One hundred times one hundred million is ten billion rupees, one hundred thousand crores. Two hundred million pounds sterling. Three hundred million dollars per annum, free of taxes. Hush money and protection money payments, annual salaries to the villagers employed to tend the Non-Existents, and miscellaneous expenses added up to less than five percent of this exquisite sum and represented nothing worse than a tiny mole, a sort of financial beauty spot, upon the immortally lovely face of this magnificent scam, which Piloo operated without hindrance—indeed, with the enthusiastic support of many of Maharashtra’s greatest figures—for almost fifteen years.
Three hundred million times fifteen is four and a half billion dollars. One and a half million crores of rupees. Less expenses, certainly. Let’s not exaggerate. Call it four billion dollars, net.
I went in to the office to discuss the brief. Anita Dharkar had a satirical spread in mind. On the left, Piloo’s deserted “ranches”; on the right, a more typical goat farming operation. “Presenting Piloo’s Invisible Goats,” she extemporised, enjoying herself. “Here you see them, not being seen. Unlike these Ordinary Goats, which, as you can see, you can see.”
I, who had boasted about my talent for invisibility, was commissioned to photograph these phantoms, Doodhwala’s “ghoasts.” Anita wanted Piloo’s magic herds on film. “Piloo is not only protected by corruption,” she said, becoming serious. “Also, there is the infinite indifference of India. Chalta-hai, isn’t it? So it goes. We expect our Piloos to get up to tricks, and we shrug and turn away. Only if you get the pictures proving the case beyond all doubt will we be able to make anything happen.”
She had acquired a full list of all Piloo’s registered goat-rearing facilities. “How’d you do that?” I asked, impressed. But she was too savvy to betray a source, even to me. “Truth will out,” she said. “In the end, there’s always an honest Injun somewhere, if you can find him. Even in Inja.”
“Or maybe,” I said, less idealistically, “there’s someone Piloo forgot to buy.”
“Or maybe,” Anita took up the thread, “it’s just in the nature of secrets to come out, because the only way to keep a secret is not to tell anybody, which is why I’m not answering your disgraceful question about my informant. And Piloo’s secret was shared by too many people. The wonder is it didn’t leak years ago. Piloo must’ve been paying damn, damn well.”
“Or maybe,” I responded, “your source is a kind of patriot. People are always complaining, right?, that India is too busy aping the West. But here is our very own special talent; we should celebrate it. About scams we don’t need to learn a thing. We can teach. Listen, I’m sort of proud of Piloo. I hate the bastard, but he has done a beautiful thing.”
“Sure,” said Anita. “So let’s try to give him what he deserves. The Padmashri, even the Bharat Ratna. No; these honours are not big enough. How about a pair of official portraits, front view, side view, wearing stripey outfit, and holding a card with name and serial number also, if poss?”
It sounded good to me. “Just get the photos, Rai, okay?” she said, and walked out of the room.
She didn’t tell me about the other photographer, the one she’d sent before me, the one who hadn’t returned: not because she was anxious to avoid alarming me, but because she knew I would be offended at being her second choice. She wanted to come with me, too; she had it all planned out. We would fly to Aurangabad, acting like newlyweds on honeymoon, not a camera in sight. For verisimilitude and other reasons, we would check in at the Rambagh Palace Hotel and make love all night. To keep up the honeymoon cover story—for we were going into Piloo country, where any doorman, any chaprassi, could be a stool pigeon—we would go to Ajanta and stand in the darkness of the caves while a guide switched a light on and off and the Buddhist masterpieces appeared and vanished. The bodhisattvas, the pink elephants, the half-clad women with their hourglass figures and perfect globes of breasts. Anita’s body was the equal of any fresco and the offer was an attractive one, but I left Bombay without telling her and plunged into the hard heart of India, intent upon doing what I had laughed at Vina for wanting to do, what city dwellers almost never do in India. I would enter rural India. Not to learn about rhythm or withdrawal, but to get old Piloo’s goat.
