My conscious mind was overwhelmed by a sudden blinding flash of … oncoming truck radiator.
Nirvana, from the Sanskrit word meaning blowout, is the extinction of desires, passion, illusion, and the empirical self. It happens a lot in India, especially on the highways. Sometimes it’s the result of a blowout, literally. More often it’s a head-on crash.
I traveled from Islamabad to Calcutta, some 1,700 miles, mostly over the Grand Trunk Road. The Grand Trunk begins at the Khyber Pass and ends at the Bay of Bengal. The road was celebrated in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and dates back at least to the fourth century BC (especially in the matter of stoplights and lane markers). Of all the wonders on this ancient route nothing made me wonder more than the traffic accidents.
But first came a phone call from Bill Baker, director of communications programs at Land Rover and responsible for garnering worldwide publicity. When Land Rover introduced the Discovery II in 1998, Bill decided to take the worldwide part of his mandate literally and drive a pair of Discoverys around the world.
“This,” Bill said to me on the phone, “will prove they’re tough, durable, and can operate under thousands of feet of seawater. Scratch that last part. We’ll use a boat. As I was saying, this will prove they’re tough, durable, and that automotive journalists can be talked into anything including driving across the most crowded part of the earth during the hottest time of the year at the pace set by Craig Breedlove on the Bonneville Salt Flats.”
I told Bill to count me in. I flew to Pakistan and met the Land Rover expedition when it arrived, by way of Baluchistan, fresh from confounding the fundamentalist Shiite clerics of Iran. We stayed in a nice hotel, a place that later became the target of an Islamic extremist terror attack. (But what place in Pakistan hasn’t?) There were eight of us: expedition director Iain Chapman, an ex-officer in the British army; Land Rover engineer Mark Dugmore; expedition photographer Nick Dimbly; car journalists Jeremy Hart, Todd Hallenbeck, and Franco Gionco from Britain, Australia, and Italy, respectively; and Bill and me.
The drive southeast toward the Indian border began pleasantly enough. Traffic was light. It’s remarkable how short tollbooth lines are in a country with no money. Groups of squatting men flicking whisk brooms kept the turnpike well maintained. And the pavement surface was excellent—if you don’t mind a berm six inches lower than the asphalt so that if you swerve to miss one of the whisk broomers and put a wheel off the road, all the other wheels go into the air.
This did not happen. Although we almost wished it had when we found ourselves trapped in the downtown Lahore train station parking lot. Somehow we’d gotten into the special queue for crippled beggars, bullock wagons, goatherds, and local buses.
“Can you tell us where the border is?” we yelled at a policeman busy directing traffic by hitting it with a long stick. The policeman replied, in perfect English, “No.”
“Fortunately,” said Bill Baker, “we have the Garmin GPS II Personal Navigator that can show us a route to anywhere on earth and show us our exact position within three meters.”
“Well, if it can show us all that,” Todd Hallenbeck said, “why didn’t it show us we were headed up the arse of that ox on the hood?”
“We were too busy,” said Baker, “using the BT Mobile Vehicle satellite phone that delivers full global coverage and allows us to call anywhere in the world.”
“Call room service,” said Jeremy Hart, “and order ice.” It was forty-seven degrees Celsius in Lahore.
“How hot is that in regular temperature?” I asked. No one knew. I picked up the BT Mobile Vehicle satellite phone and called my German mother-in-law in Connecticut. She’s used to the metric system. “Hi,” I said, “I’m in Lahore. Tell your daughter I’m fine. How hot is forty-seven degrees?”
“Pffffft,” said my mother-in-law, “it doesn’t get that hot.”
Mark Dugmore did the math. It was 116½ degrees in Lahore with 100 percent humidity, which meant that breathing was like drinking coffee through your nose. Our Discovery II had climate control, of course. But once we’d lowered the window to yell at the policeman we couldn’t raise it again because there was part of a goatherd and most of a crippled beggar caught in the opening.
Anyway, the Garmin GPS did, indeed, show us our position to within three meters. The problem was that the streets of Lahore weren’t three meters wide. In fact one was so narrow that I think we got off the street entirely and into someone’s house. But the GPS directed us to the border. Turn right at the armoire. Left at the kitchen sink.
Approaching the Indian frontier from Pakistan, it was clear that the land of the unfathomable was nigh. We went down the single, solitary connecting road between the two countries and there was nothing on it. Not even military fortifications were visible, just one company of crack Pakistani rangers in their jammies because it was nap time.
The only other wayfarers at the Pakistani customs post were two dirty backpackers from Switzerland who were acting like the things that pop out of Swiss clocks every hour. No one was going to or fro. They can’t. Pakistani and Indian nationals are only allowed to cross the border by train, said my tourist guidebook. This utter lack of customs traffic had not prevented the establishment of fully staffed customs posts on both sides of the boundary.
