India (24 page)

‘And yet, too, I thought I would be some kind of creative person – like the persons I knew in Calcutta, when I first met you in 1962. But that kind of life and companionship has always eluded me. I started off as a secretary, and am still a secretary, and shall probably end as a secretary. I haven’t risen beyond what my father and grandfather could rise to, at the beginning of the century. The only consolation is that, even as a secretary, I am not as badly off as most other secretaries are. And perhaps, even, I no longer believe I am just a secretary.’

As soon as I got to the airport at Santa Cruz, the airport in Bombay for internal Indian flights, I felt like a refugee. There was a crowd at the entrance; and criminally inclined young men of the neighbourhood were trying to extort money from passengers for moving luggage a few feet from taxis to the doorway.

Policemen were guarding the doorway against the young men, but they seemed not to be offering protection to people outside, even when they were almost at the door; and the young men, understanding this, ran two or three at a time to people just arriving, fell shouting on suitcases and bags, and tried to create an unbalancing atmosphere of frenzy. They were small and thin, these young criminals of the neighbourhood, and they were in tight milk-chocolate-coloured trousers of some synthetic fabric that showed up their frailty in hip and thigh. Their faces were small and bony, and their necks looked as though they might easily snap. Their wretchedness of physique didn’t make them less threatening: they called up the very thin, fawning-sinister figures of some of the Cruikshank illustrations for Dickens.

Crowd and noise and threat and urgency outside, taxis coming and going in the mid-afternoon sun. Crowd inside as well, and noise, but it was a different kind of noise: it was more stable: it was the noise of people going nowhere. There was only one internal airline in India; it was a state airline, and it was in a mess. It was said by various spokesmen that the flights of this airline had to be late because many of them originated in Delhi, and there was fog in Delhi on many mornings. There were other problems. The airline had never had enough aircraft, and in the last few weeks a number of aircraft had been withdrawn for one reason and another. Services were now in chaos. But air travel remained a necessary
badge and privilege for important people, scientists and administrators and business executives; and for weeks a fair portion of the country’s most eminent men and women was, at any given moment, becalmed in the country’s airports, as if by an act of enchantment. Items in the newspapers regularly told of depleted conferences on important subjects in this town and that town. Yet the demand for seats, especially at this holiday season, was greater than ever, and I had been able to get a ticket for this flight to Goa only through the intercession of an influential friend.

In the airport hall the information screens flashed news of ever more flights delayed or abandoned. It was as though there had been some national emergency or disaster. The many grey-and-white screens gave constant, silent electronic jumps, delivering the bad news above the heads of the crowd, who were going nowhere but were not still, were in constant, very slow movement. My own flight to Goa had been delayed for five hours already. Now the screens, whenever (as in a lottery) the number of the Goa flight came up, promised a further delay of four hours. But some people had been waiting in the hall all that day.

From time to time there were the sounds of aircraft taking off. They were tormenting sounds: the planes taking off were the actual planes people were waiting to board, but at that moment different flight numbers were attached to them, and they were starting on roundabout journeys, with many stops, before coming back to Santa Cruz.

My own flight to Goa would be in a plane that was coming from an unlikely town. This was told me by an athletic-looking man from Delhi, who went five times a year to Goa on business and knew the ways of the airline. This was all the information I had to hold on to; since after a certain time of night there appeared to be no airline officials anywhere, not even the young girls at the quaintly named Facilitation Desk. The advice of the man from Delhi was to watch out for the announced arrival time of the flight from the unlikely town he had told me about. If I added an hour’s turn-around time to that, I would have the time of my flight to Goa.

I wasn’t to give up hope, the man from Delhi said. He knew for sure that the flight wasn’t abandoned. He had a cousin in the catering business – or he might have said that his in-laws did some of the catering for the airline – and he knew that his cousin or his
in-laws had distinctly received orders for a plane-load of food-boxes for the Goa flight that day. This meant, he said, that the flight might even leave before midnight. This was the way of privilege in India: to know someone who knew someone who had a connection, even a tangential one, with an important organization.

