Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

A few miles out of Madras, an English missionary found me clutching the window, gasping in the heat that had just descended on the train. He ignored my condition. He said he was absolutely livid. He was glad to hear that I was (as I told him) a journalist: he had a story for me.

'Some Americans,' he said, 'who call themselves Christians are paying four rupees a head – and that's a lot of money in Madras – to people they baptize. Why? I'll tell you. To put up their conversion figures, so they can get more money from their parishes back home. They do more harm than good. When you go back to the States I hope you mention it.'

'Gladly,' I said. Will whoever is responsible for these corrupt missionaries who offer baptismal bribes please persuade them that they are doing more harm than good?

Then we were at Madras Central and rickshaw- wallahs were flying at me like bats, repeating, 'Where you going? Where you going?'

They laughed when I told them Ceylon.

This was what I imagined: somewhere past the brick and plaster mansions of Madras, arrayed along Mount Road like so many yellowing wedding cakes, was the Bay of Bengal, on which I would find a breezy sea-front restaurant, palm trees, flapping tablecloths. I would sit facing the water, have a fish dinner and five beers and watch the dancing lights of the little Tamil fishing smacks. Then I would go to bed and be up early for the train to Rameswaram, that village on the tip of India's nose.

'Take me to the beach,' I said to the taxi driver. He was an unshaven, wild-haired Tamil with his shirt torn open. He had the look of the feral child in the psychology textbook: feral children, mangled demented Mowglis, abound in South India. It is said they are suckled by wolves.

'Beach Road?'

'That sounds like the place.' I explained that I wanted to eat a fish.

'Twenty rupees.'

'I'll give you five.'

'Okay, fifteen. Get in.'

We drove about two hundred yards and I realized that I was very hungry: turning vegetarian had confused my stomach with what seemed an imperfect substitute for real food. Vegetables subdued my appetite, but a craving – a carnivorous emotion – remained.

'You like English girls?' The taxi driver was turning the steering wheel with his wrists, as a wolf might, given the opportunity to drive a taxi.

'Very much,' I said.

'I find you English girl.'

'Really?' It seemed an unlikely place to find an English whore – Madras, a city without any apparent prosperity. In Bombay I might have believed it: the sleek Indian businessmen, running in and out of the Taj Mahal Hotel, oozing wealth, and driving at top speed past the sleepers on the sidewalk – they were certainly whore fodder. And in Delhi, city of conferees and delegates, I was told there were lots of European hookers cruising through the lobbies of the plush hotels, promising pleasure with a cheery swing of their hips. But in Madras?

The driver spun in his seat and crossed his heart, two slashes with his long nails. 'English girl.'

'Keep your eyes on the road!'

'Twenty-five rupees.'

Three dollars and twenty-five cents.

'Pretty girl?'

'English girl,' he said. 'You want?'

I thought this over. It wasn't the girl but the situation that attracted me. An English girl in Madras, whoring for peanuts. I wondered where she lived, and how, and for how long; what had brought her to the godforsaken place? I saw her as a castaway, a fugitive, like Lena in Conrad's Victory fleeing a tuneless travelling orchestra in Surabaya. I had once met an English whore in Singapore. She said she was making a fortune. But it wasn't just the money: she preferred Chinese and Indian men to the English, who were not so quick and, worse, usually wanted to spank her.

The driver noticed my silence and slowed down. In the heavy traffic he turned around once again. His cracked teeth, stained with betel juice, were red and gleaming in the lights from the car behind us. He said, 'Beach or girl?'

'Beach,' I said.

He drove for a few minutes more. Surely she was Anglo-Indian – 'English' was a euphemism.

'Girl,'I said.

'Beach or girl?'

'Girl, girl, for Heaven's sake.' It was as if he were trying to make me confess to an especially vicious impulse.

He swung his car around dangerously and sped in the opposite direction, babbling, 'Good – nice girls – you like – little house – about two miles – five girls – '

'English girls?'

'English girls.'

The luminous certitude had gone out of his voice, but still he nodded, perhaps trying to calm me.

We drove for twenty minutes. We went through streets where kerosene lamps burned at stalls, and past brightly lit textile shops in which clerks in striped pyjamas shook out bolts of yellow cloth and sequined saris. I sat back and watched Madras go by, teeth and eyes in dark alleys, night-time shoppers with full baskets, and endless doorways distinguished by memorable signboards, SANGADA LUNCH HOME, VISHNU SHOE CLINIC, and the dark funereal THOUSANDS LIGHTS RESTAURANT.

He turned corners, choosing the narrowest unlighted lanes, and then we stayed on dirt roads. I suspected he was going to rob me, and when we came to the darkest part of a bumpy track – we were in the country now -and he pulled over and switched off the lights, I was certain he was a con man: his next move would be to stick a knife in my ribs. How stupid I'd been to believe his fatuous story about the twenty-five-rupee English girl! We were far from Madras, on a deserted road, beside a faintly gleaming swamp where frogs whistled and gulped. The taxi driver jerked his head. I jumped. He blew his nose into his fingers and flung the result out the window.

I started to get out of the car.

'You sit down.'

I sat down.

He thumped his chest with his hand. 'I'm coming.' He slid out and banged the door, and I saw him disappear down a path to the left.

I waited until he was gone, until the shush of his legs in the tall grass had died out, and then I carefully worked the door open. In the open air it was cool, and there was a mingled smell of swamp water and jasmine. I heard voices on the road, men chattering; like me they were in darkness. I could see the road around me, but a few feet away it vanished. I estimated that I was about a mile from the main road. I would head for that and find a bus.

There were puddles in the road. I blundered into one, and, trying to get out, plopped through the deepest part. I had been running; the puddle slowed me to a ponderous shamble.

'Mister! Sahib!'

I kept going, but he saw me and came closer. I was caught. 'Sit down, mister!' he said. I saw he was alone. 'Where you going?'

'Where you going?'

'Checking up.'

'English girl?'

'No English girl.'

'What do you mean, no English girl?' I was frightened, and now it all seemed a transparent preparation for ambush.

He thought I was angry. He said, 'English girl – forty, fifty. Like this.' He stepped close to me so that in the darkness I could see he was blowing out his cheeks; he clenched his fists and hunched his shoulders. I got the message: a fat English girl. 'Indian girl – small, nice. Sit down, we go.'

I had no other choice. A mad dash down the road would have taken me nowhere – and he would have chased me. We walked back to the taxi. He started the engine angrily and we bumped along the grassy path he had taken earlier on foot. The taxi rolled from side to side in the potholes and strained up a grade. This was indeed the country. In all that darkness there was one lighted hut. A little boy crouched in the doorway with a sparkler, an anticipation of Diwali, the festival of lights: it illuminated his face, his skinny arm, and made his eyes shine. Ahead of us there was another hut, slightly larger, with a flat roof and two square windows. It was on its own, like a shop in a jungle clearing. Dark heads moved at the windows.