Personally, I think it was the tokoloshe that made South Africa hold back, divert the consequences of the past. South Africans lay awake in the hot night and heard the panting and the muffled sharpening of little goblin pangas and knew what the fears made flesh would bring. The tokoloshe still lurks under the bed, but the longer this normalcy goes on, the smaller the fears that feed him.
Cockroaches live everywhere we
do, but they aren't our competitors
or the scuttling, creepy enemy to
be squashed underfoot. Rather,
they are fellow travellers.
Who was Gregor Samsa, and what does he have in common with nuclear Armageddon, the Rwandan genocide and an Australian rugby league team? We'll come back to that. A couple of years ago I wrote a story about goldmining in Johannesburg. The shaft goes down two kilometres. The alleys come off the central shaft like the veins and arteries of a body, and a new capillary is blown out every morning and the rubble cleared every afternoon. At this depth, the rock is almost too hot to touch. When it was formed, when it last saw the light of day, the sky was red and there was no atmosphere. It's pre-oxygen. This rock is older than life. In the seam of rubble, with the mile or so of roof held up by crooked steel jacks, in the light of my helmet, I was seeing something that no one and nothing had ever seen before.
I crouched in the heat and the dust in this little rock cellar thinking deep, deep, deep thoughts. And then something tickled my hand â I looked down and there was a cockroach. Three hours before, this was solid, hot, mineral blackness, and here was this bug, questing, pushing the frontiers of cockiness. Roaches live everywhere we do. In the hot, stony dark they were here eating the residue of the explosives.
âCockroach' is, of course, the answer to what Gregor Samsa was. He is the subject of Franz Kafka's
Metamorphosis
, the guy who wakes up to find he is a cockroach. Roaches were always supposed to be the main benefactors of a nuclear war. Cockroaches are what the Hutus called the Tutsis in Rwanda, making it easier to slaughter them. And I'm told it's also the New South Wales rugby league side's informal nickname, for reasons I didn't ask or wish to be told. As far as I'm concerned, you can never know too little about sport.
But the roach's nuclear radioactive invincibility is now being questioned. In universities in the '70s, no discussion of the Cold War could finish without someone pointing out that as cockroaches were able to sustain more than six times the radiation of humans, they would become in a flash the top of the rearranged evolutionary pyramid â and would quite literally inherit the earth and all the wreckage thereof, ushering in a new age where six legs and two antennae were good.
Not so, it turns out. We were wrong about nuclear annihilation and the Cold War, and we were also wrong about the cockroaches. They can indeed endure more radiation than us (radiation particularly afflicts cells that divide. Ours tend to divide quite a lot; roaches' only divide when they're changing out of their work clothes, which is about once a week). But scientists are now saying the critters would last only a year or two after we'd gone. They would pine away without us. Cockroaches, it transpires sweetly, aren't our competitors or the scuttling, creepy enemy to be squashed underfoot. Rather they are our fellow travellers. We're joined together at an alimentary level. We feed them, and without us and our refuse, they would waste away.
This has made me feel quite differently about the roach, and I have had what can only be called a Gregor Samsa moment. I am searching for my inner cockroach. I must strive if not to love them, then to realise we share the same bathroom and kitchen in life for a reason. I must understand they are as much allegorical as insect.
âCockroach' was a term some radical Latin American writers used to identify the invisible, persecuted immigrant workers in the United States. They even had a song, âLa Cucaracha'. And I'm trying to remember memorable or entertaining cockroaches that have passed though my life. It's difficult.
There was the kitchen in Delhi where I went one night to get a glass of water from the old colonial stone filter and thought the floor crunchy with spilt sugar, until the next morning when I saw my footprints perfectly captured in hundreds of dead roaches. And there was the London hotel restaurant where I was briefly a dishwasher. If you flicked on the light in the scullery, the room seemed to shiver â there was a momentary flicker, like a camera shutter. It was the carpet of roaches sprinting for cover. I also remember a vast one I reluctantly shared a shower with in Port-au-Prince, and the 500 I shared a boiled terrapin with in Saigon.
