The Indian Equator Read online

  Twain was fascinated by the Parsee funeral ritual. They hold that “the principle which underlies and orders everything connected with a Parsee funeral is Purity. By the tenets of the Zoroastrian religion, the elements, Earth, Fire, and Water, are sacred, and must not be contaminated by contact with a dead body. Hence corpses must not be burned, neither must they be buried.” Instead they used vultures to pick the body clean, after which the bones were left exposed to the tropical sun and rain - and the sacred elements - for a month, when the powdery remains were placed in a well with a drain and eventually found themselves in the Arabian Sea.

  Today, alas, the famously efficient Bombay vultures have vanished, poisoned by the twentieth century with its industrial pollution and agricultural chemicals. In their stead the Parsees have installed solar mirrors above and to the side of the funeral Towers and these are maneuvered to reflect intensified solar rays on to the bodies. The vultures are much missed: decomposition by vultures took as little as thirty minutes, whereas the same process by solar can take a week or so. The Parsees are now rearing fifteen vultures and plan to train them back in the ways of their ancestors, human and avian.

  What do remain are the spectacular location and the rather dismal ceremony. “On lofty ground, in the midst of a paradise of tropical foliage and flowers, remote from the world and its turmoil and noise, they stood - the Towers of Silence.” All three Towers[16] are located in extensive and beautifully maintained forested grounds in Mumbai’s exclusive Malabar Point, just north of Raj Bhavan. The parkland must be worth billions of any currency that comes to mind. Only the burial preparation area of the grounds is open to the public and has the air of a well tended upcountry field hospital. Photography is strictly prohibited anywhere on the site but a fair impression of the park and the Towers of Silence can be seen on Google Earth at 18°57’33.14”N; 72°48’23.24”E.

  The dismal ceremony? “None may touch the dead or enter the Towers where they repose except certain men who are officially appointed for that purpose. They receive high pay, but theirs is a dismal life, for they must live apart from their species, because their commerce with the dead defiles them, and any who should associate with them would share their defilement.”

  The Towers have a circular flat floor with surrounding walls - not unlike a squashed bull-ring, or as Twain put it, “a gasometer”. The solar panels are above and beyond the walls. The floor is divided into three concentric rings: the bodies of the Parsee men are arranged around the outer ring, women in the middle ring and children in the innermost ring. In the centre is a circular pit where the bones are left to be bleached by the sun and washed by the rain, and thus powdered and cleaned are eventually washed into the sea nearby as before. Not so much dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes as powder-to-powder, water-to-water.

  The illustration below, with the vultures awaiting their next meal, explains the Towers of Silence better than the thousand words I am hereby spared writing.

  One animal disposal accessory that has survived since Twain’s time is the dog which accompanies the body on its final voyage to the Towers; not the same dog of course, but a random ceremonial dog chosen for life, as it were, from the Parsee community. Even then the reason for the canine involvement in the ritual was lost in time: “The origin of at least one of the details of a Parsee funeral is not now known - the presence of the dog. Before a corpse is borne from the house of mourning it must be uncovered and exposed to the gaze of a dog; a dog must also be led in the rear of the funeral.”

  Twain was an early American advocate of cremation and he compared it with the Parsee vulture system: “as a sanitary measure, their system seems to be about the equivalent of cremation, and as sure. When cremation becomes the rule we shall cease to shudder at it; we should shudder at burial if we allowed ourselves to think what goes on in the grave.”

  Two days and two Talks later Mark Twain was ready to make his first foray on the road, a Talk and overnight stay at Poona, five hours away to the southeast by train. Smythe went with him; Livy and Clara stayed behind at Watson’s Hotel. By then Mark Twain had seen enough of India, albeit still only of Bombay, to remember:

  This is indeed India! The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations - the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.

  It seems that like so many of us, he was smitten - but more of that later.

  Poona

  The journey to Poona was also Twain’s first experience of Indian railways - what was to become, after Independence, Indian Railways. The train left from Bombay’s famous Victoria Terminus, known to one and all as VT, a massive Victorian Italianate Gothic Revival pile, like Watson’s Hotel modeled - or so it would seem - along the lines of St. Pancras train station in London. It had been opened just nine years before Twain’s visit and named after the Queen Empress Victoria herself. Today renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, or CST, it is still widely known to Mumbai taxi drivers and its three and a half million daily commuters - and lovers of the Gothic - as VT.

  Twain’s first impressions will be instantly recognizable to any VT visitor today:

  What a spectacle the railway station was! It was very large, yet when we arrived it seemed as if the whole world was present - half of it inside, the other half outside, and both halves, bearing mountainous head-loads of bedding and other freight, trying simultaneously to pass each other, in opposing floods of patient, gentle, long-suffering natives, with whites scattered among them at rare intervals. Wherever a white man’s native servant appeared, that native seemed to have put aside his natural gentleness for the time and invested himself with the white man’s privilege of making a way for himself by promptly shoving all intervening black things out of it. In these exhibitions of authority Satan was scandalous.

