India (80 page)

‘I remember the last words of Shabeg: “The best place to die is
the highest place of your religion, and a place connected with your ancestors.” And he further said, “The place where we are standing has got both of the highest qualities. So it is best to die here.” We were in the Akal Takht.’ The council building, it might be said, of the Golden Temple: the Chapter House. ‘To bring food from the langar’ – the communal kitchen of the Temple: the communal kitchen in the place of worship is an important Sikh idea – ‘was very hard. So food was brought over the Temple wall by the people, over the roofs of the adjoining houses. This went on for only one day. We had parched channa in quantity’ – chick-peas – ‘and that was distributed to us. Water was stored in buckets.

‘Four of us were stationed behind the two flags on the first floor. Nobody was worried. We were all happy. Kirtan was going on.’ Hymn-singing, from the central gold-domed temple in the pool. ‘And they were singing a couplet: “Nobody can kill one whose God is almighty.”
Jisda sahib dada hué usnu marna koi
. This inspired us.’

‘Did you know about the bodies stuffed into the drains?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Does it upset you now?’

‘No. All is fair in love and war.’

He became restless all at once, and said he had to go. He said he would telephone me in Delhi in a few days. I walked down the steps with him. He didn’t walk towards the hotel desk. He turned smartly about and walked at the side of the flowerbeds on the front lawn, stepped over a low border into the drive, and walked out of the hotel gate.

A day or so later the police announced that a terrorist bombing campaign might be about to start in Delhi. This gave a new twist to what Kuldip had told me about his movements, though it remained hard for me to associate the man with the lined face and subdued eyes, who had sat so stilly in my room, with violent acts.

Gurtej had said at the beginning of my time in Chandigarh, when I had asked him about the emphasis on suffering in Sikhism: ‘This world is an unhappy place for many, and it [unhappiness] has to be eliminated. There are only two ways. Either you make somebody suffer, or you suffer.’

On the day Kuldip had mentioned, the telephone operator in the Delhi hotel rang my room and said, ‘There is a man on the telephone who wants to talk to you, but he will not give his name.’
Before I could decide what to do, the caller had rung off. No further call like that was made; I never heard from Kuldip again. I was relieved in a way; because the news about the bombing campaign had put me – like the people in Jaspal village, and other villages – in a quandary.

India was full of visitors; the number rose year by year. In all the big towns I went to – except Amritsar and Lucknow – the hotels were packed: trade fair following trade fair, one kind of public or holiday occasion following another, foreign delegations of various sorts treading on one another’s heels.

The India I had gone to in 1962 was like a different country. India was not yet a place to which many people went to do business. It was not yet a place to which tourists wanted to go. Hotels of any standard were few and far between. Away from the main centres travel was hard. In some places you spent the night in a room in the railway station; in some places, if you could get the official permission that was required, you stayed at a ‘dak bungalow’, a post house. It was a lovely name, suggesting old-fashioned travel, and old-fashioned attentions. But when you got to the sunstruck, mildewed, colonial bungalow, with perhaps a few zinnias or thin-stalked roses or nondescript shrubs in its sandy garden, you had to shout for the watchman; and eventually some barefoot ragged fellow appeared and offered to cook for you in the kitchen of his own quarters the kind of meal he cooked for himself, which, when it came, might smell of woodsmoke or the cowdung cakes over which it had been cooked. In the sparsely furnished bedroom the coarse-napped ‘bedding’ would smell of the brackish or tainted soapy water in which it had been washed; the floor would feel sandy or gritty underfoot; the mosquito net would have tears and holes; the ventilation gaps at the top of the wall would leave one feeling exposed. The night could feel long.

The India I had gone to in 1962 had been like a place far away, a place worth a long journey. And – almost like William Howard Russell a century before – I had gone by rail and ship from
London: rail to Venice; ship to Athens; ship to Alexandria; ship to Karachi and Bombay. Twelve years before, I had travelled to London from the island of Trinidad. There, as the grandson and great-grandson of agricultural immigrants from India, I had grown up with my own ideas of the distance that separated me from India. I was far enough away from it to cease to be of it. I knew the rituals but couldn’t participate in them; I heard the language, but followed only the simpler words. But I was near enough to understand the passions; and near enough to feel that my own fate was bound up with the fate of the people of the country. The India of my fantasy and heart was something lost and irrecoverable.