Getting out of Pakistan was a normal third world procedure. The officials were asleep, lying on the unused concrete baggage-inspection counters like corpses in a morgue—a morgue posted with a surprising number of regulations for it’s customers. The number-one man roused the number-two man, who explained the entire system of Pakistani tariff regulation and passport control by rubbing his thumb against his forefinger. He then gave a performance in mime of documents being pounded with a rubber stamp.
“Fifty dollars,” said the number-one man. I opened my wallet, foolishly revealing two fifty-dollar bills. “One hundred dollars,” he said.
Things were very different on the Indian side of the border. Here they had not just an unused baggage-inspection counter but an unused metal detector, an unused X-ray machine, and an unused pit with an unused ramp over it to inspect the chassis and frames of the vehicles that don’t use this border crossing.
Our party consisted of people representing four nationalities, in two Land Rovers, with the satellite phone, GPS, several computers, and a trailer filled with food, camping gear, and spare parts. The rules concerning entry of such persons and things into India occupy a book large enough to contain the collected works of Stephen King.
The Indian customs agents were delighted. They’d never had an opportunity to consult their book about so many items. Bandying legal niceties, they fell into happy debate among themselves. Every now and then they’d pause in their arguments with one another to argue with us. An agent would turn a page, point to a paragraph, and say, “You are doing what with these vehicles?”
“We’re testing them,” we’d reply.
“Oh no, you are not. That would require special licensing.”
“We’re transporting them,” we’d say.
“Definitely no, that is a different permit.”
The Land Rovers had already passed the customs inspection of twelve nations, including Bulgaria, without hindrance, delay, or more than moderate palm greasing. The Indian officials heard this explained and clucked and wagged their heads in sympathy for the hundreds of brother customs agents from London to the deserts of Iran who had lost an opportunity to look up thousands of items in a great big book. Everything had to come out of the cars and trailers. Everything had to go through the metal detector, even though the detector didn’t seem to be plugged in. And everything had to come back through the X-ray machine, which the customs agents weren’t watching because they were too busy looking up items in a great big book.
All this took four hours, during which the seven or eight agents on duty met each hint at bribery with the stare you’d get from an octogenarian Powerball winner if you suggested the twenty-year payout option. The fellow who was recording, in longhand, everything inside our passports did take two cigarettes, but he wouldn’t accept a pack.
None of the cases, trunks, bags—unloaded and reloaded in 105-degree heat—was actually opened, except for a wrench set. Perhaps there is one size of wrench that requires a special permit in India. The satellite telephone did require a special permit, which we didn’t have. The briefcase-sized sat phone went unnoticed. (Engine compartments and undercarriages were inspected, but no one looked under the seat.) Our tire pressures must be checked in case the all-terrain radials were packed with drugs. The Indian government tire gauge wasn’t working. We offered our own. We were halfway through checking the tires when we realized nobody was accompanying us. I walked around behind the customs building to take a leak and found drugs to spare. I was pissing on thousands of dollars’ worth of wild marijuana plants.
The customs inspection could have gone on forever except that, in India, everything—including the endless cycle of death and rebirth—stops for tea. The customs agents shut their book.
The staggering traffic and whopping crowds of India materialized. We still had 250 miles to go that day to stay on schedule. A brisk pace was required. Think of it as doing sixty through the supermarket parking lot, the school playground, and the Bronx Zoo.
For the greater part of it’s length the Grand Trunk runs through the broad, flood-flat Ganges plain. The way is straight and level and would be almost two lanes wide if there were such things as lanes in India. The asphalt paving—where it isn’t absent—isn’t bad. As roads go in developing nations this is a good one. But Indians have their own ideas about what the main thoroughfare spanning the most populous part of a nation is for. It’s a place where friends and family can meet, where they can put charpoy string beds and have a nap and let the kids run around unsupervised. It’s a roadside café with no side to it—or tables or chairs—where the street food is smack dab on the street. It’s a rent-free function room for every local fete. And it’s a piece of agricultural machinery. Even along the Grand Trunk’s few stretches of toll-booth-cordoned “expressway,” farmers are drying grain on the macadam.
Kipling called the Grand Trunk “the backbone of all Hind,” claimed that “such a river of life … exists nowhere in the world,” and said, “It’s the Indy 500 with all the infield spectators on the track during the race. And, instead of drivers putting Budweiser on their sponsorship decals, they’re drinking it.” Or, if Kipling didn’t say that, it was only because he’d never been to the Indianapolis 500 so the metaphor eluded him.
