Sunrise with Seamonsters (54 page)

When the novelist John Irving was revealed as a wrestler, people took him to be a very serious writer; and even a bubble reputation like Erich
(Love Story)
Segal's was enhanced by the news that he ran the marathon in a respectable time. How surprised we would be if Joyce Carol Oates were revealed as a sumo wrestler or Joan Didion active in pumping iron. "Lives in New York City with her three children" is the typical woman writer's biographical note, for just as the male writer must prove he has achieved a sort of muscular manhood, the woman writer—or rather her publicists—must prove her motherhood.

There would be no point in saying any of this if it were not generally accepted that to be a man is somehow—even now in feminist-influenced America—a privilege. It is on the contrary an unmerciful and punishing burden. Being a man is bad enough; being manly is appalling (in this sense, women's lib has done much more for men than for women). It is the sinister silliness of men's fashions, and a clubby attitude in the arts. It is
the subversion of good students. It is the so-called "Dress Code" of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, and it is the institutionalized cheating in college sports. It is the most primitive insecurity.

And this is also why men often object to feminism but are afraid to explain why: of course women have a justified grievance, but most men believe—and with reason—that their lives are just as bad.

India, one of the greatest railway nations in the world, is peculiarly visible from its railway trains. I have the idea that much of Indian life is lived within sight of the tracks or the station, and often next to the tracks, or inside the station. The railway is part of Indian culture. It was one of the greatest imperial achievements, and now—a larger system than ever—it still has the powerful atmosphere of empire about it.

People sometimes wonder how the vast overpopulated subcontinent manages to run, and even to prosper. The chief reason is the railway. Trains have been running for a hundred and thirty years, but—dusty and monumental—they often seem as ancient as India itself. In Pakistan they look like part of the landscape. An old reliable network of track brings hope to beleaguered Bangladesh.

I had happy memories of these trains, and after a ten-year absence I wanted to return and to trace a line from the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, and through India, to Chittagong in Bangladesh. I wanted to take as many trains as possible. It was to be neither a vacation nor an ordeal, but rather a kind of sedentary adventuring—an imperial progress on the railways of the old Raj.

From the corner seat in a railway car it was possible to see an enormous amount of this land; moving east from the stony cliffs of the Northwest Frontier in Pakistan, then cutting into India on an express across the Punjab and traveling up and down, linking the hill stations of Simla and Darjeeling with the long straight journeys of the plains—via Delhi, the Taj Mahal, and the holy city of Benares. After Calcutta I could nip into Bangladesh and go south to the end of the line, in Chittagong. I imagined my itinerary on a map as resembling my own elongated signature written in railway lines across the top of India.

I started from Jamrud, a deserted station, a short distance from Jamrud Fort which, having been built in 1823, is just a hundred years older than The Khyber Railway. It was an early morning in July, and very hot—the monsoon was weeks overdue.

Once a week, this train descends the 3,500 feet from the highest point of the Khyber Pass, carrying the refugees and travelers who can afford the
seven rupee train fare. The train is required to climb such steep inclines that it is powered by two steam engines—one at the front and one at the rear of the five coaches—both belching smoke and whistling as it makes the journey to and from Landi Kotal.

"Once there was no trouble here," a man told me as we clattered across the plain. "There was no water, no trees. Only small villages. Then a dam was built and water came to the valley in a stream, and since then there has been constant fighting."

Tempers were very bad: the months of drought had scorched the face of the land and made it so hot that people had moved out of their houses and set up their string beds under trees—I counted fourteen beds under the dusty leaves of one large tree. To cool themselves, men sat on the banks of the stream trickling beside the railway tracks and they chatted, keeping their feet in the water.

There were over thirty-five thousand people in the Kacha Garhi Refugee Camp, and nearly as many in the one at Nasserbad not far away. Driven from their homes in Afghanistan by the war, they lay in hammocks, they cooked under trees, they waited for the daily shipment of food; they watched the train go by.

Across the ten miles of gravel are the high grey-brown mountains which mark the border of Afghanistan, and the black smoking train makes its way across the dead land.

