The Indian Equator Read online

  An awkward silence fell between them and then suddenly Manuel was in full flow. Twain held up his hand.

  “There - don’t do that. I can’t understand Hindustani.”

  “Not Hindustani, master, English. Always I speaking English sometimes when I talking every day all the time at you.”

  Within an hour Manuel had his own bearer and Twain had his first taste of the twists and turns of the Indian caste system. Rather than clean the bathroom himself Manuel “put a coolie at the work, and explained that he would lose caste if he did it himself; it would be pollution, by the law of his caste, and it would cost him a deal of fuss and trouble to purify himself and accomplish his rehabilitation. He said that that kind of work was strictly forbidden to persons of caste, and as strictly restricted to the very bottom layer of Hindoo society, the despised Untouchable.”

  Three days later, with the Twain party in despair, Smythe fired Manuel and set about finding a replacement. This time the recovering Mark Twain interviewed... well, he never did get to the bottom of his name but they all soon settled on Satan.

  Satan was a whirlwind and all Mark Twain’s “heart, all my affection, all my admiration, went out spontaneously to this frisky little forked black thing, this compact and compressed incarnation of energy and force and promptness and celerity and confidence, this smart, smiley, engaging, shiny-eyed little devil, feruled on his upper end by a gleaming fire-coal of a fez with a red-hot tassel dangling from it.”

  “You’ll suit. What is your name?” Twain said.

  “Muzzererivathayana,” Muzzererivathayana replied.

  “Let me see if I can make a selection out of it - for business uses, I mean; we will keep the rest for Sundays. Give it to me in installments.”

  “Muzz-erer-ivath-ayana,” Muzzererivathayana replied slowly.

  “There does not seem to be any shorter, except Mousawhich - suggesting mouse. It is not in your character, too soft, too quiet, too conservative, not of your splendid style. Mousa is short enough, but I don’t quite like it. How do you think Satan would do?”

  “Yes, master,” replied the newly christened Satan, “Satan do wair good.”

  Well, every chap needs a Satan - especially in India. Much as I would have loved a bearer, or a whole bevy of bearers, for the Mark Twain footsteps task in hand a research assistant is far more useful.

  Mine swings into our lives haphazardly. Through a friend at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London I am introduced to the Cultural Attaché from the Indian High Commission, Shaurya Mark. Before a slow lunch at Romanov’s in Aldwych he writes me a sort of “To Whom It May Concern” get-out-of-an-Indian-jail letter of safe passage to tuck into my back pocket. I explain about the research done with the Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley and he asks what more needs doing.

  “Well, the next stage is to hire an intern in India to do some more research over there and come on the trip with us, interpreting, generally helping us out.”

  “Us?”

  “Yes, there’s my wife and photographer Gillian too.”

  “Ah, good, so you can have a female researcher.”

  I must have looked quizzical. “Yes,” he said, “in India this is important. Chaperoning is still in vogue. In this case you are in luck.”

  “My four favorite words, but how so?”

  “My niece Charusheela John has just finished her studies at Lancaster University and is now back home in Bombay. She needs some work experience for her CV, you need an Indian intern, hey presto!”

  “What did she study?” I ask.

  “English Literature. 1.1, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Ouch,” I reply, “out-qualified again. And her second name John, would she be Anglo-Indian?”

  “No, no, her family - and mine - are Christian. We take the father’s first name as our last. Her father is John. His brother, my father was Mark. Her brother is Paul, and so on.”

  “What if you have more than twelve boys?” I ask.

  “Then you start over.”

  ***

  The Twain party’s Watson’s Hotel is no longer habitable and we are staying at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club; hardly a hardship posting. An interview with Charusheela had been arranged and she breezes into the august old club, swirling past the wood paneled, trophy-covered walls, a vision of modern India in jet black designer ringlets, pendulum designer earrings, fake designer jeans and slightly-too-tight-but-who-am-I-to-judge fake designer tee-shirt. The interview starts, the dynamic changes and after several cups of Darjeeling’s finest brew I’m pleased to say we seem to have passed and will start with her in a few days.