Nor was Kipling much on Beatles references. Given visits to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, it’s easy to see how the Fab Four came up with “Why don’t we do it in …”
The road is a store, a warehouse, a workshop. We saw a blacksmith who had pitched his tent on a bridge. Under the tent flaps were several small children, the missus working the bellows, and the craftsman himself smoking a hookah and contemplating his anvil, which was placed fully in the right-of-way. The road is also convenient for bullock carts, donkey gigs, horse wagons, pack camels, and the occasional laden elephant—not convenient for taking them anywhere, just convenient. There they stand along with sheep, goats, water buffalo, and the innumerable cows (all sacred, I presume) sent to graze on the Grand Trunk. I watched several cows gobbling cardboard boxes and chewing plastic bags. No wonder the Indians won’t eat them.
Dashing through this omnium-gatherum is every kind of motor vehicle you can think of. Or, rather, you can’t think of them. Who would think of a big automobile factory—India’s largest—manufacturing a brand-new 1954 Morris Oxford (the Hindustani Ambassador)? Who’d conceive of a rejected American Bantam design for a World War II scout car rolling off production lines fifty-five years later (the Mahindra Jeep)? Who could envision a Royal Enfield motorcycle with a diesel engine? Let alone the ubiquitous Tata truck, which seems to be a replica of what drove the Burma Road in the war against the Japanese except with a too-tall wood-frame cargo bed and a hideous demon painted on the differential? Tata tailgates bear the message (wholly gratuitous): “Please Blow Horn.”
One type of Indian vehicle was a total mystery. It had three wheels, bodywork shaped like a tongue depressor, a grille from a Chrysler Airflow, and a single-cylinder engine with a bore four times its stroke. This power plant was attached to one side of the front wheel steering fork, giving the conveyance the stability of a motorized unicycle. No nameplate was visible. (Who can blame the manufacturer?) We called it an “Ugly.” The Uglies were used as taxis, transporting as many as fifteen or eighteen people—for about a hundred yards before the Ugly expired, tipped over, or got squashed by a Tata.
All daytime driving in India is done at full throttle. And Indian drivers respond to nightfall by picking up the pace. Indian pedestrians make a special effort to be present and milling in the road after dark, bringing their household goods and chattel with them. The dimmer switch has not been discovered in India. Night driving proceeds exclusively by high beam, usually only one of them—if there are any lights on the conveyance at all. Chances are there aren’t.
Among the many things that suddenly appeared out of the gloom and right in our face was an unilluminated, reflectorless tractor-trailer with a smiley-face death’s head and a sign reading HIGH EXPLOSIVES. EXPERT ADVICE GIVEN. NO SMOKING.
The first time you look out the windshield at this melee you think, India really is magical. How, except by magic, can they drive like this without killing people?
They can’t. Jeeps bust scooters, scooters plow into bicycles, bicycles cover the hoods of Jeeps. Cars run into trees. Buses run into ditches, rolling over on their 1940s-style bread-loaf tops until they’re mashed into unleavened chapatis of carnage. And everyone runs into pedestrians. A speed bump is called a Sleeping Policeman in Jamaica. I don’t know what it’s called in India. Dead People Lying in the Road is a guess. There’s some of both kinds of obstructions in every village, but they don’t slow traffic much. The animals get clobbered too, including sacred cows, in accidents notable for the unswerving behavior of all participants. The car in front of us hit a cow—no change in speed or direction from the car, no change in posture or expression from the cow.
It’s the lurching, hurtling Tata trucks that put the pepper in the masala and make the curry of Indian driving scare you coming and going the way dinner does. The Tatas are almost as wide as they are long and somewhat higher than either. They blunder down the middle of the road, brakeless, lampless, on treadless tires, moving dog fashion with the rear wheels headed in a direction the front wheels aren’t. Tatas fall off bridges, fall into culverts, fall over embankments, and sometimes Tatas just fall—flopping on their sides without warning. But usually Tatas collide, and usually with each other. They crash not just in twos but threes and fours, leaving great smoking piles of vaguely truck-shaped wreckage. What little space is left on the road is occupied by one or two surviving drivers camping out until the next collision comes. Inspecting one of these catastrophes, I found the splintered bodywork decorated with a little metal plaque: LUCKY ENGINEERING.
In one day of travel I tallied twenty-five horrendous Tata wrecks. And I was scrupulous in my scoring. Fender benders didn’t count. Neither did old abandoned wrecks or broken-down Tatas. Probable loss of life was needed to make the list. If you saw just one of these pileups on I-95 you’d pull into the next rest stop with clutch foot shivering and hand palsied upon the shift knob, saying, “Next time we fly.” But in India you shout triumphantly to Mark Dugmore, Todd Hallenbeck, and Franco Gionco, “That’s twenty-five fatals! I had the over! I win today’s truck wreck pool!”
