KRIEIN



Judith Laikin Elkin

KRISHNA
SMLED
Assignment in Southeast Asia

SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING OFFICE ANN ARBOR 2010


Published in 2010 by The Scholarly Publishing Office
The University of Michigan University Library
© 1972 Wayne State University Press, © 2001 Judith Laikin Elkin
This edition is reprinted from the 1972 Wayne State University Press
edition by arrangement with Judith Laikin Elkin.
Permission is required to reproduce material from this title in other
publications, coursepacks, electronic products, and other media.
Please send permission requests to:
Scholarly Publishing Office
University of Michigan Library
4186 Shapiro
919 South University Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
lib.spo@umich.edu
Fax: (734) 763-6850
ISBN 978-1-60785-209-4
Grateful acknowledgement is extended to the U. S. Foreign Service Journal
for permission to reprint part of chapter 14, which appeared in a slightly
different form under the title "Where She Danced" (January 1956).


For Alissa and Susannah



Foreward

I have a special fondness for this book and its author. I read Krish-
na Smiledwhen it first appeared and I greatly enjoyed it. Sometime
after, I met the author under circumstances that were pleasingly
odd. It was at the Detroit Zoo, where we both attended a seminar
on elephants. We have been friends ever since, drawn together by
a common interest in elephants, and in India.
Krishna Smiled is the story of a young woman having the adventure
of her life as the Publications Procurement Officer to the US De-
partment of State, accredited to India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon,
and Afghanistan. The adventure began five years after the Partition
(1947) that created India and Pakistan out of British India, and
lasted two years (1954 - 56). Her task was to acquire publications
in the languages of the region and to send the books to the Library
of Congress and other libraries. To do so she had to seek out book-
sellers and government presses all over the subcontinent. This duty
provided a reason to visit to every part of South, or as it then was
called, Southeast, Asia.
This moment in history is now receding into the dimness of a past
remembered only by the mature. Even the map is unfamiliar.
Judith Laikin Elkin visited places which no longer exist, places
such as Pepsu, Patiala, Vindhya Pradesh, and East Pakistan as well
as the aforementioned Burma (now Myanmar) and Ceylon (now
Sri Lanka). It is not a diary, contemporary with that moment, but
a memoir of a rollicking adventure recalled in tranquility, written
and published more than a decade later, in 1971. It recalls an
America ignorant of India and its neighbors, a government need-
ing books about them, and a popular culture as yet untouched by
Indian culture as mediated by the Beatles, Allen Ginsberg and the
hippies. Its writing is framed by these changes that separate its now
from its then, changes it invokes at the beginning and returns to in
the magnificent crescendo and coda of the last two chapters.


It predates also the invention of political correctness. It is plain-
spoken, irreverent, high-spirited and humorous, good-hearted but
slightly tart and sparing of sweetness in a way that makes us like it
the more. It is what in diplomat-speak is called "frank", as in the
phrase, "a frank exchange of views". It is critical, while being
humane; it is humane, without losing its critical sense. Its voice is
singular. Its style is bracing, freshly-minted, free of clich6s, fun.
As the abstract and brief chronicle of the time, Krishna Smiled
sketches for us the decolonization movement following Partition
when the British and other European empires were being wound
up. It gives a picture of the new nation-states of India, Pakistan,
Burma and Ceylon shortly after their independence from Britain,
when they were hard at work defining what kind of nations they
would be, and the kingdom of Afghanistan when British influence
had retreated. We hear of the linguistic reorganization of states in
India, of the Chinese takeover of Tibet when China and India
were leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement and before the Sino-
Indian border war, of problems of poverty and the question, much
on the minds of American political scientists at the time, whether
caste and democracy are compatible.
However, we read the book not to learn about South Asia but to
follow the life adventures of this American girl, as she calls herself,
summoning her courage and trying her wings. The spreading of
wings had two aspects. On the one hand there was the foreign ser-
vice. The very first sentence of the book signals to readers that
Judith Laikin was the sole woman in her class of inductees, enter-
ing a service in which men set the norms and were the norm. This
was before what came to be called women's lib, for which the
benchmark work, Betty Friedan's Thefeminine mystique (1963), lay
far in the future. Inaugurating her career at the State Department
on the far side of that divide, Judith Laikin was given to under-
stand at the outset that the rules were different for women: they
could not marry and remain in the service. (Eventually she left the
service, and became Judith Laikin Elkin.) Under these conditions,
this is the story of a young woman maintaining her independence
in the office, so to say, under conditions that today are difficult to
imagine.


