Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (29 page)

Bapji broke off to watch the end of the cricket match, and when it was clear that India could not be beaten, he talked about the military tradition of his state. Celebrated in India, but unsung heroes everywhere else, the Indian army had been heroic in both world wars. Bapji explained that in a decisive battle in September 1918, the Royal Jodhpur Lancers led the charge into Haifa with the Hyderabad and Mysore mounted lancers on their flanks, surprising and defeating the German-Turkish army dug in on Mount Carmel.

"They charged straight into machine guns. Uphill—great horsemanship, great valor. Dalpat Singh led the charge and died in the action." Bapji was gesturing again. "Straight across, into the fire. Of course, many died, but they killed four hundred men and took Haifa. They were very brave."

He was looking out the window at the expanse of green lawn behind Umaid Bhawan. He straightened and twisted the ends of his mustache.

"My people have courage." He nodded. "Heroes."

He asked how long I would be staying. I said that I was going to leave for the station soon and I'd be on the train that night.

"You'll see my grandfather there."

He was not being enigmatic. He meant the equestrian statue of Umaid Singh in front of the Jodhpur railway station.

K
APOORCHAND, A DIGNIFIED MAN
of about sixty, was doing exactly what I was doing, and for the same reason. He lived in Jodhpur; he needed to be in Jaipur. "Train is best," he said, slightly contorted, sitting cross-legged on his bunk, and when he saw me fussing with my bedding, he said, "Don't do that. Coolie will take care of it. They have responsibilities. They must make your bed. They must wake you on time. They must bring you tea."

His tone marked him as a man of picturesque outbursts. I waited for more. It seemed that we would be the only ones in the compartment. I put my things in order: water bottle, food I'd brought from the hotel, my notebook, that day's
Hindustan Times,
my copy of
The Great Mutiny,
and an Indian Railways Concise Timetable.

The timetable impressed Kapoorchand. He said, "Plane might not take off. Or it might drop you in Delhi instead of Jaipur. Or you might have to wait hours." He smiled out the window at the platform of Jodhpur Station. "Train will leave on time. It will arrive on time. I will do my consulting and I will get evening train back to Jodhpur."

He gave me his business card, which indicated he was a chartered accountant with the firm of Jain and Jain.

"Are you busy?"

"Too busy. I have been all over India, but always train." I said, "Gauhati?" It was in distant Assam.

"I have been there."

"Manipur?"

"Yes."

"Darjeeling?"

The answer was yes to the ten other remote places I mentioned. As we
were talking about these far-off stations, a man in a soldier's uniform slipped into the compartment, said hello, and began chaining his suitcase to the stanchion on the upper bunk.

"Is that necessary?" I asked. As I spoke, the train whistle blew and we were on our way.

"It is precaution, so to say," Kapoorchand said and consulted his watch, smiling because the train had left on the minute.

As the soldier climbed into the berth over my head—older passengers, like me, got the lower berths—Kapoorchand gave me a chain and padlock from his briefcase that he carried as spares. But I didn't use them. I had very little in my bag, and I usually tucked my briefcase under my pillow, because it contained my passport and credit cards and notebooks and about $1,500 in small bills.

"You know Jain religion?" Kapoorchand asked. "I am Jain. I meditate three hours a day. But I will do more. I have two brothers who have renounced world. They wander. They use no shoes. They travel many kilometers together."

"Does this sort of life attract you?"

"Very much indeed." He was tall, friendly, silver-haired, obviously a businessman—Jains are noted for their business acumen and also for their spirituality. He was well dressed for a railway passenger, in a starched long-sleeved white shirt and blue trousers; he wore an expensive watch. He said he also wanted to renounce the world. "I will do so in five or six years. I will wander. I will discover myself."

"Where will you live?"

"I will live in my soul."

He gave me a Jain pamphlet titled
Universal Fraternity,
which I flipped through as he sat and ate from his small box of food. The pamphlet was full of sage advice—humanistic, brotherhood of man, do the right thing. I read a bit, read the newspaper, and wrote my notes about my talk with Bapji. The soldier was snoring; night had fallen, though it wasn't late. Kapoorchand seemed eager to discuss the life of the soul. Perhaps because he had just finished eating, he talked about the spiritual aspects of food.

