To the Ends of the Earth (6 page)

A
T SEVEN-FIFTEEN, THE DRIVER OF THE RAILCAR INSERTED A
long-handled crank into the engine and gave it a jerk. The engine shook and coughed and, still juddering and smoking, began to whine. Within minutes we were on the slope, looking down at the top of Kalka Station, where in the train yard two men were winching a huge steam locomotive around in a circle. The railcar’s speed was a steady ten miles an hour, zigzagging in and out of the steeply pitched hill, reversing on switchbacks through the terraced gardens and the white flocks of butterflies. We passed through several tunnels before I noticed they were numbered; a large number 4 was painted over the entrance of the next one. The man seated beside me, who had told me he was a civil servant in Simla, said there were 103 tunnels all together. I tried not to notice the numbers after that. Outside the car, there was a sheer drop, hundreds of feet down, for the railway, which was opened in 1904, is cut directly into the hillside, and the line above is notched like the skidway on a toboggan run, circling the hills.

After thirty minutes everyone in the railcar was asleep except the civil servant and me. At the little stations along the way, the postman in the rear seat awoke from his doze to throw a mailbag out the window to a waiting porter on the platform. I tried to take pictures, but the landscape eluded me: one vista shifted into another, lasting only seconds, a dizzying displacement of hill and air, of haze and all the morning shades of green. The meat-grinder cogs working against the rack under the railcar ticked like an aging clock and made me drowsy. I took out my inflatable pillow, blew it up, put it under my head, and slept peacefully in the sunshine until I was awakened by the thud of the railcar’s brakes and the banging of doors.

“Ten minutes,” said the driver.

We were just below a wooden structure, a doll’s house, its window boxes overflowing with red blossoms, and moss trimming its wide eaves. This was Bangu Station. It had a wide complicated veranda on which a waiter stood with a menu under his arm. The railcar passengers scrambled up the stairs. I smelled eggs and coffee and heard the Bengalis quarreling with the waiters in English.

I walked down the gravel paths to admire the well-tended flower beds and the carefully mown lengths of turf beside the track; below the station a rushing stream gurgled, and signs there, and near the flower beds, read
NO PLUCKING
. A waiter chased me down to the stream and called out, “We have juices! You like fresh mango juice? A little porridge? Coffee-tea?”

We resumed the rise, and the time passed quickly as I dozed again and woke to higher mountains, with fewer trees, stonier slopes, and huts perched more precariously. The haze had disappeared and the hillsides were bright, but the air was cool and a fresh breeze blew through the open windows of the railcar. In every tunnel the driver switched on orange lamps, and the racket of the clattering wheels increased and echoed. After Solon the only people in the railcar were a family of Bengali pilgrims (all of them sound asleep, snoring, their faces turned up), the civil servant, the postman, and me. The next stop was Solon Brewery, where the air was pungent with yeast and hops, and after that we
passed through pine forests and cedar groves. On one stretch a baboon the size of a six-year-old crept off the tracks to let us go by. I remarked on the largeness of the creature.

The civil servant said, “There was once a
saddhu
—a holy man—who lived near Simla. He could speak to monkeys. A certain Englishman had a garden, and all the time the monkeys were causing him trouble. Monkeys can be very destructive. The Englishman told this
saddhu
his problem. The
saddhu
said, ‘I will see what I can do.’ Then the
saddhu
went into the forest and assembled all the monkeys. He said, ‘I hear you are troubling the Englishman. That is bad. You must stop; leave his garden alone. If I hear that you are causing damage I will treat you very harshly.’ And from that time onward the monkeys never went into the Englishman’s garden.”

“Do you believe the story?”

“Oh, yes. But the man is now dead—the
saddhu
. I don’t know what happened to the Englishman. Perhaps he went away, like the rest of them.”

A little farther on, he said, “What do you think of India?”

“It’s a hard question,” I said. I wanted to tell him about the children I had seen that morning pathetically raiding the leftovers of my breakfast, and ask him if he thought there was any truth in Mark Twain’s comment on Indians: “It is a curious people. With them, all life seems to be sacred except human life.” But I added instead, “I haven’t been here very long.”

