To the Ends of the Earth (8 page)

“The engine has packed up,” one man told me. “They are sending for a new one. Delay of two hours.”

Another man said, “If there was a cabinet minister on this train they would have an engine in ten minutes’ time.”

The Tamils were raving on the platform. A native of Sirpur wandered out of the darkness with a sack of roasted chickpeas. He was set upon by the Tamils, who bought all the chickpeas and demanded more. A mob of Tamils gathered at the stationmaster’s window to howl at a man tapping out Morse code with a little key.

I decided to look for a beer, but just outside the station I was in darkness so complete I had second thoughts. The smell of rain on the vegetation gave a humid richness to the air that was almost sweet. There were cows lying on the road: they were white; I could see them clearly. Using the cows as road markers I walked along until I saw a small orange light about fifty yards away. I headed toward it and came to a little hut, a low poky shack with mud walls and a canvas roof. There was a kerosene lantern hanging over
the doorway and another inside lighting the surprised faces of half a dozen tea drinkers, two of whom recognized me from the train.

“What do you want?” one said. “I will ask for it.”

“Can I buy a bottle of beer here?”

This was translated. There was laughter. I knew the answer.

“About two kilometers down the road”—the man pointed into the blackness—“there is a bar. You can get beer there.”

“How will I find it?”

“A car,” he said. He spoke again to the man serving tea. “But there is no car here. Have some tea.”

We stood in the hut drinking milky tea out of cracked glasses. A joss stick was lit. No one said a word. The train passengers looked at the villagers; the villagers averted their eyes. The canvas ceiling drooped; the tables were worn shiny; the joss stick filled the room with stinking perfume. The train passengers grew uncomfortable and, in their discomfort, took an exaggerated interest in the calendar, the faded color prints of Shiva and Ganpati. The lanterns flickered in the dead silence as our shadows leaped on the walls.

The Indian who had translated my question said under his breath, “This is the real India!”

T
HIS WAS WHAT
I
IMAGINED: SOMEWHERE PAST THE BRICK
-and-plaster mansions of Madras, arrayed along Mount Road like so many yellowing wedding cakes, was the Bay of Bengal, on which I would find a breezy seafront restaurant, palm trees, flapping tablecloths. I would sit facing the water, have a fish dinner and five beers, and watch the dancing lights of the little Tamil fishing smacks. Then I would
go to bed and be up early for the train to Rameswaram, that village on the tip of India’s nose.

“Take me to the beach,” I said to the taxi driver. He was an unshaven, wild-haired Tamil with his shirt torn open. He had the look of the feral child in the psychology textbook: feral children—mangled, demented Mowglis—abound in South India. It is said they are suckled by wolves.

“Beach Road?”

“That sounds like the place.” I explained that I wanted to eat a fish.

“Twenty rupees.”

“I’ll give you five.”

“Okay, fifteen. Get in.”

We drove about two hundred yards and I realized that I was very hungry: turning vegetarian had confused my stomach with what seemed an imperfect substitute for real food. Vegetables subdued my appetite, but a craving—a carnivorous emotion—remained.

“You like English girls?” The taxi driver was turning the steering wheel with his wrists, as a wolf might, given the opportunity to drive a taxi.

“Very much,” I said.

“I find you English girl.”

“Really?” It seemed an unlikely place to find an English whore—Madras, a city without any apparent prosperity. In Bombay I might have believed it: the sleek Indian businessmen, running in and out of the Taj Mahal Hotel, oozing wealth, and driving at top speed past the sleepers on the sidewalk—they were certainly whore fodder. And in Delhi, city of conferees and delegates, I was told there were lots of European hookers cruising through the lobbies of the plush hotels, promising pleasure with a cheery swing of their hips. But in Madras?

The driver spun in his seat and crossed his heart, two slashes with his long nails.
“English
girl.”

“Keep your eyes on the road!”

“Twenty-five rupees.”

Three dollars and twenty-five cents.

“Pretty girl?”

“English
girl,” he said. “You want?”

