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 stayed in Calcutta for four days, giving lectures, seeing the sights, and losing my lecture fees at the Royal Calcutta Turf Club on the Saturday I decided to leave. On the first day the city seemed like a corpse on which the Indians were feeding like flies; then I saw its features more clearly, the obelisks and pyramids in Park Street Cemetery, the decayed mansions with friezes and columns, and the fountains in the courtyards of these places: nymphs and sprites blowing on dry conches, who, like the people living under them in gunny sacks, are missing legs and arms; the gong of trams at night; and the flaring lamps lighting the wild cows pushing their snouts into rubbish piles, vying with the scrabbling Indians for something edible. The high mock-Moghul tenements
hustled it, and crushed it, and stuck brick-and-mortar elbows into it, and kept the air from it, and stood perpetually between it and the light…
You groped your way for an hour through lanes and bye-ways, and court-yards and passages; and you never once emerged upon anything that might be reasonably called a street. A kind of resigned distraction came over the stranger as he trod those devious mazes, and, giving himself up for lost, went in and out and round about and quietly turned back again when he came to a dead wall or was stopped by an iron railing, and felt that the means of escape might possibly present themselves in their own good time, but to anticipate them was hopeless…
Among the narrow thoroughfares at hand, there lingered, here and there, an ancient doorway of carved oak, from which, of old, the sounds of revelry and feasting often came; but now these mansions, only used for storehouses, were dark and dull, and, being filled with wool, and cotton, and the like – such heavy merchandise as stifles sound and stops the throat of echo – had an air of palpable deadness… In the throats and maws of dark no-thoroughfares… wholesale dealers in grocery-ware had perfect little towns of their own; and, deep among the foundations of these buildings, the ground was undermined and burrowed out into stables, where cart-horses, troubled by rats, might be heard on a quiet Sunday rattling their halters, as disturbed spirits in tales of haunted houses are said to clank their chains…
Then there were steeples, towers, belfries, shining vanes, and masts of ships: a very forest. Gables, housetops, garret-windows, wilderness upon wilderness. Smoke and noise enough for all the world at once.
There is more, and it is all good, but I think I have quoted enough to show that the best description of Calcutta is Todgers' corner of London in Chapter IX of Martin Chuzzlewit. But having decided that Calcutta was Dickensian (perhaps more Dickensian than London ever was), and knowing that I could not share either the excitement of the Bengalis, who agreed with the enormous billboard put up by the State Bank of India (Calcutta is forever), or, what is more curious, the chummy regard of the Americans I met there for this vast and yet incomplete city that I felt would someday undo them, I decided to leave it and so leave India.
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 on 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 afterwards, whenever I thought of India, I saw him -hop, hop, hop – moving nimbly through those millions.
Chapter Seventeen
At sundown in Rangoon, the crows that have been II blackening the sky all day soar to their roosts as the shrill bats waken and flap in hectic circles around the pagoda-style towers of the railway station. I arrived at this hour: the bats were tumbling past the crows, and the pale yellow sky was inked like Burmese silk with the brush marks of the black bodies. I had arrived by air in Rangoon on a Saturday night – there is no train from India – and the Burmese appetite for movies I had noticed on a previous visit was undiminished. Sule Pagoda Road, with its five theatres, was mobbed with people, dressed identically in shirt, sarong, and rubber sandals, men and women alike puffing thick green cheroots, and looking (as they waved away the smoke with slender dismissing fingers) like a royal breed, strikingly handsome in this collapsing city, a race of dispossessed princes.
I had only one objective in Burma: to take the northbound trains from Rangoon via Mandalay and Maymyo to the Gokteik Gorge in the Shan States, beyond which China sprawls. Across this gorge is a magnificent steel trestle bridge, the Gokteik Viaduct, built in 1899 by the Pennsylvania Steel Company for the British Raj. I had read about the bridge, but not in any recent book. Early in this century enthusiasm for railway travel produced a spate of optimistic books about railway traveclass="underline" the French were building the Transindochinois line to Hanoi, the Russians had brought the Trans-Siberian almost to Vladivostok, the British had laid track to the very end of the Khyber Pass, and it was assumed that Burmese railways would extend in one direction to the Assam-Bengal line and in the other to the railways of China. The books had apocalyptic titles like The Railway Conquest of the World (by Frederick Talbot, 1911) and described, country by country, how the globe was to be stitched by railway track. The judgements were occasionally disagreeable. Ernest Protheroe in Railways of the World (1914) wrote: 'John Chinaman – cunning, tenacious, and virile – for centuries kept the "foreign devil" at arm's length… But, however much the Chinese hated the white man, they commenced to recognize the value of railways…' The Gokteik Viaduct, much celebrated in these books, was an important link in a line that was projected beyond the northern border town of Lashio into China. But the line had stopped at Lashio (nor were Burmese railways ever to meet Indian ones), and I had heard many rumours about this American-built bridge: one was that it had been blown up during the Second World War; another that the line had been captured by Burmese rebel forces under the command of U Nu; and another that it was off-limits to foreigners.