Magic Bus (29 page)

‘
Namaste
,' he replies, pressing his hands together in the respectful manner of an older India. Meaning ‘I bow to you' in Sanskrit. ‘Not every Westerner was middle class, you know.'

‘Even the poorest Welshman was rich beyond most Indian's dreams.'

‘I hated to see the exploitation.'

‘Your lofty ideals were never much appreciated,' says the businessman, affecting a striking balance between polite curiosity and hostility. He's in his mid-thirties, stocky and strong, with deep brown eyes and oily, trimmer-clipped hair. He wears jeans and boots.

‘I've read that our influence wasn't welcomed by everyone,' I tell him.

‘It's true that, in the sixties, India hadn't opened its eyes,' he goes on in the tone of an MBA graduate. ‘Most Indians were happy with their lot, believing that God lived among the poor, that a guest was your god, that it was
our
religious duty to help the traveller. Hippies were attracted to this “simple” contentment. But
we had survived long enough on curd and bananas. Now, if you'll excuse me.'

I want to ask the businessman more but he cuts us off, turning his attention back to his work. So I twist my head – there's not enough room to turn my body – to Jonathan.

‘And the sitar?' I ask, nodding at his case.

‘When the Bangladesh war closed the borders, I couldn't afford to fly home,' he says, distracted, an eye on our neighbour. ‘To make money I got into mix music.'

‘Mix music?'

‘The Royal Liverpool was one of the first orchestras to mix Indian soloists with a Western symphony. In 1955, the tabla master Ali Akbar Khan cut an album with Yehudi Menuhin. Then Shankar and Menuhin played together in '66, around the time that Mayer started Indo-Jazz Fusions.' As the train settles into its rhythm, Jonathan too regains his momentum. ‘I loved the sound, that crossover, so I started studying Indian technique.'

As the Beatles introduced the sitar to pop, classical musicians melded East and West, breaking away from the traditional structure of the chord sequence, laying the foundations of world music.

‘Britain offered me a job, a mortgage, the Bee Gees. I didn't want to spend my life paying for crap, listening to crap. That wasn't my scene. India gave me room to breathe, to find myself. For that I am deeply grateful.'

In a low marsh alongside the rails, naked boys pull at water-lily roots, collecting snails for supper. Behind them, their fathers harvest modest rice paddies by hand. A water buffalo, with only its head visible, stands motionless in the water. As our filthy metal tube clatters past the fields, its whistle blowing off-key, an egret lifts into the sky, a flash of white against the emerald shoots.

The businessman, whose name is Arun, looks again at Jonathan. ‘So we've known India for the same number of years,' he says, an edge of anger in his voice. ‘I was born about the time you decided that life was a succession of
lassis
.'

‘Not for everyone,' I say.

In 1968, the year of Arun's birth and Jonathan's arrival, India
teetered on the cusp of revolution. After Independence and Partition, with its appalling loss of life, Nehru came to power championing a vision of a secular, tolerant India. His socialist democracy set about abolishing feudal estates and building steel mills. His dream caught the imagination of India's youth, who made him an icon of the optimistic new age. But, in private, Nehru saw himself only as ‘a traveller, limping along in the dark night' and, by his death in 1964, much that he fought for proved illusory. His grand economic policies were overambitious. A massive influx of refugees, mostly from east Pakistan, precipitated a national crisis. Rice, wheat and sugar had to be rationed following a failed monsoon and severe droughts. China seized parts of the North-East Frontier. A staggering 60 million unemployed – about 10 per cent of the population – harboured huge resentment against the system.

In their frustration, many young Indians turned to spiritual cults or extremist militant groups. A peasant uprising in Naxalbari in Darjeeling became the flashpoint for armed revolt. The Naxal guerrillas imported communist ideals and aimed to force revolution on India. They rejected electoral politics and called for a return to an agrarian economy.

Five years later, the ‘Emergency', when wide powers were given to the prime minister, finally crushed the movement by suspending fundamental rights. Thousands were held without trial. The press was censored. In a joke printed at the time in the underground newspaper the
Battledrum
, Gandhi rose from the dead to ask Indira, now leader, what had happened to his India.

‘Where are my spectacles?' he asked her.

‘We gave them to the hippies.'

‘Where is my
dhoti?
' His homespun loin-cloth.

