graceful, dark-skinned young woman was washing her feet, using water taken from a stagnant, reeking pond with a lid of bright green scum. She looked up as we passed, and met my eyes, and smiled at us: and her smile had a quality rarely found in modern Europe. It recalled something I had read on the plane, in Dr Radhakrishnan’s essay on ‘Ethics’. ‘When the soul is at peace, the greatest sorrows are borne lightly. Life becomes more natural and confident. Changes in outer conditions do not disturb. We let our life flow of itself as the sea heaves or the flower blooms.’
Presently a taxi slowed beside us and the driver suggested – ‘You go Gateway of India for only Rs.40?’* He dropped abruptly and unashamedly to Rs.10 on realising I was no newcomer to India. Then, when I still shook my head, he looked sympathetic and advised us to board an approaching city-bound bus. The fare, he said, would be only 40 paise for me and 20 paise for ‘the baby’.
The bus was crammed and we were nowhere near a scheduled stop. Yet the driver obligingly halted and the conductor curtly ordered a barefooted youth with dirty, matted hair – probably a tribal outcaste – to give up his seat to the foreigners. The youth obeyed at once, but sullenly; and his resentful glare so embarrassed me that I remained standing beside him while Rachel sat down. Then another young man, weedy-looking but neatly dressed, offered me his seat, told me his name was Ram and asked, ‘Where is your native place?’ He thought Glasgow was the capital of Ireland but claimed to be a Times of India staff reporter.
A cool breeze freshened the windowless bus as we slowly jolted through mile after mile of slums, semi-slums and swarming bazaars. Rachel was fascinated to see bananas growing on trees, cows lying on city pavements and a crow boldly swooping down to steal a piece of toast off a street-vendor’s stall. And I was relieved to feel myself rejoicing. On the plane it had suddenly occurred to me that this return could prove a dreadful mistake. But now, looking affectionately out at India’s least attractive urban-slum aspect, I knew it was no such thing.
Ram followed us off the bus and spent over two hours – ‘It is my duty …’ – helping us to locate this hostel. I can never come to terms with his type of doggedly helpful but obtuse Indian. To us such people seem too self-consciously altruistic as they offer help or hospitality, though in fact this is a gross misinterpretation of their state of mind. Nevertheless, the mleccha – the foreigner – is usually helped by Indians like Ram not because the Indian cares about the individual’s fate but because he regards the needful stranger as an incidental source of religious merit, a messenger from the gods who, if given aid, will act as a channel for valuable blessings. Granted, this is a nice idea: but from the mleccha’s point of view it tends to stunt many of his relationships with Indians. Few Westerners enjoy being discounted as individuals; and most travellers like to be able to feel that each new acquaintance is potentially a new friend.
This morning I would have much preferred to find my own way and we might well have got there sooner without a guide who refused to admit that we were repeatedly being sent astray. Every one of whom we sought assistance gave us a different set of wrong directions with complete assurance. I had forgotten the Indians’ propensity for being ultra-dogmatic when in fact they haven’t a clue; and on a hot day in a big city with a small child after a sleepless night I found it excessively trying. Moreover, because Ram meant so well, and yet was being so stupid and obstinate, I felt increasingly irritated and ungrateful and therefore guilty. It is on such trivia that everyday Indo-European relations most often founder.
When at last we arrived here Ram held out his hand to say a Western-style good-bye and fixed his gaze on a box of cigars sticking out of my bush-shirt pocket. ‘Give me those cigars’, he requested, in an oddly peremptory tone. I stared at him, nonplussed by the strength of my disinclination to reward him for all his efforts. Then I opened the box and handed him one cigar. He could see there were four others, but he seemed not to resent my meanness. Turning away from him I realised something was out of alignment, though I couldn’t quite determine what. Perhaps because of this being Disembodied Day, the whole incident made me just a little apprehensive. It seemed to conceal a warning of some sort, possibly to the effect that it is perilously easy for Indians and Europeans to bring out the worst in each other.
It is now 2 p.m., so Rachel should be back soon from her luncheon party. I had planned to sleep while she was out, but I seem to have reached that point of exhaustion at which sleep eludes one. Why do people regard flying as an easy way to travel?