“I will tell you what I think,” he said. “If all the people who are talking about honesty, fair play, socialism, and so forth—if they began to practice it themselves, India will do well. Otherwise there will be a revolution.”

He was an unsmiling man in his early fifties and had the stern features of a Brahmin. He neither drank nor smoked, and before he joined the civil service he had been a Sanskrit scholar in an Indian university. He got up at five every morning, had an apple, a glass of milk, and some almonds; he washed and said his prayers and after that took a long walk. Then he went to his office. To set an example for his
junior officers he always walked to work, he furnished his office sparsely, and he did not require his bearer to wear a khaki uniform. He admitted that his example was unpersuasive. His junior officers had parking permits, sumptuous furnishings, and uniformed bearers.

“I ask them why all this money is spent for nothing. They tell me to make a good first impression is very important. I say to the blighters, ‘What about
second
impression?’ ”

Blighters
was a word that occurred often in his speech. Lord Clive was a blighter and so were most of the other viceroys. Blighters ask for bribes; blighters try to cheat the Accounts Department; blighters are living in luxury and talking about socialism. It was a point of honor with this civil servant that he had never in his life given or received
baksheesh:
“Not even a single paisa.” Some of his clerks had, and in eighteen years in the civil service he had personally fired thirty-two people. He thought it might be a record. I asked him what they had done wrong.

“Gross incompetence,” he said, “pinching money, hanky-panky. But I never fire anyone without first having a good talk with his parents. There was a blighter in the Audit Department, always pinching girls’ bottoms. Indian girls from good families! I warned him about this, but he wouldn’t stop. So I told him I wanted to see his parents. The blighter said his parents lived fifty miles away. I gave him money for their bus fare. They were poor, and they were quite worried about the blighter. I said to them, ‘Now I want you to understand that your son is in deep trouble. He is causing annoyance to the lady members of this department. Please talk to him and make him understand that if this continues, I will have no choice but to sack him.’ Parents go away, blighter goes back to work, and ten days later he is at it again. I suspended him on the spot, then I charge-sheeted him.”

I wondered whether any of these people had tried to take revenge on him.

“Yes, there was one. He got himself drunk one night and came to my house with a knife. ‘Come outside and I will kill you!’ That sort of thing. My wife was upset. But I was
angry. I couldn’t control myself. I dashed outside and fetched the blighter a blooming kick. He dropped his knife and began to cry. ‘Don’t call the police,’ he said. ‘I have a wife and children.’ He was a complete coward, you see. I let him go and everyone criticized me—they said I should have brought charges. But I told them he’ll never bother anyone again.

“And there was another time. I was working for Heavy Electricals, doing an audit for some cheaters in Bengal. Faulty construction, double entries, and estimates that were five times what they should have been. There was also immorality. One bloke—son of the contractor, very wealthy—kept four harlots. He gave them whisky and made them take their clothes off and run naked into a group of women and children doing
puja
. Disgraceful! Well, they didn’t like me at all and the day I left there were four
dacoits
with knives waiting for me on the station road. But I expected that, so I took a different road, and the blighters never caught me. A month later two auditors were murdered by
dacoits.”

The railcar tottered around a cliffside, and on the opposite slope, across a deep valley, was Simla. Most of the town fits the ridge like a saddle made entirely of rusty roofs, but as we drew closer the fringes seemed to be sliding into the valley. Simla is unmistakable, for as
Murray’s Handbook
indicates, “its skyline is incongruously dominated by a Gothic Church, a baronial castle and a Victorian country mansion.” Above these brick piles is the sharply pointed peak of Jakhu (eight thousand feet); below are the clinging house fronts. The southerly aspect of Simla is so steep that flights of cement stairs take the place of roads. From the railcar it looked an attractive place, a town of rusting splendor with snowy mountains in the background.

“My office is in that castle,” said the civil servant.

“Gorton Castle,” I said, referring to my handbook. “Do you work for the Accountant General of the Punjab?”

