Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (36 page)

Only the natural courtesy, good nature, and geniality of the Tamils in the mob kept me from being trampled—that was a discovery. Overpopulation was made bearable by politeness. But, trying to walk, I was getting nowhere, seeing nothing, merely protecting myself.

"You see, sir?" the doorman said, summing me up on my sudden return. "Difficult"

Difficult was not the way I thought of the mobbed streets in Chennai. They were something else—unendurable, pure horror,
cauchemardesque.
They were freaking me out.

"Walking is not possible. Take taxi."

So I took a taxi to Beach Road and on the way reflected on the life of
the expatriate American in India: the multitasking businessman or lawyer with his driver, his air-conditioned office, and his secretaries—India is the land of retainers, gofers, body servants, door openers, waiters, and flunkies. The spouse of such an expatriate is similarly elevated, transformed from a simple soul, possibly unlettered—who would have trouble finding India on a map—to a memsahib, the status of an important lady in society, with a cook, a cleaner, a chowkidar, a
dhobi
or launderer, and if she has a garden, she will have two gardeners.

Typically, this expat couple has limited interests, knows nothing about Indian history, does not speak Hindi. Their children may attend an exclusive school, catering to the children of wealthy Indians and diplomats, in which case the husband will be involved with the school and his wife busybodying with the other parents. They may talk about their hardship, but India has allowed them to taste power—the power of wealth and, even more beguiling, the power over servants and an ease of living that is almost unmatched in the world. In Bombay in 1860, the visiting Bostonian Richard Henry Dana recorded in his diary his surprise at the number of servants in English households (one modest house he visited had seventeen flunkies) and his shock at their low wages. "Their pay is very small & they find themselves [their own] food, lodging and clothing." Nothing had changed.

Inconvenient and grubby though India sometimes seems to the expatriates, it is preferable to being back home and having to drive their own car, cook their own meals, wash the dishes, and do the laundry. The role of the burra memsahib (the great lady), the corrupt quest for cheap labor, the laziness and complacency of the life, the clubbing and partygoing—all this was described in satirical detail long ago, as the dereliction of the British Raj, by Kipling, Orwell, and other mockers. But in this high-tech-driven Raj, the sahibs were back—in Delhi, in Mumbai, in Bangalore, in Chennai, and many other places. Most were Indians lording it over the cheap labor; many were Europeans, some were Americans.

Their counterparts in the old Raj hadn't walked; neither did these people. And now I was one of them, sitting in a taxi to avoid fighting the crowds. I did not like this at all. I did not approve of what I was doing.

I got to the beach—very hot, very dirty, like the wide flat foreshore of the beach at Santa Monica, but this one piled with wrecked boats, squat
ting fishermen near them fussing with nets at the tidemark. It was hard for me to imagine a worse life than being a fisherman on the beach at Madras. Having been displaced by the tsunami, they lived in hovels—there were thousands of them—of crackling wind-blown plastic sheeting supported by stick frames of driftwood, two years after the seismic event. Many had been drowned. The blue plastic tarps wore the stenciling of emergency services. Some men were offshore hauling nets; women were selling fish by the side of the road; small children were playing cricket using appropriately shaped bats and wickets of driftwood.

There was no shade. In the blazing sun the temperature was well over 100 degrees. It would be much hotter next month.

I talked to people with memories of the tsunami. One old man said, "Full water, up to St. Mary's"—and he pointed a quarter of a mile away, inland, across Beach Road.

"Boats, too. Full damage," his son said.

These heavy twenty-five-foot boats, shaped like large fiberglass dories, had been lifted by the tidal wave and tumbled across the road onto the lawn of St. Mary's College.

"Master," one man said, tugging my arm. "Help us."

"You want money?"

"No money. You help pull boat."

I surprised them by taking hold of the line, and they laughed as I joined them in pulling one of the fishing boats up the beach and away from the tidemark.

That was one of six boats named
Acts of Mercy.
Others were named
SOS Children's Village.
The names reflected the charitable agencies that had provided them after the disaster struck.