"Onions and garlic are worst," he said. "They make a desire for sex. And they cause angerness."

"I did not know that."

"My friend when he travels without wife never eats onions." He was
enumerating vegetables on his fingers. "Carrots. Root vegetables. I don't eat, because it is killing the living plant. I eat tops only."

"Potatoes?"

"Some people eat. But for me—no. So many live things can be found on a potato."

"Live things, such as...?"

"Bacteria and molds. Why should they be killed because of me?"

For this reason, Jains habitually wore masks, so as not to inhale any gnats that might be hovering near their open mouths; and they swept at the surface of water to disperse—what? water bugs? mosquito larvae?—before they drank. It was a strict interpretation of the Do Not Kill stricture: nothing must be killed, and that included flies and mold.

"Fruit is good, but ... bananas can be tricky. It depends on time of day." Up went his admonitory finger. "Banana is gold in morning. Silver in afternoon. Iron in evening. One should not eat bananas in evening. Also, no yogurt in evening, but yogurt in morning is beneficial."

"Indian food is spicy, though," I said.

"Not beneficial. Chilies and pickle make angerness. They increase cruel nature."

I could see that he enjoyed putting me in the know, because there is a freight of detail in Indian life—an ever-present cargo of dogma, of strictures, of lessons, of distinctions—that turns Indians into mono-loguers. Their motive seemed pedantic, not to convert you but to exaggerate how little you knew of life.

I ate some of the food I'd brought and offered a bit to him. He looked confused, but took it. He said, "I am so ashamed. I didn't offer you anything because you were writing. But now you offered. This is my fault. You set a better example."

"That's a compliment."

"Shake my hand," Kapoorchand said suddenly. I leaned across the rocking railway compartment and did so. He said, "You are generous. Good. I have many theories about handshakes. If you do it like this"—he extended a limp hand—"you are not generous. You are a cheat. Or it might mean you have only daughters. I shook a man's hand like that once and asked him, 'How many daughters?' He said, 'Three.' Then he said, 'Why did you not ask about sons?'" Kapoorchand paused, allowing me to savor this moment. "I said, 'Because you have no sons.' Man was astonished. 'How did you know?'"

"What's the answer?"

"Handshake. Weakness. Weak sperm cannot make sons."

"Any more theories?" I reminded myself that this man was a chartered accountant on his way to Jaipur to spend a day looking through the entries of a company's ledgers.

"Yes, many. Those who become angry but do not express their angerness get sick. Many die of cancer. They hold the angerness inside their body and it kills them."

"Possibly."

"Do you have theories, Mr. Paul?"

"I have a theory that no house should be taller than a palm tree."

"That is good. I have a
haveli
some distance from here. Modest size is there."

"I also have a theory that nothing matters."

Kapoorchand stared at me, looking dismayed.

Feeling that I had shocked him (I was simplifying something that Leonard Woolf had once written), I said, "And I sometimes notice that when a man is looking at you and telling a lie, he touches his eye or his face."

"That is so!" Kapoorchand said. "There is so much untruth in the world. That is another reason I will become a sadhu. My brothers did so. My father became a saint." He fumbled with his wallet and drew out a small faded photograph. "Here is his picture."

Even faded and in black and white, the photo showed a man with a kindly face, gray-bearded, a white turban on his head.

"First he waited for some years. When he saw that I was settled, he said that he would become a saint. He lived for fifteen years as a saint."

"How did he go about this?"

"He came to me. He said, 'Look after your mother.' I did so. I do so still. He then renounced all worldly things. He gave up shoes, going barefoot only. Sleeping on floor. Owning nothing. He became a sadhu, a holy man. He went about by walking in bare feet. Simple clothes, living in ashrams, going from place to place, sometimes walking fifteen kilometers a day. He could not visit me, but I could visit him, if he allowed it."

"Was he happy?"

"Very happy."

And Kapoorchand explained that another branch of the Jains, the
Digambara sect, renounced clothes, too. They kept to the forests, living naked, appearing in public only every dozen years or so for the great spiritual gathering, with ritual bathing in the Ganges and other rivers, called Kumbh Mela.

"You mentioned that you meditate."