I thought this over. It wasn’t the girl but the situation that attracted me. An English girl in Madras, whoring for peanuts. I wondered where she lived, and how, and for how long; what had brought her to the godforsaken place? I saw her as a castaway, a fugitive, like Lena in Conrad’s
Victory
fleeing a tuneless traveling orchestra in Surabaya. I had once met an English whore in Singapore. She said she was making a fortune. But it wasn’t just the money: she preferred Chinese and Indian men to the English, who were not so quick and, worse, usually wanted to spank her.

The driver noticed my silence and slowed down. In the heavy traffic he turned around once again. His cracked teeth, stained with betel juice, were red and gleaming in the lights from the car behind us. He said, “Beach or girl?”

“Beach,” I said.

He drove for a few minutes more. Surely she was Anglo-Indian—“English” was a euphemism.

“Girl,” I said.

“Beach or girl?”

“Girl,
girl
, for Heaven’s sake.” It was as if he were trying to make me confess to an especially vicious impulse.

He swung the car around dangerously and sped in the opposite direction, babbling, “Good—nice girls—you like—little house—about two miles—five girls—”

“English girls?”

“English
girls.”

The luminous certitude had gone out of his voice but still he nodded, perhaps trying to calm me.

We drove for twenty minutes. We went through streets where kerosene lamps burned at stalls, and past brightly lit textile shops in which clerks in striped pajamas shook out bolts of yellow cloth and sequined saris. I sat back and watched Madras go by, teeth and eyes in dark alleys, nighttime shoppers with full baskets, and endless doorways distinguished by memorable signboards,
SANGADA LUNCH HOME, VISHNU SHOE CLINIC
, and the dark, funereal
THOUSAND LIGHTS RESTAURANT
.

He turned corners, choosing the narrowest unlighted lanes, and then we stayed on dirt roads. I suspected he was going to rob me, and when we came to the darkest part of
a bumpy track—we were in the country now—and he pulled over and switched off the lights, I was certain he was a con man: his next move would be to stick a knife in my ribs. How stupid I’d been to believe his fatuous story about the twenty-five-rupee English girl! We were far from Madras, on a deserted road, beside a faintly gleaming swamp where frogs whistled and gulped. The taxi driver jerked his head. I jumped. He blew his nose into his fingers and flung the result out the window.

I started to get out of the car.

“You sit down.”

I sat down.

He thumped his chest with his hand. “I’m coming.” He slid out and banged the door, and I saw him disappear down a path to the left.

I waited until he was gone, until the
shush
of his legs in the tall grass had died out, and then I carefully worked the door open. In the open air it was cool, and there was a mingled smell of swamp water and jasmine. I heard voices on the road, men chattering; like me they were in darkness. I could see the road around me, but a few feet away it vanished. I estimated that I was about a mile from the main road. I would head for that and find a bus.

There were puddles in the road. I blundered into one, and, trying to get out, plopped through the deepest part. I had been running; the puddle slowed me to a ponderous shamble.

“Mister!
Sahib!”

I kept going, but he saw me and came closer. I was caught.

“Sit
down
, mister!” he said. I saw he was alone. “Where you going?”

“Where
you
going?”

“Checking up.”

“English girl?”

“No English girl.”

“What do you mean, no English girl?” I was frightened, and now it seemed clearer than ever.

He thought I was angry. He said, “English girl—forty, fifty. Like this.” He stepped close to me so that in the darkness
I could see he was blowing out his cheeks; he clenched his fists and hunched his shoulders. I got the message: a fat English girl.
“Indian
girl—small, nice. Sit down, we go.”

I had no other choice. A mad dash down the road would have taken me nowhere—and he would have chased me. We walked back to the taxi. He started the engine angrily and we bumped along the grassy path he had taken earlier on foot. The taxi rolled from side to side in the potholes and strained up a grade. This was indeed the country. In all that darkness there was one lighted hut. A little boy crouched in the doorway with a sparkler, in anticipation of
Diwali
, the festival of lights: it illuminated his face, his skinny arm, and made his eyes shine. Ahead of us there was another hut, slightly larger, with a flat roof and two square windows. It was on its own, like a shop in a jungle clearing. Dark heads moved at the windows.