I hung around to see them unloading the morning's catch—three or four boats accounting for about fifty pounds of small elongated fish, like oversized sardines. Skinny children gathered near me and made pleas of hunger, gesturing to their mouths, rubbing tummies, and some of the men, too, asked for handouts.

"I'll buy your fish," I said. I intended to give them money for their catch and then hand the fish back to them. "How much for all of this?"

"No. Buyers are there," the old man said.

"Money, money," the younger men said.

I was backing up. I didn't want to show them any money. I said, "You have fish. Fish is money."

"Fish is little money."

That was probably true. I said to one of the boys, "You come with me," and he followed me to Beach Road. I gave him some rupees, just to make a graceful escape from this crowd of twenty or more hungry and half-naked men, looking small and spidery on the hot white sand.

I walked up the scorching road by the beach, and after a mile or so I recognized an odd cylindrical building from my first trip, and from an old watercolor I owned. The painting's style, the art of it, was undistinguished—I had bought it cheap in London—but it depicted an unusual structure of this city. The title was
The Ice House, Madras.
I knew very little about the building other than that it had been put up to store ice that had been sent by ship from New England.

The building, with its single castle tower, which I had first seen in a state of disrepair, a ruin of flaking green paint, had been renovated and repainted. With wide verandas, arched windows, and a bright, creamy façade, it looked smug and renewed in a compound behind a wall. Around it was a garden of purplish bougainvillea, and in the driveway a statue ringed by flowering shrubs. The plaque at the gate said,
Vivekanandar Illam.

Since I owned an old picture of this former ice house, I had wondered about the building for thirty years. Now it was open, one of the sights of Chennai, with its history displayed in its newly painted rooms. I went inside and bought a ticket and browsed. A little of its past was given, and I dug up the rest. It had been built in 1842 by Frederic Tudor, "the Ice King," a merchant from Boston. Tudor had brought the first shipment of ice in 1833 from Massachusetts to Madras on the clipper
Tuscany,
and later built this storehouse. In the beginning, most of Tudor's ice came from ponds near Boston where I had skated as a boy.

From his cabin, Henry David Thoreau had watched the Tudor Ice Company cutting blocks of ice on Walden Pond in the winter of 1846-47. Impressed, Thoreau wrote about it in his journal, as well as in the "Pond in Winter" chapter of
Walden,
estimating that on a good day the cutters could produce "a thousand tons" of ice slabs. Knowing that the ice was being shipped to India provoked Thoreau to lyricism in his journal: "Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of ... Madras and
Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well," and "The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."

Tudor continued to bring ice to India for the next thirty years, until he died in 1864. Later (so one of the captions in the Ice House said), "the invention of the 'steam process' of making ice ruined [the ice import] business." The Madras Ice House became defunct, and in the 1890s it passed into the hands of an Indian businessman, who enlarged it, naming it Castle Kernan.

When Swami Vivekananda visited Madras in February 1897, the fanciful-seeming structure, cylindrical and strange, was regarded as suitable for his holy presence. The Swami stayed in the building, "delivered seven electrifying lectures," and was urged to consecrate it as a spiritual center. He agreed, and a few months later sent his disciple Swami Ramakrishna to spread the word. Ramakrishna lived a guru's life here, meditating and preaching spiritual renewal.

One day in 1902, while praying in the Ice House, Swami Ramakrishna heard "a bodiless but familiar voice declaring 'O Sasi [Swami R], I have spat out the body'"—and soon afterwards Ramakrishna received the news that Vivekananda had passed away.

Eventually the Ice House was bought by the Indian government. It was first used as the Brahmana Widows' Hostel, then a teachers' hostel, and then was left to rot. When I saw it in 1973 it was a semi-ruin. It was now a spiritual center and a museum, a permanent exhibit of the life and work of Swami Vivekananda, an architectural curiosity and part of India's "cultural heritage," so the sign said; but also, in its way, a permanent contribution to the Chennai skyline from a New England entrepreneur.

