Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (24 page)

Who shares in the wealth? In the Punjab, I heard of a powerful Indian lawyer who earned $1.5 million a year and still paid his driver $20 a week and got his shoes shined for 25 cents. Later in my trip I met a lawyer, a woman, who had been offered, by an American firm, a guaranteed $1 million a year plus profits on contracts, but she held out for more and eventually joined a rival firm that offered her almost $2 million. Nothing wrong with that, Indians say; it is an example of market forces, and the conventional Indian response is to say how such tycoons are great philanthropists. It is the Indian paradox: driving hard bargains, underpaying people, becoming a corporate slave driver, and later these same desperate employees will qualify for handouts.

The losers in India have their revenge, always, as I saw all over Amritsar: not just the strikes and sit-downs and go-slows to torment employers, but the visible fact that the biggest, fastest limousine is forced to travel at a crawl behind the pony carts and the skinny men on their bicycle rickshaws. That is the other truth about India, that so much of it is a moral lesson, a set of simple visuals; so much of it is vivid symbolism, the cows and the rickshaws and men pulling wagons, slowing the progress of limos and delivery trucks. The truck might be delivering computers, God knows, but the computers won't get through any quicker than the man with ten sacks of beans in his wheelbarrow.

By chance I met Amar Singh. He owned a car. He had functioned for years as a go-between for journalists. He said, "We're a big power now."

"In what sense?" I asked.

"Better than before. Much stronger."

"Give me an example."

"We're like America now," he said.

In Amritsar this statement was debatable, but I was impressed by his confidence. No one would have said that thirty years ago. Yet in order to say such things you have to ignore the mangy cows, the stalled traffic, the squatters, the beggars, the crowds, the dirt, the squalor.

It was a relief to me that Amritsar was not very different. I liked it as it was—progressing, obviously, but so immersed in its past and its pieties that it could not change much. Because it was a holy city, its visitors put up with more inconvenience: dirt and distance and noise were the price of sanctity and blessings.

I had walked for quite a while, but then hailed a taxi, and it was Amar Singh who drove me slowly through the crowds. We passed a sign saying
Service to Humanity Is True Service to God.

I wrote it down in my notebook.

Amar Singh said, "You're a journalist?"

"Sort of."

We went to the Golden Temple, but the crowd was so large there was no way a car could get near. I left Amar Singh and walked the last half mile with all the skipping pilgrims—good-humored and frisky
yatris,
because they were near the object of their long
yatra.
Some were stepping out of their shoes and sandals and tiptoeing on the scalded bricks this hot day at the entrance to the temple; others were flinging scarves into a big barrel, or selecting scarves from it to put on their heads.

"What is this?" I asked.

"It is the system," a man said.

"What is the system?"

"Cloth on head for temple."

"No open head," another man elaborated. "No exceptions."

He meant: No exceptions for
ferringhis
—foreigners. But I was wearing a hat.

A Punjabi woman interrupted to say, "Your hat is acceptabubble."

The label of my hat, a style called the Traveler, said
Locke's The Hatter, St James, London W1
—surely suitable headgear for the Holy of Holies?

I walked with a tramping crowd through a trough of water meant to purify our feet, but because it had been walked through by thousands of pilgrims, the water was foul—green and viscous, like swamp water. This
was the usual thing—if a pool or a tank or a trough was considered sacred, it didn't matter whether it was stagnant. The holier the pool, the more foul-smelling it was.

Never mind. This was the India I remembered, and I was grateful to be here. The Golden Temple looked golder, brighter, more effulgent. I walked down the hot marble causeway with the happy pilgrims, but because I didn't have the faith, it was just a glittering palace of roistering Sikhs, a feature, a sight to see—the crowds interesting me more than the gold domes and chanting priests.

"Get over here!" and "This is so neat, Ma!"

Sikhs with American accents, Sikhs with the west London whine, Sikhs from California, Sikhs from Scotland and Canada. I glided around the hot walkways for a while, made a circuit of the sacred pool, found my way back to the entrance and my shoes, and then hiked to the car.

"Do you know Mark Tully?" the driver Amar Singh asked.