The physical country existed. I could travel to that; I had always wanted to. But on that first journey I was a fearful traveller.

I had planned to spend a year in India; and – though I had no clear idea for a book – I hoped that for part of that year I would settle down somewhere and do some writing. I arrived in Bombay some time in February. Early in April I went north to Kashmir: train to Delhi; night train to Pathankot; and then by bus for a day and a morning (with a halt for the night: moonlight on the terraced rice-fields of Banihal) up into the mountains and then down into the vale of Kashmir.

I put up in a gloomy, mildewed hotel in the town. In its rooms you had no idea of the setting, no sight of lake or mountains or fresh snow; you just had a cluttered backyard town view. I didn’t see myself staying there for three or four months. There were the houseboats on the lake, relics of the Raj. But the well-equipped ones – like white barges on the water, echoing the fresh snow on the dark mountains all around – were too expensive for me. These were the ones with the good china and the hand-carved old furniture and the old-fashioned English menus (and still, here and there, the photographs and sometimes the recommendations of English guests of 30 years before – before independence, before the war). The smaller houseboats were shabby. But even if I could have afforded the better ones, I didn’t think I would have been able to write and live in one room on a houseboat. It would have been constricting not to be able to walk out when one wanted; I would have felt it as a kind of imprisonment.

It began to look as though, after the long trip north, Kashmir
wasn’t going to work out. But then, on the second or third day, looking all the time for a good place to stay, I allowed myself to be led by a small man with a big blue jacket and a black fur cap to what he had said was a hotel on the lake itself, with its own garden.

It was hard to credit, but it was as Ali Mohammed, the man with the black cap, had said. I was to get to know him very well. For many weeks I was to see him leaving his hotel base, morning and afternoon, getting into a lake boat with his big bicycle, being paddled to the lake boulevard, and then cycling to the bus station or the tourist department or any other place where he might win a visitor, as he had won me. Though he wasn’t pushy or talkative, was really a shy, subdued fellow, liking nothing better than a little smoke on the hookah with his friends in the hotel kitchen at the end of the garden.

The hotel was like a little house. It was called the Hotel Liward – that was the way the word was spelt, and that was how I thought of it. It had two storeys and a pitched corrugated-iron roof. It stood in its own garden in the lake, not one of the floating gardens, thick mats of lake weeds and earth, which could be towed about, but a fixed plot of earth. I rented an upper-floor bedroom at one end of the house. This section of the house had just been built for the new season – the Liward expanded every few years – and the way the building was designed, this bedroom had no immediate neighbour. It had windows on two sides, with views of the lake and the mountains and the snow. It had its own brand-new bathroom. Bathroom and bedroom smelled agreeably of new wood and new concrete. The small sitting room of the hotel was adjacent to the bedroom; I rented that as well, so that I could almost say that I had my own little wing of the Liward.

It was an extraordinary piece of luck for me. The Liward, my time in Kashmir, became a point of rest in my Indian year, a point of rest in my fearful travelling; and perhaps it enabled me to go through with my Indian venture. I had uprooted myself from London, and invested all the money I had in this Indian journey; it would have been hard if it hadn’t worked, and I hadn’t been able to last.

I stayed at the Liward for more than four months. I got to know all of them who worked and smoked in the kitchen shack at the end of the garden. Ali Mohammed – so important at the very beginning – soon became a figure in the background. Mr Butt
owned the hotel, but English was beyond him; we communicated only by smiles and gestures. Mr Butt’s right-hand man was Abdul Aziz. He couldn’t read or write. But he had an acute social sense and could read faces and situations; he had a prodigious memory; and he spoke an idiomatic English, picked up purely by ear. It was with Aziz that I dealt during those four months at the Liward. It was with Aziz that I made my excursions to the higher valleys. Aziz and Mr Butt planned my expedition to the cave of Amarnath, at the time of the great pilgrimage there in the month of August; and Aziz came with me on that as well, to exercise some control over the retinue they had hired for me.