  I mention how Mark Twain had grappled with Muzzererivathayana and settled on calling him Satan. “Look, I hope you don’t mind me saying so but Charusheela doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue either. The idea behind the story is then-and-now. I can’t call you Satan. Maybe I can call you Angel?”

  Gillian leans forward imperceptibly and an eyebrow raises towards the conversation. “Maybe not Angel,” I stumble, “What is the name of your favorite Hindu goddess, for example?”

  “Sita,” she replies, “She’s not really a goddess but I like her name.”

  “And do you like her?”

  “Yes, of course, she is Rama’s consort.”

  “Then Sita you are. Sita and Satan. I think you are going to make quite a pair.” And they did.

  ***

  Watson’s Hotel ain’t what it used to be. It was built as the finest hotel in Asia in the mid-1860s and by common consent for a generation it was just that - if you were white, for that was its policy. If you were non-white you would have been among the six hundred staff working to service the 150 rooms all of which could be adjoined to make suites; but then you had to be white again, and female, to work in the restaurant; and white again and male to work in the lobby. A popular untruth is that when the Indian tycoon Jamsetji Tata was refused a room in 1903 he built the Taj Mahal Hotel next to the Gateway of India in retaliation. Not so, he had already determined that Watson’s was in incurable decline and Bombay was booming enough to warrant a replacement. And, like a good Tata, he was absolutely right: today the ludicrously overpriced Taj still stands tall and full and Watson’s is condemned and crumbling - but, this being India, still full.

  The construction was unusual and serves to show how much the Empire benefited Britain. Private money was raised to employ the civil engineer who cut his teeth on St. Pancras, a Gothic-revival main line train station in London; he used the same system of Lego-linking cast-iron steel girders that had been used at London’s Crystal Palace, built ten years earlier for the Great Exhibition. The four thousand beams were made over three years in three factories in the Black Country in the English Midlands, then shipped by canal to Manchester, by barge to Liverpool and by a series of freighters to Bombay. Like many buildings designed by engineers it wears its heart on its sleeve, or in this case its girders on its façade. It is, even now in its death throes, rather magnificent - albeit more so as a monument to the financial and imperial confidence of the early the Raj period than to its aesthetic merit.

  The Twain party arrived there on the morning of 18 January 1896 and were immediately bedazzled by their early impressions of India. “The lobbies and halls were full of turbaned, and fez’d and embroidered, cap’d, and barefooted, and cotton-clad dark natives, some of them rushing about, others at rest squatting, or sitting on the ground.” Their suite of rooms was on the fourth floor and a long procession of Indians carried their numerous possessions up to the suite. Each man carried one item as is still the case in smart hotels today. “Each native carried a bag, in some cases, in other cases less. One strong native carried my overcoat, another a parasol, another a box of cigars, another a novel, and the last man in the procession had no load but a fan.”

  Gillian and I travel somewhat
more modestly: two large suitcases and two carry-ons. All glide along on wheels - the suitcases are four wheel drive - and are easily self-driven but it’s impossible to avoid a scurry of porter activity as soon as you are spotted. The subsequent tipping regime remains unchanged - “each man waited patiently, tranquilly, in no sort of hurry, till one of us found time to give him a copper, then he bent his head reverently, touched his forehead with his fingers, and went his way” - although the copper has been replaced by a ten-rupee note per bag. Also unchanged is the first impression: “They seemed a soft and gentle race, and there was something both winning and touching about their demeanor.”

  Fortunately though this has most certainly changed:

  The door opening onto the balcony needed cleaning and a native got down on his knees and went to work at it. He seemed to be doing it well enough, but perhaps he wasn’t, for a burly German in charge put on a look that betrayed dissatisfaction, then without explaining what was wrong, gave the native a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him where the defect was. The native took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing in his face or manner any resentment. I had not seen the like of this for fifty years. It carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the usual way of explaining one’s desires to a slave.