I'm trying to find some fondness, some liberal sense of multicultural, multi-species togetherness with the cockroach, but I can't. Likewise, I suppose I'm also trying to find something positive and winning to say about parties. It's a Freudian slip, that asked to contribute to the magazine's party issue I come up with insect vermin. But I've always been very bad at parties. Even in the short, frenetic period when I was good at them, I was really appalling at parties.
I have been to some astonishing ones over the years. Just taking New Year's Eve, for example, there was a candlelit castle which sat in the sea off Sri Lanka where we had to wade up to our waists in the warmly lapping Indian Ocean to get to the turbaned waiters with the champagne. There was a swimming pool in Bali in a thunderstorm with a roast pig. A tented camp in the Kalahari with a dozen Germans in fancy dress. A yacht in the Caribbean on a sea fluorescent with DayGlo. There have been penthouses and snowy cabins, with punch and mulled wine, with fireworks and cabarets, with cocktails and topless samba dancers. With people I've loved and people whose language I don't speak. And every time I've yearned for the first bellow of âshould auld acquaintance be forgot' because I can't wait to forget all of them. To get through the sticky alcoholic kisses and the soggy bear-hugs so I can leave and go home to bed.
I have never been to a party I didn't think could be improved by fewer people. The only thing I enjoy less than other people's lavish hospitality is my own. Years ago I gave up giving communally. It made me too miserable. I clearly haven't come to terms with my inner cockroach, the ability to be singular in company, to catch a common mood and gain happiness from the propinquity of happy people. A jolly community depresses me. Small talk is too much of a mouthful. I'm bad at flirting and worse at being flirted at, and I despise myself for not being able to just join in, to get up and dance on a table once in a while.
Oh, to be Gregor Samsa, to wake up one New Year's Day to discover that at last, finally, I'd metamorphosed.
Utah may be better known
for the fervour of its resident
Mormons, but this state is
also home to the West's most
pervasive morality play.
Give them the barest, skinniest streak of half a chancy idea, and people will believe anything. Somewhere, sometime, someone has put their hands on their hearts and believed everything. There is no human thought so logically bankrupt that someone isn't hanging it up as one of the solemn truths of their lives, and God gave us Utah just to prove it.
Utah is pretty much monopoly Mormon. Now I don't want to wee on anyone's cherished and precious soft centre, but the history and beliefs of the Mormons would make a Rastafarian blow his cheeks out, roll his eyes and click his fingers in incredulous wonder. But then I quite admire that. Faith is all about a step into the mystical. It is the trust in the unknowable. So the more unbelievable and unknowable, the bigger the leap of faith. And when you come from the land of Anglicanism, which is no more than dipping your toe in while holding on to the secular handrail, I'm rather envious of the belly-flop belief in Utah.
Utah came to me as a revelation, which is biblically appropriate. I didn't mean to visit it â I was actually in Colorado for a kid's holiday, but we just sort of edged on in to Utah, and it's astonishing. Outside of America, it's not in the top 20 states people want to visit. In fact, the Mormons only settled there after they'd been moved on from everywhere else with pickaxe handles. There is the story that Brigham Young promised that after their 40 days in the wilderness he would lead the Mormons to the land of milk and honey that God had promised them. The weather got worse and worse, and the land got harder and harder, and the Indians ever more hostile and the Mormons were complaining and moaning, and finally they came across this great lake. Here we are, said Young, this land will bloom with our crops and our livestock; this is the land of milk and honey. And he took a drink of the water. And it was salty. Okay, newsflash, he spluttered. God says you can have as many wives as you can handle.
Utah is a breathtaking landscape of red sandstone bluffs and weirdly sculptured cliffs and precipitously balanced stone. It has pinnacles and canyons and deserts and huge mountains all arranged in a shimmering beauty. The desert is full of aromatic plants that smell of turpentine and stunted acid pine and juniper. In the evening, it's like opening the door to an old garden shed. We stood on 2000-foot cliffs and looked down at rivers that had carved serpentine canyons. In the sunset, the whole pink and russet sky cast a last glare over 100 miles of wilderness that in scale and colour and texture, and surreal imagination, is unrivalled anywhere. It all ended up with the horizon of Monument Valley.
