A Place Within (4 page)

Bhubaneswar–Coimbatore

I remember musing, many years ago when I was a student and would often find myself between cities on a train in North America, that it could go on forever, this journey, for all I cared, I could give my life to this long moment of rolling and roaring, of endless rhythm. I was a displaced person, like Zeno’s arrow going some place else even as I was stationary in another, and a train ride vivified the feeling of constant motion, going somewhere endlessly.
Trains here in India are the next best thing to endless constant motion. The Puri Express of a few days before, though it seems months away now, so intense have been my experiences, was some nine hundred miles long, thirty hours in duration. This present journey is even longer, from the northeast to the bottom of India, Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea. What better way than to sit in a train responding to the ancestral homeland, every scene and every moment full of meaning and possibility, blooming epiphany? The only torment: the wet washrooms.

A woman sleeps in the seat-bunk across from me, her husband, without a sleeping berth of his own, sits near her feet. She hardly says a word, doesn’t eat, even when she sits up. Eat, he says several times. She declines. A tear in her eye. Why is she crying? No, I realize, she seems to have a cold. Finally she opens her box, brings out puris, pickle, and something else—but I give them their privacy, I look away.

The Coromandel goes up to Madras, arrives twenty-four hours after departure, in the evening. From here I have to catch another train, on which I don’t have a reservation. The station is teeming with people, India in motion. You have to know where you are going, you have to have a ticket. It all looks hopeless. With me is an escort, on his way to Trivandrum, who has a reservation on ordinary second class. Out of desperation for my case we take a rickshaw to the bus station; perhaps I can catch a bus. The bus station, too, is packed. We return to the train station. My companion, Hussein, goes to look around, comes back with the information, having peeked at the reservation chart for the train, that four berths are vacant in second-class AC. Get into one of them, he instructs me, and I do just that. We encounter the TC, ticket collector, and declare my Emergency Quota status. But the Orissa governor’s influence does not extend this far. First-class passengers have priority, says the TC, what can he do? Hussein goes
away with him to have a chat in private and returns. Go and give him fifty rupees, he advises me. Tell him it’s for his trouble. I go outside on the platform, where the TC awaits, and mumble something about the emergency quota and hand him the fifty rupees. The TC is embarrassed, says, If you need anything let me know. And on the way, he does inquire after me, in the morning brings me a cup of coffee.

In the middle of the night he brings a woman to the berth opposite mine. A young woman in red sari, with a child, and a family elsewhere in the compartment that comes to see her occasionally. Perhaps they, too, have paid off the TC. A young man comes several times—husband or brother? Later in the night a young woman sits on my berth, at the edge, and watches over the girl. Definitely not a sister, I think, she is too formal; and definitely not her husband’s sister. Must be a bhabhi, her brother’s wife. It’s the girl’s
own
family. The young woman leaves after a while.

The girl’s brought her bedding with her, and neatly makes up the bed, and makes a bed for the baby, too—nice, frilly, pink and yellow with a plastic sheet. I know exactly how she’s going to sleep, I tell myself. On her side, back towards me, the baby (a quiet, obliging type) in the concave in her front.

But first she feeds the child; I turn away. Later, after one more visitor to inquire after her, she prepares to sleep. Shall we turn off the light? I ask. She does it. A relation soon comes by and partly draws the curtain to her berth.

There is a certain humbleness bred out of a common humanity that one experiences in such situations. How in close proximity one does one’s thing, retaining a sense of modesty and dignity, a sense of private self. The woman feeds the child some more, on her side, then sleeps on her back.

I’m trying to say that now I’m in India. And I feel an empathy I cannot fully understand.

“Eleven Burnt Alive in Bombay”—headline,
Deccan Herald
.

And so, somewhere, the “disturbance,” or the “communal violence,” goes on, the fire rages. Once more a glimpse of the dark side behind the warm embrace, the familiarity. An unease descends upon the soul. There is a real mystery to these mob violences, something truly unfathomable.

We get off at Coimbatore to change trains. The station has rooms for resting, each with a bed, a shower, and a toilet, at one hundred rupees a day. My companion, Hussein, finds it scandalous that we should pay that much for only an hour or two. But at this point I’m willing to pay five times that much, though I don’t tell him this. After a shower and coffee I tell him I’m ready to go the twelve more hours to our destination. It’s been thirty-six hours since we left Bhubaneswar and I don’t know whether I am coming or going, what day of the week it is. Toronto seems far far away.

The station is crowded with dozens of men who look like some kind of mendicants: clad in black dhotis going round the waist and black shirts, with marks on the forehead. They are all barefoot and carry cloth bundles which they tend to hold on their heads. Some have bells tinkling at the waist, most also carry water flasks; two exceptions among them wear trousers instead of dhoti, and two others have canvas shoulder bags. Sometimes a line of them passes by, chanting. I’m told they come from all places and are on their way to a pilgrimage to Lord Ayyappan, a form of the god Vishnu.

Coimbatore–Trivandrum

I did not catch the name of this train, but it is crowded. No space, says the TC. People get in anyway, even find places to sit. I feel bold enough by now to do the same. On the train from Delhi, and later the one from Bhubaneswar, sitting with strangers, facing each other for hours, watching and being watched all the time, I felt intolerably overexposed. Now I feel I can sit anywhere. Almost.

