Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (58 page)

There are shapes and forms which rise out of this natural order. Trees, caves and animal architecture lead naturally to thatched roofs, stone houses and mud walls. If you knew this, you would not choose to put up a roof of corrugated iron. Nor would you think of throwing a plastic bag in a stream, not because of what you have been told about pollution, but because the idea of a plastic bag in a stream is offensive in itself. Without this sense of what is naturally fitting, you can be cleaning up the world with one hand and spreading poison with the other.

It surprised me to discover that this sense of Tightness does not appear naturally in people, even though they live in the heart of nature. In my own village in France the same people who fished the streams shoved every possible kind of refuse and sewage into them, even when offered convenient alternatives. In Nepal, where not a single engine or power line disturbs the mediaeval rusticity of the Himalayan valleys, people shit in their rivers with a dogmatic persistence ensuring that every village is infected by what the people upstream have got.

The Truth obviously does not reveal itself unaided to humans. It has to be uncovered by an effort of consciousness. Or, more likely, it only exists in human consciousness. Without man around to recognize it, there is no Truth, no God.

Yet is it not consciousness that governs the world, nor even ideology, not religious principle or national temperament. It is custom that rules the roost. In Colombia it was the custom to do murder and violence. In a period of ten years, some two hundred thousand people were said to have been killed by acts of more or less private violence. Yet I found the Colombians at least as hospitable, honourable and humane as the Argentinians, whose custom is merely to cheat. Arabs have the custom of showing their emotions and hiding their women. Australians show their women and hide their emotions. In the Sudan it is customary to be honest. In Thailand dishonesty is virtually a custom, but so is giving gifts to strangers.

Every possible variation of nudity and prudishness is the custom somewhere, as with eating habits, toilet practices, to spit or not to spit; and almost all of these customs have become entirely arbitrary and self-perpetuating. Above all it is customary to suspect and despise people in the next valley, or state, or country, particularly if their colour or religion is different. And there are places where it is customary to be at war, like Kurdistan or Vietnam.

Speaking of the more vicious customs, and of men who should have known better, St. Francix Xavier said a long time ago: 'Custom is to them in the place of law, and what they see done before them every day they persuade themselves may be done without sin. For customs bad in themselves seem to these men to acquire authority and prescription from the fact that they are commonly practised.'

Custom is the enemy of awareness, in individuals as much as in societies. It regularizes the fears and cravings of everyday life. I wanted to shake them off. I wanted to use this journey to see things whole and clear,

for I would never pass this way again. I wanted to be rid of the conditioning of habit and custom. To be the slave of custom, at any level, is much like being a monkey, an 'ape of the wayward senses'. To rise above it is already something like becoming a god.

With these elevating thoughts forming in my mind, I rode along narrow country roads among trees in a state bordering on ecstasy, and there did come a moment when I was actually prepared to take seriously the possibility of some semi-divine status. At that very moment, which I only recognized in retrospect, I turned a corner and came upon a
saddhu,
a travelling holy man, his forehead smeared with the colours of his profession, dragging his bundles on to the next shrine. He looked up at me as though he had expected me, and his face showed pure distaste. Then he spat vigorously in my path as I passed him by.

The comment could not have been more appropriate. It had the same electric connection with my thoughts that had so excited me about the flying fish on the
Zoë
G.

Really, I told myself, you could hardly ask for a more convincing demonstration, and I took the hint.

Even so, I did go to see Sai Baba at Whitelands. There was a walled compound the size of a football pitch, with a rain shelter in the middle that could house a lot of people. The holy man apparently lived in an opulent villa at one end of the garden, accessible by a flight of broad stone steps. Scattered around near the villa were several keenly nonchalant young men of the kind you see working for progressive candidates at American conventions. There was a new building going up too, handmade in the Asian tradition with women doing most of the work. When you have seen women working a coal mine in saris, nothing in the field of human labour seems improbable.