This was always a tribal area, the people were always dressed like this, and always armed, the train was always pulled by smoking screeching steam engines, and the night-time noises were always human voices and the clopping hooves of the tonga ponies, and when—hours late—the train pulls into Peshawar Cantonment Station, the passengers hurry in various directions—to "Lower Class Exit" or "First Class Exit," to "Woman's Waiting Room" or "Waiting Room for Gents." It is pitch dark and a hundred and ten degrees. As in the old days most people make straight for the bazaar.

"This is the Qissa Khawani Bazaar," said Ziarat Gul in Peshawar. Mr Gul was a powerfully-built and kindly soul who was known locally as "Gujjar"—"Buffalo Man." He was pointing at a labyrinth of alleys too narrow for anything but pony carts.

"This means 'The Storytellers' Bazaar'. In the old times all the
kafilas
(caravans) came from Persia and Russia and Afghanistan, here to Peshawar. They told stories of their journeys."

But Peshawar is once again a great destination. Now the travelers are Afghan refugees and the stories in the bazaar concern the heroism of Pathans ambushing Soviet convoys. There are said to be more than a million of them, and many of them bring goods and food to sell at the bazaar—carpets and jewelry, embroidery, leatherwork, cartridge belts,
pistol holders, rifle slings, almonds, dates, prunes, and fresh fruit. The bazaar has never been busier or more full of hawkers, and everywhere are the beaky craggy faces of the travelers, the turbaned men and shrouded women, the rifles and pistols, and the tea-drinkers huddled around samovars—storytellers again.

Once I had come to Peshawar and asked for a bed-roll for the train and was told they had none. This evening I inquired again and was told they had one—but only one: "You may book it." I gladly did so and then stood with it under a whirring fan. Most of the larger railway stations in Pakistan and India have ceiling fans on the outdoor platforms, which is why the people waiting are spaced so evenly—clustered in little groups at regular intervals, and the humming fans make one feel one is trapped in a food processor.

It was an air-conditioned compartment and in its grumbling way the machinery actually worked. I was soon traveling under a bright moon through Nowshera and across the Indus River at Attock. We passed through Rawalpindi a!nd Jhelum, too, but by then I was asleep.

Just before Wazirabad at dawn there was a knock on the door of my compartment. "You wanting breakfast?"

I could have been wrong of course, but it seemed to be the same brisk man who had asked the question ten years ago: it was the same bad eye, the same dirty turban, the same lined face. And the breakfast was the same—eggs, tea, bread on heavy stained crockery.

Scattered showers of the monsoon had begun to appear. They had darkened Lahore, once the princely city of Akbar and Shah Jahan, now the capital of Punjab. It was cooler here and the rice fields had water in them; planting had begun; the grass was green. Here the soil was mostly clay and so brick-works had sprung up, each one with a steeple-like chimney. Little girls, some looking as young as six or seven, were digging mud and clay out of pits for bricks and carrying it in baskets on their heads. In sharp contrast to this, little boys were playing gaily in the grass or else swimming in ditches. It is the absurd puritanism of the country that requires little girls modestly to remain clothed and do laborious work, while naked boys can frolic all the livelong day.

The decrepitude near Shahdara Bagh was interesting, because not far from Shahdara Station is one of Pakistan's most glorious buildings, the Tomb of Jahangir, with its vast park—grander than the Shalimar Gardens—and the marble mausoleum inlaid with gems; all of it in a perfect state of preservation. Surrounded by palms, it lies outside Lahore, another marvel on the northwest railway.

When India was partitioned in 1947, so was the railway, and there were no through trains to Pakistan. But the tracks were not removed, and the steel rails still connected Wagha in Pakistan with Atari, the Indian border town. And then in 1976, the trains began to run again. Very little had changed on this line; the steam locomotives, like all steam locomotives in India, looked filthy, ancient, and reliable; they are great sooty thunder boxes, and there are eight thousand of them still operating in India; and the travelers, no matter what their religion or nationality, still privately celebrated the fact that they were Punjabis. The coaches were battered, and the train was very slow. This was the International Express.