The pilgrims, it appears, cannot find seats or a place to pause on the train, lines of them pass through our compartment, clutching their bundles, looking very cheerful. The scenery outside is pleasant—the Western Ghats in the distance to my right, a lot of lush greenery all around, with a profusion of coconut and banana trees. Colourful yellow, blue, and pink houses. Not much sign of the kind of poverty of the north, not close to the track at least. Halfway to Trivandrum, the pilgrims all get off, hang around the station platform. From here they will proceed on foot to a pilgrimage site up a mountain. As I watch, a few of them take to the adjacent tracks to attend to nature, facing away. One can only look away in return.

Scootering through the Countryside in Search of Lost History

“Our Martyrs are the fountainhead of our sorrows,” says a somewhat puzzling slogan written in English on a public fence. There are signs and slogans all over Trivandrum; as in Bengal, the hammer and sickle is prominently present. Kerala has had elected communist governments on and off for many years, although at present it’s Congress that holds office. The student movement is a force to be reckoned with. It will provide the next generation of political leaders and has to be indulged. Currently they are holding the university vice-chancellor under siege in his residence; only the police can see him, important business (such as that relating to the workshop I am attending) has to be smuggled in to him. He has been charged with possessing a fraudulent degree from Sussex. A previous vice-chancellor, who returned from America to take up the post, I am told, died of a heart attack. Such are the strains of this office.

Kerala is a long stretch of lush green land between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats; next to it, in the east, lies Tamil Nadu. The landscape is dominated by coconut trees, rivers, and canals; the language spoken is Malayalam. This is the real south; Hindi is
almost a foreign tongue, and the English spoken is hard to understand. I was asked, upon arrival, to see a Yum Yum Thomas, influential journalist; it took me two days of asking and considerable embarrassment before I realized that M. M. Thomas was meant. There is a certain reserve in the people. Whereas in the north people come at you, tell you things, are curious about you, thrust their books into your hands, here they hold back. This reserve they attribute to their sense of personal pride. It is for me a little like going from Brussels to Antwerp, as I happened to do once, many years ago. But there are no beggars here to touch your feet or thrust their hands at you inside a rickshaw. The long-distance STD booths are full in the evenings, with people making calls worth a few rupees to one wonders where, until one is told that all villages are connected to telephone lines. Traffic is orderly; unlike in Delhi, cars actually drive behind one another, they wait at stop signs, and signal before turning. And there is more colour here, houses look freshly painted, blue, pink, yellow, with attention to detail in their construction.

Because it faces the Arabian Sea, Kerala has ancient links with Arabia. The population is divided between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians; one is taken with pride to the city centre, where a mosque, a temple, and a church stand facing each other. The first Christians were converted by Saint Thomas in the first century. But the recent disturbances in the north have made people conscious of who they are, in a way they weren’t before, they say.

The slogans in evidence everywhere in the city are due to a national students’ congress that is about to open. On the afternoon of the opening parade, the city promises to come to a standstill; ordinary people start off early for their homes, to leave the city centre to the students. I take up an invitation by Hussein to go to his home for dinner (and therefore spend a night there). He is honoured, and so am I.

On the way to the village by bus, we pass dozens of loud honking buses racing to the city full of students shouting, “Inqalab Zindabad,” Long live the Revolution!

We stop at a town where my host teaches at a small college. It dispenses B.A.s. A somewhat bleak place, looking more like a slum apartment building—a block with dirty yellow paint, no grounds, many windows. I am taken to the principal, introduced in the most effusive terms. The office: long empty tables arranged in a U, at the head of which sits the weary-looking principal with no work in front of him. He’s tired simply being there. He’s not very old, has been recently transferred here from the city. His is a government job. At one end of the almost empty room are bundles of paper, tied with string and piled up; I understand from a similar pile at the University of Kerala, though upon a table there, that this is the filing system, a century old, perhaps even regressed since then. The only prominent items in the principal’s room: a row of five formal photographs of former principals on one wall; on another wall, Gandhi, Nehru, and Swami Vivekananda. As I sit somewhat uncomfortably at a table, there takes place a long exchange between Hussein and the principal. The outcome is that the principal signs five copies of a letter which turns out to grant three weeks’ unpaid leave to Hussein for having participated in the conference in Orissa. Hussein is very disappointed; he had been granted permission, commended for his initiative to further his qualifications; and now this bureaucratic betrayal. He had hoped my presence would convince the principal to cooperate, but that strategy has obviously failed. He has only lost face.

After lunch—the students have filled up most of the restaurants—we take another bus, to Hussein’s local town, Varkala. Here he picks up his scooter parked at a friend’s house, and we ride it to his village ten miles away. He parks outside a shop and takes me home.

The village consists of a small row of shops on one side of the road, a few side streets, and across the road some houses scattered
next to the beach. To get to his house, which is on the beach side, we walk along a narrow path at the edge of an aqueduct said to be built by the British, a short stream at which some womenfolk are washing. At the end of the path we walk up onto the bank, cutting across an uneven landscape full of coconut trees and other vegetation, until we reach the house. In the old days, Hussein explains, one was considered to have a lower status if one’s house was close to the highway.

The coconuts, he says, bring in one thousand rupees a month, a considerable sum. The land belongs to his wife through her father, the adjacent land with an empty house belongs to his sister, who is in the Gulf.

The traditional occupations of the village are selling copra and coir—both coconut products—and fishing. As we look upon the Arabian Sea, the beach is empty, there are a few boats in the distance. They are from a Christian village up the road, Hussein says. Nowadays the fishermen of his village—generally men of over forty years in age—fish from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m., and collect some
two hundred rupees, of which they spend half on occasional household expenses, half on drink.