Taking the wheel in India was, however, less fun. I had a tendency to beat my forehead against the horn button and weep, “I have a family. I’m fifty. That goat didn’t have its turn signal on. My glasses are smudged. I hate the food. We’re all going to die.”
Fortunately, expedition leader Iain Chapman and Land Rover engineer Mark Dugmore knew what they were doing. Luke 18:25 should be revised to read, “For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God, unless the rich man has the good sense to hire Iain Chapman and Mark Dugmore.” The younger journalists—Dimbly, Hart, Hallenbeck, and Gionco—were steely nerved as well. And Bill Baker, who is in fact older than I am, was an amazing driver.
Bill, that was particularly amazing when you pulled out from behind two side-by-side Tatas and discovered that the oncoming lane was occupied by two other Tatas with a Premier Padmini microvan wedged between them—closing speed about 120 mph and road shoulder blocked by a dense contingent of women and children.
I have no memory of how Bill got us out of that. But I do remember thinking it was odd what was said in the car at the time. There were no swear words or calls to God or Mommy, just a joint statement on the vagaries of Indian traffic: four people, in unison, going “Whoa.”
I also don’t remember being crushed to death by a coal truck. We were trapped behind a stupendously overloaded, hilariously top-heavy Tata. Its leaf springs were in the autumn of their suspension life. Every time the truck hit a bump it would tip on two wheels. Bill waited until a bump tipped it away from us, then tried to pass. The truck hit a contrapuntal bump. The last thing I recall was an acre of bituminous-laden Tata bed descending upon us.
The body-on-frame Discovery II was built like the proverbial brick thing of which there were hardly any in India. (And when you do find one, it has a bowl of water instead of a roll of toilet paper. Bring Handi Wipes.) It was doubtless crashworthy, something we—amazingly—did not test. Although we did experience a side mirror fold-in from an express bus, got a Lambretta into the tail gate of the trailer, and had several sacred cow brushbacks (touched by the Pot Roast of God).
We tested the Discovery’s off-road qualifications, though not on purpose. We’d go off road abruptly and at high speed because of horrendous events in front of us or because of sudden pavement disappearance. This is not the preferred “tread lightly” method of exploring the wilderness in a sport utility vehicle. Nonetheless the Discovery has excellent rough-terrain capabilities including the all-important capability to not flip over.
The trailer was also great off-road—straight up into the air due to the remarkable things it ran over on Indian pavement. Despite being loaded with spare wheels, tool chests, and jerry cans of diesel fuel, gasoline, and purified H2O (Indian weight-loss miracle: one tablespoon of tap water with every meal and eat what you want), the trailer planted its landings with gymnastic grace and precision.
Our Discoverys could move ahead quick as stink (not a meaningless cliché in India) and stop faster than the pair of Tatas we saw going in opposite directions who snagged each other’s rear wheels and tore each other’s axles off. Plus they could maneuver with the agility of a President Clinton policy position. As proof of these assertions, I give you the fact that I lived to write this.
We had to be in Calcutta by the afternoon of June 25, to get the Discoverys into a cargo container for the next leg of the global tour. We left Islamabad on June 20. Our route was 1,710 miles. In five and a half days, we clocked seventy-eight hours of driving time. Thus we crossed the subcontinent at twenty-two miles per hour—on average. This average was achieved by going a million miles an hour for a total of about one of those hours and sitting as still as road kill the other seventy-seven.
Coming east from the border we traveled to the dirty and disorganized town of Chandigarh—pronounced “Chunder-gar,” Todd Hallenbeck noted, as in the Australian slang for blowing lunch. Brief rest was had at the Budgerigar Hotel (it’s motto, no kidding: “Welcome to your nest”). A parakeet in every room? There was something that size in mine but it was a member of the order Insectivora.
Then we made a dash up to Shimla and back through the Himalaya foothills, the Himachals. These foothills are about the size of the Rockies. Highway engineers customarily use switchbacks to decrease grade inclines across mountain slopes. In the Himachals the switchbacks are arranged to maximize vertical ascents and abysmal plunges. Heaps of smoldering Tata wreckage decorated the bottoms of ravines.
Shimla, the famous hill station and summer capital of the British Raj, built at a higher elevation than Kathmandu, was a standard Indian mess of sheet-tin roofing, catawampus concrete block walls, and imperial leftovers. Along the mall there’s a row of dusty British-era shops that the British—seeing mountains all around them and not knowing what else to do—built in the alpine style. But the town had a view to die for (or die of, if you leaned against the parade ground’s flimsy railings).
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then prime minister of India, was headed to Shimla. Preparation consisted of someone loudly testing the PA system.
