DAY DAWNS-INDIA

Day dawns.  Early morning standing in the doorway of the little courtyard of Shinji Butt. Outside, pigs are grunting about in the mud.  A little boy squats and defecates while a multi-teated sow waits behind for him to finish.  A goat, wearing a yellow sweater, its front legs inserted into the arms, munches grass at the side of the road.

Inside the lodge, embers from the previous night's celebrations, set into a square bed of sand with a parapet of bricks around the edges, still smoulder and glow red in the middle of the open yard.

The fog of the previous day has cleared, revealing cold edges and carved roundels on the lintel at the entrance to the shrine room.  Staff move around, here and there, lightly brushing the paving with a besom, clearing the corners of cobwebs that glisten in the grey, morning light.

Slowly, we leave the temple and make our way to Maha Bodhi for our morning perambulation around the walkway bordering the quadrant in which is set the main temple area.

Clearly, in my head, is the sound of the Japanese monk, Ryosho Shimiza, playing his ancient sho with its bamboo pipes standing erect.  He follows spider-like notation conceived in meditative harmonies that are strange, other-worldly dischords.

The instrument is blown and sucked; the disparity in the harmonies sends shivers down the spine - discordant, flowing, pensive sounds.

In the evening, we sleep well and waken the next day to a bright, clear and crisp morning.

*

 Around midday we leave Bodh Gaya in a hired car for Patna.  The journey through dusty Bihari towns and villages takes 3 hours.  Our journey will continue from Patna to Guwahati, the capital of Assam state in the north east.

Alighting from the car with our baggage, we are suddenly in the chaotic traffic circle in front of the entrance to the station. We enter the concourse and walk around the various families and individuals camping on the floor of the reception hall.  Those who are awake stare at us as we make our way to the waiting rooms.

The concourse at Patna Railway Station

As in all of India, real information is very difficult to come by and we know the train is late, by how much we don't know.  

We find our way to the ladies' waiting room.  One old lady is making a fuss about there being men in the room although they are obviously with their families - wives and children.  But the general waiting room has an air of depression that overwhelms.  The bright overhead lights, the resigned hunched postures of the waiting passengers, the smell of vomit from a corner where someone has thrown up is overpowering and sends me back to the ladies' waiting room from which I had been ejected.

By 12 midnight, according to the electronic notice board, the train will be at least 4 hours late, an increase of 2 hours on the last bulletin.  

A descent down the worn stairs, past a beggar wearing shorts to  show off his chronic leukodema:  the poor guy is a sickly white except for brown panda eyes; and on to a "help desk" where my wife has already been and where she was told, "No rooms available".

At the help desk, the clerk and his assistants speak no English.  I get passed from one to another and every time I start to communicate with them about getting a room somewhere in the station, they all cast their eyes down and giggle.  Eventually, I manage to communicate and I'm given a room, number 4 somewhere along from the waiting rooms upstairs.

I pay the Rs 780 (about £9) and a coolie in regulation maroon uniform takes us along a dark passageway past a restaurant that is closed and we come to a door with a padlock. We leave our bags and progress, feeling exhausted, to a dark alcove in which there is a raised deck.  A peon is asleep under a blanket.

We waken him and he rubs his eyes and gives us the key for the padlock.  We return to the door, open it and enter a large square room that could double for a multiple occupancy prison cell in Saudi Arabia or Syria with a palette and mattress in the middle of the room.  Using our own sheets on the thin, lumpy mattress to lessen the chances of being bitten by bugs, we flop down and sleep a dreamless sleep with the fluorescent light blazing above our heads. 

As we can't hear the announcements fro the tannoy every hour or so, I have to traipse downstairs to check the bulletin board for any hint of the arrival of our train and it's back to a short nap in our torture chamber, the lower wall splashed red from the expectorant release of pan. 

Pan stains on the wall.

At 4 am the board still states our train will arrive at 2 am.  

Suddenly I hear that the train is arriving at the station.  The coolie has failed to arrive to take us to the train and the peon is fast asleep again under his blanket.

I waken my wife and send her downstairs to fetch the coolie while I pack and pile our luggage outside the door.  

THE TRAIN IS NOW ARRIVING AT PLATFORM 2, I hear over the tannoy.  It's the North East Express to Guwahati.  

Just then, my wife arrives with the coolie looking guilty.  We shake the peon awake and shove the door key at him then rush downstairs, the coolie carrying our bags on his head.

Across a pedestrian bridge we go, weaving in and out of the crowds.  FM is running ahead.  The train has come in from Delhi and we have only about 10 minutes to find our carriage and get our bags on the train, and there is a really, really long train of carriages.

