without the British?’ asks the Englishman.
‘But we do know what India’s economy was like with the British: universal poverty. The Middle Ages,’ the Indian explains to his fellow passenger from Poland. (At least, this is what the reporter who hardly knew any English understood him to be saying.)
The New Delhi airport building is small and dark. It is night – and he is alone in the Indian darkness. He looks around, he is completely lost, he doesn’t know where to go or whom to ask for help. Unprepared for the journey, he can’t speak English, and he has no names or addresses in his notebook. Despair! Described this way in Travels with Herodotus, it sounds like an adventure.
The fact is, Kapuściński stands alone at the airport only until PAP correspondent Ryszard Frelek arrives by car to fetch him. They have met just once before – at a labour camp for prisoners: Kapuściński was going to write a report on it for Sztandar Młodych (he never did), and Frelek was there to research an account for the PAP.
After one day in New Delhi, Kapuściński has just one wish: to go home. He is oppressed by the tropical heat and humidity, tormented by a feeling of loneliness, and horrified by the sight of people suffering en masse.
The city, and the entire area of the country that is situated along the Ganges, have just experienced the predictable annual cataclysm: a flood. The fields beyond the city are filled with people, and in the city there are campsites in the streets. Children lie on the baking-hot ground, and old men warm their bones in the sunshine. Anyone who has managed to spread a small piece of matting on the road has a home; anyone who has failed to do so is roaming about, still searching. All of life is concentrated in the streets. If there’s a bowl above some embers, a stink, and some flies, it’s a restaurant. If there’s a man squatting and another man flourishing a pair of scissors about his head, it’s a barber’s shop.
‘Life here is not life, food is not food, only poverty really is poverty,’ he will write immediately after returning home.4
For the next two weeks, Frelek shows Kapuściński New Delhi. In this apocalyptic setting they strike up a friendship, an understanding that will last for the next thirty years. Frelek will be a guardian angel, a protector and a co-architect of Kapuściński’s career – first as one of the PAP’s decision-makers, and later as a senior Party dignitary, able to help when needed, to protect, push matters forwards, press the right buttons.
After two weeks as a tourist in the capital, Kapuściński starts to worry. He doesn’t know what to write about and has no material to form the basis of his reports for Sztandar. But how can he get any, when he’s losing his battle with English? (‘Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and preventing my going further,’5 he will say years later in his final book.) To teach himself English, he buys Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls from a street stall, but the language of the novel is too difficult – he’d be better off with English for Beginners.
He decides to leave the city and see the provinces, the sites of religious worship and deepest India. ‘You haven’t any clothes – the weather could vary on the journey: winter’s coming,’ says Frelek astutely, and takes his colleague to the bazaar. They buy a warm hat and coat made of multicoloured wool. Kapuściński sets off on a rickety, crowded bus. Frelek notices that his new friend is the only white man among the passengers.
Four weeks later, the watchman comes running into the building where Frelek’s office is located and cries out, ‘There’s a dirty, ragged Indian trying to get in here, and he’s given your name!’
Kapuściński had dark eyes and a swarthy complexion, so once he was dirty and ragged, he could well have looked like a local vagrant. On the journey he bought a quilted blanket that he rolled up during the day and unrolled at night, sleeping in sheds with the locals. Years later Frelek will say, ‘He identified with the Indians.’
From New Delhi:
A large gang of children are lying in the dust, idly gazing around them. They aren’t playing: they are hungry. There’s nothing happening here . . . A couple of kilometres away is the army. Dinghies are doing the rounds, and the soldiers are picking up whatever they can – people out of trees, drowning cattle, the wreckage of tools . . .
It’s the same everywhere. There is no end to the people, the water and the tragedy.6
From Bengal:
India is so unlike Poland! The same concepts do not mean the same things here as there. ‘I have no home,’ says my friend from Warsaw, ‘I’m literally living in the street.’ Of course he wasn’t telling the truth, he was using a metaphor. Not a single person in Poland lives in the street. But if a homeless Indian gives me his address as ‘The Mutra Street roadway, somewhere between the bridge and the cinema’, I can boldly go and look for him in that spot – he is sure to ‘live’ there.
In our life we have no equivalents for various Indian phenomena, and that’s why it’s so easy for all sorts of eyewash to be believed . . .
The exotic? I’ve been looking for it in the streets of Calcutta, the villages of Bengal and the towns of Andhra. I can’t find it, and I’m not in the least bit concerned. India is not an exotic country, but if you insist, then the only thing that’s exotic there is the scenery . . . [India] is living at the bottom of utter poverty, among plagues of disease and under ruthless, alien authority. This was a ‘shameful topic’ and it had to be replaced with something more palatable and more enticing. And so the popularly distributed literature about India is limited to the Mysterious Exotic – jungles and fakirs, sacred monkeys and snake charmers. That is what our imagination has been fed on; hungry as it is for knowledge of faraway countries, it cannot tell that instead of facts it is absorbing myths.7
Thoughts on the road from Bangalore to Hyderabad:
The crime of colonization arrested development a very long time ago . . . Machinery and industry reached India not as an element of progress or the liberation of man, but as an oppressive weapon, a yoke. Higher technology made it possible to plunder and starve, enslave and destroy. This injury has not yet healed today.8
At the end of his journey, Kapuściński has a curious adventure. He is due to go home on a ship called the Stefan Batory, which sails between Gdańsk and Bombay. But conflict erupts over the Suez Canal, whose nationalization has been announced by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser; the British and the French dispatch troops, and traffic through the canal is halted. Kapuściński has to go home by plane, via Karachi, Kabul and Tashkent to Warsaw.
On landing in Kabul he has a nasty surprise. He hands his passport to the immigration official. He waits. The airport is a small barracks, surrounded by desert. The policeman comes back with his passport, places one arm over the other to form a cross and spreads out his fingers: he’s in detention. An official summoned from the airport explains that a transit visa is obligatory in Afghanistan; Kapuściński doesn’t have one.
The Soviet embassy rescues Kapuściński from this predicament. A diplomatic courier whom he met on the plane realizes that he has been detained at the airport; someone from the Soviet embassy finds a Polish salesman, who accompanies the Soviet attaché to the Afghan Ministry for External Affairs, where they sort out a visa, probably by bribing an official. Together they come and fetch the ‘prisoner’ from detention. But now Kapuściński has to extend his visa, because the one issued at the Afghan ministry is valid for only a single day.
At the police station he receives one of his first lessons about the Third World during the Cold War. As the official hands him back his passport, he says in broken English: ‘You are lucky to
