Delhi and Dostoyevsky (sequel to Birthday on a Train)

Dostoyevsky found his way into my mind this morning and it was painful: he was still hovering around my head since one of yesterday’s conversations with Kamal on the train from Calcutta, the one in which he expounded a bizarre theory of literature that involved the superiority of India over Pakistan and left me baffled and bored. I had arranged to meet him at the old railway station for lunch after the early breakfast and the slow wander round by the Jama Masjid that I’d promised myself.

I love Delhi in its visit of early morning fog that drifts about till it decides that it’s time to lift and reveal the true glory and filth of the city. I took breakfast in an eating-house down one of those narrow lanes that I can never resist venturing into even though I know in my heart of hearts that, for all the promise it may hold out to the passer-by, it offers nothing new.

As always I ended up in a particularly grimy, unhygienic place, but I’m fairly certain by now that grime and muck possess an aesthetic charm of their own, a charm that’s usually worth investigating, and my radar always seems to guide me straight into the most exquisite mire. Tea and various savoury bites were brought to the broken aluminium table I sat at. As I sipped at the glass of hot, milky, sugary tea with its head of greasy scum, the main features of muck and grime presented themselves one by one, layer after layer. The shallow trough sunk in the concrete floor which passed directly under my chair started to flow with urine when a man went behind the waist-high partition beside the table and seemed to just stand there staring at the wall in front of him for a few moments. Used glasses were rinsed under a tap that was plumbed into the same partition about 18 inches above the trough, and kettles were filled at that tap too, spraying my table and all that I was about to eat. The tea boy emptied his nose frequently through his fingers onto the floor, and after a good telling off from someone who sounded to be in authority, he half-heartedly shooed a large, slow, overweight rat from the kitchen, and I watched as it waddled in no particular hurry across the floor towards the open door and out onto the street.

After breakfast I took a horse rickshaw to the station (this is where Dostoyevsky comes in) and the morning, which until then had been cold and heavily hung with fog, started to heat up with a vengeance. I had never ridden in one of these vehicles before – motorised, bicycle and hand-pulled rickshaws yes, but never a horse- drawn one, and I don’t like horses. The passenger sits facing the direction from which he has just come rather than looking to where he is being taken; maybe that’s a good thing, maybe not. The traffic was heavy and loud, with horses and cars emitting fumes of a quantity and potency that I have never experienced before, not even in Delhi. The air was saturated with oil. The horse could scarcely get moving because of the traffic, and the animal pulling the following rickshaw started closing in on us as soon as we headed off into the stream of carts and lorries.

I became anxious when the horse behind caught up with us and its smell closed in on me. In no time I was able to feel its breath as it puffed and snorted under its heavy load. It started muzzling my knees which were perched just under its chin. Soon its big brown teeth and slobbering tongue were travelling up my thighs and it was pressing its nose hard in between them as if trying to prise them apart. I desperately tried to pull a box that was on the seat beside me onto my lap for protection, shouting to my driver to hurry up and to the other one behind to slow down, but all that happened was that both animals were whacked even more ferociously with whips. The man behind was yelling at his horse, whipping it, pushing it onwards when there was no room for it to move. The load on the cart was heavy and cumbersome, falling off to one side. We were climbing a slight rise in the road that ordinarily no-one would have noticed, but the old nag could certainly feel the strain and must have thought it was trying to haul a bus load of tourists up Everest. Then it faltered and froze.

The animal pulling the rickshaw I was in moved on a bit giving my knees a bit of welcome space, but the frozen horse behind, under another relentless thrashing, shuddered and fell dead a few feet from me. A similar scene from Crime and Punishment exploded in my mind. I’d been taken unawares. Each time I read Crime and Punishment I try to skip that episode because I find it so distressing even though I’m no animal lover and find horses to be particularly silly animals.

However the reference had forced its way into my head when my defences were down, but at least the horse was dead. It couldn’t feel the blows that continued to rain down on it from the frustrated, impatient, irrational and now suddenly impoverished and unemployed rickshaw-wallah who looked up imploringly to the sky between each stroke he delivered.

Kamal wasn’t impressed when I told him what had happened. He said it was odd that a book, a fiction, should work its way into a man’s mind like that. Fiction needs to remain fiction; it has nothing to do with real life. There can be no correspondence between life and fiction, fiction is only for entertainment, and the two need to be kept separate, and he continued his theory at length before dismissing the subject. I didn’t feel like arguing or asking if that’s what the lecturers on his literature degree course at Calcutta University thought or taught.

What did grab Kamal’s attention however were my jeans, and he wanted to buy them. He behaved like a different person now that he was well away from his aunt and uncle who I had met him with on the train from Calcutta the day before; he had become more arrogant, far too pushy, and I began to regret arranging to meet him. My mind was still occupied with Dostoyevsky and horses and heat when he suggested 50 rupees as a fair price. I said I wanted to go somewhere away from the traffic and noise and we ended up in some extensive, private gardens that I’d never heard about not far from Old Delhi railway station. It was peaceful there. No violent assaults on the senses, only the calming influence of fountains and the shade of the orange trees we sprawled ourselves under. We ate nuts that Kamal had bought from a man at the gate and sat in silence for a while until he again brought up the subject of my jeans. This time he went up to 75 rupees and I agreed but first we were going to have to go back to the appropriately-named Muck hotel where I was staying so that I could change out of them; and I had to buy something more loose and comfortable for the Delhi afternoons which I intended to enjoy for at least another week, and that all took a while.

Back at the Muck Kamal baulked when I showed him into the kind of squalor I’d grown content to live with, and he made no attempt to conceal disapproval and distaste. The room had no window other than the one that looked into the dark interior corridor, or in through which the people in the corridor could look, there being no curtain. Each wall was no more than 5 feet long so I’d set the unreasonably small bed on its end and arranged the mattress diagonally across the floor. Thankfully there was no other furniture to be fitted in, but there was a fan on the ceiling which had been installed too near a wall so that when it was switched on the blade crashed into the brickwork and the motor whirred a bit and started to burn. When I took off my jeans Kamal seemed a bit annoyed that I also took off the belt and emptied the pockets onto the bed before handing them to him, but he was still keen to try them on and was rather pleased with the look of himself, but he couldn’t resist commenting on the lack of a mirror in the room. He wondered aloud about how much my underwear had cost but soon took the hint that it wasn’t for sale and was certainly not coming off.

The proud owner of the old jeans decided he was going to wear them on his way home until I reminded him about the heightened religious sensibilities his family’s fasting and feasting were likely to have raised, so he wrapped them in a newspaper instead. Buying jeans, he reflected, taking credit for my judicious advice, would not be considered an appropriate activity for someone supposed to be on a religious pilgrimage. We said goodbye over a cup of coffee in Connaught Place. It was a timely goodbye.