To the Ends of the Earth (9 page)

A Chinese man and his Singhalese wife had boarded the train in Galle with their fat dark baby. They were the Wongs, off to Colombo for a little holiday. Mr. Wong said he was a dentist; he had learned the trade from his father, who had come to Ceylon from Shanghai in 1937. Mr. Wong didn’t like the train and said he usually went to Colombo on his motorcycle except during the monsoon. He also had a helmet and goggles. If I ever went back to Galle he would show them to me. He told me how much they cost.

“Can you speak Chinese?”

“
Humbwa
—go,
mingwa
—come. That’s all. I speak Singhalese and English. Chinese very hard.” He pressed his temples with his knuckles.

Simla had been full of Chinese dentists, with signboards showing horrible cross sections of the human mouth and trays of white toothcaps in the window. I asked him why so many Chinese I had seen were dentists.

“Chinese are very good dentists!” he said. His breath was spiced with coconut. “I’m good!”

“Can you give me a filling?”

“No, no stoppings.”

“Do you clean teeth?”

“No.”

“Can you pull them?”

“You want extraction? I can give you name of a good extractionist.”

“What kind of dentist are you, Mr. Wong?”

“Tooth mechanics,” he said. “Chinese are the best ones for tooth mechanics.”

Tooth mechanics is this: you have a shop with a shelf of English putty, a pink semiliquid; you also have drawers filled with teeth in various sizes. A person comes in who has had two front teeth knocked out in a food riot or a quarrel over a coconut. You fill his mouth with pink putty and make a mold of his guns. A plate is made from this, and, when it is trimmed, two Japanese fangs are stuck to it.
Unfortunately, these plastic dentures are valueless for chewing food with and must be removed at mealtime. Mr. Wong said business was excellent and he was taking in between 1,000 and 1,400 rupees a month, which is more than a professor gets at Colombo University.

Inside the train the passengers were banging the windows shut to keep the rain out. The sunset’s fire was tangled in leaden clouds, and the pillars of rain supporting the toppling thunderheads were very close; the fishermen were fighting their catamarans ashore through high surf. The train had begun to smell awful; Mr. Wong apologized for the stink. People were jammed in the compartments and pressed in the corridors. I was at the door and could see the more nimble ones clinging to the steel ladders, balanced on the coupling. When the rain increased—and now it was really coming down—they fought their way into the carriages and slammed the doors and stood in the darkness while the rain hit the metal doors like hail.

My door was still open, and I was against the wall, while blurred gusts of rain beat past me.

F
ROM THE OUTSIDE
, H
OWRAH STATION LOOKS LIKE A SECRETARIAT
, with its not quite square towers and many clocks—each showing a different time—and its impenetrable brickwork. The British buildings in India look as if they have been designed to withstand a siege—there are horn-works and cannon emplacements and watchtowers on the unlikeliest structures. So Howrah Station looked like a fortified version of a mammoth circumlocution office, an impression that buying a ticket there only confirms. But inside it is high and smoky from the fires of the people who occupy
it; the ceiling is black, the floor is wet and filthy, and it is dark—the long shafts of sun streaming from the topmost windows lose their light in dust on the way down.

“It’s much better than it was,” said Mr. Chatterjee, seeing me craning my neck. “You should have seen it
before
they cleaned it up.”

His remark was unanswerable. Yet at every pillar squatters huddled amid the rubbish they had created: broken glass, bits of wood and paper, straw, and tin cans. Some infants slept against their parents; others were curled up like changelings in dusty corners. Families sought refuge beside pillars, under counters and luggage carts: the hugeness of the station intimidated them with space and drove them to the walls. Their children prowled in the open spaces, combining their scavenging with play. They are the tiny children of tiny parents, and it’s amazing how, in India, it is possible to see two kinds of people in the process of evolution, side by side, one fairly tall, quick, and responsive, the other, whose evolution is reduction, small, stricken, and cringing. They are two races whose common ground is the railway station, and though they come quite close (an urchin lies on his back near the ticket window watching the legs of the people in line) they do not meet.