On the other hand, there was South Asia, which was an especially
challenging place in which to do so--which is to say, it was the per-
fect place. Readers will admire her courage and inventiveness as she
undertakes travels, some of which would be much easier today, and
others of which would be utterly impossible. Afghanistan offered
the greatest challenge. On a bus ride to Mazar-i-Sharif she had to
decide whether to transform herself into an Afghan girl by don-
ning a chador, or a beardless Afghan boy by putting on a turban. I
will not spoil it by telling which way she chose.
Readers are in for an enjoyable ride. I wish them pleasant journey,
and I send Judith Elkin renewed thanks for the pleasure this book
has given me.
Thomas R. Trautmann
Ann Arbor
25 August, 2010



CONENTS
In which the President of the United States sends
me to lie abroad for my country 11
2
On the way to Banaras, I fall in with Everyman 16
3
I fail to procure the Bhilsa telephone directory,
but live to fulfill other intelligence missions 32
4
Awash in Delhi, Pepsu, and Punjab 44
5
I spend a night in a Moslem graveyard, collecting
ephemera for the Library of Congress 61


Into the Tower of Babel and out by that same door
where in I went 70
7
Inadvertently, I introduce Henry Miller to the
Defense Minister of Nepal 90
Q
Touching the Untouchable 96
Beware the Orakzai, My Son 108
(0
Wandering through Pomegranate Bazaar,
I eat one seed too many 123
Maidens 130
12
I climb a Himalaya and miss a coup d'etat 147


13
Through Kerala with coir and cashew 157
14
The good servant, Jesus Christ 177
15
After two years, I finally acquire some
intelligence 190
I become the first American girl to ride the Afghan
Mail to. Mazar-i-Sharif-and return  206
17
Holy, Holy, Holy 226
It's a long way to Khafuraho, we'd better
get started 244

Index 249


1 S S FI

C H I N A

r

Jhajra.  Allahabaj .
labad  Rhopal. Bis
Nagpui "
BI
I N          D I A
Hyderabad."          A


In which the President of the United States
sends me to lie abroad for my country
Ah, a rose among thorns," Dean Acheson mur-
mured when he commissioned me a United States Foreign
Service Officer. True enough, I was the only girl in the class
of twenty-seven who graduated from the Foreign Service In-
stitute that term.
It was 1952, and the United States government, still
widely regarded as omnipotent, was about to send me to
Southeast Asia as its publications procurement officer.
The assignment was an unusual one in many respects.
Diplomats, who are honest men sent to lie abroad for their
country, are usually assigned to one particular city, for ex-
ample, New Delhi. Ambassadors get an entire country, for
example, India. But I, a novice, was assigned simultaneously
to India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, and Afghanistan.
I had prepared myself for Asian adventure by majoring
in Latin American studies at the Columbia University School
of International Affairs. After receiving my master's degree,
11