  Sita’s research had revealed that the World Monuments Fund, a US-based NGO, had managed to enlist Watson’s as one of the “100 World Endangered Monuments” but being a mere NGO did not have the power to make the landlord repair it; the landlord anyway cited the city’s rent freeze as making restoration infeasible. Meanwhile in a monsoon a large chunk of masonry had fallen from the old hotel’s western façade, killing a beggar below, frightening the life out of passing worthies and damaging various vehicles. Town Hall declared the building unsafe to survive another monsoon and ordered its evacuation and a demolition report. The engineers reported the building was not only evidently unsafe but also economically indestructible and Town Hall were faced with a Watson-22: given its prime downtown location and massive girder construction the old hotel would be so expensive and disruptive to demolish that it had to remain in situ, but to have it remain in situ would mean evacuating it and under an old Raj-era by-law compensating the landlord as if it were in prime condition - compensation he would not be due had they been able to afford to demolish it. Welcome to the labyrinthine world of British-derived Indian bureaucracy.

  We arrive to find Mark Twain’s old hotel not only booming but bursting with ramshackle offices and stalls. The illegal temptation to have a free downtown office next to the High Court is too much to resist for dozens of advocates as well as for the shoal of printing, copying and faxing pilot fish attending the legal - well, illegal - sharks. The electric wiring alone is a masterpiece of daring, crackling improvisation; most of the glass from the famous old atrium is smashed and shards lie dagger drawn read to fall from on high, while others lie in wait in the corridors; litter is piled to shoulder height and the lawyers with offices at the rear of the building have had to cut a path through it to reach their shack-offices.

  We are keen to reach the fourth floor where we reckon the Twain party stayed; to rephrase - I am keen to make the climb but Gillian takes one look at the holes in the treads of the stairways and stays firmly grounded. I tread the treads but by the third floor it is clear that each one of the old hotel rooms has been divided and subdivided into so many lawyer’s cubicles to make them unrecognizable as the finest rooms in Asia that they were. More fun is to be had reading the overlapping lawyers’ signs, part directions, part advertisements, part pleas for any sort of legal work in the illegal surroundings and all bottomed off by a plethora of buckets to catch the leaks.

  ***

  That afternoon there is a matinee performance of Bollywood’s Tanu Weds Manu at the Excelsior Cinema just around the corner from Watson’s. Sita has a crush on the lead supporting actor Jasjit Singh Gill, who trades under the name Jimmy Shergill, but the official reason for standing outside the Excelsior is that this is where Mark Twain opened his lecture tour of India when the Excelsior Cinema was known as the Novelty Theatre. Waiting outside we pass around the advertisement Sita had found in an old Times of India:

  FIRST APPEARANCE IN INDIA

  of the

  GREATEST HUMOURIST OF THE AGE

  The Author of ‘The Innocents Abroad’

  MARK TWAIN

  who

  In the presence of

  HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR

  And party will

  TO-MORROW (FRIDAY) AFTERNOON

  at 5-30 in the

  NOVELTY THEATRE

  give his

  FIRST MARK TWAIN ‘AT HOME’

  Humorously And Numerously Illustrated With

  LIFE AND CHARACTER SKETCHES

  ---

  THE SECOND ‘AT HOME’ with Entirely Different subjects will be on MONDAY at the same time.[2]

  ---

  PRICES OF ADMISSION: Rs 4;3;2;1

  Tickets maybe purchased and seats secured at Messrs. SOUNDY & CO.

  Inside, the auditorium is unchanged in space but has lost its ornate decorations and gained a shabby nylon carpet. There are and were five six-seat boxes on each side of the hall and forty-one rows of seats at thirty-two to a row. I can feel Smythe beside me now, pencil scratching on the back of an envelope: 1,372 x av Rs 2.50 = Rs 3,430 - 500 exps. = 2,930. 293 for CS, 2637 for MT.