I walked outside, into the midday chaos at the western end of the Howrah Bridge. In Simla, rickshaws were retained for their quaintness: people posed in them. In Calcutta, rickshaws, pulled by skinny running men in tattered clothes, are a necessary form of transport, cheap, and easy to steer in narrow back lanes. They are a crude symbol of Indian society, but in India all symbols are crude: the homeless people sleeping in the doorway of the mansion, the commuter running to his train accidentally trampling a station sleeper, the thin rickshaw-wallah hauling his plump passengers. Ponies harnessed to stagecoaches labored over cobblestones; men pushed bicycles loaded with hay bales and firewood. I had never seen so many different forms of transport: wagons, scooters, old cars, carts and sledges and odd, old-fashioned horse-drawn vehicles that might have been barouches. In one cart, their white flippers limp, dead sea turtles were stacked; on another cart was a dead buffalo,
and in a third an entire family with their belongings—children, parrot cage, pots and pans. All these vehicles, and people surging among them. Then there was panic, and the people scattered as a tottering tramcar marked
TOLLYGUNGE
swayed down the bridge. Mr. Chatterjee said, “Too much of people!”

Mr. Chatterjee walked across the bridge with me. He was a Bengali, and Bengalis were the most alert people I had met in India. But they were also irritable, talkative, dogmatic, arrogant, and humorless, holding forth with malicious skill on virtually every subject except the future of Calcutta. Any mention of that brought them up short. But Mr. Chatterjee had views. He had been reading an article about Calcutta’s prospects. Calcutta had been very unlucky: Chicago had had a great fire, San Francisco an earthquake, and London a plague as well as a fire. But nothing had happened to Calcutta to give planners a chance to redesign it. You had to admit, he said, it had vitality. The problem of pavement dwellers (he put the figure at a quarter of a million) had been “somewhat overdramatized,” and when you considered that these pavement dwellers were almost exclusively engaged in ragpicking you could see how Calcutta’s garbage was “most intensively recycled.” It seemed an unusual choice of words, and it strayed close to claptrap; vitality in a place where people lay dead in the gutter (“But everyone dies eventually,” said Mr. C.), the overdramatized quarter of a million, the recycling ragpickers. We passed a man who leaned at us and put his hand out. He was a monster. Half his face was missing; it looked as if it had been clumsily guillotined—he had no nose, no lips, no chin, and clamped in his teeth, which were perpetually exposed, was the bruised plug of his tongue. Mr. Chatterjee saw my shock. “Oh,
him!
He is always here!”

Before he left me at the Barabazar, Mr. Chatterjee said, “I
love
this city.” We exchanged addresses and we parted, I to a hotel, Mr. Chatterjee to Strand Road, where the Hooghly was silting up so badly, soon all that would float on it would be the ashes of cremated Bengalis.

I
WAS ON MY WAY WHEN
I
SAW THE HOPPING MAN IN THE
crowd on Chowringhee. He was very strange: in a city of mutilated people only the truly monstrous looked odd. This man had one leg—the other was amputated at the thigh—but he did not carry a crutch. He had a greasy bundle in one hand. He hopped past me with his mouth open, pumping his shoulders. I went after him, and he turned into Middleton Street, hopping very fast on one muscular leg, like a man on a pogo stick, his head rising above the crowd, then descending into it. I couldn’t run because of the other people, black darting clerks, swamis with umbrellas, armless beggars working their stumps at me, women proffering drugged babies, strolling families, men seeming to block the sidewalk with their wide flapping trousers and swinging arms. The hopping man was in the distance. I gained on him—I saw his head clearly—then lost him. On one leg he had outrun me, so I never found out how he did it. But afterward, whenever I thought of India, I saw him—hop, hop, hop—moving nimbly through those millions.

T
HE OLD MAN NEXT TO ME ON THE
L
OCAL TO
M
AYMYO SAID
, “How old do you think I am? Guess.”

I said sixty, thinking he was seventy.

He straightened up. “Wrong! I am eighty. That is, I passed my seventy-ninth birthday, so I am in my eightieth year.”

The train switched back and forth on curves as sharp as those on the way to Simla and Landi Kotal. Occasionally, for no apparent reason, it ground to a halt, starting up without a warning whistle, and it was then that the Burmese who had jumped out to piss chased after the train, retying their sarongs as they ran along the track and being whooped at by their friends in the train. The mist, the rain, and cold, low clouds gave the train a feeling of early morning, a chill and predawn dimness that lasted until noon. I put a shirt over my jersey, then a sweater and a plastic raincoat, but I was still cold, the damp penetrating to my bones. It was the coldest I had been since leaving England.