HELLO HELLO HELLO ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN MICROPHONE TESTING HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO
For an hour. This was the crowd warm-up. The speech must have been a dilly. Meanwhile, behind handsome batik curtains, tribal women in full native dress, with nose jewelry the size of baby shoes, were repairing the pavement.
We almost, but not quite, fatally plunged downhill to Dehradun, home of the Indian Military Academy and also the “Windi Ass Shopping Centre.” The Hotel Madhuban (“Please do not open window to keep mosquitoes out”) was all right, but it didn’t have hot water. And all you have to do to make hot water in India this time of year is leave it outside for ten minutes.
Next, we went south to Agra for a peek at the Taj Mahal. It’s one of those satisfying tourist destinations that looks just like it’s always looked like it would look. An impressive pile built with public funds while a famine scourged the countryside, the Taj was commissioned by Shah Jahan to memorialize his favorite wife, who died in 1629 giving birth to their fourteenth child. If Jahan had really wanted to show his love, he could have cut back on the ginseng and powdered rhino horn.
We had our first glimpse of the famous mausoleum at sunset, from a heap of trash and offal on the bank of the Yamuna River. Mixed into the garbage around our feet were hundreds of miniature clay images of Krishna. These are tossed into the water by devotees upstream in Mathura, the god’s supposed birthplace. The holiness of India is impressive. The ground is littered with divinities.
The bridge across the Yamuna into Agra was also interesting—two-way traffic on a one-lane bridge going both ways at once. Three-way traffic was threatened. Splash.
Then it was back on the Grand Trunk to Varanasi, the most holy place in India, where millions of pilgrims come to wash themselves in the purifying Ganges and also to cremate corpses in it. Everybody got up at five in the morning to see this done except me. I figured that, when it came to scary things in the water, the hotel coffee would do.
Varanasi was squalid even by Indian standards. Expedition members had their own reactions. Todd Hallenbeck, an Australian transplanted from California, retained an American can-do sensibility. “Gosh,” he said, “you see so many things you’d like to fix.”
Franco Gionco, with Latin sophistication, was inclined to excuse the accumulated dreck. “But it is an ancient civilization, very old.”
“Certainly smells past its sell-by date,” said Jeremy Hart.
Iain Chapman gazed upon all the oddity and impoverishment and made his pronouncement upon India in general: “Surreal pity.”
East of Varanasi the driving got harder yet, unhelped by the fact that we were in left-hand-drive cars in a country that drives on the left. A spotter had to be on duty in the death seat saying, at each attempt to pass, “Yes,” or “No,” or, “Oh, God, no!”
Opportunities to overtake were so few that spotters started modifying their pessimistic assessments. Sometimes the spotter would use the laws of physics and comparisons of relative mass: “Go ahead, nothing but Vespas coming.” Sometimes the spotter would try to gauge the legal and social ramifications of possible collision: “Are pigs sacred?” And sometimes the spotter would get distracted by the random nattering in the car.
“Should Prince Andrew marry Sporty Spice?” someone in the backseat would inquire.
“Yes, definitely,” the spotter would say, causing the driver to …
“Whoa.”
This is the India ordinary travelers never see—because they’re in their right minds. And we didn’t see much of it ourselves. The scenery was too close to view, a blur of cement-block shops and hovels in unbroken ranks inches from the fenders. Yet my map showed open country with only occasional villages meriting the smallest cartographic type size. There are a lot of people in India: 966.8 million as of 1998. I don’t know what they want with the atomic bomb. They already have the population bomb, and it’s working like a treat.
Nevertheless India, with a population density of 843 people per square mile, is not as crowded as the Netherlands, which packs 1,195 people into the same space. Nobody comes back from Holland aghast at the teeming mass of Dutch or having nightmares about windmills and tulips pressing in on every side.
Poor people who depend on agriculture for a living, as 67 percent of Indians do, take up room. If 67 percent of New Yorkers depended on agriculture for a living, someone would be trying to farm the dirt under the floor mats of your Yellow Cab.
Everything is squeezed together in India to keep it out of the picnic-blanket-sized rice field that’s the sole support for a family of ten.
Every nook of land is put to use. At the bottom of a forty-foot-deep abandoned well, which would be good for nothing but teenage suicides in America, somebody was raising frogs. City public restrooms employ the space-saving device of dispensing with walls and roofs and placing the urinal stalls on the sidewalk. No resource goes to waste, which sounds like a fine thing to advocate next Earth Day—except, in the real world of poverty, it means that the principal household fuel of India is the cow flop. This is formed into a circular patty and stuck on the side of the house, where it provides a solution to three problems: storage room, home decor, and cooking dinner.
