‘Now I am asking them.’
An animated conversation ensued.
‘They have never been so far from their homes before. If there is a village they do not know it. They know nothing. It is difficult for me to understand these fellows,’ G. said.
We were in a fix, really the last of a succession of fixes, but the overcoming of insuperable difficulties is, of course, one of the unspoken reasons for travelling in remote places. Nevertheless it was a bore. We had anticipated living simply, and purposely we had brought with us simple things, for there is nothing more disagreeable than eating copiously in the presence of people to whom a square meal is an unknown pleasure. Now the whole lot of us were faced with the possibility of being without any food at all if the journey to the Balawali Bridge was unduly prolonged, for this was the nearest point at which we could be certain of getting any. We had bought what seemed a lot of rice in Hardwar, but not enough to feed everyone. We had chilli powder, sugar, tea, biscuits, a few tins of sardines and some Indian tinned meats. I was determined that we should not have recourse to the tinned meats unless we were forced to. Although there are numerous secret cow-eaters and a host of overt pig-eaters in India, the mere possession of tinned beef and bacon was enough to label us as cannibals so far as the Hindus were concerned, and as unmitigatedly filthy persons to any orthodox Muslim. To tell the truth, I was far less worried about the stigma that attached to its consumption than I was about the possible indignities to which it might have been subjected in the course of its preparation. Both beef and pork, according to the labels on the tins, emanated from the same factory. It was difficult to imagine any Indian sufficiently debased to can beef and bacon indiscriminately; it was equally difficult to imagine Hindus and Muslims both working under the same roof, each, in one another’s eyes, committing sacrilege. Did they, I wondered, have separate production lines or did they spit ritually in each tin before sealing it, in order to square themselves with their respective gods? But these were useless speculations. The boatmen had worked well, all three of them. There was nothing to do but give them food and hope that something would turn up.
Among our stores was a bottle of Indian whisky and a bottle of rum, which we had procured from Jawalapur, the place which the guide book referred to as being infested with thieves and pickpockets. It seemed as good a moment as any for a drink, but with only two bottles between three of us, in a land be-devilled by prohibition, either partial or complete according to where one found oneself, and no prospect of being able to buy any more, I jibbed at sharing it with the boatmen.
‘We don’t have to give them drinks as well, do we?’
‘Certainly not,’ G. said. ‘These men are not drinking. It is against their religion.’
A special journey had had to be made by bicycle ricksha in order to buy these two bottles. Because it was outside the sacred area, two miles away on the banks of the Ganges Canal, Jawalapur was the place of pilgrimage for those in search of forbidden pleasures. This was the rendezvous of secret drinkers, eaters of fish and fowl, eggs and meat; while across the canal in a sad area of mud-filled lanes and mean brick buildings were the stews to which the pandas came to stretch themselves after long hours of squatting on their wooden platforms, puja-chanting, casting horoscopes and making the tilak marks on the foreheads of the faithful.
The place was a great hive of whores. It was late afternoon when we arrived and they were just beginning to stir after the long sleep of the day. Bleary-eyed, the older ones leaned against the door posts in narrow alleys choked with sewage, babies at their slack breasts, while bigger daughters still too young to be broken to the trade, wearing frilly western dresses and with their hair in red ribbons, peeped round their skirts; others, younger women, crouched in doorways that were so low that they were more like entrances to a rock tomb than to a brothel, smoking cigarettes, and one could imagine the clients, emerging in the early dawn, half stupefied with hemp, hurting themselves dreadfully. Some were as stern and forbidding as the Goddess of Destruction herself, with long thin downturned mouths. Some had the broken-looking snub noses and the slightly bulbous foreheads that seem to be universally esteemed by men. All were heavily bangled; jewels shone in their noses, their eyes were set in black rings of shadow that proclaimed an intense fatigue. One needed courage to lie with women like this, to put out of mind the awful smells in the lanes; to banish the thought of their mothers and grandmothers who hovered behind them, too old for further service and an earnest of what they themselves would one day become, and of their husbands/keepers/fathers, whatever they were, still snoring, stretched out on charpoys under the washing that hung lifelessly in the airless courts, but they were in no real mood for business, and those that were offered their services without enthusiasm. In a little while they would begin to prepare themselves for the night’s work, but this was their quiet hour and they were making the most of it.
Wanda put on a lot more rice to cook, gave Karam Chand a wooden spoon and left him in charge of it. Then the three of us paddled out to the boat. Hidden from view behind the open lid of one of the trunks, as surreptitiously as any panda, we drank whisky that had been distilled with the aid of Scottish technicians, using Indian ingredients and Indian water.
At dinner we ate a mountain of boiled rice, heaped with chilli powder. In addition the three of us shared a tin of sardines and some slices of rather nasty cut loaf. We had difficulty with the sardines as there was no opener. Later, as we crouched round a gigantic fire that the boatmen had kindled I had the first real opportunity of observing them as individuals. Karam Chand, their leader, was about twenty years old. He was thin and intelligent-looking. He had shown himself an excellent navigator when there had been any water to navigate. The other two had more primitive countenances which, in the case of the elder one, Bhosla, verged on brutality. Jagannath, the youngest, was more animated. From time to time our eyes met, and I wondered what their feelings were, these men who had never left their native place, embarked on a crazy journey with no avowed purpose and now marooned with three foreigners (for them G. was as foreign as any of us) on a bank of stones in the middle of the Ganges. My heart, made mellow by whisky, warmed to them.
While the three of us were drinking more tea and smoking Trichinopoly cheroots, two men appeared and stood at the edge of the fire. They had been overtaken by night while in the jungle, they said, and had come to recruit their spirits by the fire before setting off for their village which was a couple of miles to the west. We gave them tea and cigarettes and, after ascertaining that we were outside the sacred area of Hardwar, ordered a dozen eggs from them to be delivered early the next morning.
We slept close to the fire cocooned in our bedding rolls, buoyed up by the rubber mattresses which we had cursed because they were so cumbersome. Before we went to bed, shamed by the inadequate coverings that the boatmen had brought with them, we gave each of them one of the blankets we had bought in the bazaar; but they were not in the mood for sleep and they remained hour after hour droning on about new masters while I lay listening to the sound of goods trains concertina-ing in the sidings at Hardwar and the water rippling over the pebbles. Overhead the sky was a great blanket filled with innumerable holes through which shone innumerable stars. To the north the lights of the town loomed above the mist that hung low over the plain.
At six o’clock the next morning the sky to the east began to glow. Soon it was fierce red. It was as if someone was stoking a furnace. Against it the Siwalik Hills undulated away to the east-south-east as far as the eye could see, like a giant switchback. Flight after flight of duck streamed up the river towards the north. Across the water the stranded trees were like sea monsters hauled out on the shore.
Then the sun rose over the Plains. Three spotted deer came out of the jungle which was still in deep shadow and crossed the river towards us, while a fourth emerged from a belt of long grass that fringed one of the tree-clad islands a quarter of a mile downstream. Seeing us it remained motionless until we got up to look at it. Then it took fright and