“You come,” said the taxi driver, parking in front of the door. I heard giggling and saw at the windows round black faces and gleaming hair. A man in a white turban leaned against the wall, just out of the light.

We went inside the dirty room. I found a chair and sat down. A dim electric bulb burned on a cord in the center of the low ceiling. I was sitting in the good chair—the others were broken or had burst cushions. Some girls were sitting on a long wooden bench. They watched me, while the rest gathered around me, pinching my arm and laughing. They were very small, and they looked awkward and a bit comic, too young to be wearing lipstick, nose jewels, earrings, and slipping bracelets. Sprigs of white jasmine plaited into their hair made them look appropriately girlish, but the smudged lipstick and large jewelry also exaggerated their youth. One stout, sulky girl held a buzzing transistor radio to the side of her head and looked me over. They gave the impression of schoolgirls in their mothers’ clothes. None could have been older than fifteen.

“Which one you like?” This was the man in the turban. He was stocky and looked tough in a rather grizzled way. His turban was a bath towel knotted on his head.

“Sorry,” I said.

A thin man walked in through the door. He had a sly, bony face and his hands were stuck into the top of his
lungi
. He nodded at one. “Take her—she good.”

“One hundred rupees all night,” said the man with the turban. “Fifty for one jig.”

“He said it costs twenty-five.”

“Fifty,” said the grizzled man, standing firm.

“Anyway, forget it,” I said. “I just came for a drink.”

“No drink,” said the thin man.

“He said he had an English girl.”

“What English girl?” said the thin man, now twisting the knot on his
lungi
. “These Kerala girl—young, small, from Malabar Coast.”

The man in the turban caught one by the arm and shoved her against me. She shrieked delightedly and hopped away.

“You look at room,” said the man in the turban.

The room was right through the door. He switched on the light. This was the bedroom; it was the same size as the outside one, but dirtier and more cluttered. And it smelled horrible. In the center of the room was a wooden bed with a stained bamboo mat on it, and on the wall six shelves, each holding a small tin padlocked suitcase. In a corner of the room a battered table held some medicine bottles, big and small, and a basin of water. There were scorch marks on the beaverboard ceiling, newspapers on the floor and on the wall over the bed charcoal sketches of dismembered bodies, breasts, and genitals.

“Look!”

The man grinned wildly, rushed to the far wall, and threw a switch.

“Fan!”

It began to groan slowly over the filthy bed, stirring the air with its cracked paddles and making the room even smellier.

Two girls came into the room and sat on the bed. Laughing, they began to unwind their saris. I hurried out, into the parlor, through the front door, and found the taxi driver. “Come on, let’s go.”

“You not liking Indian girl?
Nice
Indian girl?”

Skinny was starting to shout. He shouted something in
Tamil to the taxi driver, who was in as great a hurry as I to leave the place: he had produced a dud customer. The fault was his, not mine. The girls were still giggling and calling out, and Skinny was still shouting as we swung away from the hut and through the tall grass onto the bumpy back road.

T
HE TRAIN FROM
G
ALLE WINDS ALONG THE COAST NORTH TOWARD
Colombo, so close to the shoreline that the spray flung by the heavy rollers from Africa reaches the broken windows of the battered wooden carriages. I was going third class, and for the early part of the trip sat in a dark, overcrowded compartment with people who, as soon as I became friendly, asked me for money. They were not begging with any urgency; indeed, they didn’t look as if they needed money, but rather seemed to be taking the position that whatever they succeeded in wheedling out of me might come in handy at some future date. It happened fairly often. In the middle of a conversation a man would gently ask me if I had any appliance I could give him. “What sort of appliance?” “Razor blades.” I would say no and the conversation would continue.

After nearly an hour of this I crawled out of the compartment to stand by the door and watch the rain dropping out of a dark layer of high clouds just off the coast—the distant rain like majestic pillars of granite. To the right the sun was setting, and in the foreground were children, purpling in the sunset and skipping along the sand. That was on the ocean side of the train. On the jungle side it had already begun to pour heavily, and at each station the signalman covered himself with his flags, making the red one into a kerchief,
the green one into a skirt, flapping the green when the train approached and quickly using it to keep the rain off when the train had passed.