"Three hours daily, in morning time. I recite Jain scriptures. I say prayers."

"Tell me one. I want to write it down."

He said, or rather intoned,

I forgive all beings.
May all beings forgive me.
I have friendship with all,
And vengeance with none.

He went to sleep soon after that, while I scribbled, thinking: This man is the perfect traveling companion.

***

JAIPUR JUNCTION STATION
in the middle of the night was crowded with people, though in India it was hard to tell the travelers from the squatters. Even in the dark hours of the morning there were chatterers and tea drinkers under the glaring lights, family groups huddled over pots of food, some people sleeping in heaps, stretched out like mummies, or like corpses in body bags. Others were haggling over tickets, and dawn was far off.

"Get a coolie" were Kapoorchand's parting words.

I left him to his arduous pursuit of virtue. I didn't need a coolie. I needed a taxi. A group of touts and drivers, tugging my sleeves, followed me outside, and I chose the oldest of them, on the assumption that he would be the most reliable, and we settled on the fare before I got into his old car. He drove me into the darkness, but kept his word. And even at that hour I found a welcome at the hotel, and a glass of juice, and a cozy room; I slept soundly.

I had stayed in this hotel before, the Rambagh Palace, but it had been barer then, a big echoey place of marble halls. In the morning I saw it was now luxurious.

"I did not see the inside of a train station, I did not take a train or
board a bus, until I was in my late teens," an Indian woman told me at the Rambagh Palace.

She was in her early forties, a well-brought-up woman from a good family who had always gone to school in a chauffeur-driven car. "I never saw a poor person. I never saw a slum. I never took public transport. I didn't know how to buy a ticket. Home to school, school to home—that was the routine. But one day I rebelled. I was about seventeen or eighteen. I told the driver, 'I'm walking home.' He followed me in the car. He was afraid for me, and afraid of what my father would say. But walking home, and then taking trains later, I finally saw what India was really like. And I was so shocked. I had no idea such poor people existed in India."

In the market and antique shops of Jodhpur I had seen a number of reverse-glass paintings that had attracted me, and one had bewitched me. This was a painting of an Indian Nautch girl—a dancing girl—caught in a sinuous move, intentionally teasing, probably painted in the middle or late nineteenth century, with Chinese characters in black brushstrokes on the wood-slatted back, and set in a decaying frame. I wasn't sizing it up. I was teased, indeed falling in love. It was an old feeling.

The collector's instinct, which is also a powerful appetite, begins with a glimpse of something singular, and a smile of recognition. The technique of painting on the back of a pane of glass, building up effects that were visible when viewed from the front, was European in origin (a cheaper and quicker version of stained glass); but the style of this piece was Chinese, the subject secular and unusually sensual. Europeans in the eighteenth century introduced this technique to India, where it flourished. The Chinese had learned reverse-glass painting from early Jesuits in China at about the same time or earlier, and some itinerant Chinese artists eventually reached India, where they produced many of these secular pictures. Portraits of royals and dancing girls and scenes from the
Ramayana
had been painted, and Indian artists had begun creating their own reverse-glass paintings—theirs were of Krishna and Shiva, Ganesh and Hanuman—in brighter colors, with highlights of gold and silver.

What entranced me was that, though these paintings were superb, they were not treasures in the classic sense, not yet very popular with
the big-money buyers. They were beloved objects from a simple household, created by an individual hand, someone with enthusiasm and vision.

I bought the painting of the Nautch girl (probably done by a Chinese painter in Gujarat) and looked for more. It was not easy to find others, but I was delighted by the variety I encountered—religious, mythical, erotic—and by the out-of-the-way places where I found them.

Traveling with, say, something like glass painting in mind (it could also be lime pots, weavings, tribal earrings, Deccan daggers, or the bestiary of molded brass handles from palanquins), it is possible to make an amateur study merely by wandering in the bazaars. Yet another pleasure of traveling in India is the dawdling in antique shops, in markets and museums, talking to dealers and collectors and connoisseurs. After you've seen hundreds of the paintings, some dusty, some cracked, taken out of drawers and attics and cupboards, you begin to develop an eye, to distinguish the real from the fake, the good from the hastily contrived ones.