The Customs and Immigration bottlenecks were set up there at Lahore Station—platform one—and four officials, one after the other, peered at me and said, "Profession?" I said I was a writer. "Ah, books."

The train left on time, which surprised me, considering that the thousand or so people on board had all had their passports stamped and their luggage examined. We traveled across a plain towards India. After an hour every man we passed wore a turban. We were nearing Amritsar, spiritual capital of the Sikhs, and we were among the great family of Singhs.
Sikh
is from the Sanskrit word
Shishya,
"disciple"—they are disciples of a tradition of ten gurus, beginning with the fifteenth century Guru Nanak who taught monotheism, espoused meditation, and opposed the Hindu caste system. Sikhs herded goats, Sikhs dug in the fields, Sikhs processed the passengers on the International Express. This was Atari Station and the operation took several hours: everyone ordered off the train, everyone lined up and scrutinized, everyone ordered back on. Then the whistle blew and the black smoke darkened the sky, and we proceeded into India.

But it was not only black smoke in the sky. The clouds were the color of cast iron; they were blue-black and huge. It is usually possible in India to tell whether it will rain from the whiteness of the egrets—they look whitest when rain is due; and these dozens flying up from the rice paddies near Amritsar were brilliantly white against the dark clouds massing over us.

We arrived just before one o'clock at Amritsar, and as we pulled in, passing buffaloes and scattering the goats and ducks and children, the storm hit. It was the first rain of the monsoon—pelting grey drops, noisy and powerful and already, only minutes after it had begun, erupting from drains and streaming under the tracks.

The rain in its fury put the Indians into a good mood. It was the sunny days and blue skies—intimations of drought—that made them bad-tempered.

Because of the rain, only rickshaws were running in Amritsar. Cars lay stranded and submerged all over the inundated city. I sat inside, deafened by the rain, and studied the Indian Railways Timetable, and after a while I
became curious about the route of a certain train out of Amritsar. This particular mail train left Amritsar at ten in the evening and headed south on the main line to Delhi; but halfway there it made a hairpin turn at Ambala and raced north to Kalka where, at dawn, it connected with the railcar to Simla. It was an extraordinary route—and a very fast train: instead of going to bed in the hotel, I could reserve a sleeper, and board the train, and more or less wake up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in Simla.

It was not a popular train, this Simla Mail. Its odd twisted route was undoubtedly the result of the demands of the imperial postal service, for the British regarded letter writing and mail delivery as one of the distinguishing features of any great civilization. And Indians feel pretty much the same.

"Use the shutters," the ticket collector said, "and don't leave any small articles lying around."

The whistle of the Simla Mail drowned the sounds of music from the bazaar. I was soon asleep. But at midnight I was woken by rain beating against the shutters. The monsoon which had hit the Punjab only the day before had brought another storm, and the train struggled through it. The thick raindrops came down so hard they spattered through the slats and louvers in the shutters, and a fine spray soaked the compartment floor.

The Guard knocked on the door at 5:20 to announce that we had arrived at Kalka.

It was cool and green at Kalka, and after a shave in the Gentlemen's Waiting Room I was ready for the five-hour journey through the hills to Simla. I could have taken the small pottering "Shimla Queen" or the express, but the white twenty-seat railcar was already waiting at the platform. I boarded, and snoozed, and woke to see mists lying across the hills and heavy green foilage in the glades beside the line.

Two hours later at five thousand feet, we came to the little station at Barog, where every day the railcar waits while the passengers have breakfast; and then it sets off again into the tumbling cloud. Occasionally the cloud and mist was broken by a shaft of light and it parted to reveal a valley floor thousands of feet below.

Solan Brewery, on the line to Simla, is both a brewery and a railway station. But the station came afterward, for the brewery was started in the nineteenth century by a British Company which found good spring water here in these hills of Himachal Pradesh. In 1904, when the railway was built, the line was cut right through the brewery.