Therefore, what makes a drive across India insane (and smelly) isn’t overpopulation, it’s poverty. Except this isn’t really true either. The reason for those ranks of shops and houses along the Grand Trunk, and for the cars, trucks, and buses bashing into each other between them, is that people have money to buy and build these things. And the reason for the great smoldering dung funk hanging over India is that there’s something to cook on those fires.
When the British left in 1947, India got itself an economy in the socialist closet, an economy in the political bag. The Indians called it the “license-permit-quota raj.” The Economist magazine once stated, “This has no equal in the world. In many ways it puts Soviet central planning to shame.” Indian industries were trapped and isolated by the government. Like an aunt locked in the attic, they got strange. The results can still be seen in the Tata trucks, Ambassador sedans, and motorcycles that Evel Knievel would be afraid to ride. But in 1992 India began to surrender to free-market reforms. Imports were allowed, foreign investment was encouraged, and customs regulations were (amazing as this seems to those who have been through Indian customs) simplified.
By 1998 the Indian economy had been growing for half a decade at about 7 percent a year. As many as two hundred million people had been added to the Indian middle class—a number almost equal to the total middle class of the United States.
India is still very poor. Small boys with hammers make gravel by the side of the road, an activity that must seem worse than school even to small boys and isn’t much of a skill-building vocational opportunity either. The people on the Grand Trunk looked in need but not in wretched misery (until they stepped in front of a speeding Tata). There are plenty of flat bellies in India but few of the distended kind that announce malnutrition. And the beggars, whom Western visitors have been taught to expect in legions, arrive only in squads and platoons. A kid selling trinkets in Agra was irked to be mistaken for such. “I’m not a beggar,” he said. “You want to buy, you get.” Then he named a thievish price.
What is happening in India is what happens every place where an agrarian economy changes into a modern one. The first stage of prosperity is ugly. This is the ugliness that caused William Blake, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, to speak of “dark Satanic mills”—dark satanic mills that were giving people cash, social mobility, and an opportunity to escape a hundred generations of chopping weeds with hoes. Hoeing is not as dark, maybe, as working in a mill, but it’s plenty satanic, as anyone with the smallest garden knows.
The quaint and orderly India of old is still there, just beyond the clutter of the Grand Trunk Road. In West Bengal we visited a beautiful farm village full of amusing thatch architecture and cute peasant handcrafts. Here the handsome patina of tradition glowed upon lives that were quiet, calm, and as predictable as famine and the dowry needed to marry off the ten-year-old daughter.
The villagers were friendly enough. But what if a carload of grubby journalists came into my driveway and Nick Dimbly began taking happy snaps while I was scrubbing down the barbecue grill? I preferred the chaos of the Grand Trunk.
The road is a trash basket, as all roads in India are. I saw a dressy middle-aged woman eat a chocolate bar on Nehru Road (the so-called Fifth Avenue of Calcutta). She threw the candy wrapper at her feet with a graceful and decisive motion. And the road is the john. You never have to wonder where the toilet is in India, you’re standing on it. The back of a long-distance bus had a sign in Hindi and an elaborate pictogram, the import of which was Don’t crap on the pavement, and wash your hands after you do.
By day four we were accustomed to the voluminous detritus, but somewhere around the town of Dhanbad (pronounced as it ought to be) we encountered mile upon mile of garbage stretching to both horizons. We were riding through this in awed silence when Jeremy Hart said, “I … I don’t know what came over me … I just put my empty cigarette pack into our litter bag.”
Iain Chapman, who was driving, laughed so hard he had to pull over. We pitched all the detritus in the car out the window, litter bag included.
Then the monsoon arrived, eliminating all daylight and firing boiled egg–sized raindrops into the slime on the Grand Trunk Road. “You know you’ve got pollution when the rain foams,” said Bill Baker. The temperature dropped nineteen degrees in five minutes. Which was nice. But if we’d opened the windows to enjoy the frigid eighty-four-degree weather we would have drowned.
Our last night on the road we stayed in an insalubrious government guesthouse. My bathroom was already being used by some of the other guests, each with six legs and a body the length of a hot dog roll. “That’s a good thing,” said Iain. “It means no cobras in your toilet. They would have eaten the bugs.”
Just when I thought I wasn’t getting it about India, I started to get it less. The next day, we encountered a communist rally. Hundreds of agitated-looking agitators waved red flags and brandished staves. We were a ripe target for the anger of the masses—eight capitalist prats in Land Rovers with a trailer full of goodies protected only by a tarp. We were ignored. It seems the ideological fury of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) is directed primarily at the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
The latter runs Calcutta. According to my guidebook, “They have somehow succeeded in balancing rhetoric and old-fashioned socialism with a prudent practicality … Capitalism is allowed to survive, but made to support the political infrastructure.”
