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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Dervla Murphy and her five-year-old daughter Rachel- with little money, no taste for luxury and few concrete plans- meander slowly from Bombay to the southernmost tip of India. Interested in everything they see but only truly enchanted by people, they stay in fisherman's huts and no-star hotels, travelling in packed-out buses, on foot and by local boats. They double back to the place they liked most, the hill province of Coorg, and settle down to live there for two months. Here, anchored by her daughter's delight in the company of her Indian neighbours, Murphy sketches an affectionate, fresh and evocative portrait of these cardamom scented highlands and their warm, spontaneous and self-sufficient inhabitants.
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On a Shoestring to Coorg
An experience of southern India
DERVLA MURPHY
To Rachel and her father with love and gratitude
It may yet be found that the traveller who tosses up at every crossroads will arrive first at the goal.
from The Thoughts of Wi Wong by Arland Ussher
Contents
Acknowledgements
My thanks must go in many directions: to A. C. Thimmiah and Dr Chengappa of Virajpet, who made it possible for us to settle in Coorg; to the Bernstorffs of New Ross, who had us to stay for three months while I was writing this book and created a perfect background atmosphere of sympathetic encouragement; to Alison Mills and Karen Davenport who gallantly typed from an almost illegible manuscript without error or complaint; to Diana Murray who tactfully but relentlessly de-purpled many passages, and provided endless inspiration and comfort during the darkest hours of Revision; to Jane Boulenger and John Gibbins who helped prepare a chaotic typescript for the printer; to Patsy Truell who helped with the index and with correcting the proofs and to the editors of Blackwood’sMagazine and The Irish Times in which some extracts first appeared.
Prologue
In August 1973 it was exactly five years since I had been outside Europe. Therefore feet and pen were equally itchy and I decided that this was the moment – before schooling started in earnest – to share with my daughter Rachel the stimulation of a non-European journey. Already she had twice proved, on European testing-grounds, that she could enjoy short bouts of travelling rough: but I did realise that no five-year-old could be expected to proceed as speedily as my faithful bicycle or as sturdily as my Ethiopian mule.
A period of happy dithering followed; I consulted the atlas almost hourly and received much conflicting advice. One friend, a political journalist, thought International Harmony badly needed a book on China by D. M. and urged me to write to the Chinese Embassy in London. I obeyed, ingratiatingly quoting a pro-Mao passage from my book on Nepal, but there was no reply. From Australia, another friend who works in god-forsaken mines wrote that the outback has much more to it than Europeans imagine; that the animal life and landscapes are fantastic; that if I avoided all cities I would adore the place and could write a pornographic classic about the mining subculture. From Kuala Lumpur, a friend’s daughter who had been teaching in Malaysia for two years almost succeeded in persuading me that it is the only country worth an intelligent person’s attention; and another friend was adamant that anybody who has neglected to walk through the Pindus Mountains knows nothing of the more sublime joys of travel.
Most tempting of all, however, were the letters from a charmingly eccentric millionaire who repeatedly invited us out to explore the mountains of Central Mexico. His Mexican estate is embedded in primeval jungle and the nearest town of any size is many miles away. I liked the sound of all this, and one does not have to be a nasty calculating bitch to appreciate the advantages of a tame millionaire in the background.
Meanwhile, my publisher (who is Rachel’s godfather and takes his duties seriously) was expressing the opinion that for me there is a book in Scotland. And left to myself I rather fancied Madagascar or New Guinea – though neither, I realised, is the ideal country in which to blood a five-year-old.
In the end I settled for Mexico, under the influence of the superb photographs that arrived in the post at least once a month. Included were views of a Gothic-style temple recently built in the middle of a mountain torrent for a colony of tame ducks who had found the surrounding terrain uncomfortable. One day I showed these pictures to an imaginative friend who said, ‘If that’s what he’s built for his ducks, what will he build for you?’
Everybody was suitably impressed/censorious/envious/incredulous when I announced that soon I was going to Mexico to live with a millionaire in a jungle. But then a friend came to stay, who had just returned from India, and as we talked a most delightful feeling took possession of me.
I recognised it at once, though some years had passed since I last felt it. It was an excitement amounting almost to intoxication, a surging impatience that quickened the pulse. It was a delicious restlessness, a stirring of the imagination, a longing of the heart, a thirst of the spirit. It meant that I did not want to go to Thailand, Greece, Kenya, Australia, Malaysia, Dhagestan, Tanzania, Scotland, Madagascar, New Guinea, Mexico or anywhere other than India. It was absurd – and, at that stage of my planning, downright inconvenient. But I welcomed it.
My choice of Mexico had been quite arbitrary. All the other possibilities had seemed equally attractive and just as likely to bear readable fruit; and this detachment had been, I now realised, a bad omen. If travel is to be more than a relaxing break, or a fascinating job, the traveller’s interest, enthusiasm and curiosity must be reinforced by an emotional conviction that at present there is only one place worth visiting.
Initially I felt bewildered by this effervescence of what must have been fermenting for years in hidden corners of my mind. Far from having fallen in love with India during previous visits I had been repelled by some aspects of Hindu life, irritated by others, uneasily baffled by most and consciously attracted by very few. On balance I had found the Indians less easy to get on with than the Pakistanis and Nepalese – to say nothing of the Afghans and Tibetans – and by making this fact too plain in my first book I had deeply offended a number of people.
