An Area of Darkness

  Regularly white jeeps and station-wagons raced along the roads. In the afternoons they appeared to carry picnic parties of women and children in straw hats; in the evenings, bridge parties. The jeeps and station-wagons were marked U.N. in thin, square letters; they watched over the ceasefire line. In Kashmir they seemed as anachronistic as the clock in Julius Caesar.

  *

  But there was money in Kashmir, more than there had ever been. In 1947, I was told, there were fifty-two private cars in the entire state; now there were nearly eight thousand. In 1947 a carpenter earned two or three rupees a day; now he could get eleven rupees. The new wealth showed in the increased number of veiled women: for people like tonga-wallahs and fuel-vendors a new, veiled wife was a symbol of status. It is estimated that in Kashmir, as in the rest of India, one-third of development funds drains away in corruption and the exchanging of gifts. No disgrace attaches to this. The Kashmiri tailor spoke with envious admiration of his patwari friend, a surveyor and type of records-keeper, who in one day might collect as much as a hundred rupees; a lorry-driver had a similar admiration for a traffic inspector he knew who received monthly protection money from various lorry-drivers. From time to time there was an outburst in the press and Parliament about corruption, and here and there frenzied action might instantly be taken. In one state a minister had his doorman charged with corrupt practices: the doorman had bowed to him too low and too often, and by this had shown that he expected a tip. An architect in Delhi told me that even such token attempts to ‘stamp out’ corruption could be demoralizing and dangerous: the system was necessary and in India it was the only system that could work.

  From the engineer I learned how the system worked in Kashmir. A contractor dug, say, one hundred cubic feet of earth. He sent in a bill for two hundred. Now it was precisely to frustrate such adventurousness that the Indian Civil Service method of checking and counter-checking had been devised. The contractor’s claim had to be verified; the verification had to be endorsed; and the endorsement, to be brief, had to be approved. In the thoroughness of the system lay its equity. When verification was complete everyone, from top man to messenger, was in the know, and everyone had to be made some offering. The contractor was charged a fixed percentage of his extra profits, and this was divided, again in fixed percentages, among the employees of the department concerned. It was all regulated and above board; everything, the engineer said, smiling as he used the civil service phrase, went ‘through proper channel’. It was almost impossible for any government servant to contract out, and no one particularly wanted to. Tipping was expected; the contractor who dug a hundred cubic feet and claimed for a hundred cubic feet was likely to run into trouble; and it had happened that a civil servant who objected to corruption had been transferred or dismissed for corruption. ‘Even if the contractor is a relation,’ the engineer said, ‘he will still have to give something. It’s the principle of the thing.’ The top man didn’t necessarily get the biggest cut of any one levy; but in the long run he made out better than his subordinates because he got a percentage of more levies.

  The engineer was in his camp, at the edge of a pine forest, chill when the sun went down. Whitewashed stones lined the path to his tent. In another tent some distance away his subordinates were preparing their evening meal. There had been some trouble with them when he first came on this job, the engineer said. His predecessor had not distributed the levies fairly, and the men were rebellious. His first act had been to renounce his percentage; he had also managed to get them certain stores to which they were not entitled. This had calmed them. The engineer said he himself was against the system. If the system was worked fairly, however, it made for efficiency. It gave the men an interest in their work. Take telegraph poles. They were required to be thirty-four feet tall, to be of a certain girth; and they had to be buried five feet in the ground. Assuming that a pole of thirty-two feet was accepted – and it was only on such sub-standard poles that worthwhile tipping could reasonably be expected – it was important that the pole should be put up quickly. And who was to tell then that it was only three feet in the ground?

  There was no means of checking the engineer’s account. But I felt that it partly explained the illicit felling which was stripping Kashmir of its accessible forests. (To this the Kashmiris attributed the hotness of their recent summers.) And certainly the wires hung dangerously low from many of the telegraph poles in Srinagar.