Just in time, the coolie finds our carriage about halfway along the platform, and we settle into our sleeping quarters.

On the way to Assam, our train is delayed again and we don't reach our destination till past midnight the following night...altogether a 33 hour journey from Gaya.

A friend has booked us into the Surya Hotel but the place seems locked up for the night.  Raju phones the hotel and eventually a young boy opens the hotel door and takes us up to our room.  

After the filth on the train, the room sparkles.  At last, we have a shower and sleep.

Surya Hotel room.

 

Two Roads Diverge

 Hasten slowly.  You will soon arrive. (Jetsun Milarepa.)

Sign outside of Haflong town in Assam

There's something wonderfully hedonistic about an alarm that goes off at 5am and you lie in bed for another hour in that half dream-like state.  This is India; and lateness is a fine art that requires a last minute scrabbling for the prize - a seat on the bus or train; meeting a friend in a chaotic, busy city; frantically looking for an internet hotspot at the airport.

So FM is off to the train station.  One hour late!  Not that it matters.  She's meeting her brother and his wife and a sister coming on the Delhi express which is two hours late.

Today is chilly and misty.  We're in Guwahati, the capital of the state of Assam in the north east of India.  The flat has been lent to us by Sadhana, a childhood friend of FMs.  Sadhana heads a team in the precisely named DIRECTORATE OF WELFARE AND SCHEDULED CASTES and lives with her husband on the other side of the city.

Sadhana outside her office.

I spend some time relaxing and reading India in Slow Motion by Mark Tully, the BBC correspondent for India.  Someone described his broadcasts as sounding as if he were speaking from a phone box in the middle of a busy city with the hum of traffic and horns sounding in the background.  The chapter I'm reading is about Sufism, Islamic mysticism expressed in dance and rituals.  A pity there is the split now amongst so many aspects of the religion.

FM brings the family back from the station and they quickly settle in to the spare room, a rather dark and dank affair as it hasn't been lived in for some time.

Time to go for a wander in the town, we leave the house and board a bus which takes us to the outskirts of the city.  Walking around, we come across the Science Museum, surprisingly neat and tidy with lots of experiments for the the kids to play with inside the building.  Nothing really sophisticated is there but the attempt to engage children in scientific practice is well thought-out.

Outside is a medicinal, aromatic herbal garden with all kinds of plants in neat beds.  Signposts indicate their Latin and local names as well as their efficacy for treating various ailments.  Doubt is cast when I see that some are purported to cure leprosy and cancer, though who knows what truths lurk in local lore.

We aim to return before we leave, but knowing that road leads on to road and we doubt that we will ever come back.

SHAKIN' ALL OVER

I’m having a stroke!  But here was no panic.  

Half-way through my morning chi gong warm-up session on the balcony and my vision seems to blur.  The steel grill in front of me begins to quiver.  There has been this beating in my temple especially evident when I tried to sleep, like a warning tom tom just above my left ear. A radiotherapist in Edinburgh, Jacquie Riegal had told me to sleep with my head in an elevated position to keep the blood from overloading the brain.  I had tried this, but it was uncomfortable so I had reverted to the one-pillow and the drum beat continued, about one per second.

But this was a psychosomatic reaction – the earth had literally and laterally moved.  As I entered the living room, I saw that Fulmaya had opened the outside door and some boys from a flat above were running barefoot down the stairs. Later on, I learn there has been an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale with an epicentre in Bhutan.

Back to my chi gong. 

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GUWAHATI

A DAY IN THE LIFE

                                    

Morning is dark and I struggle to waken up.  The room isn’t exactly cold but it’s warm under the blankets and the dreams are slow to fade, like water lapping on the shores of a breeze-blown pond amongst the rushes.

Sadhana Hojai visits us in a flat she has lent us early in the morning while the city wakens slowly to the ubiquitous sound of horns from the traffic outside.  She is the head of the Directorate of Welfare of Scheduled Castes in Guwahati, the capital city of Assam.  Being of the scheduled Dimasa caste herself, she is tall  and stately yet elegant wearing a silk sari.  Being a childhood friend of Fulmaya’s, she has offered us a flat to stay in while here.  Sadhana seems busy with little time for much around her, fleeting here and there, explaining briefly how the flat works.

SADHANA HOJAI OUTSIDE HER OFFICE 

Sadhana takes us in her government car to her office.  We sit there and a little old lady brings us black Assamese tea on a tray while Sadhana has her staff box some books and seal them noisily with brown sticky tape.  She has a clipped, commanding voice in what seems to be a variety of languages as the staff are busying themselves around her.