Why, then, my compulsion to go back? I had no quasi-mystical ambition to improve my soul by contact with Hindu spirituality, nor had I forgotten the grim details of everyday Indian life – the dehumanising poverty, the often deliberately maimed beggars, the prevaricating petty officials, the heat, the flies, the dust, the stinks, the pilfering. Is it, perhaps, that at a certain level we are more attracted by complexities and evasions, secrets and subtleties, enigmas and paradoxes, unpredictability and apparent chaos, than by simplicity, straightforwardness, dependability and apparent order? It may be that in the former qualities we intuitively recognise reality, and in the latter that degree of artificiality which is essential for the smooth running of a rationalistic, materialistic society.
Certainly I had always been aware – without always being prepared to admit it – that my more unsympathetic responses to Hindu culture exposed a personal limitation rather than the defects of Indian civilisation. In other words, India represented a challenge that I, like countless other Europeans, had run away from. However, unlike the impregnably self-assured Victorian imperialists I could not convince myself that a failure to appreciate India was a mark of virtue. So perhaps it is not really surprising that as the time-gap widened between India and me the pull to return to the scene of my defeat and try again operated like an undertow in the unconscious – growing steadily stronger until, on that September evening, it took command.
By next day, however, my euphoria had ebbed slightly and I was seeing this return to India as a dual challenge. Apart from the subtle, impersonal challenge of India itself, there would be the personal challenge posed by trying to achieve a successful fusion of two roles: mother and traveller. It seemed those roles must inevitably clash and at moments I doubted if they could ever be made to dovetail. Then I realised that from the outset one role had to be given precedence: otherwise the whole experience would be flawed, for both of us, by my inner conflicts. So I decided to organise our journey as Rachel’s apprenticeship to serious travelling.
In effect, this decision meant not organising it; we would fly to Bombay and slowly wander south to Cape Comorin, planning our route on a day-to-day basis. As things turned out, these inconsequential ramblings had the happiest results. In South West India, between the Malabar Coast and the Carnatic, we both fell in love with the little-known province of Coorg. And there we stayed for two months.
At Heathrow there was a cheerful man behind the weighing-machine and I felt rather smug when he said – ‘So you’re off to India for a short weekend?’
I think I can claim to have perfected the art of travelling light. Neither my medium-sized rucksack nor Rachel’s mini-rucksack was quite full, yet no essential had been left behind. We were even carrying some luxuries; seven minute rubber animals in a tin box: crayons and felt pens: a favourite furry squirrel: one storybook (a Rupert Bear annual – not my choice) and half a dozen schoolbooks. For four months in South India one needs much less kit than for four weeks in Europe. From November to March the weather is warm and dry, and light clothing costs so little in the bazaars that our wardrobe consisted only of a change of underwear. Rachel’s pack held Squirrel Nutkin, our sponge-bag and our first-aid kit, water-purifying pills, antiseptic ointment, Band-Aids, multi-vitamin capsules and antidysentery tablets. My pack held a bathing-costume, our sleeping-bags, books, notebooks and maps.
As our plane took off Rachel plunged into conversation with an amused gentleman from Kerala and I suddenly became conscious of having embarked on an adventure that would demand mental rather than physical stamina. This was to be my first long journey with a human travelling-companion, and I am a person who needs solitude. Yet there were obvious compensations. I regard other adults – however congenial – as a form of insulation against the immediate impact of travelling experiences; but small children form links, not barriers. And I was enjoying a delightful ‘holiday feeling’, knowing this to be the start not of an endurance test but of a carefree journey ‘as the spirit moved us’.
CHAPTER ONE
Initiation in Bombay
NOVEMBER 16TH. YWCA HOSTEL, BOMBAY
Somewhere Apa Pant has remarked that air-travellers arrive in two instalments and for me this is Disembodied Day, that dreamlike interval before the mind has caught up with the body; and because a natural parsimony compels me to eat all the meals served en route the body in question feels so overfed I wish it could have been left behind, too.
Oddly enough, Rachel seems immune to jet-lag, despite having had less than three hours’ sleep. I chose to stay in this hostel for her sake, thinking it would serve as a not too unfamiliar halfway house between Europe and Asia. But such solicitude was soon proved needless and I last saw her disappearing up the street with two new-found Indian friends. It seems she has gone to lunch with someone; I felt too exhausted to find out exactly with whom or where.
Of course even I was buoyed up, for the first few hours after our landing at seven a.m., by the simple fact of being back in India. Emerging from the cool plane into warm, dense air (72 ºF., according to official information) I was instantly overwhelmed by that celebrated odour of India which I had last smelt many hundreds of miles away, in Delhi. It seemed to symbolise the profound – if not always apparent – unity of this country. And it is not inappropriate that one’s first response to India should involve that sensual experience least amenable to analysis or description.