“Well, I
am
the A.G.,” he said. But he was giving information, not boasting. At Simla Station the porter strapped my suitcase to his back (he was a Kashmiri, up for the season).
The civil servant introduced himself as Vishnu Bhardwaj and invited me for tea that afternoon.

The Mall was filled with Indian vacationers taking their morning stroll, warmly dressed children, women with cardigans over their saris, and men in tweed suits, clasping the green Simla guidebook in one hand and a cane in the other. The promenading has strict hours, nine to twelve in the morning and four to eight in the evening, determined by mealtimes and shop openings. These hours were fixed a hundred years ago, when Simla was the summer capital of the Indian empire, and they have not varied. The architecture is similarly unchanged—it is all high Victorian, with the vulgarly grandiose touches colonial labor allowed, extravagant gutters and porticoes, buttressed by pillars and steelwork to prevent its slipping down the hill. The Gaiety Theatre (1887) is still the Gaiety Theatre (though when I was there it was the venue of a “Spiritual Exhibition” I was not privileged to see); pettifogging continues in Gorton Castle, as praying does in Christ Church (1857), the Anglican cathedral; the viceroy’s lodge (Rastrapati Nivas), a baronial mansion, is now the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, but the visiting scholars creep about with the diffidence of caretakers maintaining the sepulchral stateliness of the place. Scattered among these large Simla buildings are the bungalows—Holly Lodge, Romney Castle, The Bricks, Forest View, Sevenoaks, Femside—but the inhabitants now are Indians, or rather that inheriting breed of Indian that insists on the guidebook, the walking stick, the cravat, tea at four, and an evening stroll to Scandal Point. It is the Empire with a dark complexion, an imperial outpost that the mimicking vacationers have preserved from change, though not the place of highly colored intrigues described in
Kim
, and certainly tamer than it was a century ago. After all, Lola Montez, the
grande horizontale
, began her whoring in Simla, and the only single women I saw were short red-cheeked Tibetan laborers in quilted coats, who walked along the Mall with heavy stones in slings on their backs.

I had tea with the Bhardwaj family. It was not the simple meal I had expected. There were eight or nine dishes:
pakora
, vegetables fried in batter;
poha
, a rice mixture with
peas, coriander, and turmeric;
khira
, a creamy pudding of rice, milk, and sugar; a kind of fruit salad, with cucumber and lemon added to it, called
chaat; murak
, a Tamil savory, like large nutty pretzels;
tikkiya
, potato cakes;
malai
chops, sweet sugary balls topped with cream; and almond-scented
pinnis
. I ate what I could, and the next day I saw Mr. Bhardwaj’s office in Gorton Castle. It was as sparsely furnished as he had said on the railcar, and over his desk was this sign:

“W
HAT’S THIS
?” I
ASKED
M
R
. G
OPAL, THE EMBASSY LIAISON
man, pointing to a kind of fortress.

“That’s a kind of fortress.”

He had ridiculed the handbook I had been carrying around: “You have this big book, but I tell you to close it and leave it at hotel because Jaipur is like open book to me.” Unwisely, I had taken his advice. We were now six miles outside Jaipur, wading ankle-deep through sand drifts toward the wrecked settlement of Galta. Earlier we had passed through a jamboree of some two hundred baboons: “Act normal,” said Mr. Gopal, as they hopped and chattered and showed their teeth, clustering on the road with a curiosity that bordered on menace. The landscape was rocky and very dry, and each rugged hill was capped with a cracked fortress.

“Whose is it?”

“The Maharajah’s.”

“No, who built it?”

“You would not know his name.”

“Do
you?
”

Mr. Gopal walked on. It was dusk, and the buildings crammed into the Galta gorge were darkening. A monkey chattered and leaped to a branch in a banyan tree above Mr. Gopal’s head, yanking the branch down and making a punkah’s
whoosh
. We entered the gate and crossed a courtyard to some ruined buildings, with colored frescoes of trees and people on their façades. Some had been raked with indecipherable graffiti and painted over; whole panels had been chiseled away.

“What’s this?” I asked. I hated him for making me leave my handbook behind.