Later. My philosophical acceptance of Indian destitution did not survive this afternoon’s stroll around Bombay. Men with no legs and/or arms were heaped in corners or somehow propelling themselves along pavements; lepers waved their stumps in our faces or indicated the areas where their noses had been; deformed children frantically pleaded for paise and hung on to my ankles so that, as I tried to move away, their featherweight bodies were dragged along the ground; and – in a way worst of all – perfectly formed children, who could be like Rachel, sat slumped against walls or lay motionless in gutters, too far beyond hope even to beg. One pot-bellied, naked toddler stood quite alone, leaning against the pillar of a shopping arcade with a terrible expression of resignation, and mature awareness of misery, on his pinched, mucus-streaked face. Should he survive he will doubtless end up resembling the next wreck we passed – an ancient, armless man, wearing only a token loin-cloth and sitting cross-legged beneath the arcade, his shaven head moving all the time slightly to and fro, like a mechanical toy, and his hardened, sightless eyeballs rolling grotesquely.
Around the next corner we came on a small girl who had festering scurvy sores all over both legs and was sitting on the edge of the pavement with her baby brother (I suppose) in her lap. He lay gasping, his mouth wide open, looking as if about to expire. He weighed perhaps ten or twelve pounds but, judging by his teeth, must have been at least a year old. Near by, a young woman with the dry, lined skin of the permanently hungry lay stretched full length in the shadow of a wall. Her skeletal torso and flaccid breasts were only half-covered by a filthy cotton wrap and her eyes were partially open though she seemed to be asleep. She may have been the children’s mother. None of the passers-by took any notice of her. One 5 paise piece lay in the tin begging-bowl by her side and a small glass of tea now costs at least 20 paise. As I dropped 50 paise into the bowl I was ravaged by the futility of the gesture. Of course one has seen it all before, and read about it, and heard about it, and despairingly thought about it. Perhaps it is too commonplace, too ‘overdone’, to be worth talking or writing about again. Perhaps the tragedy of poverty has lost its news-value. Yet it has not lost the power to shatter, when one comes face to face with fellow-humans who never have known and never will know what it feels like to eat enough.
This evening I find another of Dr Radhakrishnan’s comments more pertinent than the one I quoted earlier. ‘There was never in India a national ideal of poverty or squalor. Spiritual life finds full scope only in communities of a certain degree of freedom from sordidness. Lives that are strained and starved cannot be religious except in a rudimentary way. Economic insecurity and individual freedom do not go together.’
In the bed next to mine is an Iraqi woman journalist who also arrived today to report on India’s reaction to the oil-crisis. She admitted just now to feeling no less shattered than I am, though during the 1960s she worked in Bombay for four years. ‘One forgets,’ she said, ‘because one doesn’t want to remember.’
‘And why doesn’t one want to remember?’ I wondered.
She shrugged. ‘It serves no purpose to clutter the mind with insoluble problems. Tonight, as you say, we are shattered. And in what way does that help anybody? It simply boosts our own egos, allowing us to imagine we have some vestige of social conscience. It’s only when the Mother Teresas feel shattered that things get done. Now I must sleep. Good-night.’
A forceful lady – and a realist.
17 November. Y.W.C.A. Hostel, Bombay.
Most of the young women here seem to be Christians from Kerala or Goa. They speak intelligible though not fluent English and work as teachers, secretaries, clerks, receptionists or shop-assistants. By our standards the majority are outstandingly good-looking, though too many have bewilderment, loneliness – and sometimes disillusion – behind their eyes. Transplanted from sheltered, gregarious homes to this vast and callous city of 6 million people, their lives must be dreary enough. Overprotected upbringings will have done nothing to prepare them to make the most of their stay in what is – much as I dislike the place – India’s premier city and an important centre of every sort of social and cultural activity.
None of those to whom I have spoken has any relative or friend in Bombay: if they had they would not be staying in a hostel. Yet they consider themselves lucky to have got into the Y.W.C.A. and one can see their point; the place is clean and spacious, though gloomy with the endemic gloom of institutions, and the charges are reasonable. We are paying only Rs. 25 per day for four meals each – as much as one can eat – and two beds in a six-bed, rat-infested dormitory. To Rachel’s delight, pigeons nest in the dormitory rafters (hence the rats, who appreciate pigeon eggs) and cheeky sparrows by the dozen hop merrily around the floor. The walls are decorated with large, violently coloured photographs of the girls’ favourite film stars and four ceiling fans keep the temperature comfortable.