After that strange, jangling single night with Vina, it did me good to get away. Of course I never set any fire. You think I burned your house down? Did your mother think so? Gee, thanks. I may have been a thief, but I wasn’t crazy. She had wanted to meet my mother, to offer restitution. New jewellery for old. But it was too late for things like that. The rifts in our world could not be mended. What was burned could not be unburned, what was broken could not be fixed. A dead mother, a father rotating slowly and reeking of bitter perfume as his bedroom fan turned. Strange fruit. I tried to imagine how Ameer Merchant might have reacted to Vina’s return. I think she would simply have opened her arms and taken Vina right back into her heart.
To think about those days again—Ameer, V.V., the fire, the lost love, the wasted chances—was upsetting. The size of the countryside, its stark unsentimental lines, its obduracy: these things did me good. To be moving within its great dusty sweep, its lack of interest, helped restore a sense of proportion; it put one in one’s place. I drove my Jeep—laden with supplies of dry and tinned food, jerry cans of petrol and of water, spare tyres, my favourite hiking boots (the ones with the secrets in their heels) and even a small tent—into the far east of Maharashtra. I was in Piloo’s empire, looking for the back door.
Always the back-door man.
A journey to the centre of the earth. The air grew hotter with every mile, the wind seemed to blaze more fiercely on my cheeks. The local bugs seemed larger and hungrier than their city cousins, and I was, as usual, lunch. The road never emptied: bikes, horse-drawn carts, burst pipes, the blare of buses and trucks. People, people. Roadside saints in plaster. Men in a circle at dawn pissing on an ancient monument, some dead king’s tomb. Running dogs, lounging cattle, exploded rubber tyres prominent among the piles of detritus that were everywhere, like the future. Groups of youths with orange headbands and flags. Politics painted on passing walls. Tea stalls. Monkeys, camels, performing bears on a leash. A man who pressed your trousers while you waited. Ochre smoke from factory chimneys. Accidents. Bed On Roof Rs 2/=. Prostitutes. The omnipresence of gods. Boys in cheap rayon bush shirts. Everywhere around me, life was striving, pullulating. The roaches, the beasts of burden, the enervated parrots, fought for food, shelter, the right to see another day of life. The young men with their oiled hair strutted and preened like skinny gladiators, while the old watched their children suspiciously, waiting to be abandoned, to be shouldered aside, tossed into some ditch. This was life in its pure form, life seeking no more than to remain alive. In the universe of the road, the survival instinct was the only law, the hustle the only game in town, the game you played until you dropped. To be here was to understand why Piloo Doodhwala was popular. The Great Goat Scam was the life of the road writ large. It was a mega-hustle which freed his people from the daily hustles that drove them into early graves. He was a miracle man, a prophet. It would not be easy to bring him down.
My plan—more a notion than a strategy, really—was to get as far off the beaten track as possible. I had seen from Anita’s list that many of Piloo’s ghost farms were located in the most remote parts of the state, in highly inhospitable territory, with a communications infrastructure that was poor to non-existent. Any farmer of Actually Existing Goats would have had the greatest difficulty, and would also have incurred inordinate and crippling expenses, in simply bringing his herds to the slaughterhouse or shearing shed. Non-Existent Goats caused no such problems, naturally, and the inaccessibility of the “ranches” made the true nature of Piloo’s operation easier to conceal. I was gambling on the over-confidence of his minions in these far-flung places. A photographer from the Illustrated Weekly would be the last person on earth they’d expect to see.
At that time, a much
ballyhooed Trans-India Auto Rally was taking place, and it was my intention to pose as a lost driver in need of food, water, rest and guidance. This would, I hoped, buy me a few hours of time in the company of Piloo’s phantoms. Then it would be up to my powers of photographic invisibility to seize the opportunity. Dusty, exhausted, I turned my Jeep off the main highway on to ever smaller and more broken roads, and headed for the hills.
