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Ihad been in India for nearly a week, but only that morning, on footand
beneath the hot blue sky, did I begin to see the country. From the train I had
witnessed a dream-like sequence: canals and hamlets; elephants bearing massive
loads and camels hitched to wagons; a dead cow in a field, decorated with
vultures; a man in homespundhotiand purple socks wobbling on a shiny new
bicycle; an Englishman in khaki shorts solemnly jumping rope on his verandah;
a peacock atop a crumbling wall, feathers spread wide in a blaze of shimmering
iridescence before his dull and disinterested lady; train stations without
number, each packed like sardine-tins with veiled women hugging bundles
andkohl-eyed babies, men draped with a thousand goods for sale, cows stealing
from the food-sellers, policemen pontificating, and scabby dogs picking up the
edges. Just before dusk I had seen a red-eyedsadhuseated cross-legged at a
roadside shrine, his forehead smeared with the three white lines of the holy
man, his thin body clad only in beads and the scrap of cloth around his loins.
At first light the following morning I had seen a group of men in a river,
brushing their teeth and washing their heads, while farther out from the bank
three elephants were being bathed. From behind the dirty windows I had watched
the passing of a dusty and unreal landscape, as if I were being transported
through an art gallery.
Now, I had stepped into the painting, which mixed Breughel s activity with
Persia s colours, with just a touch of Bosch horrors.
Women dressed in crimson and apple-green and yellow ochre swayed with loads
balanced on their heads, one hand steadying the brass pot or the straw basket,
the other holding one end of their scarf up, lest strange eyes see what they
shouldn t. Men in cheap suits and men in filthylunghis scurried or lounged,
chewing betel or smoking thin brownbidis.Naked children tumbled in the gutters
while pale hump-backed cows roamed freely through the markets, snatching
greens where they might.
And when we were finally clear of the city, when the tree-lined road
stretched out before us through fields of cauliflower and onions, sugar cane
and chilis, the air began to smell of something other than dust and diesel.
The acrid odour from a brilliant field of flowering mustard blended with the
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soft sweet incense wafting from the doors of a small whitewashed temple. The
stink of putrefaction slunk over from a heap of scrap-draped bones, too
leathery even for vultures, then the next moment the nostrils tingled with
pepper and turmeric from a spice-seller s, and rejoiced with the rich
rosewater smells from the sweetmeat stand. Wet dust around a well; drying
clothing from a long hedge; the ripe dung of an elephant; hot-burning coal and
overheated metal from a blacksmith s; urine and feces; opium from an upstairs
window; sweet-cooking wheat chapatis from below.
We were on the Grand Trunk Road, that river of humanity flowing fifteen
hundred miles across northern India from the swampy heat of Calcutta to the
thin, dry air of the Khyber Pass, linking the Bay of Bengal with Afghanistan,
passing the lands of conquest: Darius and Alexander, Timur and Babur,
slaughtering and conquering and looting; the plains of Kurukshestra where the
Aryans first took root; the battlefields ofThe Mahabharataand of the Indian
Mutiny three millennia later; the place where Babur killed fifteen thousand
and brought the Moghul empire to Delhi, where Afghans killed Mahrattas, and
where Persians killed Moghuls (twenty thousand in two hours, the historians
say) then walked on to strip Delhi of its gold, its Peacock Throne, and its
Koh-i-noor diamond. Holy places and bloodshed lay all around me, while in the
fore, Bindra gnawed on a length of sugar cane and skipped beside the placid
donkey.
To begin with, all was dust and turmoil, even at an hour when the dew was
still damp on the canvas. With the distinct sensation of becoming a twig
tossed into a fast-moving stream, I gave myself over to the current, needing
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