Not that you’d know this by driving into Calcutta, where the infrastructure doesn’t look like it could support another flea. Certainly the Howrah Bridge over the Hooghly River can’t. It carries sixty thousand motor vehicles a day, and they were all there when we tried to get across at five p.m.
Packed along the filthy opposite bank of the Hooghly were temples to scary gods, a ratty colonial fort, a coal power plant barfing cones of smudge, and the dreariest kind of glass-box office buildings. The city appeared to be an educational diorama: the History of Mess.
I retain nothing but a few disordered and bedlamic images of our entrance into the city: An intersection with a crushed traffic warden’s shelter in the middle. A main street with more human beings than I’d ever seen. (One out of five people in the world is an Indian. And, believe me, that person was standing in Nehru Road on June 25, 1998.) A shop that sold what looked like department store mannequins, but they had four arms. A herd of sheep being driven through the traffic. And a very dirty banner advertising “World Environment Day.” (Canceled due to overbooking is my guess.)
Jeremy Hart, Todd Hallenbeck, and Franco Gionco flew home. Bill Baker and Nick Dimbly went on to Perth to arrange the next leg of the expedition. I stayed with Iain Chapman and Mark Dugmore to help them load the Discoverys into a cargo container. This took twenty minutes or—adjusting the clock to Indian Daylight Wasting Time—four days.
First the port was closed. Well, it wasn’t really closed. I mean, it was sort of closed because the port of Calcutta has silted in and is nearly useless. Only about three ships were there. This didn’t keep hundreds of stevedores, shipping clerks, and port officials from coming to work. But there were city council elections that day with attendant rioting. So the police had to suppress voters and weren’t available to harass us at the port.
Then the port was closed because it was Sunday.
Then our shipping agents fell into an argument about when to pick us up at the hotel the next day. Not that they disagreed with one another.
“We will go to get them at nine-thirty in the morning,” one said.
“Oh, no, no, no, no,” said another. “It must be nine-thirty in the morning.”
“How can you talk like this?” asked a third, stamping his foot. “The time for us to be there is nine-thirty in the morning!”
We had about ten shipping agents. There’s no such thing as hiring an individual in India. In a Bihar village it took the services of two shops, four shopkeepers, and a boy running for change to sell me a pack of cigarettes.
While waiting for the port to open, I wandered the streets of Calcutta. The late-nineteenth-century Writers Building is crumbling and dirty although a row of large, carefully tended potted plants decorates the sidewalk below its windows. Trees, products of less intentional horticulture, grow out of the cracked Edwardian edifice of the nearby Standard Assurance and Life headquarters. Even Calcutta’s New Market, built in 1985, seems about to fall down and probably doesn’t only because—being nothing but a pile of moldering concrete in the first place—it can’t.
Calcutta is a byword for squalor. Most Americans suppose that to tour its precincts is to flush oneself down the toilet of humanity and amble through a human septic system. This isn’t true. There aren’t that many flush toilets in Calcutta. Anyway, parts of Washington, D.C., are dirtier (Congress, the White House) and Calcutta smells no worse than a college dorm.
The poverty is sad and extensive but at least the families living on the Calcutta streets are intact families—talking to one another instead of themselves. I did see some people who seemed really desperate, addled, and unclean. But these were American hippies at Calcutta’s Dum Dum airport. I was standing in the ticket line behind an Indian businessman who stared at the hippies and then gave me a stern look, as if to say, “These are your people. Isn’t there something you can do?”
Calcutta’s pollution is more visible than it’s fashionable for American pollution to be—smoke and trash instead of microwaves and PCBs. The food sold on Calcutta’s streets may be unidentifiable, but it’s less likely than New York City hot dogs to contain a cow rectum. The crowding is extreme but you get used to it. You get used to a lot of things: naked ascetics, elephants in downtown traffic, a single file of costumed girls linked by electric wires, with one carrying a car battery and the rest having blue fluorescent tubes sticking out of their headdresses.
I was waiting to cross the busiest street in Calcutta when a four-story temple complex on wheels went by, complete with high priest, idols, acolytes, clouds of incense, blazing torches, and banging gongs. And what I noticed was that I wasn’t noticing it. Imagine the pope (and quite a bit of Saint Peter’s) coming down Broadway at rush hour and you thinking, Should I jaywalk or wait for the light?
There’s a certain pest factor in Calcutta, mostly from the touting of roving market bearers. But it’s not without its entertainment value. Bearer No. A-49 from the New Market told me not to listen to any of the other bearers because they would get me into their shops and cut my throat. So be sure you get Bearer No. A-49. Accept no other. Lesser merchants, squatting on the street, sell everything from new Lee jeans to brightly colored pebbles and pieces of broken mirrors. The poster wallah’s selection included views of the Taj Mahal, photographs of kittens tangled in balls of yarn, and the gore-faced goddess Kali holding a severed human head by the hair.