This little discovery and its history cheered me up, but when I left the Ice House and headed south along Marina Beach towards Mylapore and its churches, I was followed by a troop of ragged children, begging for money, asking for food, for anything; and by the time I had outwalked them, I was back in the crush of people and traffic.

In my Bangalore hotel I had found a discarded copy of
Dream Catcher,
by Margaret Salinger, a memoir of her experience growing up in the J. D. Salinger household. It was a humane and insightful account of a volatile man whose moods dominated the family. He was not lovable, vulnerable Holden Caulfield, but paranoiac and self-important, with an
easily ruffled disposition. Margaret convincingly made the case for the Salinger household having all the traits of a cult and J.D. himself the severe attributes of a cult leader.

In the course of the book, Margaret mentions her father's interest in Raj Yoga and Sri Ramakrishna, who was Vivekananda's guru. She quotes from
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna:

A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts and practice austere discipline, but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on "woman and gold," I say, "Shame on him!" Woman and gold are the most fearsome enemies of the enlightened way, and woman rather more than gold, since it is woman that creates the need for gold. For woman one man becomes the slave of another, and so loses his freedom. Then he cannot act as he likes.

"The only thing worth reading" was J. D. Salinger's judgment on this bit of pompous misogyny. Swami Vivekananda was another story. He is praised by Seymour Glass in the Salinger short story "Hapworth 16, 1924." A scripture I found at the Ice House suggested why this might be so. The Swami said, "Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy—by one or more or all of them. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines or dogmas or rituals or books or temples are but secondary details."

***

I STILL WONDERED IF
I might find a ferry to Sri Lanka. Often, it was not until I was near a point of departure that I got reliable information. It was easy in Chennai to find out about airline flights to New York City; it was impossible to get a straight answer about ferries that departed Rameswaram, just down the line.

Chennai was listed among the cities described as being the engines driving the economy of the new India. Foreign companies relocated here to improve their profits, to manufacture clothes and electronics, to get their phone calls answered, to outsource their piece goods. Yet my being in Chennai only confirmed what I had felt in Bangalore, that the new India was rising on the backs of poorly paid (but well-educated) workers. Yes, it was better than their starving, and I admired their work
ethic. But I had seen enough; it was another shocking and unfinished transformation, and I hated having to contend with the continuous struggle and nonconsensual rubbing in this reeking sprawl of eleven million people, no matter how conscientious they were.

***

THE BEAUTIFUL THING
about boredom or irritation in an Indian city was that it could be relieved by catching a train. I went to Egmore Station and bought a ticket for the morning train to Tiruchirappalli—"Trichy" to most Tamils. It was less than a six-hour ride, with coconut trees and paddy fields the whole way. The man in the next seat introduced himself as Sathymurthy. He was a Tamil. I asked him if he knew anything about the ferry to Sri Lanka.

"Notwithstanding the present crisis," he began, and then, in the mellifluous generalities I had come to associate with Indians who had no idea what they were talking about, he described the situation in the south. I was soon asleep. When I woke, he was gone and the train was pulling into Tiruchirappalli.

Trichy was everything I hoped for: small, dusty, mostly rickshaws, rising from the flat outskirts a vast rock fort with a temple on top, and farther out an ancient, partially painted temple complex covering many acres. With this, cheap food and fruit juice, a small population, and no traffic to speak of: the sort of country town that had hardly changed in thirty—or perhaps a hundred—years. No outsourcing here, no talk of the new India, no careerists, no techies, no industrial parks or call centers, and the best hotel in the place was a great bargain.

I visited the temples, taking my time—it was 95 in the shade—and tried to make plans to go farther south. Rameswaram was only half a day from here.

"No ferry," I was told by Mr. Sundrum, a writer I met in Trichy who had recently been to Rameswaram. More mellifluous generalities. "Fighting has flared up."

I did not know it at the time, but this fighting was the start of a major offensive that had begun in the north of Sri Lanka by the group that called itself the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. At the end of it, more than four thousand people would be dead.