Krishna Smiled
I sat for the gruelling, three-day foreign service examination
for no particular reason save that it was there. Unexpectedly,
I passed, and finding the challenge exhilarating, presented
myself for oral examination before a board of five curmud-
geons. I recall that one of the questions hurled at me then was
to name five cities of India. I could muster only four, and had
to throw in Karachi for good measure. Had I but known it,
before the next two years were out I would become so inti-
mate with Asian geography that cities such as Nasik, Kalim-
pong, and Peshawar would have the familiar ring of Akron,
Phoenix, or Boston.
Having passed the oral, I was examined by a physician,
investigated by the FBI, named by the President, confirmed
by the Senate, and dispatched via Pan American Flight 2.
My mission was to collect publications of research value
for various federal agencies, primarily the Department of
State and the Library of Congress. I was to buy, borrow, or
procure in any other way, such overtly available printed mat-
ter as political manifestos, forest surveys, telephone direc-
tories, communist tracts, street guides, dictionaries, economic
surveys, newspapers, magazines, and something called ephem-
era, all of which I was to ship home to the State Depart-
ment for transmittal to various client libraries in Washington.
There they would be culled, cataloged, and made available
to researchers.
I was provided with an unlimited book-buying budget
and a free hand at arranging my travel. Since books are no-
toriously cheap and travel notoriously difficult on the sub-
continent, what this meant was that I had full authority to
break my neck at practically no cost to anybody.
And so I found myself, at age twenty-one, accredited by
my government to five foreign capitals: New Delhi, Rangoon,
Kabul, Colombo, and the then capital of Pakistan, Karachi.
I boarded my plane bound for the world.
So far as I was concerned, I was catapulting into the un-
known. I knew Kipling, but he was dead. I had read E. M.
Forster, but I could not make sense of A Passage to India un-
til my own passage home from there. On my last night in
12


The President sends me abroad

America, friends took me to see The River, but Rumer God-
den and Jean Renoir were a bit poetic to act as guides in con-
crete situations.
The general atmosphere provided no clues as to the na-
ture of the nonwestern world. The Beatles were still only
larvae over in Liverpool, and consequently the raga had yet
to penetrate western music. Hollywood stars had not yet
initiated their exchange program with Indian holy men, Allan
Ginsburg was a cloud no bigger than a guru's hand, and
Svetlana Alleluieva lived on in the Kremlin, unaware of the
compassionate nature of Hindu men.
The word sari was virtually unknown in the United
States, and Indian women strolling our streets were generally
taken for gypsies. Nehru jackets were less well-known than
Nehru, and psychedelic colors bloomed unheralded in the
circular gardens of Rashtrapathi Bhavan. If anyone had told
me that fifteen years hence American fashion magazines
would be pushing Punjabi tunics, I would have thought he
had taken leave of his senses, along with the informant who
reported that the United States is now the leading importer
of sitars.
India, in short, had not been discovered. It awaited me.
Five years after Partition, in the Year 5 of Independence,
the state of the Indian and Pakistani publishing industries
was such that two years of tangling with them changed my
life permanently. Business efficiency was still an exotic fancy
waiting to be imported from the West. Although my client
libraries besieged me with demands for catalogs and bibli-
ographies, there were in fact no reliable indications of what
books, magazines, or newspapers were being published any-
where. Mail orders were not always filled, and when they
were, not necessarily by the desired item. A book one saw
advertised today might actually have been published twenty
years ago and long since been ingested by the great maw of
the Library of Congress. Overloaded government presses con-
scientiously ground out annual reports of ten years back,
while this year's report (urgently desired by one of my li-
braries) waited its turn to see the light of day a decade hence.
13


Krishna Smiled

And although India had a copyright law, requiring a copy of
each published book to be deposited in the Central Secre-
tariat Library, the law was as much honored by the presses
as by the library; which is to say, not much at all.
As a result I discovered that the only way to acquisition
books was to sally forth into the bazaars, find them, and physi-
cally possess them. Often, as I prowled the bazaars of Bhu-
vaneshwar or traced a tip through Tiruchchirappalli, I would
think of those poor souls, immured in dusty corridors, who
would have the cataloging of the publications which I had
the fun of procuring. Their work seemed but a pale reflection
of mine.
An additional circumstance which forced me into a life
of travel was the existence of so many languages within my
area of interest. The State Department had given me a six-
week crash course in Hindi. But Hindi is the native language
of rather less than half the people of India, the other half
speaking 845 other languages, 14 of which have Constitution-
al status. Pakistan has two major linguistic areas and a half
dozen minor ones; Afghanistan has two, Ceylon two, and
Burma is a linguistic snake pit.
The literature of any one of these linguistic areas is not
generally considered to be of interest in any of the other
linguistic areas, even if it is of interest to the Library of Con-
gress, and consequently is not advertised or sold outside its
own immediate area. The best of the crop appears in its own
script, in job lots, from the press of a dear friend of the author
who lives in a town which is the ancient seat of that culture,
but which in recent centuries has not been much in the pub-
lic eye, with the result that the roads into town aren't too
good and the railroad never got there. To procure these pub-
lications, one must begin by learning of their existence. Then
one must find the printing press where the type was set, rouse
the owner, and try to buy a copy of the book.
In pursuit of these acquisitions I crossed and recrossed
the continent by bus, car, train, boat, plane, foot, and ferry
over a period of two years. I saw snow-capped Kanchenjunga,
and Quetta at 1200. I stood in the demonic down-draft where
14