“I was born in 1894 in Rangoon,” said the old man suddenly. “My father was an Indian, but a Catholic. That is why I am called Bernard. My father was a soldier in the Indian Army. He had been a soldier his whole life—I suppose he joined up in Madras in the 1870s. He was in the Twenty-sixth Madras Infantry and he came to Rangoon with his regiment in 1888. I used to have his picture, but when the Japanese occupied Burma—I’m sure you have heard of the Japanese war—all our possessions were scattered, and we lost so many things.”

He was eager to talk, glad to have a listener, and he didn’t need prompting questions. He spoke carefully, plucking
at the cloth bundle, as he remembered a clause, and I hugged myself in the cold, grateful that all that was required of me was an occasional nod to show I was interested.

“I don’t remember much about Rangoon, and we moved to Mandalay when I was very young. I can remember practically everything from 1900 onward. Mr. MacDowell, Mr. Owen, Mr. Stewart, Captain Taylor—I worked for them all. I was head cook in the Royal Artillery officer’s mess, but I did more than cook—I did everything. I went all over Burma, in the camps when they were in the field. I have a good memory, I think. For example, I remember the day Queen Victoria died. I was in the second standard at Saint Xavier’s School in Mandalay. The teacher said to us, ‘The Queen is dead, so there is no school today.’ I was—what?—seven years old. I was a good student. I did my lessons, but when I finished with school there was nothing to do. In 1910 I was sixteen and I thought I should get a job on the railways. I wanted to be an engine driver. I wanted to be in a loco, traveling to Upper Burma. But I was disappointed. They made us carry coal in baskets on our heads. It was very hard work, you can’t imagine—so hot—and the man in charge of us, one Mr. Vander, was an Anglo-Indian. He shouted at us, of course, all the time; fifteen minutes for lunch and he still shouted. He was a fat man and not kind to us at all. There were a lot of Anglo-Indians on the railway then. I should say most of them were Anglo-Indians. I imagined I would be driving a loco and here I was carrying coal! The work was too much for me, so I ran away.

“I liked my next job very much. This was in the kitchen of the officers’ mess in the Royal Artillery. I still have some of the certificates, with
RA
written on them. I helped the cook at first and later became a cook myself. The cook’s name was Stewart and he showed me how to cut vegetables in various ways and how to make salad, fruit cup, the trifle, and all the different kinds of joints. It was 1912 then, and that was the best time in Burma. It will never be nice like that again. There was plenty of food, things were cheap, and even after the First World War
started things were still fine. We never knew about the First World War in Burma; we heard nothing—we didn’t feel it. I knew a little bit about it because of my brother. He was fighting in Basra—I’m sure you know it—Basra, in Mesopotamia.

“At that time I was getting twenty-five rupees a month. It doesn’t sound so much, does it? But, do you know, it only cost me ten rupees to live—I saved the rest and later I bought a farm. When I went for my pay I collected one gold sovereign and a ten-rupee bank note. A gold sovereign was worth fifteen rupees. But to show you how cheap things were, a shirt cost four annas, food was plentiful, and life was very good. I married and had four children. I was at the officers’ mess from 1912 until 1941, when the Japanese came. I loved doing the work. The officers all knew me and I believe they respected me. They only got cross if something was late: everything had to be done on time, and of course if it wasn’t—if there was a delay—they were very angry. But not a single one was cruel to me. After all, they were officers—British officers, you know—and they had a good standard of behavior. Throughout that time, whenever they ate, they wore full-dress uniforms, and there were sometimes guests or wives in evening dress, black ties, and the ladies wore gowns. Beautiful as moths. I had a uniform too, white jacket, black tie, and soft shoes—you know the kind of soft shoes. They make no noise. I could come into a room and no one could hear me. They don’t make those shoes anymore, the kind that are noiseless.

“Things went on this way for some years. I remember one night at the mess. General Slim was there. You know him. And Lady Slim. They came into the kitchen. General and Lady Slim and some others, officers and their wives.