After travelling for two days I came to a river, a trickle down the centre of a dry, rocky bed. There was a peasant passing, as there always is, with a stick over one shoulder and a water pot hanging from each end of the stick. I asked him the river’s name, and when he answered “Wainganga,” I had the odd feeling of having taken a wrong turning out of the real world, of having slipped somehow into fiction. As if I had accidentally crossed the border of Maharashtra not into Madhya Pradesh but into a parallel, magic land. In contemporary India those hills ahead of me, a low range with jungled ravines, would have been the Seoni range, but in the magic sphere I had entered they were still called, in the old fashion, Seeonee. In their jungles I might chance upon legendary beasts, talking animals who never were, created by a writer who put them in this faraway wilderness without ever seeing it with his own eyes: a panther and a bear and a tiger and a jackal and an elephant and monkeys and a snake. And on the hills’ high ridges I might at any moment glimpse the mythic figure of a human boy, a Non-Existent Boy, a figment, a man-cub dancing with wolves.
Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free.
I had reached my destination. A deeply rutted dirt path led off the country road towards Piloo Doodhwala’s mysteries. Still in the grip of my curious mood of unreality, I drove towards my fate.
The sheer unchartedness of rural India in its most profound depths never failed to amaze. You turned off the road on to the rural tracks and at once felt as the earth’s early navigators must have done; like a Cabot or Magellan of the land.
Here the polyphonic reality of the road disappeared and was replaced by silences, mutenesses as vast as the land. Here was a wordless truth, one that came before language, a being, not a becoming. No cartographer had fully mapped these endless spaces. There were villages buried in the backlands that never knew about the British Empire, villagers to whom the names of the nation’s leaders and founding fathers would mean nothing, even though Wardha, where the Mahatma founded his ashram, was only a hundred-odd miles away. To journey down some of these tracks was to travel back in time for over a thousand years.
City dwellers were constantly told that village India was the “real” India, a space of timelessness and gods, of moral certainties and natural laws, of the eternal fixities of caste and faith, gender and class, landowner and sharecropper and bonded labourer and serf. Such statements were made as if the real were solid, immutable, tangible. Whereas the most obvious lesson of travelling between the city and the village, between the crowded street and the open field, was that reality shifted. Where the plates of different realities met, there were shudders and rifts. Chasms opened. A man could lose his life.
I am writing about a journey into the heart of the country but it’s just another way of saying goodbye. I’m taking the long way round to the exit because I can’t agree with myself to let go, to be done with it, to turn away towards my new life, just to settle for that fortunate existence. Lucky me: America.
But it’s also because my life hinges on what happened out there, on the banks of the Wainganga River, within sight of the Seeonee hills. That was the decisive moment that created the secret image which I have never revealed to anyone, the hidden self-portrait, the ghost in my machine.
Nowadays I can behave, most of the time, as if it never happened. I’m a happy man, I can throw sticks for my dog on an American beach and let the turn-ups on my stone-grey chinos get wet in the Atlantic tides, but sometimes in the night I wake and the past is hanging there in front of me, rotating slowly, and all around me the jungle beasts are growling, the fire grows dim, and they are closing in.
Vina: I promised you I would open my heart, I swore that nothing would be spared. So I must find the courage to reveal this also, this terrible thing I know about myself. I must confess it and stand defenceless before the court of anyone who can be bothered to judge. If anyone remains. You know the old song. Even the President of the United States sometimes must stand naked.
Or I washed my hands in muddy waters, I washed my hands but they wouldn’t come clean.
At a certain point I left the Jeep behind, off the track, and proceeded on foot. As I crept towards my goal I felt an excitement—no, it was more than a mere kick, it was fulfilment—which left me in no doubt that I had discovered what I wanted most. More than money, more than fame, maybe even more than love.