Outside the airport buildings the scores of waiting taxi-wallahs made little effort to capture us – no doubt they understand by now the financial implications of a rucksack – and with the roar of jets in the background we walked for the next forty minutes through scenes of poverty, filth and squalor which make exaggeration impossible. On flat stretches of wasteland dozens of men were performing their morning duty, unselfconsciously squatting, with rusty tins of water to hand and sometimes a hopeful pig in the background. The Hindu opening his bowels must be the world’s greatest mass-manifestation of the ostrich-mentality. Your average Hindu is an extremely modest man, but because he can’t see you, having his gaze fixed on the ground, he will serenely evacuate while hundreds of people pass to and fro nearby.
So we proceeded, with bougainvillaea gloriously flourishing on one side of the highway and the stench of fresh excrement drifting to us from the other. All around were uncountable thousands of homes – many no bigger than small tents – constructed of bamboo matting, or driftwood, or beaten kerosene tins. Between and in these shelters people seethed like so many ants, and diseased pi-dogs nosed through stinking muck, and shrivelled-looking cattle were being driven on to the dusty, grey-green wasteland to eat Shiva-alone-knows-what. After some time Rachel observed dispassionately, ‘I must say this place seems rather shattered’ – a tolerably graphic description of the outskirts of Bombay. Yet I was not overcome by that nauseated depression which similar scenes induced ten years ago. Perhaps I am no longer quite sure that India’s dire poverty is worse than the dire affluence through which we had been driving twelve hours earlier in London.
Outside one sagging bamboo shelter at the edge of the road a graceful, dark-skinned young woman was washing her feet, using water taken from a stagnant, reeking pond with a lid of bright green scum. She looked up as we passed, and met my eyes, and smiled at us: and her smile had a quality rarely found in modern Europe. It recalled something I had read on the plane, in Dr Radhakrishnan’s essay on ‘Ethics’. ‘When the soul is at peace, the greatest sorrows are borne lightly. Life becomes more natural and confident. Changes in outer conditions do not disturb. We let our life flow of itself as the sea heaves or the flower blooms.’
Presently a taxi slowed beside us and the driver suggested – ‘You go Gateway of India for only Rs.40?’* He dropped abruptly and unashamedly to Rs.10 on realising I was no newcomer to India. Then, when I still shook my head, he looked sympathetic and advised us to board an approaching city-bound bus. The fare, he said, would be only forty paise for me and twenty paise for ‘the baby’.
The bus was crammed and we were nowhere near a scheduled stop. Yet the driver obligingly halted and the conductor curtly ordered a barefooted youth with dirty, matted hair – probably a tribal outcaste – to give up his seat to the foreigners. The youth obeyed at once, but sullenly; and his resentful glare so embarrassed me that I remained standing beside him while Rachel sat down. Then another young man, weedy-looking but neatly dressed, offered me his seat, told me his name was Ram and asked, ‘Where is your native place?’ He thought Glasgow was the capital of Ireland but claimed to be a Times of India staff reporter.
A cool breeze freshened the windowless bus as we slowly jolted through mile after mile of slums, semi-slums and swarming bazaars. Rachel was fascinated to see bananas growing on trees, cows lying on city pavements and a crow boldly swooping down to steal a piece of toast off a street-vendor’s stall. And I was relieved to feel myself rejoicing. On the plane it had suddenly occurred to me that this return could prove a dreadful mistake. But now, looking affectionately out at India’s least attractive urban-slum aspect, I knew it was no such thing.
Ram followed us off the bus and spent over two hours – ‘It is my duty…’ – helping us to locate this hostel. I can never come to terms with his type of doggedly helpful but obtuse Indian. To us such people seem too self-consciously altruistic as they offer help or hospitality, though in fact this is a gross misinterpretation of their state of mind. Nevertheless, the mleccha – the foreigner – is usually helped by Indians like Ram not because the Indian cares about the individual’s fate but because he regards the needful stranger as an incidental source of religious merit, a messenger from the gods who, if given aid, will act as a channel for valuable blessings. Granted, this is a nice idea: but from the mleccha’s point of view it tends to stunt many of his relationships with Indians. Few Westerners enjoy being discounted as individuals; and most travellers like to be able to feel that each new acquaintance is potentially a new friend.
This morning I would have much preferred to find my own way and we might well have got there sooner without a guide who refused to admit that we were repeatedly being sent astray. Everyone of whom we sought assistance gave us a different set of wrong directions with complete assurance. I had forgotten the Indians’ propensity for being ultra-dogmatic when in fact they haven’t a clue; and on a hot day in a big city with a small child after a sleepless night I found it excessively trying. Moreover, because Ram meant so well, and yet was being so stupid and obstinate, I felt increasingly irritated and ungrateful and therefore guilty. It is on such trivia that everyday Indo–European relations most often founder.
When at last we arrived here Ram held out his hand to say a Western-style goodbye and fixed his gaze on a box of cigars sticking out of my bush-shirt pocket. ‘Give me those cigars,’ he requested, in an oddly peremptory tone. I stared at him, nonplussed by the strength of my disinclination to reward him for all his efforts. Then I opened the box and handed him one cigar. He could see there were four others, but he seemed not to resent my meanness. Turning away from him I realised something was out of alignment, though I couldn’t quite determine what. Perhaps because of this being Disembodied Day, the whole incident made me just a little apprehensive. It seemed to conceal a warning of some sort, possibly to the effect that it is perilously easy for Indians and Europeans to bring out the worst in each other.