The President sends me abroad
the Western Ghats fall away to the central plains just above
Poona; and hiked forty miles out of Afghanistan's aptly-
named Desert of Death. Thousands of miles to the south, I
flew over Dhanushkodi, where India trickles away into the
sea, spattering little islands right up to the green gem Ceylon,
all of it in perfect Mercator projection. Oh yes, I bought maps
too.
Imagine me, then, in cotton homespun skirt and shirt,
travelling alone through antique lands and unknown lan-
guages in search of books I could not read. Over my shoulder,
anticipating the hippies, I slung an embroidered bag into
which I popped my acquisitions. On my feet I wore sandals
made of the hides of cows who had died nonviolent deaths.
A song that was popular while I was in India began "Zin-
digi, kia hai? eek tamasha." "What is life? a county fair."
While filling my bag with books, I stored my mind and heart
with memories of a time when life indeed seemed like a
county fair, and Krishna smiled.

15


2
On the way to Banaras, I fall in with Everyman
Racketing through the dusty landscape of Uttar
Pradesh, alone in my second-class coach, I was shaken by the
apparition of a hand at the window.
Brown and dusty, it reached inside the rattling window
of the swiftly-moving train, hauling a face behind it. The
sight of my own ghastly white face froze the intruder with
his mouth open. Then the mouth yelled, though I could not
hear the words, and the hand appeared to be slipping back
into the scenery. The lad was in some danger I thought and,
grasping his arm, landed him on the floor of the coach with
minor injuries.
He had been running for the train, he explained in Hin-
dustani (without a ticket, I added to myself) and lost-'his shoe
... and.., the explanation trickled into silence. For the next
thirty miles, till the next station, the boy sat in a corner, sus-
picious and yet not daring to be suspicious, because I was
white and rich, and he was black and nobody. I tried to talk
16


I fall in with Everyman
to him; after all, I was travelling second class rather than first
so I could meet people. But my newly-fashioned Hindustani
(clearly comprehensible to my teacher) got nowhere with the
boy. In Hindustani he answered: "I am sorry, Madam, I do
not speak English."
I turned to stare out the window again. It is a long jour-
ney from Delhi to Banaras, and a dusty one. The fields are
dust; the tracks are overlaid with dust; the peasants plow dust
and sow it; great sheets of dust rise up, roll themselves into
funnels that pirouette nastily, and collapse in dead heaps on
the parched seed. Men baked brown by the sun and oxen
bleached white by it spot the land with red turbans and gilded
horns. Wells draw the countryside to them. Women haul wa-
ter from a well, their red-cloaked bodies pulling against the
weight. Oxen clatter up and down earthen ramps that lead to
wells, lifting leather bagsfull of water for the irrigation
ditches. Babies lie swaddled and quiescent in the precious
shadow of the ramps. At dusk, men coming from the field
stop to bathe at a well, their spare bodies silhouetted against
the briefly incandescent sky.
My train traversed the Gangetic plain.
Mud villages are half reclaimed by mud around them.
Some hills, perhaps, were once villages. Little girls knead
cakes of dung, patty-cake, patty-cake, and plaster them
against the walls of their homes to dry in the sun. Then they
will be stacked in ricks, from which chips will be taken for
fuel. When the manure is burned, the ashes will be used for
soap and toothpaste, and to spread on the floor of the home at
Dussehra time. And this is one of the tragedies of India, for
where else can the farmers find fertilizer for their fields?
The boy without a ticket slipped from the coach at the
next station, retreating in the direction of third class, which
was really fourth class since there was an "inter" between
second and third. Out on the platform, the eternal bazaar of
India was in progress. Waiting passengers squatted around
a family cooking pot, their weight suspended from uncom-
plaining knee hinges. Babies lay sleeping in heaps of rags.
Water carriers and hawkers of sweets and betelnut and pan-
17