Mark Tully, known in India as Tully Sahib, was for many years the BBC correspondent in India—a much-loved man for his sympathetic but scrupulous reporting, his truthfulness, his love for the country.

"I met him once," I said. "He's a great journalist and a friend of India."

"I took him around here during the Blue Star action," Amar Singh said.

So this taxi driver whom I had met by chance at the railway station turned out to have been one of the resourceful operatives during Amritsar's crisis in 1984.

Operation Blue Star was a military assault by the Indian army on the Golden Temple—an unspeakable, unjustified defilement of the holiest shrine in Sikhdom, Sikhs said. It was disastrous: heavy artillery in a small overcrowded town. It came about because Sikh militants had occupied the towers and cellars and kiosks of the temple. They were part of a revivalist movement that had also called for a separate Sikh state, to be named Khalistan ("Land of the Pure"). Led by a Sikh preacher named Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, this action was watched closely by Sikhs worldwide. Bhindranwale (a prophet to some Sikhs, a pest to nearly everyone else) was disruptive; he called for the murder of Hindus and moderate Sikhs. His beard reached to his waist, he was said to be charismatic, he was well armed, and he wouldn't budge from the temple he occupied with many of his followers and an arsenal of weapons in May 1984.

In June of that year, after some days of fruitless negotiation, Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, gave the order to dislodge Bhindranwale and his men. The army occupied Amritsar in large numbers, and black-suited commandos stormed the temple complex. They were cut down by machine-gun fire from Bhindranwale's men. Some soldiers fired from a distance, but succeeded only in killing civilians and wrecking parts of the temple. Indian army officers begged for backup, insisting they needed tanks. After initial refusals—because of the danger to civilians—permission was granted. Thirteen tanks were lined up and were met by a barrage of antitank fire and rocket launchers. Hundreds more died.

Still, Bhindranwale was trapped, and it was only a matter of time before he ran out of ammunition. He decided to go down in a blaze of glory. In the course of the siege he had become messianic, and in one version of the events he said to his men, "Those who want to be martyrs, come with me." He emerged from his hiding place firing his machine gun, and was mowed down with fifty of his men. Six hundred men on both sides had already been shot or blown up.

That was not the end of the business. Sikhs were furious that the Golden Temple had been desecrated by the assault, and Mrs. Gandhi was blamed. Stories circulated that Indian soldiers who occupied the temple drank alcohol there and, much worse, smoked tobacco. Sikhs have a unique horror of cigarettes. Mrs. Gandhi hunkered down, protected by a number of bodyguards. But Sikhs got their revenge four months later when, in October, Mrs. Gandhi (who had ignored several warnings) was murdered by two of her bodyguards, who were Sikhs. One morning in Delhi, on the pretext of guarding her, they pulled out their service pistols and shot her dead.

With their obvious turbans, their full beards, and their characteristic silver bracelets, Sikh males are among the most easily identifiable believers in the world. In the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination Sikhs were singled out and set upon by Hindus—dragged from trains and buses, stabbed in bazaars, set on fire as they tried to flee in their cars. Perhaps three thousand were killed—no figures are accurate, just round numbers of a tragic event that no one has forgotten.

"It was terrible," Amar Singh said. "So many people killed."

"But it finished the problem of Bhindranwale, didn't it?"

"It finished problem, yes. But danger for us lurked everywhere."

"What did you think of Mrs. Gandhi?"

"A nice woman," he said, but he was being polite. Even Indira Gandhi's closest friends would not have called this manipulative demagogue a nice woman.

"Do people still talk about Khalistan?"

"In villages, some people. Not city people."

Nevertheless, Khalistan, "an aspirant Sikh nation," has an office in Washington, which sends out press releases, campaign information, furious rants, and images of the Khalistan flag.

That night I was making notes in my room in a cheap hotel in Amritsar, where there are no good hotels. It occurred to me why the Golden Temple looked golder and brighter and better kept than it had when I'd first seen it. Because of the damage of the siege and the reassertion of Sikh identity, the temple had been renovated, regilded until it dazzled.