It is now two p.m., so Rachel should be back soon from her luncheon party. I had planned to sleep while she was out, but I seem to have reached that point of exhaustion at which sleep eludes one. Why do people regard flying as an easy way to travel?
Later. My philosophical acceptance of Indian destitution did not survive this afternoon’s stroll around Bombay. Men with no legs and/or arms were heaped in corners or somehow propelling themselves along pavements; lepers waved their stumps in our faces or indicated the areas where their noses had been; deformed children frantically pleaded for paise and hung on to my ankles so that, as I tried to move away, their featherweight bodies were dragged along the ground; and – in a way worst of all – perfectly formed children, who could be like Rachel, sat slumped against walls or lay motionless in gutters, too far beyond hope even to beg. One pot-bellied, naked toddler stood quite alone, leaning against the pillar of a shopping arcade with a terrible expression of resignation, and mature awareness of misery, on his pinched, mucus-streaked face. Should he survive he will doubtless end up resembling the next wreck we passed – an ancient, armless man, wearing only a token loincloth and sitting cross-legged beneath the arcade, his shaven head moving all the time slightly to and fro, like a mechanical toy, and his hardened, sightless eyeballs rolling grotesquely.
Around the next corner we came on a small girl who had festering scurvy sores all over both legs and was sitting on the edge of the pavement with her baby brother (I suppose) in her lap. He lay gasping, his mouth wide open, looking as if about to expire. He weighed perhaps ten or twelve pounds but, judging by his teeth, must have been at least a year old. Nearby, a young woman with the dry, lined skin of the permanently hungry lay stretched full length in the shadow of a wall. Her skeletal torso and flaccid breasts were only half-covered by a filthy cotton wrap and her eyes were partially open though she seemed to be asleep. She may have been the children’s mother. None of the passers-by took any notice of her. One five-paise piece lay in the tin begging-bowl by her side and a small glass of tea now costs at least twenty paise. As I dropped fifty paise into the bowl I was ravaged by the futility of the gesture. Of course one has seen it all before, and read about it, and heard about it, and despairingly thought about it. Perhaps it is too commonplace, too ‘overdone’, to be worth talking or writing about again. Perhaps the tragedy of poverty has lost its news-value. Yet it has not lost the power to shatter, when one comes face to face with fellow-humans who never have known and never will know what it feels like to eat enough.
This evening I find another of Dr Radhakrishnan’s comments more pertinent than the one I quoted earlier. ‘There was never in India a national ideal of poverty or squalor. Spiritual life finds full scope only in communities of a certain degree of freedom from sordidness. Lives that are strained and starved cannot be religious except in a rudimentary way. Economic insecurity and individual freedom do not go together.’
In the bed next to mine is an Iraqi woman journalist who also arrived today to report on India’s reaction to the oil-crisis. She admitted just now to feeling no less shattered than I am, though during the 1960s she worked in Bombay for four years. ‘One forgets,’ she said, ‘because one doesn’t want to remember.’
‘And why doesn’t one want to remember?’ I wondered.
She shrugged. ‘It serves no purpose to clutter the mind with insoluble problems. Tonight, as you say, we are shattered. And in what way does that help anybody? It simply boosts our own egos, allowing us to imagine we have some vestige of social conscience. It’s only when the Mother Teresas feel shattered that things get done. Now I must sleep. Good-night.’
A forceful lady – and a realist.
NOVEMBER 17TH. YWCA HOSTEL, BOMBAY
Most of the young women here seem to be Christians from Kerala or Goa. They speak intelligible though not fluent English and work as teachers, secretaries, clerks, receptionists or shop-assistants. By our standards the majority are outstandingly good-looking, though too many have bewilderment, loneliness – and sometimes disillusion – behind their eyes. Transplanted from sheltered, gregarious homes to this vast and callous city of six million people, their lives must be dreary enough. Overprotected upbringings will have done nothing to prepare them to make the most of their stay in what is – much as I dislike the place – India’s premier city and an important centre of every sort of social and cultural activity.
None of those to whom I have spoken has any relative or friend in Bombay: if they had they would not be staying in a hostel. Yet they consider themselves lucky to have got into the YWCA and one can see their point; the place is clean and spacious, though gloomy with the endemic gloom of institutions, and the charges are reasonable. We are paying only Rs.25 per day for four meals each – as much as one can eat – and two beds in a six-bed, rat-infested dormitory. To Rachel’s delight, pigeons nest in the dormitory rafters (hence the rats, who appreciate pigeon eggs) and cheeky sparrows by the dozen hop merrily around the floor. The walls are decorated with large, violently coloured photographs of the girls’ favourite film stars and four ceiling fans keep the temperature comfortable.