  Inside the great station, tides upon tides of rainbow-costumed natives swept along, this way and that, in massed and bewildering confusion, eager, anxious, belated, distressed. And here and there, in the midst of this hurly-burly, and seemingly undisturbed by it, sat great groups of natives on the bare stone floor, young, slender brown women, old, gray wrinkled women, little soft brown babies, old men, young men, boys; all poor people, but all the females among them, both big and little, bejeweled with cheap and showy nose-rings, toe-rings, leglets, and armlets, these things constituting all their wealth, no doubt.

  If he thought it was teeming then he should see it now! Working the late afternoon arrival time at Poona of their five-hour journey backwards, Smythe and Mark Twain were on the Hyderabad Express, which still leaves at midday, a period of slightly lesser mayhem.

  Mayhem in all its madness, pandemonium in all its confusion, bedlam in all its uproar, merely scratch the surface of VT at rush hour. They arrive on the carriage roofs; they arrive hanging from the window bars; they arrive clinging to the door frames; they arrive balancing on the bogeys; four and a half thousand die from these antics every year[17] - and the trains are not some super smooth Japanese contraptions, nor the tracks the latest in German seamless welding technology, but rickety old Raj-era jigger-buckets which give every impression of trying to shake their passengers off like a dog in from the rain.

  Yet the real amusement for the first timer comes when any of the three and a hal
f million daily commuters tries to disembark. It’s out of the question to wait for the train to stop; much more fun to jump from it as soon as it is alongside any part of the platform. The first fliers inevitably stumble as they land and their trick is to be up and away before, mere seconds later, fliers from the following carriage land in the same spot. Pile-ups inevitably occur every few steps along the way but never a cross-word is heard. The driver joins in the fun too: instead of pulling alongside the platforms at walking speed he barrels in at a good trot looking backwards at the flying fun behind, then brakes hard as he approaches the stoppers and then has time for a last look behind as any stragglers are thrown off by the sudden stop.

  By now those inside the carriages are starting to leap out, pushed from behind by the hundreds on board anxious to join in the fun on the platform. Each carriage is so full that it seems to take a minor eternity to empty itself. Eight hours later the process is reversed when after the gates open the Platform Olympic Games sees thousands of commuters sprint, hurdle, high jump and long jump first into and then over each other onto the carriages; just when you think the train is full, just when the train is full, just when it you think it is overflowing, just when it is overflowing, a fresh layer of desperadoes climbs on top of those already on top to make their way up onto the roof... and off it shudders through the slums.

  It’s a funny thing about the Indians that although so many of them spend so much time - and danger and discomfort - commuting, they haven’t learnt Lesson One: let ’em off before you let ’em on. This phenomenon is best observed on the commuter trains or, better still, the metro. First you notice something strange: between stations commuters shuffle and shove for position within the carriages, some moving towards the doors and some backing off. The reason becomes clear as the overpacked carriage arrives at a station. The moment the doors open an inch the pushing and heaving starts in equal measure: those trying to get in, try to get in and those trying to get out, try to get out. It’s a crush, it’s a scrum, it’s a heaving scramble. The trick to getting out is to line up in the second row behind one of the larger commuters and then when the doors open use him as your battering ram, as you yourself will be used from behind. The trick to getting in is to line up in the third row and when the pushing stops you will be just outside the doors at which point you haul the man in front back and take his place just as the doors close. It’s more fun than it sounds.

  Train travel between cities is a lot less fraught and can be quite comfortable; it is always slow and always absorbing. When Twain caught the Hyderabad Express on 29 January there were three classes. “The natives traveled third class, and at marvelously cheap rates. There was an immense string of those third-class cars, for the natives travel by hordes; and a weary hard night of it the occupants would have, no doubt.”

  Now there are no fewer than eight classes. The old First Class, by which the Twain Grand Tour traveled when not in a special VIP “Palace-on-Wheels” carriage laid on by one of their hosts, is now only fourth in the hierarchy of comfort. Indian train journeys are built around overnight travel, partly because the distances are so long and the speed so slow, and partly because it is so much more comfortable to travel in the cool of the night. Top spot now goes to Air-conditioned First Class (AC1), which has only two berths in a lockable compartment; AC1 is now a rare class as the deregulated airlines[18] have taken the money of those who can afford AC1’s relatively high prices. AC2 (as in two-tier bunks per compartment) is half the price of AC1 and has four-berth curtained off compartments, with fresh sheets and pillows and blankets supplied each night. AC2 is how the Indian middle class and most tourists travel; it is how the Strathcarron Re-Tour travels (although Sita looks a bit glum: her family normally travel AC1).

  After AC3, which means three tiers of bunk, so six per compartment, comes (non-air-conditioned) First Class in fourth spot and not much changed from that day in 1896.

  It was a car that promised comfort; indeed, luxury. The floor was bare, but would not long remain so when the dust should begin to fly.

  Across one end of the compartment ran a netting for the accommodation of hand-baggage; at the other end was a door which would shut, upon compulsion, but wouldn’t stay shut; it opened into a narrow little closet which had a wash-bowl in one end of it, and a place to put a towel.