In India the establishment of even the simplest facts can take several hours and it was lunch-time today before I could feel reasonably certain that tomorrow at 8 a.m. we may board a steamer to Panaji (Goa) from the Ballard Pier. However, our misdirected wanderings in search of this information were enjoyable enough and at one stage took us through the narrow, twisting streets and lanes of the old city, where many of the Gujarati houses have carved wooden façades, recalling Kathmandu. Rachel was thrilled to see craftsmen at work behind their stalls – sandalwood carvers, tortoise-shell carvers, brass-smiths, coppersmiths – and when we passed the unexciting eighteenth-century Mombadevi Temple she said she wanted to ‘explore’ it. But a rather truculent priest demanded Rs.io as an entrance ‘offering’ so I suggested she postpone her study of Hindu architecture until we reached some more spiritual region.
In the enormous, high-ceilinged hostel refectory we lunched at the matron’s table by an open window and, as we ate our rice and curried fish, watched a kite eating a rat (ex-dormitory?) in the topmost branches of a nearby fig-tree. Then Rachel got into conversation with two friendly Peace Corps girls, on their way home from Ethiopia, who invited her to accompany them to Juhu beach. She accepted delightedly and, as an afterthought, suggested that I might come, too.
Juhu is only ten miles from the city centre but it took us two hours to get there. Today Bombay’s taxis are on strike, in protest against the government’s suggestion that auto-rickshaws should be introduced into the city to conserve fuel, so the buses were impossibly crowded and we had to walk to the railway station.
Even when the suburban train was moving, agile urchins constantly leaped in and out of our carriage, hawking a wide variety of objects, edible or decorative. The little girls were no less daring and strident than the little boys and Rachel became quite distressed lest one of them might fall under the train. (She herself is by nature extremely cautious, with a tendency to pessimism which can be exasperating: but at least it means I need never worry about her doing reckless deeds.) There is an enormous difference between the children of the truly destitute, who are past trying, and these ragged but enterprising youngsters with their mischievous eyes, wide grins and flashing teeth.
Juhu beach is lined with tall palms, expensive hotels and the homes of the rich. Where we approached it, through a gap between the sea-front buildings, a large notice said ‘Danger! Bathing Forbidden!’ The sand stretched for miles and was unexpectedly deserted, apart from a few servants of the rich exercising a few dogs of the rich, yet within seconds of our beginning to undress a score of youths had materialised to stand and stare.
The Americans decided simply to sunbathe, because of the above-ground sewage pipes we had passed on the way from the station, and to avoid whatever the danger might be I kept close to the shore, where the water was shallow, tepid and rather nasty. I couldn’t even feel that I was being cleaned, since my own pure sweat was obviously being replaced by something far less desirable. I soon got out but Rachel refused to emerge until the huge red balloon of the sun had drifted below the horizon.
Back on the road, we stopped at a foodstall to buy deliciously crisp, spiced potato-cakes, stuffed with onions and freshly cooked over a charcoal fire that flared beautifully in the dusk. Then we stood at a bus stop for thirty-five minutes, during which time seven alarmingly overcrowded buses lurched past without halting. The eighth and ninth did stop, but took on only the more belligerent members of the assembled mob, so before the tenth appeared I requested the girls to fight their way on, take Rachel from me and, if I got left behind, cherish her until we were reunited. In fact neither the tenth nor the eleventh stopped, but we successfully assaulted the twelfth.
The narrow streets of the Ville Parle bazaar were lit by a golden glow from hundreds of oil-lamps hanging over stalls heaped with every sort of merchandise: bales of shining silks and vividly patterned cottons, stacks of gleaming copper pots and stainless steel ware, round towers of glittering glass bangles, pyramids of repulsively Technicolored sweetmeats, acres of fresh fruit and vegetables, mountains of coconuts, molehills of cashew-nuts, hillocks of melons, forests of sugar-cane and gracefully overflowing baskets of jasmine-blossom. Mingling with the dreamy richness of the jasmine was that most characteristic of all Indian evening smells – incense being burned in countless homes to honour the household gods. (Foul gutters and festering sores, jasmine and incense: India in a nutshell?)
Through the jostling, noisy crowd – uninhibitedly abusing, joking, arguing, gossiping, chiding, haggling: no sign here of Hindu inertia – through this pulsating crowd moved creaking ox-carts and hooting buses, chanting sadhus and yelling balloon-sellers, thoughtful-looking cows and overloaded handcarts, cursing cyclists and battered trucks, hoarse lottery-ticket sellers and faceless Muslim housewives carrying so many purchases beneath their burkahs that they looked pregnant in the wrong places. ‘It’s fun here,’ said Rachel, ‘but you must be careful not to lose me.’ She fell asleep on the train and had to be given a piggy-back home from Churchgate Station.