To the Ends of the Earth

Mr. Chatterjee walked across the bridge with me. He was a Bengali, and Bengalis were the most alert people I had met in India. But they were also irritable, talkative, dogmatic, arrogant, and humorless, holding forth with malicious skill on virtually every subject except the future of Calcutta. Any mention of that brought them up short. But Mr. Chatterjee had views. He had been reading an article about Calcutta’s prospects. Calcutta had been very unlucky: Chicago had had a great fire, San Francisco an earthquake, and London a plague as well as a fire. But nothing had happened to Calcutta to give planners a chance to redesign it. You had to admit, he said, it had vitality. The problem of pavement dwellers (he put the figure at a quarter of a million) had been “somewhat overdramatized,” and when you considered that these pavement dwellers were almost exclusively engaged in ragpicking you could see how Calcutta’s garbage was “most intensively recycled.” It seemed an unusual choice of words, and it strayed close to claptrap; vitality in a place where people lay dead in the gutter (“But everyone dies eventually,” said Mr. C.), the overdramatized quarter of a million, the recycling ragpickers. We passed a man who leaned at us and put his hand out. He was a monster. Half his face was missing; it looked as if it had been clumsily guillotined—he had no nose, no lips, no chin, and clamped in his teeth, which were perpetually exposed, was the bruised plug of his tongue. Mr. Chatterjee saw my shock. “Oh, him! He is always here!”

Before he left me at the Barabazar, Mr. Chatterjee said, “I love this city.” We exchanged addresses and we parted, I to a hotel, Mr. Chatterjee to Strand Road, where the Hooghly was silting up so badly, soon all that would float on it would be the ashes of cremated Bengalis.

The Hopping Man

I WAS ON MY WAY WHEN I SAW THE HOPPING MAN IN THE crowd on Chowringhee. He was very strange: in a city of mutilated people only the truly monstrous looked odd. This man had one leg—the other was amputated at the thigh—but he did not carry a crutch. He had a greasy bundle in one hand. He hopped past me with his mouth open, pumping his shoulders. I went after him, and he turned into Middleton Street, hopping very fast on one muscular leg, like a man on a pogo stick, his head rising above the crowd, then descending into it. I couldn’t run because of the other people, black darting clerks, swamis with umbrellas, armless beggars working their stumps at me, women proffering drugged babies, strolling families, men seeming to block the sidewalk with their wide flapping trousers and swinging arms. The hopping man was in the distance. I gained on him—I saw his head clearly—then lost him. On one leg he had outrun me, so I never found out how he did it. But afterward, whenever I thought of India, I saw him—hop, hop, hop—moving nimbly through those millions.

Memories of the Raj—Mr. Bernard in Burma

THE OLD MAN NEXT TO ME ON THE LOCAL TO MAYMYO SAID, “How old do you think I am? Guess.”

I said sixty, thinking he was seventy.

He straightened up. “Wrong! I am eighty. That is, I passed my seventy-ninth birthday, so I am in my eightieth year.”

The train switched back and forth on curves as sharp as those on the way to Simla and Landi Kotal. Occasionally, for no apparent reason, it ground to a halt, starting up without a warning whistle, and it was then that the Burmese who had jumped out to piss chased after the train, retying their sarongs as they ran along the track and being whooped at by their friends in the train. The mist, the rain, and cold, low clouds gave the train a feeling of early morning, a chill and predawn dimness that lasted until noon. I put a shirt over my jersey, then a sweater and a plastic raincoat, but I was still cold, the damp penetrating to my bones. It was the coldest I had been since leaving England.

“I was born in 1894 in Rangoon,” said the old man suddenly. “My father was an Indian, but a Catholic. That is why I am called Bernard. My father was a soldier in the Indian Army. He had been a soldier his whole life—I suppose he joined up in Madras in the 1870s. He was in the Twenty-sixth Madras Infantry and he came to Rangoon with his regiment in 1888. I used to have his picture, but when the Japanese occupied Burma—I’m sure you have heard of the Japanese war—all our possessions were scattered, and we lost so many things.”

He was eager to talk, glad to have a listener, and he didn’t need prompting questions. He spoke carefully, plucking at the cloth bundle, as he remembered a clause, and I hugged myself in the cold, grateful that all that was required of me was an occasional nod to show I was interested.