To look with one’s own eyes into the eyes of the truth, and stare it down. To see what was thus, and show it so. To strip away the veils and turn the thunderous racket of revelation into the pure silence of the image and so possess it, to put the world’s secret wonders in your suitcase and go home from the war to your once-in-a-lifetime woman, or even to the picture editor you slept with twice a week.
But this world was not rackety. Its stillness was unnatural, it was much more than country hush. I had entered the territory of the four-billion-dollar phantom goat, and the goat is, of course, an ancient avatar of the devil. Allow me to concede that in that occult silence I felt a little scared and far from help.
The herds are shut in byre and hut
For loosed till dawn are we.
There was a cluster of buildings ahead. Huts and byres, but where were the villagers’ herds? Yet more silence burst from Piloo’s scam sheds, eloquent as a lion’s roar. I reached into the patch pocket on my right trouser leg and felt the reassuring presence of the slim little Leica which I’d bought myself in honour of my encounter with the great Henri Hulot. Then men carrying field implements rose up all around me, seeming to burst from the very earth, and that, as far as photography was concerned, was that.
They had seen me coming a mile off, which didn’t in itself matter too much. In my long and various professional life, I have bribed and sweet-talked my way past the roadblocks of regional warlords in Angola and former Yugoslavia, I have found routes in and out of twenty-seven different revolutions and major wars. The security cordons at the Milan and Paris fashion collections, the concentric circles of armed and unarmed aides guarding the route to the man or woman of real power, the maître d’s at the leading Manhattan restaurants, pah! I snap my fingers under their collective nose. Even on that early adventure, rookie that I was, I felt confident of my ability to hoodwink these back-of-beyond yokels and then get the goods on their little livestock swindle.
Unless, of course, they weren’t yokels. Unless they were members of one of the feared gangs of killer bandits who roamed these invisible parts. Unless Piloo was actually using the bandits to police his operation. Unless they murdered me there and then and left my body for the vultures and carrion crows.
My captors and I turned out to have no language in common. They spoke a local dialect that made no sense at all to me. However, conversation quickly became redundant. After they had removed my cameras and rolls of film and the keys to my Jeep and robbed me of all my money, they took me to the place of imaginary goats. Here I met the other journalist, the one of whose existence I had previously been unaware. He was waiting for me in one of the byres, hanging from a low beam, rotating slowly in the hot draughts of wind, and dressed very like myself. The same patch pockets on his trousers, the same hiking boots. The same empty camera bag at his feet. He had been dead for much too long, and even as I started vomiting I understood that my yarn about the Trans-India Rally was probably not going to be believed.
Why didn’t they string me up right away? I don’t know. Boredom, probably. There’s not much to do out there in the boondocks when you don’t even have real goats to fuck. You’ve got to spread out your pleasures. The anticipation i
s more than half the fun. Crocodiles do the same thing. They keep their quarry half alive for days sometimes, saving them for later. So I’m told.
Boredom and laziness saved my life. These husbanders of fictive billies and nannies were people who had made their illicit living for one and a half decades by doing nothing at all. If they were bandits (which I increasingly doubted), they were bandits who had lost their edge. Many of them were stout, soft-bodied, which was rarely true of peasants and dacoits. Corruption had both fattened their bodies and eroded their spirits. They bound me and abandoned me, left me retching emptily on account of the stench of my dead colleague, and at the mercy also of the one zillion crawling things to whom a dead body is the occasion for a grand inter-species reunion.
At night the phantom goatherds got drunk in another hut, and the loud noises of their carousing stopped only when they were all unconscious. I managed to free myself of the badly tied ropes around my arms and legs, and after a few moments more I made my escape. The Jeep was where I’d left it, looted but with enough gas in the tank to get me to a town. I managed to hot-wire it and drove away as fast as the surface would permit. I did not turn on the headlights. Fortunately there was a bright-yellow gibbous moon to light my way.