In India the establishment of even the simplest facts can take several hours and it was lunchtime today before I could feel reasonably certain that tomorrow at eight a.m. we may board a steamer to Panaji (Goa) from the Ballard Pier. However, our misdirected wanderings in search of this information were enjoyable enough and at one stage took us through the narrow, twisting streets and lanes of the old city, where many of the Gujarati houses have carved wooden façades, recalling Kathmandu. Rachel was thrilled to see craftsmen at work behind their stalls – sandalwood carvers, tortoise-shell carvers, brass-smiths, coppersmiths – and when we passed the unexciting eighteenth-century Mombadevi Temple she said she wanted to ‘explore’ it. But a rather truculent priest demanded Rs.10 as an entrance ‘offering’ so I suggested she postpone her study of Hindu architecture until we reached some more spiritual region.
In the enormous, high-ceilinged hostel refectory we lunched at the matron’s table by an open window and, as we ate our rice and curried fish, watched a kite eating a rat (ex-dormitory?) in the topmost branches of a nearby fig tree. Then Rachel got into conversation with two friendly Peace Corps girls, on their way home from Ethiopia, who invited her to accompany them to Juhu beach. She accepted delightedly and, as an afterthought, suggested that I might come, too.
Juhu is only ten miles from the city centre but it took us two hours to get there. Today Bombay’s taxis are on strike, in protest against the government’s suggestion that auto-rickshaws should be introduced into the city to conserve fuel, so the buses were impossibly crowded and we had to walk to the railway station.
Even when the suburban train was moving, agile urchins constantly leaped in and out of our carriage, hawking a wide variety of objects, edible or decorative. The little girls were no less daring and strident than the little boys and Rachel became quite distressed lest one of them might fall under the train. (She herself is by nature extremely cautious, with a tendency to pessimism which can be exasperating: but at least it means I need never worry about her doing reckless deeds.) There is an enormous difference between the children of the truly destitute, who are past trying, and these ragged but enterprising youngsters with their mischievous eyes, wide grins and flashing teeth.
Juhu beach is lined with tall palms, expensive hotels and the homes of the rich. Where we approached it, through a gap between the seafront buildings, a large notice said ‘Danger! Bathing Forbidden!’ The sand stretched for miles and was unexpectedly deserted, apart from a few servants of the rich exercising a few dogs of the rich, yet within seconds of our beginning to undress a score of youths had materialised to stand and stare.
The Americans decided simply to sunbathe, because of the above-ground sewage pipes we had passed on the way from the station, and to avoid whatever the danger might be I kept close to the shore, where the water was shallow, tepid and rather nasty. I couldn’t even feel that I was being cleaned, since my own pure sweat was obviously being replaced by something far less desirable. I soon got out but Rachel refused to emerge until the huge red balloon of the sun had drifted below the horizon.
Back on the road, we stopped at a foodstall to buy deliciously crisp, spiced potato-cakes, stuffed with onions and freshly cooked over a charcoal fire that flared beautifully in the dusk. Then we stood at a bus stop for thirty-five minutes, during which time seven alarmingly overcrowded buses lurched past without halting. The eighth and ninth did stop, but took on only the more belligerent members of the assembled mob, so before the tenth appeared I requested the girls to fight their way on, take Rachel from me and, if I got left behind, cherish her until we were reunited. In fact neither the tenth nor the eleventh stopped, but we successfully assaulted the twelfth.
The narrow streets of the Ville Parle bazaar were lit by a golden glow from hundreds of oil-lamps hanging over stalls heaped with every sort of merchandise: bales of shining silks and vividly patterned cottons, stacks of gleaming copper pots and stainless steel ware, round towers of glittering glass bangles, pyramids of repulsively Technicolored sweetmeats, acres of fresh fruit and vegetables, mountains of coconuts, molehills of cashew-nuts, hillocks of melons, forests of sugar-cane and gracefully overflowing baskets of jasmine-blossom. Mingling with the dreamy richness of the jasmine was that most characteristic of all Indian evening smells – incense being burned in countless homes to honour the household gods. (Foul gutters and festering sores, jasmine and incense: India in a nutshell?)
Through the jostling, noisy crowd – uninhibitedly abusing, joking, arguing, gossiping, chiding, haggling: no sign here of Hindu inertia – through this pulsating crowd moved creaking ox-carts and hooting buses, chanting sadhus and yelling balloon-sellers, thoughtful-looking cows and overloaded handcarts, cursing cyclists and battered trucks, hoarse lottery-ticket sellers and faceless Muslim housewives carrying so many purchases beneath their burkhas that they looked pregnant in the wrong places. ‘It’s fun here,’ said Rachel, ‘but you must be careful not to lose me.’ She fell asleep on the train and had to be given a piggyback home from Churchgate Station.
* One rupee equals five pence and there are one hundred paise to the rupee.
CHAPTER TWO
Hippies in Goa
NOVEMBER 18TH. AT SEA BETWEEN BOMBAY AND PANAJI
The deck-area of our steamer is not too crowded and after Bombay one appreciates sea-breezes, even when adulterated by clouds of hash; forty or so of our fellow deck-passengers are hippies on their annual migration from Nepal, or the north of India, to Goa.