  On each side of the car, and running fore and aft, was a broad leather-covered sofa to sit on in the day and sleep on at night. Over each sofa hung, by straps, a wide, flat, leather-covered shelf - to sleep on. In the daytime you can hitch it up against the wall, out of the way - and then you have a big unencumbered and most comfortable room to spread out in.

  No car in any country is quite its equal for comfort (and privacy) I think. For usually there are but two persons in it; and even when there are four there is but little sense of impaired privacy. Our own cars at home can surpass the railway world in all details but that one: they have no cosiness; there are too many people together.

  At the foot of each sofa was a side-door, for entrance and exit. Along the whole length of the sofa on each side of the car ran a row of large single-plate windows, of a blue tint-blue to soften the bitter glare of the sun and protect one’s eyes from torture. These could be let down out of the way when one wanted the breeze.

  Air-conditioning has really done for First Class. To keep out the heat the dark blue tinted windows that Twain described are actually almost black, which means one cannot see the great Indian countryside, and they need to be left a bit ajar for ventilation, which fills the compartment with heat and dust. After these come various versions of non-a/c discomfort known as Second Class, which Twain would have known as Second and Third class. He noted also that: “The Indian trains are manned by natives exclusively. The Indian stations except very large and important ones - are manned entirely by natives, and so are the posts and telegraphs. The rank and file of the police are natives. All these people are pleasant and accommodating.” Actually a large part of the trains and stations were manned by Anglo-Indians and we’ll see how they fared later.

  ***

  Twain’s and Smythe’s visit to Poona was a bit of a damp squib. Poona itself was at its colonial finest. The British had discovered a pretty little mountain town a hundred miles southeast of Bombay - but more importantly 1,500 feet above the rank humidity of the monsoon-prone coast. From June to September the governor and his government decamped to the hill station and moved their whole operation into Poona’s Governor’s House. Scattered around the surrounding hills were the old Peshwa palaces, with pride of place going to the Parvati hill temple - all remnants of past Hindu glories and all giving the area an added oriental heritage and zest. By 1896 Poona was a full-scale, but still small-scale, Raj summer resort and year-round military headquarters centered in the cantonment area.

  This was Twain’ first cantonment experience; over the next two months he would experience many more cantonments as he was to a large extent under the care of the military side of the Raj and it was in cantonments that they were based. In small towns like Poona the cantonment quickly became the centre of activity and to visit a cantonment now is to experience an India that was: freshly painted buildings, swept and uncrowded streets and a strange sense of order and functionality. The Indian Army, Raj-like in so many ways, keep the cantonments all over India not just intact but spick and span, and Poona, being the headquarters of Southern Command, is especially spick and not a little span.

  Fifteen years before Twain’s Talk here the British had built the Poona Gymkhana Club adjoining the cantonment. “Gymkhana” is an Urdu and Hindi word for any form of sporting contest; the Indian nuance tips towards racket games, especially squash and badminton, and the British nuance towards equestrian events, especially polo and show-jumping. By the time Twain visited Poona on 30 January 1896 the Club had a large enough cricket ground to play two games simultaneously, numerous tennis and squash courts, two polo pitches and the beginnin
gs of what is now an 18-hole golf course scattered across Poona’s cantonment area.

  When not disporting themselves on the sports or the battle fields Gymkhana Club members could enjoy tiffin in the day or cocktails in the evening, all served by uniformed bearers on the long veranda that joined onto the cricket pavilion. The bearers and the other staff were the only non-royal Indians allowed into the club. Royal Indians, with their boundless wealth and anyway tending to be more British than the British, were more than welcome - and more than paid their way. The founding fathers of the Poona Gymkhana Club were indeed the great and the good of Anglo-Indian society, proclaimed on a varnished and gold-leafed plaque above the entry to the veranda:

  His Exalted Highness The Aga Khan

  Nawab Shah Rookh Yar Jung Bahadur

  Sir Cowasji Jehangir

  Aga Kasim Shah

  Sir Nusserwanjee Wadia

  Aga Jalal M. Shah

  Sir Jehangir (Kothari)

  Sir Dhanjbhoy Bomanji

  His Highness The Nawab of Junagadh

  Sir Victor Sassoon

  His Highness The Maharaja of Jodhpur

  His Highness The Maharaja of Rajpipla

  Sir Sasoon David

  Sir Dorab Tata

  Sir Cusrow Wadia

  His Highness The Gaikwar of Baroda

  It is hard to stress too highly the importance of club life in the Raj days. Most, like the Poona Club here or my Royal Bombay Yacht Club, started off as sporting clubs as sport was the overwhelming leisure activity of the Europeans in India. But the real value of club life for its members came off the polo pitch, tennis court or golf links, when the military and civilians could meet in the cool of the evening at bridge or cocktails or dinner. The club was where a major could compare notes with a sessions judge, a captain could confer with the district forest officer, a colonel could rub shoulders with a headquarters tax-collector and so on.