4
… THEY STARTED OUT AT first light. Spence had not slept at all well. If not because of the hungry dogs that roamed in packs barking through the night, it was the sudden chilling expectation that Rikki the rat-catching python would mistake him for a rodent and strangle him. He was up and ready to be off as soon as dawn broke over the iron-blue, smoky skyline of Calcutta.
Gita had been up long before dawn making arrangements and seeing to last-minute details. He returned huffing excitedly and talking in gibberish, his round, dark moon face glowing with pride and good cheer.
"I have secured our passage," he announced. It sounded as if they were attempting a hazardous ocean crossing.
"How long will it take to reach Darjeeling?" Spence asked.
"A week. Maybe two if it rains." To Spence's look of amazement he hurriedly added, "You do not understand our roads. In the rain they dissolve and run away. They become rivers. It would take you a long time to swim to Darjeeling, and all uphill."
Gita scampered around his apartment throwing provisions and personal belongings into sacks and bundling them together. "One bundle for each," he explained. "That way if we must walk part of the way it will not cause too much strain."
Gita looked like a man who had lived most of his life investing in strain-avoidance schemes, and had become wealthy collecting the dividends.
"Is it really as bad as all that?" Spence asked, hardly keeping the naive bumpkin out of his voice.
"Traveling to Darjeeling will be like traveling back in time," Gita warned.
He had arranged for them to join a group of merchants camped about half a mile from his house. These men banded together to travel under the protection of armed soldiers, hired to defend them against the goondas and dakoos – bandits and outlaws living in the hill country. They would be moving at a snail's pace in rusty old gas-burning cars over once-smooth roads that had crumbled into little more than cattle tracks.
Spence and the others set out walking the few blocks to the caravan in the early morning light, tinged an oily brown from the smoke of ten million cooking fires throughout the city. They stepped carefully over the sleeping bodies of Calcutta's homeless who lined the streets like human pavement. Mange-ridden dogs ran yapping, poking here and there among mounds of putrefying garbage for morsels to eat. A hump-backed cow stood gazing at them with deep melancholy over a dead body where two crows perched on a stiffened arm, clucking their beaks in anticipation. Small children, already awake and crying, clung to their stillsleeping mothers, becoming quiet as the men passed.
The buildings lining the streets wore iron bars at windows and doors, though it seemed on the whole a useless gesture since, by Spence's estimation, anyone with little more than a strong resolve could have toppled them, they looked so tentative.
The three rounded a corner a few blocks away from Gita's house and saw the caravan. Their convoy consisted of five clanking sedans, a small bus loaded with objects of trade, and a jeep carrying three soldiers with old-fashioned M-16s leading the procession. It was already lined up, and the various merchants involved in the enterprise darted here and there to store their goods and pack just one more item on the bus. The soldiers came strolling down the street at a leisurely pace eating their breakfasts wrapped in paper with their fingers. Their rifles were slung on their backs and they laughed heartily among themselves.
This is our protection? Spence wondered.
The whole troop would have been comical if not for the fear Spence saw in the faces of the merchants. To them it was a life – or – death proposition with death an all-too-possible outcome. He found it hard to believe such conditions still existed in a world that was quickly hurtling itself toward the stars. He himself had walked on Mars, and these frightened merchants could not even conceive of such a thing. His world was as far from theirs as – well, as far as Kyr's was from his.
When they had walked the length of the caravan a tall, gaunt Indian with the pursed expression of a man perpetually sucking lemons hailed Gita and met them.
"This is Gurjara Marjumdar, leader of the merchants making this trip." The man bowed low, placing his hands together in the classic greeting.
"Your presence among us strengthens our purpose." He smiled a puckery smile. Later, Gita told Spence that with the money they had paid Gurjara to join the convoy the merchant had already made a profit.
"I have arranged for you to travel in my car," Gurjara said with some pride. "I hope you will be very comfortable."
It was all Spence could do to keep from remarking that perhaps they would be more comfortable if the car had springs. He could already see that the junker rode low to the ground, and as yet no passengers were aboard.
After a few more minutes of frenzied packing and tearful, heart-rending good-byes among the merchants and their families, the caravan, asthmatic engines gasping and sputtering, rumbled off. Gawking street sleepers staggered out of the way as the odd train of vehicles rattled past. Children and dogs ran beside as they wound through the streets, hoping for trinkets and shouting at the drivers to honk their horns-a request the drivers obliged with childlike persistence.
Spence marked their passage through the decaying city with numbed wonder. It was repulsive, and yet somehow fascinating in its lazy, sprawling decadence. He had never experienced anything like it.
Behind the train a small army of ragged wayfarers walked or rode bicycles. They too were making the trip to Darjeeling; though lacking the money to hire a car or other transportation, they were nevertheless anxious to benefit from the presence of the soldiers.
At the outskirts of Calcutta they came to a greasy, noisome river where they stopped, though Spence could not determine why. He and Adjani got out to give their legs a last stretch before the train headed into open country. Walking to the head of the convoy they saw the reason for the delay. A family had set up housekeeping on the bridge during the night-not only one family, but several-and were having to be removed in order to let the cars pass by. The people repacked their baggage and belongings-which seemed to Spence to consist mostly of broken bamboo chairs, rags, and hacked-up oil drums-with a sullen slowness under the urgings of the soldiers.
"Why would anybody homestead a bridge?" he asked as he watched the unusual scene.
"Look around you-where else is there for them to go? Besides, it's close to the water for bathing and drinking-that's why most of them try it. They may even get to stay there a day or two if no one moves them."
Spence looked down at the buff-colored water and grimaced. "They surely don't try to drink that stuff." Adjani didn't say anything, but pointed down along the banks below them.
Every square meter of available space was taken up by crude brush lean-tos and cardboard huts right down to the water's edge. The Hooghly river was both sewer and reservoir to the clamoring masses that crowded its bare earth shores. In the murky light of a new day, as far along the shore as he could see, thousands of river dwellers were going about their daily business; men, women, and children stood naked in the shallows and splashed the foul water over themselves to wash away the previous day's filth.
Near a group of bathers, a starving dog worried a floppy, white rubbery object which Spence at first could not identify. Then with a sick, churning feeling he recognized the thing as a human corpse, bleached white by the river and deposited on the shore.
Spence turned away from the scene with a hollowness in his chest. In a short while the journey resumed. He avoided the accusing stares of the displaced bridge settlers as the car passed them along the side of the road.