And there were so few people here. This was a place that made the Lake District look like a cottage garden, and the South of France a municipal roundabout. We camped on a high cliff and watched the world without a single electric light or human noise. It was as Brigham Young first saw it, except without the maniac voices in my head. Above us the vapour-trails of jets flew smart people from Los Angeles to New York, and I stared at them as they turned pink and then headed into the clear dome of the night sky. They were as distant and as alien to this place as you can imagine.
All landscapes come with an atmosphere, a sense of narrative, a back-catalogue of plot. They aren't created with it; we bring it with us. It's our contribution to the picnic of nature: we give it a reason. It doesn't want one or need one, but we do. We have to organise the view into some sort of coherent story that has some place for us. We geomorphise the world to fit it into our heads. The thing about Utah is that while it's astonishingly conceived and echoingly empty, it has a whole library of plots. This landscape of Utah is the theatre for the greatest genre in the world ever. This is the set and the background for cowboys.
There is a continuous sense of déjà vu here. You know this place, you know what happens. You have the soundtrack in your head. It's very nearly a spiritual experience. The cowboy story has gone around the world. This landscape is the Vatican of that story. It is riding into the sunset. It is the church of a man doing what a man's gotta do. This landscape is the great tablet of rock that the commandments of good and evil, and righteous endings are written on.
We all know the code of the West, the strict morality of the cowboy story. For 100 years, it's been the simile and metaphor for our behaviour. It's one of the guiding clichés of politics, and the model for conflict. And it's all here in these silent, massive, tortured soft rocks. This is the truth about Utah's arid land. But it isn't The Truth. This place is also home to the enigmatic predecessors of the Indians who were such a necessary part of the cowboy story. They themselves are relatively recent immigrants. Before them in this place lived pastoralists who were simply called the basket people. They grew minute corn and squash and wove baskets. Apparently they cooked in baskets. They had failed to learn pottery. Now missing pottery is pretty basic. Not getting the wheel or writing or condoms is understandable, but not discovering mud is frankly, in evolutionary terms, an F.
Nobody knows why the basket people failed to notice clay. Perhaps they looked up at the astonishing landscape and thought, better not touch the dust children of the big stones. You know people will believe absolutely anything. You look at this panorama and believe cowboys and Indians and getting the girl and riding off into the sunset.
Temper your fears and
love Calcutta.
India is the way station between tourist and traveller. You remember the declension: I am a traveller, he is a tourist, they are trippers. Well, New York's a trip, Bali's tourism, Varanasi's travelling. I must say that I think the well-rounded and inquisitive life includes a bit of all three, but there are people who never get to travel. It's not money or opportunity â it's cheaper to be a traveller than a tripper â they're too busy or too squeamish or too frightened.
And India is where they stumble. Not travelling to Turkestan or Texas is understandable. They're ugly, angry and the food's filthy, the accommodation grim. Of course, there are wonderful things to see and experience, but it's like eating whelks â only the really keen see the effort worth the reward. But India has the lot. It's the destination of destinations. Whatever it is you're looking for, India has it with six arms on.
But still people will shy at it. âIndia? I don't think I could. No, I know it's wonderful, but the poverty, the begging, the deformity, the lavatories, the smell.' And I've come to realise that no amount of proselytising will change their minds; best to put away the snaps and say, well, it'll still be there if you change your mind.
Having said that, I want to try to get some of you to go to the most exciting and rewarding place I went to last year. Even those travellers who happily embark on India will be unlikely to have taken the detour to take in Calcutta. Those on a limited budget, or pressed for time, will find other places come beckoning more sweetly. Calcutta's reputation is not good. In fact, it's probably the all-round bookies' favourite for the worst place in the world. The black hole of black holes. Mother Teresa could've gone anywhere in the world in her bid for sainthood, but this was the mother lode.