All this while – the bright light of mid-afternoon giving way to late-afternoon smokiness, to dusk, to undeniable night, to a dim fluorescent evenness in the hall – an elderly American lady had been standing next to the barrow or cart with her luggage. She wasn’t relaxed; she didn’t lean on the cart; her aged body was rigid as if with the fear of theft and the need to protect her goods. Her eyes were now blank, as though, not through tantric excess or meditation (which she might even have come to dabble in), but only by waiting in an Indian airport hall, she had arrived at the inner calm the famous gurus had the secret of. She had been waiting since morning and would have to wait several hours more. She was now mentally so far away that even when the pretty, plump Indian Muslim woman (herself waiting since the previous evening) got up from her chair and offered it to her, it was some time before the American lady understood she was being spoken to. When she understood that she was being asked to separate herself from her cart, her old lady’s face filled with alarm, and, speaking no word, she stood more rigidly in a protective posture beside her goods.

She was standing not far from the check-in counter. The air-conditioning in that corner was very cold. I hadn’t felt it at first. But then I was glad I had a thickish jacket. Even with that jacket I began to feel stiff after a few hours. I gave up the chair I hadn’t wanted to leave, and I joined the very slow refugee movement in the hall. I discovered a bookshop. I bought two Indian paperbacks, a book of cartoons by the cartoonist Laxman, and
Khushwant Singh’s Book of Jokes
, and discovered in five minutes (what I might have guessed) that humorous books require a full life and a contented mind; that where empty time stretches on without limit, the short joke, requiring only a few seconds’ attention, can be wearisome to the spirit, and can make a bad situation worse. Better simply to endure.

There was a restaurant. It was on an upper floor. It was comfortingly warm after the frigid conditions near the check-in counter. It took about half an hour, a plateful of cashew nuts I
didn’t need, and a pot of tea I didn’t need, for me to realize that the musty, tainted smell of the restaurant was more than the smell of warmth, was the smell of an enclosed and airless room; that the air-conditioning there had broken down.

Cold downstairs, hot and dusty and choking upstairs. Outside, in the night, was the fresher, un-conditioned air; but to get at that somebody would have had to break the sealed glass.

And just as, according to some people, you can empty your mind in a meditation chamber by focussing on a single flame, so – among the becalmed travellers moving about in slow whorls in the aqueous fluorescent light, people increasingly like people in an allegory, darkly reflected in the glass that sealed them in, conversation now fled from most of them – so, thinking only of my flight number, I found that with every passing quarter of an hour I was taken more and more out of myself. I was taken far away from the man I had been earlier that day, and was becoming more like that American lady I had seen (when I had been more in command of myself), standing rigid beside her goods on a barrow: Indian architecture and air travel giving me, as it had given her, the Hindu idea of the illusion of things.

There was no escape. With every passing hour, the possibility of a return to the hotel in Bombay (would there be room?), and the hiring of a car for the 12 or 14-hour drive to Goa (where a hotel booking had to be taken up, or lost forever), became less and less a practical proposition. So between heat and cold I moved, withdrawn, living feebly on rumour.

But the man from Delhi was right. There was a plane to Goa; and when – time having ceased to matter – we swarmed and bumped aboard, there were the food-boxes of the Delhi man’s story, the grey cardboard boxes (with white-bread sandwiches and a pastry of some kind and an apple from the North) that his friends or relations had prepared for the airline for that day’s Goa flight. The plane felt over-used. The airline in-flight magazine was dog-eared. A piece of the overhead trim had shaken loose; every time the stewardess tapped it back in, it quivered out again. But there was Goa at the end of the very short flight. And it was interesting, getting out into the clean night air, at last, to see the name of the place spelt out in the Hindi Devanagari characters:
Go-wa
.