In the midst of this is the Oberoi Grand Hotel, with guards stationed at the gate holding sticks to use on touts and beggars. At the Oberoi everything is efficient, crisp, clean, and pukka (except when the electricity goes out). The Indians inside seemed as perplexed by the chaos of India outside as I was. I told Alex, the restaurant manager, about the muddle at the port. “Oh, this country,” he said, “there are no two ways around it.”
We had parked the Land Rovers and trailer in the hotel courtyard. The shipping agents came by to inform us that everything in the vehicles had to be clean and packed exactly as described on the customs documents. Iain, Mark, and I set about amending seventeen hundred miles of dirt and equipment disorder. It was a hundred degrees in the courtyard. A dozen members of the hotel staff gathered to watch us. I don’t think they’d seen Westerners do actual work. (And—as far as my own experiences go in the offices and stores of America and Europe—neither have I.) Removing the trailer tarp we discovered an axe had come loose from its lashing and punctured a container of beef stew and a can of motor oil. The trailer bed was awash in petroleum and what Hindus euphemistically call “brown meat.”
On Monday we went back to the port, where the customs inspectors ignored everything about our cleanliness and packing except the axe. “What is this?” said the chief inspector.
“An axe,” said Iain Chapman.
The officials conferred at length and decided it was so. Then there was a seven-hour delay because of an engine-serial-number discrepancy. The customs inspectors were worried that we’d stolen one of the Discovery IIs from Rover. “We’re from Rover,” said Iain. “These are the only Discovery IIs in Asia, and they can’t be stolen because they’re both right here.” The inspectors returned to their office to ponder this. We sat on the dock.
I asked one of our shipping agents why so many of the Tata truck drivers had decorated their front bumpers with one dangling shoe.
“Oh, for the heck of it,” he said.
Finally the Land Rovers were rolled into the cargo container. Things do eventually get done in India. My theory about why they do is that, although making business matters complicated is a great source of fun there, you know how it is with fun. Sooner or later it’s time for different fun, such as making family matters complicated. “I am a twenty-one-year-old man involved in a physical relationship with my thirty-six-year-old unmarried cousin for the past six years,” read a query to an advice column in a Calcutta newspaper. “It all began when I raped her.”
I was sad to see the Discovery IIs go. They weren’t broken, an anomaly in this land. And they never burned or exploded, which is more than I can say for Iain when, leaving the docks, the police tried to arrest us because we had padlocks in our possession.
“What the hell kind of thief comes back with the locks instead of the swag?” Iain asked them. Maybe an Indian one, if it would complicate matters.
I remained in Calcutta for a few days after Iain and Mark left, in sort of a paralysis of awe at a dundering muddle of a place that seems in total disorganization but where I couldn’t even get lost because everyone with a clean shirt speaks English. And they speak it in a style that is a reminder of India’s claim upon the language. There were Indians speaking English when most of America was gibbering in Gaelic, German, or Italian on the wrong side of the Ellis Island fence. Placards ask that Calcutta’s subway be treated WITH RESPECT AND AFFECTION. Street signs read, I USE FOOTPATHS, DO YOU?
Indian journalist Gita Mehta says India turns out five million university graduates a year. That’s four times the number of bachelor degrees awarded annually in the United States. Yet the ancient guild of scribes still does brisk business outside Calcutta’s general post office. Scores of men hunker on the sidewalk writing and reading other people’s letters. Forty-eight percent of Indians are illiterate, including almost two-thirds of Indian women.
You walk by a newsstand—a news squat, to be precise—and see the Calcutta Telegraph, the Calcutta Statesman, the Asian Age, the Times of India, and stacks of newspapers printed in Hindi and other languages. The Telegraph ran a know-how feature on particle physics. A Statesman op-ed page had an article on energy efficiency: “The heat rate of the power plant, in layman’s terms, refers to how much kilo calorie of heat is required to produce 1 kwp of power.” You think you’re in a nation of Einsteins until you read the advice columnist’s answer to the rapist: “At this stage of life you ought to detach yourself from this cousin to secure a healthy life. Initially your cousin provoked you in the act, and hence it cannot be called rape.”
In the midst of Calcutta’s street stampede (not a figure of speech, considering cows), there are young hawkers with what look like shoe-shine boxes. What’s offered for sale isn’t a wingtip buff. The youths crouch in the hubbub, juggle the tiny wheels and springs of wristwatches, and set the timepieces running again. There is a whole street in Calcutta lined with stalls too small and ill-equipped for lemonade sales. Here, artisans with flame-heated soldering irons rearrange the logic on the latest computer circuit boards. Then you look up and see a man walking around wearing a bucket upside down over his head.