  By the time Mark Twain stood up in front of the audience at the Novelty Theatre on 24 January he had already delivered 726 lectures - or as he would insist on calling them, Talks. The “At Home” world tour lasted for exactly a year, from 15 July 1895-6 during which time he gave the At Home Talk 160 times; that first night in Bombay was the 99th date. Why At Home? To include the words “At Home” on a formal invitation to an informal party was a British Empire convention and it was this informal atmosphere in a formal setting that he wished to create. He told the Bombay Gazette the day before the opening how he saw the difference: “A lecture could appear in print by virtue of its calculated form and graceful phrasing. A fine speech might be badly delivered yet it would read perfectly well in print. A Talk is a very different thing. It is the delivery that makes a Talk effective not the phrasing... The audience plays a vital role in completing the Talk... The best and most effective parts of the Talk are acted not spoken.”

  To develop this further, in his introduction to How to Tell a Story he notes that:

  There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind - the humorous. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.

  The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.

  The humorous story is strictly a work of art - high and delicate art - and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it.

  The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it. Very often the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it. Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretence that he does not know it is a nub.

  On stage he was really an actor, playing the part of a bumbling country innocent who had no idea why people were laughing at what he said. Off stage he was the opposite, urbane, well connected, fond of luxury and protective of his reputation. I often think the stress of performance must have been worsened by having to change character so profoundly.
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  The Talk would typically last for an hour and a quarter and although delivered entirely without notes followed a fail-safe formula. He had up his sleeve eight well rehearsed, amusing anecdotes of about fifteen minutes each and on any evening he would use any five of these to suit his mood and how he judged the audience. He also had a choice of two set readings from Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn if he needed a break from adlibbing. He believed in the old adage that an amateur rehearses until he has it right, whereas a professional rehearses until he cannot get it wrong. From the same Bombay Gazette article we find:

  I prepare carefully for the lectures. I am not for one moment going to pretend I do not. I don’t believe that any public man has ever attained success as a lecturer to paying audiences who has not carefully prepared, and has not gone over every sentence again and again until the whole thing is fixed upon his memory.

  It is all very well to talk about being not prepared and trust into the spirit of the hour. But a man cannot go from one end of the world to the other, no matter how great his reputation may be, and stand before paid audiences in various large cities without finding that his tongue is far less glib than it used to be. He might hold audiences spell bound with unpremeditated oratory in past days when nothing was charged to hear him, but he cannot rely on being able to do so when they have paid for their seats and require something for the money unless he thinks all out before hand.

  The theme of “At Home” was moral regeneration, told with the irony that the more wicked you are now the less likely you are to sin in the future. He used the then-current advances in medicine as a physical parallel: just as doctors inoculate patients against deadly diseases by giving them a harmless dose of the same disease, he proposed that we apply the same logic to sinning. To sin then becomes a virtue; there are 462 (or any number he made up on the night) sins and the best we can do is through then whole gamut until we are sin-proof.

  His stagecraft was as much a part of the allure as the anecdotes. Dressed all in white,[3] either a morning suit with collared shirt or in morning dress with wing-collar shirt, either of these with a white bow-tie and waistcoat and gold chain, he would wander onto the stage unannounced in a cloud of cigar smoke and stand there looking perplexed when the applause started. Then he would wait for the audience to settle down and pause, still without speaking, until the first nervous sniggers came up to the stage, and then, feet apart, a puff on the cigar, in a very slow syllable-stretching, exaggerated drawl he was off: “I intend to put before the world a scheme for the moral regeneration of the whole human race. I hope I can make it effective but I can’t tell yet - but I know it is planned out upon strictly scientific lines and is up to date in that particular. I propose to do for the moral fabric just what advanced medical art is doing the physical body. I propose to inoculate for sin.”