Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

After my lecture that evening I met several writers. One was Mr V. G. Deshmukh, a jolly novelist who said that he could not make a living by his pen. He had written thirty novels. Writing is the single activity in India that doesn't pay, and anyway this man wrote about the poor: no one was interested in reading about poor people. He knew, because the poor were his business.

'Famine relief, resettlement, drought prevention, under-privileged, anything you can name. It is a headache sometimes. But my books don't sell, so I have no choice. You could call me an organizer.'

'How do you prevent droughts?'

'We have programmes.'

I saw committees, position papers, conferences – and dusty fields.

'Have you prevented any lately?'

'We are making steady progress,' he said. 'But I would rather write novels.'

'If you've written thirty, surely it's time to stop.'

'No, no! I must write one hundred and eight!'

'How did you arrive at that figure?'

'It is a magic number in Hindu philosophy. Vishnu has one hundred and eight names. I must write one hundred and eight novels! It is not easy – especially now, with this damned paper shortage.'

The paper shortage was also affecting Kushwant Singh's Illustrated Weekly of India. His circulation was 300,000 but he was about to cut it down to save paper. It was an Indian story: Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure. India, the largest rice-grower in the world, imports rice. 'Hunger is the handmaid of genius,' says the Pudd'nhead Wilson epigraph above one of the Bombay chapters in Mark Twain's Following the Equator, and truly India's hunger-inspired genius threatens to sink her. Every success I heard of convinced me that India, swamped by invention, was hopeless and must fail unless what I saw later that night ceases to exist. It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.

Unable to sleep, I went for a walk. I turned left out of my hotel and walked a hundred yards past the brothels to the sea wall, counting the sleeping figures as I went along. They were stretched out on the sidewalk, lying side by side; some were on pieces of cardboard but most slept flat on the cement, with no bedding and few clothes, their arms crooked under their heads. The children slept on their sides, the others on their backs. There was no sign anywhere of their possessions. I reached seventy-three and turned the corner, where down the road that ran next to the sea wall there were hundreds more -just bodies, no bundles or carts, nothing to distinguish one from another, no evidence of life. It is sometimes thought that these sleepers in the Bombay streets are a recent phenomenon; but Mark Twain saw them. He was on his way to a midnight betrothal ceremony:

We seemed to move through a city of the dead. There was hardly a suggestion of life in those still and vacant streets. Even the crows were silent. But everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives – hundreds and hundreds. They lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, heads and all. Their attitude and rigidity counterfeited death.

That was in 1896. They are more numerous today, and there is another difference. The ones I saw had no blankets. Hunger -pace Pudd'nhead Wilson – is also the handmaid of death.

That's this?' I asked Mr Gopal, the embassy liaison man, pointing to a kind of fortress.

'That's a kind of fortress.'

He had ridiculed the handbook I had been carrying around: 'You have this big book, but I tell you to close it and leave it at hotel because Jaipur is like open book to me.' Unwisely, I had taken his advice. We were now six miles outside Jaipur, wading ankle-deep through sand drifts towards the wrecked settlement of Galta. Earlier we had passed through a jamboree of some two hundred baboons: 'Act normal,' said Mr Gopal, as they hopped and chattered and showed their teeth, clustering on the road with a curiosity that bordered on menace. The landscape was rocky and very dry, and each rugged hill was capped with a cracked fortress.

'Whose is it?'

'The Maharajah's.'

'No, who built it?'

'You would not know his name.'

'Do you?

Mr Gopal walked on. It was dusk, and the buildings crammed into the Galta gorge were darkening. A monkey chattered and leaped to a branch in a banyan tree above Mr Gopal's head, yanking the branch down and making a punkah's whoosh. We entered the gate and crossed a courtyard to some ruined buildings, with coloured frescoes of trees and people on their facades.

Some had been raked with indecipherable graffiti and painted over; whole panels had been chiselled away.

'What's this?' I asked. I hated him for making me leave my handbook behind.

'Ah,' said Mr Gopal. It was a temple enclosure. Some men dozed in the archways, others squatted on their haunches, and just outside the enclosure were some tea and vegetable stalls whose owners leaned against more frescoes, rubbing them away with their backs. I was struck by the solitude of the place – a few people at sundown, no one speaking, and it was so quiet I could hear the hooves of the goats clattering on the cobblestones, the murmuring of the distant monkeys.

'A temple?'

Mr Gopal thought a moment. 'Yes,' he said finally, 'a kind of temple.'

On the ornate temple walls, stuck with posters, defaced with chisels, pissed on, and scrawled over with huge Devanagri script advertising Jaipur businesses, there was a blue enamel sign, warning visitors in Hindi and English that it was 'forbidden to desecrate, deface, mark, or otherwise abuse the walls'. The sign itself had been defaced: the enamel was chipped – it looked partly eaten.

Farther along, the cobblestone road became a narrow path and then a steep staircase cut into the rock walls of the gorge. At the top of this was a temple facing a still, black pool. Insects swimming in circles on the pool's surface made minuscule ripples, and small clouds of vibrant gnats hovered over the water. The temple was an unambitious niche in the rock face, a shallow cave, lighted with oil lamps and tapers. On either side of its portals were seven-foot marble slabs, the shape of those handed down from Sinai but with a weight that would give the most muscular prophet a hernia. These tablets had numbered instructions on them in two languages. In the failing light I copied down the English.

1. The use of soap in the temple and washing clothes is strictly prohibited

2. Please do not bring shoes near the tank

3. It does not suit for women to take bath among male members

4. Spitting while swimming is quite a bad habit

5. Do not spoil others clothes by splitting water while swimming

6. Do not enter the temple with wet clothes

7. Do not spit improperly to make the places dirty

"Splitting? I said to Mr Gopal. 'What is splitting?'

'That does not say splitting.'

'Take a look at number five.'

'It says splashing.'

'It says splitting.'

'It says -'

We walked over to the tablet. The letters, two inches high, were cut deep into the marble.

' – splitting,' said Mr Gopal. 'I've never run across that one before. I think it's a kind of splashing.'

Mr Gopal was doing his best, but he was a hard man to escape from. So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable; I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere; sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.