I called Amar Singh the next day to get a ride to the railway station and to say goodbye. He mentioned the other journalists he had taken around. Besides Mark Tully, there was Satish Jacob, whom I had also met many years ago—Tully and Jacob had written the definitive account of the Blue Star operation.

"And David Brown from the
Guardian—
I drove him, too. He is now in Jerusalem. I helped him."

Amar Singh said he still listened to the BBC. He followed world news and always looked for word of journalists he had driven. I complimented him on his curiosity and helpfulness.

"My aim is good service," he said.

It could have sounded like a cliché, but it didn't. It was serious and sincere, and it touched me coming from this old driver who had a book and a newspaper on the front seat of his car, who lived at the periphery of journalism, who kept up with the news. That was part of the pleasure I felt being back in India again, where everyone seemed overqualified for whatever job they were doing. Though their talk could be maddening and their demands exasperating, I loved the fluency of Indians. The crowds of people seemed worse than ever, but I was pleased to be back in the Indian stew.

***

AMRITSAR CENTRAL STATION
had been built in 1931; the date was carved on its red brick façade. The antique weirdness was another pleas
ure of India. Entering the station, I felt I could have been walking backwards into the past, passing the big gloomy station restaurant and its overhead fans, the urchins chasing each other on the platform, the Sikh in a brown suit and blue turban, the man in dusty pajamas sleeping against a pile of burlap bags. And there were the station's hustlers, children mostly, selling bottles of soda they carried in a big bucket, or ice cream bars they hawked out of a wooden box, or with shoeshine kits slung over one skinny shoulder, all of them completely fluent in English but illiterate.

"What does that sign say?"

The boy was about thirteen, and I was pointing to one of the more dramatic-looking examples of railway strike graffiti.

"I don't know. I don't go to school."

Half-naked sadhus, holy men with metal tridents and all their possessions in one small cloth bag; groups of women looking tidy and serene amid the squalor; a man hoicking just under a No Spitting sign; fierce mustached matrons and small girls, nearly all the women in saris or Punjabi dress, all the men in turbans. It could have been the 1930s; it could have been 1973, when I had been on the Railway Bazaar trip. Superficially, nothing had changed, and it was uplifting, as though time had stood still, as though I were young again.

"What is your bogie?" the conductor asked.

I told him and he showed me my seat. It was a day train, the seven-hour trip to Delhi, not as fancy or as fast as the Shatabdi Express, but comfortable, on time, with a meal service, and soon rolling and bouncing through the wheat fields of the Punjab—Pakistan just a few miles to the west.

I had thought of taking the train to Lahore, but the news from Pakistan discouraged me. Riots had recently taken place in many Pakistani cities, Lahore included, after this week's court case in which a man in neighboring Kabul, one Abdul Rahman, was put on trial for converting to Christianity. The charge was "apostasy." One of the Hadiths specified death as the punishment for a Muslim who abandons the faith. But when the man's life was spared, riots broke out, huge mobs crying "Death to Christians!"

"Death to America!" was another shout, and "Abdul Rahman must be executed!" Meanwhile, court officials pondering the man's baptism said, "Rahman's mental health will be evaluated."

These Koranic laws were enacted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which theoretically were our allies. But I knew it wasn't safe. The journalist Daniel Pearl had been recently abducted and beheaded in Pakistan, and Westerners were routinely harassed in the bazaars. This was the result of billions of dollars spent and many lives lost in the futile attempt by the U.S. government to prop up the governments of these countries.

"This is a young democracy," the American secretary of state remarked when Abdul Rahman's life was on the line for his crime of apostasy, and Afghanistan needed apologists.

So I didn't revisit Pakistan. Instead, I headed south and intended to keep going until I got to the southernmost tip of India.

Many people boarded the train at Ludhiana, among them Kuldeep and Kumar in the seats next to me. Neither wore a turban, yet I guessed they might be Sikhs—Westernized from their residence in England, where they said they lived, both in Ilford, Essex. Kuldeep had gone to England as a ten-year-old; Kumar had been born there. Both were visiting relatives in Ludhiana. Kuldeep was the more talkative of the two.

"Could you live here?" I asked him.