In affluent Europe I find it easy enough to understand an individual hippy’s point of view, but on seeing them massed against an Indian background of involuntary poverty I quickly lose patience. Several of those within sight at this moment are emaciated wrecks – the out-and-outers, travelling alone, carrying no possessions of any kind, clad only in tattered loincloths, their long sadhu-style hair matted and filthy, their bare feet calloused and cracked, their legs pitted with open scurvy sores, their ribs and shoulder-blades seeming about to cut through their pallid skins, their eyes glazed with over-indulgence in Kali-knows-what and their ability or will to communicate long since atrophied. This is dropping-out carried to its terrible conclusion – but dropping into what, and why? Certainly these wrecks will soon drop into a nameless grave, and for their own sakes I can only feel the sooner the better. One agrees when hippies criticise the essential destructiveness of a materialist society, but what are they offering in its place?
All day we sailed south under a cobalt sky, within sight of the mountainous Maharashtrian coast, past dark-sailed fishing-boats that have scarcely changed since pre-Aryan times. The deck, shaded by a vast tarpaulin, never became too hot and now the night breezes feel deliciously cool.
This afternoon, while Rachel was bossing three shy little Goan boys into playing her sort of game, I was talked at by a young engineer from Poona who proved to be a compulsive statistics quoter. He told me that Maharashtra makes up one-tenth of India’s territory, that two out of every five industrial workers employed in India are Maharashtrians, that the Indian film industry, most of the defence factories and two-thirds of the textile and pharmaceutical industries are in Maharashtra, that that State contributes more than one-third of India’s revenues and that its per capita consumption of electricity is more than twice the all-India average.
At this point the plump, amiable young Goan who was sitting on my other side – father of Rachel’s current boy-friends – remarked thoughtfully, ‘And in the capital of Maharashtra more than a lakh people sleep on pavements every night.’
The Maharashtrian glared. ‘At Nhava Sheva a second Bombay is to be built soon,’ he said coldly.
‘How soon?’ wondered the Goan mildly, his eyes on the Western Ghats.
‘Sooner than anything is likely to be built in Goa!’ snapped the Maharashtrian.
The Goan continued to gaze at the mountains. ‘But I don’t think we need new buildings,’ he said. ‘Not many, anyhow. We are content.’
‘Content!’ sneered the Maharashtrian. ‘Do you not know that after 450 years of Portuguese ruling not one village had electricity? Now after eleven years of the Indians’ ruling, most villages have it.’
The Goan looked from the mountains to me and smiled very slightly. ‘But for a lot of those four hundred and fifty years no village anywhere had electricity,’ he observed.
Then he and I stood up and went to make sure our respective offspring had not flung each other overboard.
At about five-thirty we altered course, making for Ratnagiri harbour, and the sun was swiftly sinking as we sailed between high headlands, covered with long red-gold grass that glowed like copper in the slanting light. A romantically ruined fort and a small white temple crowned the cliffs to starboard – lonely against the sky, looking out to sea. ‘It is a very holy temple,’ my Roman Catholic Goan friend told me. A civilised respect for all religions has rubbed off on to many Indian Christians from their Hindu neighbours.
In Ratnagiri’s wide lagoon little craft sped towards us like waterbeetles and briefly the western sky was a flaring expanse of scarlet and purple, orange and violet. Then the sun was gone, but still I stood enchanted, gazing across the dark green waters of the bay to where distant flecks of firelight marked the many thatched huts on the lower slopes of the steep encircling hills.
A steamer puts in at Ratnagiri every evening, except during the monsoon, yet our arrival caused such excitement we might have been calling at Pitcairn. The unloading and loading of passengers and cargo took over an hour, but unfortunately Rachel missed the fun – having gone to sleep, almost literally on her feet, at four o’clock. A Spartanish upbringing is now paying off: she thinks nothing of lying down on a filthy deck amidst scores of talking, eating, praying or copulating Indians. Yet she cannot – positively cannot, without retching – tolerate the deck-class loo and I have had to show her the way to the first-class lavatories. No amount of Spartan brainwashing can reasonably be expected to eradicate this sort of inherent fastidiousness.
A hazard I had overlooked was the degree of spoiling to which a small child would be exposed in India. During these first few days it has perhaps helped to give Rachel confidence in relation to her new surroundings, but I hate to think what four months of it will do to her.
Indian reactions to the very young can be most trying from a European’s point of view. While we were unloading at Ratnagiri Rachel slept deeply, undisturbed by hundreds of people – passengers, crew and coolies – running, leaping and shouting all around her. Yet, despite her being so obviously exhausted, at least a dozen women had to be physically restrained from trying to fondle, play with and talk to her. I fear a few of them misunderstood my motive and fancied I was operating some mleccha caste taboo. In a country of overcrowded joint-family dwellings there can be no conception of a child’s need for long hours of unbroken sleep. In other respects, too, the tendency is to treat Rachel as an animated toy rather than a human being. Most of the Indians we have met so far are complimentary about her in her presence, recklessly provoke her to show off (little provocation is needed) and allow her to interrupt their conversations with impunity. All this naturally aggravates her bumptiousness, which trait seems to me the chief distinguishing mark of small female humans. But perhaps I should have said ‘Western humans’, since most Indian children are evidently immune to it. The Indian tradition discourages the development of a child’s self-reliance and no doubt counteracts what to us is ‘spoiling’. One can afford to be tolerant of bad manners and constant demands for attention, and effusive about a child’s allegedly winning ways, if one has no real regard for him as a unique human personality.