‘We gave it to the hippies.'

‘Where is my stick?'

‘That we've kept to ram up the rectums of Indians.'

Arun looks at his Rolex and says, ‘I suppose we should be grateful to you for perpetrating the myth of self-discovery.' His dark eyes are resolute yet dart about the hot compartment. ‘That at least did wonders for our foreign-currency reserves.'

‘Why are you so hard on him?' I ask.

‘Because his generation was so naive,' Arun says to me. ‘No wonder Bhagwan and the Maharishi managed to fleece them so successfully. I do admire those gurus. They sold themselves with the same smart marketing that sold flower power.' He goes on, ‘You know Sai Baba used to pull a stream of ash and watches from the air? When the Mumbai magician P. C. Sorcar Jnr met him, he conjured up a watch, an alarm clock and a plate of
rassogolla
, a milky sweet dripping with syrup.'

‘Sai Baba was a charlatan,' says Jonathan, now irritated. ‘Bhag-wan fled his ashram, leaving behind ninety-three Rolls-Royces. The Maharishi also failed because of materialism. All he wanted was a Western mind and washing machines.'

‘You can't say he failed, not with his annual turnover,' says Arun. ‘The gurus' mistake was not having an exit strategy.'

‘I once heard a story about an American student flying into Delhi,' I say. ‘He dropped some LSD, then stripped off all his clothes and started to run up and down the aisle, claiming to have been a
sadhu
in his past life, crying out, “Daddy, I'm coming home!” The stewards and stewardesses sat on him to restrain him.'

Arun smiles, ‘Those were the days when Air India promised nirvana to tourists for $10 a day.'

‘Costs a bit more today,' I say.

As we speak, the train thunders across another bridge, the noise halting conversations, the shadows of girders strobing across our faces. The smells of scorched metal and spices waft into our carriage, mixing with the coarse heat of bodies. A tray of nuts and seeds appears in the doorway of the compartment, held aloft by a skinny, serious boy. Jonathan cuts across his sales cry, saying, ‘Once, I was travelling alone on a train. I got out to stretch my legs and came back to find my backpack had been stolen. “Do not worry, sir, there are many poor people in India,” the conductor told me. So I learnt that money didn't matter.'

Arun gapes at him – the modern Indian unable to understand the romantic Welsh convert – then looks out of the window.

The sun burns through the thin clouds, delivering a noontime
heat at half-past nine in the morning. Poor, line-side homes open on to the rails. Our sweltering express runs between their front rooms and blue-tile temples. At Laksar, the platform is so long that, as the train slows, announcements are heard over seven or eight times along the run of tannoys. Shoeless sweepers press their brooms between the crowds. A porter loses his load of green bananas. The distant locomotive's departure whistle can hardly be heard above the rattle of the carriage's fans.

‘Hippies weren't considered bad hats at first,' says Arun, still peering out of the window. ‘The majority of Indians knew nothing about them and their drug culture until
Haré Rama Haré Krishna
.'

Now Jonathan looks away with a sigh. ‘Dreams died with that movie,' he admits, playing with his fingers in obvious anxiety.

In 1971 Bollywood produced an unexpected blockbuster. In the film, Zeenat Aman – a former Miss India – ran away from home to follow the hippie trail to Nepal. The hit song ‘
Dum Maro Dum
' caused a sensation, as did the sight of stoned Westerners twisting and kissing in a candle-lit Kathmandu night-club. ‘Dope Take Dope' began with a whoosh of exhaled smoke and swelled into a Doors-like rhythm as Aman, lost and disillusioned, danced with the flower children. A Hendrix lookalike played the guitar. ‘Free Love' was tattooed on a man stripped to the waist. Later, Aman killed herself; a first cinematic casualty in the fusion of East and West.

Jonathan says, ‘At every tea stall, in every bazaar, people chanted “
Dum Maro Dum
”.'

‘And when we tired of singing the song, you became her murderers,' Arun says to Jonathan.

In India and Pakistan, newspapers started to turn against the transcendental intruders. Indira Gandhi, having once welcomed the hippies as ‘children of India', now criticized their careless dressing and hedonism. The
Rawalpindi Sun
wrote, ‘It is tragic indeed that our youth should indiscriminately try to ape Western values.'

