I had tea with the Bhardwaj family. It was not the simple meal I had expected. There were eight or nine dishes: pakora, vegetables fried in batter; poha, a rice mixture with peas, coriander, and turmeric; khira, a creamy pudding of rice, milk, and sugar; a kind of fruit salad, with cucumber and lemon added to it, called chaat; murak, a Tamil savory, like large nutty pretzels; tikkiya, potato cakes; malai chops, sweet sugary balls topped with cream; and almond-scented pinnis. I ate what I could, and the next day I saw Mr. Bhardwaj’s office in Gorton Castle. It was as sparsely furnished as he had said on the railcar, and over his desk was this sign:
I AM NOT INTERESTED IN EXCUSES FOR DELAY;
I AM INTERESTED ONLY IN A THING DONE.
— Jawaharlal Nehru
In Jaipur with Mr. Gopal
“WHAT’S THIS?” I ASKED MR. GOPAL, THE EMBASSY LIAISON man, pointing to a kind of fortress.
“That’s a kind of fortress.”
He had ridiculed the handbook I had been carrying around: “You have this big book, but I tell you to close it and leave it at hotel because Jaipur is like open book to me.” Unwisely, I had taken his advice. We were now six miles outside Jaipur, wading ankle-deep through sand drifts toward the wrecked settlement of Galta. Earlier we had passed through a jamboree of some two hundred baboons: “Act normal,” said Mr. Gopal, as they hopped and chattered and showed their teeth, clustering on the road with a curiosity that bordered on menace. The landscape was rocky and very dry, and each rugged hill was capped with a cracked fortress.
“Whose is it?”
“The Maharajah’s.”
“No, who built it?”
“You would not know his name.”
“Do you?”
Mr. Gopal walked on. It was dusk, and the buildings crammed into the Galta gorge were darkening. A monkey chattered and leaped to a branch in a banyan tree above Mr. Gopal’s head, yanking the branch down and making a punkah’s whoosh. We entered the gate and crossed a courtyard to some ruined buildings, with colored frescoes of trees and people on their façades. Some had been raked with indecipherable graffiti and painted over; whole panels had been chiseled away.
“What’s this?” I asked. I hated him for making me leave my handbook behind.
“Ah,” said Mr. Gopal. It was a temple enclosure. Some men dozed in the archways, others squatted on their haunches, and just outside the enclosure were some tea and vegetable stalls whose owners leaned against more frescoes, rubbing them away with their backs. I was struck by the solitude of the place — a few people at sundown, no one speaking, and it was so quiet I could hear the hooves of the goats clattering on the cobblestones, the murmuring of the distant monkeys.
“A temple?”
Mr. Gopal thought a moment. “Yes,” he said finally, “a kind of temple.”
On the ornate temple walls, stuck with posters, defaced with chisels, pissed on, and scrawled over with huge Devanagri script advertising Jaipur businesses, there was a blue enamel sign, warning visitors in Hindi and English that it was “forbidden to desecrate, deface, mark or otherwise abuse the walls.” The sign itself had been defaced: the enamel was chipped — it looked partly eaten.
Farther along, the cobblestone road became a narrow path and then a steep staircase cut into the rock walls of the gorge. At the top of this was a temple facing a still, black pool. Insects swimming in circles on the pool’s surface made minuscule ripples, and small clouds of vibrant gnats hovered over the water. The temple was an unambitious niche in the rock face, a shallow cave, lighted with oil lamps and tapers. On either side of its portals were seven-foot marble slabs, the shape of those handed down from Sinai but with a weight that would give the most muscular prophet a hernia. These tablets had numbered instructions cut into them in two languages. In the failing light I copied down the English.
The use of soap in the temple and washing clothes is strictly prohibited
Please do not bring shoes near the tank
It does not suit for women to take bath among male members
Spitting while swimming is quite a bad habit
Do not spoil others’ clothes by splitting water while swimming
Do not enter the temple with wet clothes
Do not spit improperly to make the places dirty
“Splitting?” I said to Mr. Gopal. “What is splitting?”
“That does not say splitting.”
“Take a look at number five.”
“It says splashing.”
“It says splitting.”
“It says—”
We walked over to the tablet. The letters, two inches high, were cut deep into the marble.
“—splitting,” said Mr. Gopal. “I’ve never run across that one before. I think it’s a kind of splashing.”
The Grand Trunk Express to the Real India
THE LUMBERING EXPRESS THAT BISECTS INDIA, A 1,400-mile slash from Delhi south to Madras, gets its name from the route. It might easily have derived it from the kind of luggage the porters were heaving on board. There were grand trunks all over the platform. I had never seen such heaps of belongings in my life, or so many laden people; they were like evacuees who had been given time to pack, lazily fleeing an ambiguous catastrophe. In the best of times there is nothing simple about an Indian boarding a train, but these people climbing into the Grand Trunk Express looked as if they were setting up house — they had the air, and the merchandise, of people moving in. Within minutes the compartments were colonized, the trunks were emptied, the hampers, food baskets, water bottles, bedrolls, and Gladstones put in place; and before the train started up its character changed, for while we were still standing at Delhi Station the men stripped off their baggy trousers and twill jackets and got into traditional South Indian dress: the sleeveless gym-class undershirt and the sarong they call a lungi. These were scored with packing creases. It was as if, at once — in expectation of the train whistle — they all dropped the disguise they had adopted for Delhi, the Madras-bound express allowing them to assume their true identity. The train was full of Tamils; and they had moved in so completely, I felt like a stranger among residents, which was odd, since I had arrived earlier than anyone else.
Tamils are black and bony; they have thick straight hair and their teeth are prominent and glister from repeated scrubbings with peeled green twigs. Watch a Tamil going over his teeth with an eight-inch twig and you begin to wonder if he isn’t trying to yank a branch out of his stomach. One of the attractions of the Grand Trunk Express is that its route takes in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, where the best toothbrush twigs are found; they are sold in bundles, bound like cheroots, at the stations in the province. Tamils are also modest. Before they change their clothes each makes a toga of his bedsheet, and, hopping up and down and working his elbows, he kicks his shoes and trousers off, all the while babbling in that rippling speech that resembles the sputtering of a man singing in the shower. Tamils seem to talk constantly — only toothbrushing silences them. Pleasure for a Tamil is discussing a large matter (life, truth, beauty, “walues”) over a large meal (very wet vegetables studded with chilies and capsicums, and served with damp poori and two mounds of glutinous rice). The Tamils were happy on the Grand Trunk Express: their language was spoken; their food was served; their belongings were dumped helter-skelter, giving the train the customary clutter of a Tamil home.