Another minor problem at present is how to take Rachel’s occasional harsh criticisms of the behaviour of certain Indians. For instance, early this morning our half-empty bus twice sped away from bus stops, leaving several would-be passengers behind, and she asked, ‘Why didn’t the driver give these people time to get on? He’s being cruel.’
Not wishing her to become the sort of habitually condemnatory traveller one too often meets in India, I muttered something about ‘thoughtlessness rather than cruelty’; but I could see she was not impressed by this. Our bus-driver’s behaviour was most probably a result of his enjoyment of power, but it would have been both absurd and unwise to try to explain to Rachel that recently urbanised young Indians, in positions of petty authority, often become bullies for complex reasons connected with the structure of the Hindu family. Therefore, to avoid confirming her deduction that many Indians are callous louts, I had fallen back on the sort of waffling she so rightly scorns. The snag is that small children have their own black and white code and to try to make them focus on the grey areas too soon would impose an unfair strain. Against one’s own cultural background one manages this situation without even thinking about it, but given the added complication of an alien set of values it can become decidedly awkward.
I have been advised that the best and cheapest place to relax in Goa is Colva beach, where the hippy colony is small, the beach long and the absence of man-eating insects makes sleeping out feasible. Although Goa has a lot to offer I don’t plan to explore: we are pausing there solely to give Rachel a few days’ rest while she completes her adjustment to the time-change.
NOVEMBER 19TH. COLVA BEACH
We berthed at Panaji two and half hours late; I’m not sure why, but who cares anyway? Today I have been quite overcome by Indian fatalism plus European sybaritism. This beach really is everyman’s dream of a tropical paradise.
Our night on the boat was imperfectly restful; during the small hours we stopped twice at obscure ports and the usual pandemonium ensued by the light of the moon and a few Tilly lamps. Soon after five o’clock both Rachel and I gave up the attempt to sleep and sat looking over the side at the tender beauty of moonlight on water. Then gradually came a dove-greyness to the east; and then a lake of bronze-green light widening behind the Western Ghats; and finally a sudden reddening and a radiant arc above the night-blue mass of the hills. That was a sunrise to remember.
We sailed up the palmy, balmy Aquada estuary through schools of frolicking porpoises, yet despite its lovely setting I was not impressed by Panaji which is being developed with more haste than taste.
Goa has traditionally enjoyed a standard of living higher than the Indian average, but recently new industries fostered by Delhi have attracted thousands of landless peasants, from Andhra Pradesh, UP and Mysore, and many have been unable to get the jobs they hoped for. Therefore the scene as we berthed was not quite what the tourist literature leads one to expect of dreamy, easy-going, old-world Goa. Some fifty or sixty porters were grouped on the quay and they fought each other like tigers for access to the boat and an opportunity to earn the equivalent of two and a half pence. In some places such mêlées are no more than a local sport; here the frantic desperation on these men’s faces made one realise that carrying a load could mean the difference between a meal and no meal.
Panaji’s best buildings line the quay – the Old Fort, Government House and the Palace of the Archbishop, who is Primate of the Roman Catholic Church in India. (Since reading Desmond Morris I cannot use that phrase without visualising a gorilla in cardinal’s robes.) Having strolled past these and other handsome façades we spent half an hour wandering through the narrow but astonishingly neat and clean lanes of the old, Iberian-flavoured quarter of Fontainhas. During Portuguese times every urban householder was compelled by law to paint the outside of his house annually, after the monsoon, and it seems the Goans have not yet abandoned this habit.
From Panaji one can take a motor-launch to Rachol, en route for Colva beach, but wishing to glimpse the countryside we went by bus – a roundabout journey, because of Goa’s many rivers and estuaries. For two hours we jolted slowly between still, palm-guarded paddyfields, or over steep hills entangled in dense green jungle, or past tidy hamlets of red-brown thatched cottages, or over wide, slow rivers serenely reflecting a deep blue sky. I couldn’t help longing to be on foot, with a pack-animal to carry my kit; but another year or so must pass before I can revert to that way of life.
In four and a half centuries the Portuguese naturally made a much deeper impression on Goa (area 3,800 square kilometres: population 837,180 in 1971) than the British could make on their unwieldy empire in less than half that time. Margao is emphatically not an Indian town – not even to the extent that the British-built hill-stations now are – but neither is it Portuguese, despite a few imposing buildings with Moorish touches. Like the rest of Goa, it has its own unique, unmistakable character.
One immediately senses the effect on local attitudes of the hippy influx. The Goans are by nature welcoming and warm-hearted, and not unduly disposed to take financial advantage of the tourist, but many do now feel it necessary to be politely on guard with outsiders. Much hippy behaviour grossly offends Indians of every sort, though this country’s high standards of tolerance and hospitality usually preserve the offenders from being made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. In Goa, however, with its strong Christian minority, I had thought people might be less temperate in their reactions to such hobbies as nudity and drug-taking; but apparently this is not so.
When we got down from our bus it was two o’clock, and hot and still in the streets of Margao. Most of the shops were shut – I was looking for a liquor store – so we sat drinking tea under a tattered awning, watching a couple of American hippies rolling a joint. When someone beckoned from the tea-house door the young man jumped up with more alacrity than hippies are wont to display and hurried round to the side of the building. His companion then looked at us, smiled hazily and asked, ‘You want some grass?’