  *

  We seemed to be in danger of losing the hotel garden altogether. First there had come the digging for the ugly telegraph pole to carry the electric wires. And now there came the digging for the poles of the awning, which was put up like lightning with the rough-and-ready carpentry of the lake, and the irruption into the hotel garden of dozens of the lake folk, variously clad in pyjamas or flapping trousers, offering advice, help or simply interest. The awning was an appanage of the houseboat; this was the reason for its appearance in the garden, where it served no purpose. It provided little shade and much heat when the sun was out, and it was taken down whenever rain threatened. It had scalloped edges, trimmed with black, and was exactly like every other houseboat awning in the area. These awnings were all made in the single-roomed tailor’s shack on the water highway, where everyone, flower-sellers, grocers, red-turbanned policemen, appeared to stop for a chat and a pull at the hookah.

  A day or so later Mr Butt was painting the poles of the awning a light green, and I went down to watch him. He looked up and smiled, and went on with his painting. When he looked up again he wasn’t smiling.

  ‘Sir, you ask Mr Madan to tea?’

  ‘Mr Butt, no.’

  *

  The summer had seemed endless. We had put off the ruins: the Palace of the Fairies, which we could see low on the hills beyond the lake; Akbar’s lake fort, Hari Parbat; the temple at Pandre-than; the sun temple at Martand; the temple at Awantipur. Now we did them all at once.

  It was a cool day when we went to Awantipur, the dry fields a warm brown against the dark grey-blue mountains. We could make little of the ruins, the massive central platform, the anvil-shaped fonts of solid stone that lay among the rubble, the carvings; and the villager who attached himself to us didn’t help. ‘It all fell down,’ he said in Hindustani, waving a hand. ‘All?’ ‘All.’ It was a type of North Indian dialogue, made possible by the stresses of the language, which I had grown to enjoy. He showed the base of a column and indicated by gestures that it was the bottom stone of a quern. That was the limit of his knowledge. No tip for him; and we walked down to the village to wait for the bus.

  The blue-shirted boys had just been released from school; down a side lane we saw the young Sikh teacher organizing a ball game in the schoolyard. The boys gathered around us; they all carried enormous bundles of books wrapped in grubby, inky cloths. We made one boy take out his English book. He opened it at a page headed ‘Our Pets’, read out: ‘Our Body’, and began reeling off a text which, after a search, we found on another page. And what book was this? Urdu? They became helpless with laughter: it was Pharsi, Persian, as any child could tell. The crowd had now grown. We broke out of it, saying we wanted to get back to Srinagar; and they all then began waving down buses for us. Many buses passed, full; then one shot past, hesitated, stopped. A Kashmiri attempted to get on but was repelled by the conductor, who made room for us.

  We sat in the back among some sensationally unwashed people, their cotton dhotis brown with dirt, and many Dalda tins. The man next to me was stretched out on the seat, clearly unwell, his eyes without expression, the pestilential Indian flies undisturbed on his lips and cheeks; from time to time he gave a theatrical groan, to which no one in the chattering bus paid the slightest attention. We saw that we were in a bus of ‘lower-income’ tourists and that we were sitting with their servants.

  At the ruins the bus stopped and the khaki-clad moustached driver turned around and tried to persuade his passengers to go out and have a look. No one moved. The driver spoke again, and at leng
th one elderly man, whom we had already recognized as the wit and leader of the bus, heaved himself up with a sigh and went out. He wore a black Indian jacket, and his top-knot proclaimed him a brahmin. The others followed.

  From nowhere children appeared: ‘Paisa, sahib, paisa.’ ‘Oh,’ said the leader in Hindi. ‘You want money? Now what does a little child like you want money for?’ ‘Roti, roti,’ they chanted. ‘Bread, bread.’ ‘Bread, eh?’ He was only teasing. He gave; the others gave.

  The leader climbed to the top of the stone steps and regarded the ruins with patronage. He made a witticism; he lectured. The others idled about dutifully, looking without interest where he looked.

  A sixteen-year-old boy in white flannel trousers hurried over to me and said, ‘This is Pandavas’ fort.’

  I said, ‘This is not a fort.’

  ‘It is Pandavas’ fort.’

  ‘No.’