It was now well past midnight. We got into a cramped tourist bus. There was very little space between the seats, and the glass
was tinted: it was like a continuation of the constraints of Santa Cruz. After some time we came to the Mandovi River. And there, literally, was a break in the journey. There was no bridge over the Mandovi River. There had been a bridge, a new one, until quite recently. But after standing for 10 years or so, the bridge had fallen down one day, and the Mandovi was now crossed by ferries, rough contraptions that looked as old as the century, but had been built only after the bridge had fallen down. Luggage was manhandled down from the roof of the bus on to Indian earth and then into the ferry, and then, at the other bank, out of the ferry and up on to the roof of a second bus: technology giving way (furtively, in the Indian night) to the India of many feeble hands doing simple small tasks.

And when, two days or so later, I saw the collapsed bridge in daylight, only the mighty piers standing, the linking pieces not there, it seemed to sum up the experience of that long day and night, the fracture in reality.

Nikhil, talking to me one day in Bombay of his religious faith, which was profound, had told me of his devotion, especially in times of crisis, to two figures: Sai Baba (not the current figure with the Afro hairstyle, but the original turn of-the-century teacher), and the Image of the Infant Jesus.

Nikhil came of a Hindu family, and his choice of Jesus – which at first was what I thought he meant – seemed unusual. But Nikhil had a particular image in mind, and he told me of the reason for his faith. He had once had some worrying legal problem in connection with his work. In this anxiety he had come across a leaflet about the Image of the Infant Jesus. The leaflet recommended that in times of special need prayers should be offered up to the Infant Jesus every nine hours. This was what Nikhil had begun to do. It meant getting up at a difficult time every two or three days, but it also meant that his days were built around the act of prayer. Nikhil lived with this devotion to the Image of the Infant Jesus over many weeks, and at last the legal problem that had been worrying him disappeared. Nikhil remained grateful. It was irrational, he said; he knew that; but he couldn’t help it.

Nikhil must have told me about the whereabouts of this image, but I hadn’t taken it in. At the hotel in Goa one morning I saw, at
the entrance, a new, well-cared-for minibus with the words INFANT JESUS painted above the windscreen. I asked the driver about it. He pointed to a cream-coloured plastic figure – like a toy from a corn-flakes box – on his dashboard. The driver was a Christian Goan. He told me that the original image was in a church in Old Goa.

It was a famous image, of tested efficacy. The plastic image on the minibus dashboard was the merest symbol of the real thing. The church the minibus driver spoke of was, in fact, the famous cathedral of Old Goa, where Saint Francis Xavier was buried.

This cathedral, and the other Portuguese buildings of Old Goa, some way inland on the Mandovi River, were quite staggering in the setting. So far from Europe (six months’ sailing even in the 18th century); so bright the light; the white beaches speaking more of the empty islands of the New World (but empty only after they had been ‘dispeopled’: they would have been populated and busy at the time of the discovery) rather than the crowded villages and towns of old India, with its tangled past. Part of that Indian past was right there, in Old Goa: in the Arch of the Viceroys, which had been created out of an arch of the – barely established – Muslim ruler the Portuguese had dispossessed. Through that arch, it was said, every new viceroy of Goa ceremonially passed when he arrived.

In another old building, now the museum, there was a gallery with portraits of all the viceroys of Goa. The portraits had been done in batches. One portrait was of Vasco da Gama. A fabulous name, but the portrait of him, as of the other viceroys, was clumsy, a kind of poor shop-sign art. The art of the colonisers didn’t match their venturesomeness. This deficiency fitted in with what one knew of the brief period of Portuguese vigour; and it perhaps explained why, outside Old Goa, so little remained of Portugal, adding to the unreality of the damp-stained rococo ecclesiastical buildings of Old Goa.

Still, it was the early date of the Portuguese empire in India that continued to astonish. Every day I was reminded of it when – far from Old Goa on the Mandovi, and just with a sight of the remains of great red-stone military fortifications, all circles and straight lines, on a tropical beach – I sat down to eat in the hotel, and saw an old European print of Goa reproduced on the paper place-setting. The engraved legend gave the year of the arrival in India
of the fierce and victorious Portuguese viceroy, Albuquerque: 1509. He conquered Goa the next year. Just 18 years after Columbus had discovered the islands of the New World, and before that discovery had proved its worth; nine years before Cortés started on his march to Mexico. In India itself, before the great Mogul emperor Akbar was born.