‘When we hear about the so-called independence of the Western woman – bouncing around in mini-skirts and bell-bottoms
trying to take a last go at life, let us not close our eyes to their ordeals,' continued the article. ‘Imagine a girl in a snow storm and bone-chilling winds waiting at a bus-stop in order to reach her office in time to avoid the dirty looks of her boss. Imagine her sitting on typewriter for eight hours, coming back wet and tired to her apartment, with no one to welcome her. What can this independent girl do but take a double Scotch and start cooking the dinner?'

The correspondent concluded, ‘I fail to understand the reasons which prompt our boys and girls to be lured by the so-called advanced Western civilization.'

‘Do you know Gandhi's comment on Western civilization?' asks Jonathan. ‘He said he thought it was a good idea.
Haré Rama Haré Krishna
was part of the commercial crap we'd tried to leave behind.'

A laugh escapes from Arun. ‘The paradox is you brought it with you,' he says.

‘And you embraced it,' replies Jonathan.

The train runs on. The Ganges plain spreads toward the horizon, its large, fertile fields surrounded by poplars. Cow pats dry for winter fuel beneath the high-tension pylons. Within a few hours' journey are four of Hinduism's holiest sites, as well as the city where the Buddha first preached his message. Across from the Taj Mahal, there stands – as in Istanbul – a Pizza Hut.

‘
Rishi Bhoomi
,' says Jonathan, looking out of the window. ‘The Land of Sages is what Indians call this country. There's meant to be a sage destined to teach enlightenment to every seeker.'

Arun raises his eyebrows and glances up from his laptop. He says, ‘A devotee asks his guru, “What should I seek in the cradle of civilization?” The guru looks at the man with infinite compassion and answers, “Zanussi”.'

At a hundred oval work stations, students in saris and baseball caps book flights from Gatwick and JFK to Johannesburg and Sydney. Calls from Paris, Dublin and Frankfurt are routed to Delhi. Beneath posters of Spanish footballers and notices about a pending Royal Mail strike, the young sales staff work four-hour shifts, usually after class, reading their horoscopes and loading Ganesh idol screen-savers between calls. A technician, having inadvertently stubbed his toe against a hard drive, touches his forehead and heart with his right hand to pay respect to Saraswati, the goddess of learning. I'm reminded that Indians have a gift for transforming the prosaic into the extraordinary, whereas the travel industry ferrets out the unique and turns it into the mundane.

Arun is a tourism consultant. On the phone, he becomes Arnie. Next to him, French-speaking Manisha is Monique. Beyond a potted palm sits Jaideep.

‘Call me Jerry,' he says, holding out his hand.

Their employer is Tecnovat Data, the Indian subsidiary of ebookers, a European dot.com owned by the American travel-and property-services provider Cendant. Its open-plan operations floor, with screens and keyboards, could be in Croydon or Kalama-zoo. In the back office, another five hundred employees issue tickets, settle accounts and crunch numbers for a dozen other European and American travel agencies. In the free staff canteen, Team UK watch BBC World, read the British papers and try to keep up with events on
Coronation Street
. The German team discusses the
Füssball Weltmeisterschaft
and Air Berlin's new schedule.

‘The European markets are still sensitive to overseas call centres,' says Arun, slipping on his headset. ‘So we try to give the impression of being a local operation.'

‘What about
Big Brother
?' a pretty operator recites into her headset. ‘Wasn't last night outrageous?'

Only Suomi proved to be a language beyond the abilities of native linguists. So Finnish graduates are enticed to Delhi by the offer of free flights and accommodation in exchange for a year's work at the call centre. Their blond heads bob in a far corner of the office, speaking to Helsinki and Turku, flogging vacations in the exotic East.

‘We're not just selling a product which lets people cross the world,' Arun tells me. ‘We're selling dreams.'

‘Just like the sixties gurus,' I say.

Arun is lucid, ambitious and generous. On the train I asked him to explain his ‘myth' of self-discovery, and he invited me to stay at his Delhi house. I while away the afternoon at Tecnovat talking to his workmates, collecting my email and booking my flight out of Kathmandu. Sixty years ago, Nehru wrote that India was a bundle of contradictions held together by strong and invisible threads. Today, those threads are likely to be the digital cables which link the world.