And I wrote my book. What had been a mere idea, an impulse, a series of suggestions, what at the start of the writing had felt unreal, began to have its own life and to exercise its own power in that room with the two views. That had also been part of the comfort and reassurance of that season, that feeling of a book growing day by day. Aziz and Mr Butt had knocked up a table for me to write at. They had also given me a table lamp.

The next year, in an oppressive furnished flat in south London, I began to write my book about India. I had intended to write one, but after my early weeks I had begun to give up the idea. Travel writing was new to me, and I didn’t see how I could find a narrative for a book about India: I was too overwhelmed by the distress I saw. I had kept no journal, made few connected notes. But money had been spent, and a book had to be written. A full two to three months after my return, I began to write. In the writing, the Kashmir interlude became what it had been the year before in India: a point of rest. Calling up events day after day, I found a narrative where at the time there had appeared to be none.

After the book was written – order given to memories, a narrative found, Indian emotions faced and written out – the details began to fade. The time came when I no longer read the book. Kashmir and the Hotel Liward – and Mr Butt and Aziz – remained a glow, a memory of a season when everything had gone well. It was open to me after that to go back to Kashmir at any time. Air travel had simplified the world, had simplified our ways of dealing with sections of our past. Sometimes people wrote me about the hotel; someone sent me a photograph to show the changes that had come to the building. But I never felt the need to go back.

*

This time I went back. I went by air. So I saw the airport which, 27 years before, I had never seen or been near. There had been stringent security checks at Delhi airport, because of the situation in the Punjab. There was security at Srinagar: the Kashmir valley was restless. It had been restless in 1962 as well. But all over India people lived more on their nerves now, and had a different attitude to authority.

The road to the town was being improved. It led past many big new houses; I hadn’t seen that kind of private wealth in 1962. The city centre was as mud-coloured and medieval-looking as I had remembered: as though all the colours of Kashmir, by themselves as vivid as the colours in a paint-box, had run together and created the effect of mess and mud. The brick and timber of old buildings – or buildings that looked old – were both the colour of mud. Mud was also the colour of the streets, the colour-effect of the variegated clothes of the people; and mud – with here and there a green algae patch or crust – was the colour of the turgid, steep-banked river that ran through the town. An arm or canal of this river was choked with small unpainted houseboats side by side: and there the houseboats showed very clearly as a slum row, little floating houses permanently moored to the bank, each with its outhouse on the bank.

Some memory stirred, at the grey-brown colour of the houseboats; but the feeling of crowd and constriction was new. Some memory also came to me of someone telling me in 1962 that in the days of the British (though Kashmir was a princely state, with its own ruler) Indians were not allowed to walk on the Bund, the main avenue in the town. That was now far in the past. The Kashmiri-Indian town had burst its bonds and had spread a long way down the lake boulevard. This new development was not the colour of mud. It was a roaring Indian bazaar of concrete and glass and new paint, hotels and shops and signboards. And facing it, on a section of the lake where in 1962 there had been only water, was a long row of tourist houseboats, each houseboat with its signboard: the Kashmiris and the visitors semingly lined up and facing one another like two sports teams, the visitors handicapped in their houseboats, denied movement and manoeuvre, the Kashmiris nimble on the shore, ready to deal with any landing party, with their irregulars paddling about on the lake, appearing from nowhere, their shallow low boats capable of nosing into the smallest
opening. All down this stretch of the lake boulevard was a roar of human voices, as in a market or bazaar.

At the far end of the lake boulevard, and some way beyond this new development, was the Palace Hotel, in its own spacious grounds. I was staying there this time. The hotel had been the summer palace of the Maharaja of Kashmir. It was a big but plain building of the 1930s, low and wide, set well back from the lake and boulevard. The apple orchards planted by the last maharaja but one were in blossom; so were the almond trees. After the mud colours of the town, the colours here were of the freshest spring-green.