Yesterday, we visited her and her husband in the railway managers’ enclave on the outskirts of the city, a well-maintained suburban village with armed guards at the gate and pretty bungalows surrounded by trees and flowers.  During our conversation on the porch, Sadhana told me that scheduled castes are socially and economically backward.  She is very precise in her figures – six point eight five per cent of the population are considered to be scheduled, she tells me.

Sadhana has held the post of Director since April 2010.  She laughs as she tells me that she had to sit an exam for the job, But what I studied in my graduation came in the exams. 

There is twenty-four staff on her team.  Sadhana’s job is to implement the policies of the government within the limitations of the guidelines.  I think, in the context of Indian administration machinery, how difficult that must be where every stage in the process must be confirmed by clerks and civil servants working with processes set up by the British, insignificantly changed since partition in 1947

I notice that around the office are brown, cardboard files, but although there are plans to computerise the data, Sajhana tells me that this will take some time.  They [Hyderabad] are far ahead of us, she says.

Then on to Sri Sri Thakur’s temple compound in our hired auto-rickshaw.  Thakur is a sect that Fulmaya used to follow in her younger days in Assam.  Since the death of the founder, his son, Sri Sri Dada has taken over and, as with the tradition of dynastic rule in India, he wants to expand his temple complex.

SRI SRI THAKUR'S TEMPLE

We wander around for a while in the peace and quiet of the grounds and come across a little man with pan-stained teeth standing at the entrance to his room.  He immediately begins to proselytise and his forcefulness –along with his rotting teeth – put us off going any further into the whys and wherefores of the Thakur sect.

Around the compound are signs attached to low railings in English, Assamese and Hindi.  There are some very strange sayings which require a few semantic somersaults:  KNOWLEDGE THAT DOES NOT KNOW TO APPLY IS A DIZZLING IGNORANCE; A DISTURBED OR DEPRESSED MIND IS An INDICATION OF IRREGULAR FUNCTION OF PHYSIC; CHASTITY SPECIALLY DEVOTES FEMAILS BECAUSE THEY CONCEIVE.  Each sign is attributed to Sri Sri Thakur.

After this head-spinning assault on the mind, we jump in our auto-rickshaw and take off for another of Fulmaya’s childhood friends, Basanti.

After the preliminary cups of tea and the sharing of Indian sweets bought in a shop on the way to Basanti’s house, I notice that the old man sitting facing me and talking away in Indian English is not Basanti’s father but her husband who, at 76 years old, is at least twenty-years older than her.  We have a desultory and rather depressing conversation about how he has become old and has only the TV and the newspaper to read now while the ladies laugh and blow the gaff in the kitchen while they prepare a meal.

With the sun glares behind him, his white hair gllistenes and the wrinkled skin of his hands hangs like empty sacks.  On the wall behind me is a photo with his name inscribed on the bottom: Captain Shantimoy Bhattacharjee.  Jeez, he looks so young and cavalier in his uniform compared to this old man sitting in front of me.

CAPTAIN SHANTINMOY BHATTACHARJEE (RETIRED)

He tells me he was born and brought up in East Pakistan (later to become Bangladesh) but after partition in 1947, being a Brahmin Hindu, his mother decided to leave for India.  After his stint in the army which he didn't like, he left and joined the Indian police force and was posted to Mizoram, a troubled state in North East India.  He continued to regale me about the political situations with what sounded to me like unpronounceable names of ministers and officials.  I was appointed Gazetted Deputy Supervisor of the Police then after that I retired in 1999, I think. 

He went on to tell me how he had to deal with malcontents.  Sometimes they would come to my house.  He would say to them, You are also my brothers – containment – some of them were misguided.  They would come with a gun and automatic rifles to my house.  I was not scared of them, I just offered them tea, etc. and some food also.  They asked, what to do?  What is your advice to us?  You give up all these things.  You are in a democratic country, so democratically, you try to solve the problem.

Shantimoy told me the hostiles were Mizo tribals.  Mizo people, all are Christian, he told me.  They all went to church on a Sunday carrying their bibles.

By the time lunch was served, we sat at the table and I had a kind of respect for Shantimoy.  His first wife had died and he had had two children to take care of.  He then married Basanti and had a further three-children, two-boys and a girl.  He aplogised for the humble meal set before us, rice, daal and some vegetables.

After food, we thanked them and left on the auto-rickshaw waiting outside for us.  At the flat, we relaxed and watched some silly movies on Sky, went to bed and thought of the next day’s events with Fulmaya’s brother, sister and sister-in-law from Kathmandu.

PHOTO OF A YOUNG FULMAYA (ON THE LEFT) FROM BASANTI'S ALBUM

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