‘No thank you,’ I said, ‘my vices are of another generation. I’m looking for a liquor store. But it seems they’re all closed.’
The girl stood up. ‘I’m Felicity,’ she said, shaking pastry-crumbs out of the folds of her voluminous ankle-length robe. ‘Come, I’ll show you – there’s always one open down here.’ And she took the trouble to guide us for half a mile through dusty, sun-stricken streets. At the door of the shop she nodded and turned away, having given a perfect example of the sort of disinterested kindness practised by many hippies but for which the tribe gets too little credit.
Colva is a scattered settlement, rather than a town or village, and my heart sank when the bus stopped on the edge of the beach beside a shack in which Coke and other such fizzy potions are sold. The place seemed to be infested with foreigners. Not less than ten were visible at a glance, including a flaxen-haired youth who was strolling under the near-by palms, stark naked, his eyes fixed raptly on the horizon as though it were vouchsafing him some vision not normally granted to man – as, indeed, it doubtless was. Rachel considered him closely for a moment and made an unprintable judgement before turning her attention to the camping possibilities of the terrain.
As we walked on to the beach it became apparent that Colva is not, after all, too seriously infested; pale, smooth sands stretch for many miles with no trace of development and away from the bus stop there are few people to be seen. Close to the sea, palms flourish on low, scrubby sand-dunes where I reckoned it should be possible to camp comfortably; but first we would bathe, and then return to the settlement to eat before looking for a sleeping-spot. Floating in clear green water, listening to pure white surf singing on golden sands beneath an azure sky, I felt as unreal as a figure in a travel brochure for millionaires.
The local fisherfolk – whose boats and nets are strewn all over the beach – seem very shy, though willing to be friendly with Rachel. They are almost black-skinned, quite tall and beautifully proportioned. (Good advertisements for a fish and coconut diet.) The women wear gay blouses and swirling skirts, the men only a codpiece attached to a string around their waist, or sometimes to a belt of silver links. As we bathed they were constantly passing to and fro, the women and girls carrying on their heads enormous circular wicker baskets, or earthenware or brass jars. Twice we saw crews loading elaborate nets into heavy boats, which were then pushed on rollers into the sea. It delighted me to watch these men – all grace, strength and skill – performing a ritual unchanged for millennia. As they worked they chanted a slow, haunting song and seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. These aboriginal inhabitants of Goa have never interbred with invaders.
Back at the settlement we met a pathetic American youth named Bob who had the unmistakable appearance of one suffering from chronic dysentery. When I explained that we were going to sleep out he jumped like a shot rabbit and told us that a hippy sleeping on the dunes had had his throat slit three nights ago. The naked body was found only this morning and has not yet been identified, nor have the police any idea who the killer might be, so we are now installed in a typical Goan fisherman’s hut at Rs.5 a night. It is half-full of nets and other equipment, with a roof and walls of palm-fronds, interwoven with palm-trunks, and a floor of loose, fine sand. The beds are strips of coir laid on the sand and since there is no door the place has its limitations as a protection against throat-slitters. However, our landlord’s cottage is scarcely thirty yards away and his pi-dogs are large, fierce and vociferous.
From our non-door we have a splendid view of the sea; I threw a stone to see if the waves were within a stone’s throw and if I were a better stone-thrower they would be. Rachel rejoices in the innumerable small black pigs and minute piglets, and in the brown-and-cream goats and mangy pi-dogs (too much fish produces mange) who roam around nearby. The whole beach is permeated by a strong but pleasant fishy smell: noisy flocks of gulls and crows see to it that no fish rots. Slightly less pleasant-smelling is my present form of illumination – a wick floating in a small tin of shark’s oil.
NOVEMBER 20TH. COLVA BEACH
This has been an extremely idle day: I can think of none other quite like it in my entire life. Yet now my muscles are reminding me that ‘idle’ is not the mot juste; since morning I must have swum seven or eight miles, up and down, parallel to the beach.
I am writing this sitting in the doorway of our hut, with a glass of Feni (the local spirit, distilled from cashew-nuts) beside me, and through a fringe of palms, stirring in the evening breeze, I can see a fleet of ancient fishing-boats sailing away into the gold and crimson sunset. But this is a place and a time for purple prose, so I must exercise restraint.
A coconut-picker has just been distracting me: I delight in watching them as they swarm up these immensely tall trees, with no aid but a few shallow footholds cut in the bark, and send huge nuts thudding on to the sand. Nuts are now seventy-five paise each – a few years ago a rupee bought half a dozen – but one nut provides a full meal for two.
A ripple of morbid excitement went through the settlement today as the police from Margao man-hunted. They have apparently established that the murdered man was a German – good detective work since he wore nothing, carried no documents and had communicated with nobody during his fortnight or so amongst these dunes. Such a degree of withdrawal is common at a certain stage of drug-addiction, when the victim himself hardly knows who he is, but the Goan police do not realise this and clearly suspect Colva’s foreign colony of an unhelpful conspiracy of silence.