  He waved hesitantly towards the leader. ‘He says it’s Pandavas’ fort.’

  ‘You tell him no. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’

  The boy looked shocked, as though I had offered him violence. He edged away from me, turned and fled to the group around the leader.

  We were all back in the bus and about to start when the leader suggested food. The conductor threw open the door again and an especially grimy manservant, old and toothless, came to life. Briskly, proprietorially, he shoved the Dalda tins along the dusty floor and lifted them out on to the verge. I began to protest at the delay; the boy in white flannels looked at me in terror; and I realized that we had fallen among a family, that the bus was chartered, that we had been offered a lift out of charity. The bus again emptied. We remained helpless in our seats, while Srinagar-bound passenger buses, visibly holding spare seats, went past.

  They were a brahmin family and their vegetarian food was served according to established form. No one was allowed to touch it except the dirty old servant who, at the mention of food, had been kindled into such important activity. With the very fingers that a moment before had been rolling a crinkled cigarette and had then seized the dusty Dalda tins from off the dusty bus floor, he now – using only the right hand, of course – distributed puris from one tin, scooped out curried potatoes from another, and from a third secured dripping fingerfuls of chutney. He was of the right caste; nothing served by the fingers of his right hand could be unclean; and the eaters ate with relish. The verge had been deserted; now, in the twinkling of an eye, the eaters were surrounded by villagers and long-haired Kashmiri dogs. The dogs kept their distance; they stood still, their tails low and alert, the fields stretching out behind them to the mountains. The villagers, men and children, stood right over the squatting eaters who, like celebrities in the midst of an admiring crowd, slightly adjusted their behaviour. They ate with noisier relish; just perceptibly they raised their voices, heightened and lengthened out their laughter. The servant, busier than ever, frowned as if made impatient by his responsibilities. His lips disappeared between his toothless gums.

  The leader spoke to the servant, and the servant came to where we were. Busily, like a man with little time to waste, he slapped two puris into our hands, plastered the puris with potatoes, leaked chutney on the potatoes, and withdrew, hugging his tins, leaving us with committed right hands.

  A family spokesman came to the door of the bus. ‘Just taste our food.’

  We tasted. We felt the eyes of the villagers on us. We felt the eyes of the family on us. We smiled, and ate.

  The leader made overtures of friendship; he sought to include us in his conversation. We smiled; and now it was the turn of the boy in white flannels to look hostile. Still, all the way into Srinagar we smiled.

  *

  In India I had so far felt myself a visitor. Its size, its temperatures, its crowds: I had prepared myself for these, but in its very extremes the country was alien. Looking for the familiar, I had again, in spite of myself, become an islander: I was looking for the small and manageable. From the day of my arrival I had learned that racial similarities meant little. The people I had met, in Delhi clubs and Bombay flats, the villagers and officials in country ‘districts’, were strangers whose backgrounds I could not read. They were at once narrower and grander. Their choice in almost everything seemed more restricted than mine; yet they were clearly inhabitants of a big country; they had an easy, unromantic comprehension of size. The landscape was harsh and wrong. I could not relate it to myself: I was looking for the balanced rural landscapes of Indian Trinidad. Once, near Agra, I had seen or made myself see such a landscape; but the forlorn wasted figures reclining on string beds in the foreground were not right. In all the striking detail of India there was nothing which I could link with my own experience of India in a small town in Trinidad.

  And now, unexpectedly in Kashmir, this encounter with the tourist family answered. The brief visit to the fort of the Pandavas, the gaiety of the excursion party, the giving of small coins to the begging children, the food, the rough manner of its distribution which yet concealed the observance of so many forms: I might have known that family, I could have assessed the relationships, could have spotted the powerful, the weak, the intriguing. The three generations which separated me from them shrank to one.

  The encounter had done more than dislodge a childhood memory; it awakened a superseded consciousness. That food should be served in certain strict ways I at once understood. Equally I understood the mixture of strictness and dirt, the overdone casualness with which the puris and potatoes had been slapped into hands. It was partly a type of inverted asceticism, by which a necessary pleasure is heightened; it was partly the conviction, perhaps derived from a rural society poor in implements, perhaps derived from religion, that great elaboration was unnecessary, pretentious and absurd.*

  It was above all a respect for the forms, for the way things had always been done.