I sat on the ground among a mixed crowd of Indians and Europeans, and one of the guru's staff asked me to take off my shoes. Eventually Sai Baba came down the steps with a small group and inspected the building operations. Later he came to look the rest of us over. He looked much as he had in the pictures, in his ankle-length robe of crimson, and his great head of frizzy black hair, but he seemed anxious and preoccupied. A thin red line of betel juice stained his lips. There were no miracles, and he did not even smile. He looked at us in the way a worried farmer might examine his crops for blight, and then he departed. I did not form the impression that he was God, and he seems to have been equally disappointed in me.

On my way up the coast from Mangalore I stopped at Karwar, a poor fishing town in the estuary of the Kalinadi river. I felt like drinking a beer, but alcohol had been banished to the edge of town, in a tumbledown eating house which I remembered afterwards mainly for a priceless fragment of conversation. The waiter brought fish and said:

'Your native place? From?'

London.

'Ah, London proper. You are going?'
I'm going to Goa.

'Ah, Goa going. Nice place. My from is Goa.'

Goa is quite as beautiful as everybody says, but I found it chiefly interesting for what I learned about pigs. It is the excellent custom in India, in the villages, to go out in the morning to whichever field has been specially designated, and leave your daily shit where it is most needed to fertilize the ground. In Goa also this custom is followed, but there is a special problem, because Goanese, unlike most Indians, are
carnivorous
and keep pigs. And pigs, as one may or may not know, eat shit. And the pigs of Goa are very hungry pigs, so that many an unwary person has been knocked off his toes by a charging porker before the completion of his duties.

This kind of information, which most people are sadly conditioned to think of as disgusting, forms a basic element in the life of a traveller, just as its subject matter is a basic element in life itself. The extraordinary taboos that we have raised round the business of shitting lead to far more disgusting prejudices between people, and also to quite serious health problems. To be free of that sense of unreasoning distaste I found to be a major liberation, on a par with freedom in sex.

I did not realize how advanced I was until I read a story in an illustrated Indian magazine edited by Kushwant Singh. He had a little item, headed
Tailpiece,
about a famous Indian operatic soprano who had just died. Her debut, many years earlier before a London audience, had failed rather miserably. She had not been able to bring any conviction to her singing. When asked afterwards what had gone wrong, she said she had not been able to get it out of her head, as she looked out over her distinguished audience in the Wigmore Hall, that all these people smeared their bottoms with pieces of dry paper.

Not only did I think it very funny, but I could sympathize entirely with her point of view. Anyone brought up, as Indians are, to use water, can see that the Western method is quite barbarously inefficient, while on a long journey through poor countries it becomes uncomfortable and offensive. I was often ashamed of the mess that the civilized elite of the Western World left behind them on their trail through South America and Asia, made all the worse through being forced to spend most of their time running for the lavatory.

I was lucky to have very few problems with it myself. Only once in India did I explode, and that was a clear-cut case of food poisoning in a restaurant in Bihar. I stopped in several fields on my way to Calcutta, and composed a poem while contemplating the landscape.

The food in Bihar is rather bizarre,

One should not stray far after lunch in Bihar,

Not even as far as the local bazaar,

For none can outrun the food in Bihar.

I went on through Bombay and north to Jaipur and Delhi, and from there I turned east through Kanpur to Gorakhpur, where a route runs north over the Himalayan foothills to Pokhara in Nepal.

Luckily I did not have to waste breath or energy on things which often give visitors to India so much trouble and offence. I was used to poverty, to different standards of hygiene, to the visible effects of disease and malnutrition. I knew how to frame questions so that the other person would know what answer I expected. I did not assume that something was possible only because it seemed easy to me. I stopped looking for objective truth and efficiency, and learned to value other things instead. And I loved the food.

I became saturated with Indian attitudes, but always there were more surprises. In Bombay I saw a newly released American film, full of violence and shootings. In Europe I would have shrugged it off, but there it made me squirm and choke with horror. What made the audience shudder most, though, was a happy scene in which the cowboy hero marks his cattle with a branding iron.

