Antonio Tabucchi: Indian Nocturne

As well as being an insomnia, this book is also a journey. The insomnia belongs to the writer of the book, the journey to the person who did the travelling. All the same, given that I too happen to have been through the same places as the protagonist of this story, it seemed fitting to supply a brief index of the various locations. I don’t really know whether this idea was prompted by the illusion that a topographical inventory, with the force that the real possesses, might throw some light on this Nocturne in which a Shadow is sought; or whether by the irrational conjecture that some lover of unlikely itineraries might one day use it as a guide.

A.T.

1. The Khajuraho Hotel. Suklaji Street, no number, Bombay.

2. Breach Candy Hospital. Bhulabai Desai Road, Bombay.

3. The Taj Mahal Inter-Continental Hotel. Gateway of India, Bombay.

4. Railway Retiring Rooms. Victoria Station, Central Railway, Bombay. Accommodation for the night with valid railway ticket or with an Indrail Pass.

5. The Taj Coromandel Hotel. 5 Nungambakkam Road, Madras.

6. The Theosophical Society. 12 Adyar Road, Adyar, Madras.

7. Bus-stop. The Madras — Mangalore road, about 50 kilometres from Mangalore, place-name unknown.

8. Arcebispado e Colégio de S. Boaventura. Calangute — Panaji road, Velha Goa, Goa.

9. The Zuari Hotel. Swatantrya Path, no number, Vasco da Gama, Goa.

10. Calangute Beach. About 20 kilometres from Panaji, Goa.

11. The Mandovi Hotel. 28 Bandodkar Marg, Panaji, Goa.

12. The Oberoi Hotel. Bogmalo Beach, Goa.

The taxi driver wore a hairnet and had a pointed beard and a short ponytail tied with a white ribbon. I thought he might be a Sikh, since my guidebook described them as looking exactly like that. My guidebook was called India, a Travel Survival Kit ; I’d bought it in London, more out of curiosity than anything else, since the information it offered about India was fairly bizarre and at first glance superfluous. Only later was I to realise how useful it could be.

The Sikh was driving too fast for my liking and hitting his horn ferociously. I had the impression he was deliberately going as close to the pedestrians as he could, and with an indefinable smile on his face that I didn’t like. On his right hand he wore a black glove, and I didn’t like that either. When he turned into Marine Drive he seemed to calm down and quietly took his place in one of the lines of traffic on the side nearest the sea. With his gloved hand he pointed to the palm trees along the seafront and the curve of the bay. ‘That’s Trobay,’ he said, ‘and opposite us is Elephant Island, only you can’t see it. I’m sure you’ll be wanting to go there, the ferries leave every hour from the Gateway of India.’

I asked him why he was going down Marine Drive. I didn’t know Bombay, but I was trying to follow our route on a map on my knees. My reference points were Malabar Hill and the Chor, the Thieves’ Market. My hotel was somewhere between those two points, and there was no need to go along Marine Drive to get to it. We were driving in the opposite direction.

‘The hotel you mentioned is in a very poor district,’ he said affably, ‘and the goods are very poor quality. Tourists on their first trip to Bombay often end up in the wrong sort of place. I’m taking you to a hotel suitable for a gentleman like yourself.’ He spat out of the window and winked. ‘Where the goods are top quality.’ He gave me a sleazy smile of great complicity, and this I liked even less.

‘Stop here,’ I said, ‘at once.’

He turned round and looked at me with a servile expression. ‘But I can’t stop here,’ he said, ‘there’s the traffic.’

‘Then I’ll get out anyway,’ I said, opening the door and holding it tight.

He braked sharply and began a litany in a language that must have been Marathi. He looked furious and I don’t suppose the words he was hissing through his teeth were particularly polite, but I didn’t take any notice. I had only the one small suitcase which I had kept beside me, so there wasn’t even any need for him to get out and get me my luggage. I left him a hundred-rupee note and climbed out onto the vast pavement of Marine Drive. On the beach there was a religious festival, or fair, one or the other, with a big crowd milling in front of something I couldn’t make out. Along the seafront there were bums stretched out on the parapet, children selling knick-knacks, beggars. There was also a line of motorised rickshaws; I jumped into a sort of yellow cubicle hitched up to a moped and shouted the name of the street my hotel was on to the small driver. He stamped on the starter pedal and set off at full speed, slipping into the traffic.

Cage District was much worse than I had imagined. I’d seen it in the photographs of a famous photographer and thought I was prepared for human misery, but photographs enclose the visible in a rectangle. The visible without a frame is always something else. And then here the visible had too strong a smell. Or rather smells, a lot of smells.

It was dusk when we entered the district, and in the time it took to go down a street, quite suddenly, as happens in the tropics, night fell. Many of the buildings in Cage District are made of wood and matting. Prostitutes wait in shacks made of ill-fitting boards, their heads sticking out of holes. Some of those shacks were not much larger than sentry-boxes. And then there were hovels and tents of rags, little shops perhaps or other kinds of business, lit by paraffin lamps, with small clusters of people in front. But the Hotel Khajuraho had a small illuminated sign and opened almost on the corner of a street with brick buildings, and the lobby, if you could call it that, was merely ambiguous without being sordid. It was a small dark room with a high counter like the bars in English pubs; at each end of the counter were two lamps with red shades and behind it was an old woman. She wore a gaudy sari and her nails were painted blue; by the looks of her she could have been European, although on her forehead she wore one of the many marks that Indian women do wear. I showed her my passport and told her I’d booked by telegram. She nodded and began to copy from my passport making a great show of how careful she was being, then she turned the paper round for me to sign.

‘With bathroom or without?’ she asked, and told me the price.

I took a room with a bathroom. I had the impression she spoke with a slight American accent, but I didn’t go into it.

She told me the room number and handed me the key. The keyring was made of transparent plastic with a design inside of the kind you might expect in a hotel like this. ‘Do you want dinner?’ she asked. She looked at me suspiciously. I got the message that the place was not usually used by Westerners. Naturally she was wondering what I was doing there with hardly any luggage after having cabled from the airport.

I said yes. Not that eating in the hotel was a particularly pleasant prospect, but I was very hungry and it didn’t seem a good idea to start wandering around the area at this hour.

‘The dining room closes at eight,’ she said. ‘After eight it’s room-service only.’

I said I’d prefer to eat downstairs; she led me to a curtain on the other side of the lobby and I went through into a small vaulted room with darkly painted walls and low tables. The tables were almost all free and the light very dim. The menu promised an infinite variety of dishes, but on asking the waiter I discovered that just that particular evening they were all off. Except for number fifteen. I dined swiftly on rice and fish, drank a warm beer and went back to the lobby. The woman was still on her seat and seemed intent on arranging some coloured stones on a kind of mirror. On the small sofa in the corner, near the main door, sat two very dark young men, wearing Western style dress, with flared trousers. They acted as if they hadn’t noticed me, but I immediately sensed a certain unease. I went up to the counter and waited for her to speak first. Which she did. She said some numbers in a neutral detached voice; I didn’t get exactly what she meant and asked her to repeat. It was a price list. The only figures I understood were the first and the last; from thirteen to fifteen years old, three hundred rupees, over fifty, five rupees.