  Yet three generations and a lost language lay between us. This is Pandavas’ fort, the boy had said. The Pandavas were the heroes of the Mahabharata, one of the two Hindu epics which are universally known and have something of the sanctity of holy books; the Gita is embedded in the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is placed by some in the fourth century B.C.; the events it describes are put at 1500 B.C. Yet the ruins of what was so obviously a four-walled building, exposed on all sides, that could by no stretch of the imagination be the fort of five warrior princes, were the ruins of the fort of the Pandavas. It was not that forts were unknown; in Srinagar itself there was one which nobody could miss. The tourists in the bus went against the evidence of their eyes not because they were eager for marvels but because, living with marvels, they had no sense of the marvellous. It was with reluctance that they had got out of the bus. They had known and accepted the story of the Mahabharata from childhood. It was part of them. They were indifferent to its confirmation in rocks and stones, fallen into ruin and become material commonplaces which could only be viewed literally. So this was the fort of the Pandavas, this rubble, no longer of use to anyone. Well, it was time to eat, time for the puris and the potatoes. The true wonder of the Pandavas and the Mahabharata they carried in their hearts.

  Some miles nearer Srinagar, at Pandrethan, in the middle of the army camp, a tiny, single-chambered temple, set in a hollow and shaded by a great tree, stood a little crookedly in the centre of a small artificial pool. The water was stale, leaf-littered; and the heavy, inelegant stonework of the temple was roughly patched with new concrete. The temple was in the style of the Awantipur ruin, the ‘fort of the Pandavas’; but it was still in use, and it was this, rather than its age, which gave it greater meaning. Romance arose out of a sense of more than physical loss; and here, for Muslim as well as Hindu, nothing had been lost. A building might collapse or be destroyed or cease to be of use; another would take its place, of lesser or greater size or beauty. On the eastern side of Akbar’s lake fort an exquisite building lay in ruin. It might have been a mausoleum. Two towers stood at one end of a small cool quadrangle whos
e walls were faced with black marble. The towers were broken, the flat brick dome pierced; the elegantly proportioned Mogul arches had been filled in with mud bricks, now partly disintegrated; rubble blocked the entrances and littered the high-stepped Mogul staircases which led to low dusty chambers where the fine stone grilling of the windows was broken or lost. But decay, spectacular as it was, lay only in the eye of the visitor. More important than the ruin were the corrugated-iron latrines and washing places which had been built there for the use of those who came to pray at the nearby mosque.

  The Mogul gardens remained beautiful because they were still gardens; they still worked. The mausoleum, of the same period, had ceased to be of use; latrines could be set in its ruins. Out of this unexamined sense of flow and continuity the Valley was being disfigured; for if decay lay in the eye of the visitor, so too did beauty. The gardens were clearly meant by their builders to stand alone in the parkland surrounding the lake. But on one side of the green pagoda-like roof of the pavilion that rose above the trees of the Chasmashahi Gardens there now stood, totally exposed, ten new ‘tourist huts’, six in one straight line, four in another. On the other side was the government Guest House, where Mr Nehru had stayed; next to this was a Milk Pasteurization and Bottling Plant; and next to this, logically enough, was the complex of a government farm. Sheep, I believe, were bred there. Their tracks scored the hillside all the way up to the eighteenth-century Pari Mahal, the Palace of Fairies – a library perhaps it had been, or an observatory, already absorbed, whatever it was, into myth – the flattened, overgrown terraces of which, sweet with wild white roses and dangerous with bees, were littered with sheep droppings. Through receding arches, cracked plaster revealing brick, the lake could be seen. And on the lake, to the delight of all the lake folk, there now increasingly appeared motor-boats. They tainted the air and water; their stutter carried far; their propellers whipped up eddies of mud; and long after they had passed, the water remained disturbed, slapping against the floating gardens, washing down their edges, rocking and swamping the shikaras. And this was only the beginning.