I saw women making a highway, by hand, circulating in vast numbers like beasts of burden with baskets of granite chips on their heads under the indifferent eye of a male supervisor. It seemed dehumanizing, but at least they had work of sorts.

I saw every kind of load carried. Every kind of procession came my way. Every kind of animal drew every kind of cart, and every kind of vehicle either passed me or lay in ruins by the roadside.

In Ahmedabad, two women came towards me like yoked oxen towing a heavily-loaded cart. Both wore the same saris and bodices of red and yellow. Their heads and faces were completely wrapped in saffron muslin. They were moving with extraordinary vigour, and made an unforgettable sight. It was impossible to believe, because of their very vitality, that they were suffering.

On the way from Gorakhpur to Nepal, on a long, silent, empty country road, came a sight I never thought to see in this half of the century: two wiry, barefooted men in sky blue turbans and shawls jogging along with a litter on their shoulders. I stopped, transfixed, as they went past. The plush red curtains of the litter were drawn open. Inside a young man sat
cross legged
, idly regarding the countryside. He was dressed in English clothes and was wearing a blazer and an old school tie.

But I could not accept what I saw in Bombay, when I was taken past the 'cages'. I stared goggle-eyed at prostitutes apparently enslaved behind great iron grills set into the doorways. I found the posturing women, the heavy iron bars, the theatrical lighting inside these prisons, so grotesque that my mind would not grasp it as reality.

In Kanpur (or Cawnpore as the British spelled it in the days of the Mutiny) I stayed at the old Orient Hotel. It was in a disgraceful state of dilapidation. My room was one of a number of cardboard boxes put up inside a once-grand ballroom, and I could hear the rats scampering across the dance floor. The facilities were abysmal, but one feature of the old days had been kept intact. Two beautifully maintained billiard tables gleamed under brilliant lights in a room behind the bar, and some town swells were playing a highly affected game.

One of them looked as though he belonged in a cigarette advertisement of the twenties. His black hair was plastered down flat. He wore a little

patterned bow tie. His check tweed jacket was square shouldered and as immaculately pressed as though it were on a shop window dummy. He held himself absolutely rigid above the waist, and glided back and forth like a tango dancer.

The other player wore more traditional Indian clothing; a long white shirt, baggy trousers brought in tight above the knees, a long and luxurious camel hair waistcoat, all worn with such style and arrogance that I felt like applauding. In fascination I watched as they swaggered and sported, sipping at barely concealed illegal drinks, their faces busy with the nonstop ritual of knowing glances. They spoke Hindi, but a masterful shot was acclaimed in English with the quaint cry of 'Well!' They seemed to be trapped in their own creation of some bygone sporting era, and I did not see how they would ever be able to escape.

Just before midnight I went out for a walk. The broad street was black and empty, the alleyways impenetrable. A huge advertisement leered down from the facade above my head, showing an Indian couple in swimming trunks and bikini, and announcing:

stomach gas & sex problems. consult dr. whosit.

A train of wagons was coming towards me. They were drays moving silently on rubber tyres, each one drawn by two water buffalo. The drays were long flat platforms without sides, and littered with sacking. There were eight of them, making a very long train, and each one had a driver, almost invisible under cotton wraps and
head cloth
. Only the first driver seemed to be truly awake, and his stick made a regular dull thwack against the buffalo hide.

Heaven knows how far they had come or how far they were going. Among the sacks I saw other peasants sleeping, and I guessed they were returning to their villages after delivering produce. The buffaloes looked more than usually mournful in the night, with their long necks straining out in front of them, heads lolling hopelessly, heavy black bodies plodding low to the ground, making hardly any sound on the tar.

The movement was as inexorable as it was slow, and I stood and watched until the last of the long line had vanished into the cold December night. They came into my life and left it like ghosts from the past and I was deeply moved.

On my way back I saw a man, pathetic and shivering in threadbare cotton, praying to a demonic red figure of Kali in a tiny stone temple next to a garage. A little further along a man with a distracted air in thin trousers and shirt attacked me with the story of his misery.