Krishna Smiled

cakes and soft drinks picked their way among bodies, calling
their wares in the singsong which identifies each product. The
pitchmen carried huge trays on their heads, stooping to serve
their customers without using their hands to balance the load.
Their heads were cushioned in yards of towelling, as were the
luggage-laden heads of the railway porters. But the porters
wore allover red.
The Anglo-Indian stationmaster, a member of that "in-
ter" class which is neither first, second, nor third and which
earns its living by facilitating communication among the
other classes, put a whistle to his lips and started us. I was
contemplating the precise pleat in his ragged uniform trouser
leg, when a man in a tweed suit entered. He was tall for a Hin-
du, almost as tall as I, with small deep-set eyes and disfigur-
ing pock marks.
"Good afternoon," he said toward the paperback which
I had ostentatiously raised to my eyes. "I too am an admirer
of Mr. Sinclair Lewis."
I had picked up Main Street from a book vendor several
stations back, hoping it would provide a buffer against the on-
rush of strange impressions which was threatening to swamp
me. I seemed to need a known point of reference, and yet the
last thing I wanted to do was talk about Main Street, which
bored me. In fact, considering the heat and dust, any conver-
sation would require too much effort. My clothes were stiff
with dust; I had an unidentified rash up and down one leg;
I wasn't certain where I would sleep that night. Also, it
seemed discreet to keep my distance from lone male trav-
ellers.
Each car on an Indian train is self-contained. As the
train starts up, the stationmaster bolts the carriage doors and
there you are, imprisoned along with your companions until
the next stop.
On the overnight trip from Ahmadabad to Bombay, I
had been locked up with a six-and-a-half foot Sikh with a
fiercesome beard. He outweighed me a good fifty pounds. On
that occasion I pretended that I was not present at all. But
the Sikh saw me, and after an ominous twenty miles of si-
18


1 fall in with Everyman
lence, said: "Aren't you afraid to be travelling alone with a
Sikh? We have very terrible reputations, you know." I re-
plied, "Oh, not at all, Sardarji." (All Sikhs are addressed as
"Chief" as a precautionary measure, and I added the "ji" of
respect just in case.) "When I saw you I was very glad be-
cause I felt that if the train were attacked by bandits, you
would protect me."
Our train was not attacked by bandits, though trains
sometimes were, so I was unable to test the validity of my
statement. But the theory was sound. I slept well and so did
my Sikh, and in the morning I watched as he combed out his
tremendous beard which had never seen a razor, rolled it
over an elastic garter, and snooded his chin with a hair net.
The only other word we exchanged was "Goodbye."
Of course, I could have bought a ticket in the coach re-
served for women. These were horribly crowded, their tiny
windows laced with barbed wire against the attack of pred-
ators, animal or human I was uncertain which. Women and
children engaged in a continuous round of mewling and puk-
ing, which was not surprising considering the lack of air, and
the smells which issued from these coaches were death-
dealing. Having taken a look at the accommodations Indians
reserve for their mothers, wives, and daughters, I decided to
lean on my cachet as a foreigner and travel with the men.
I soon discovered that, travelling first class, I met only
westernized Indians who persisted in talking about the
weather. So I switched to second. I paid conscience money,
though: village people never would enter a coach which I
was occupying, and thus I increased the congestion in all the
other coaches.
Now, on the Banaras train, I was locked up with this
type I hadn't identified as yet. I regretted his wanting to dis-
cuss English literature. It was a bad sign. There are some In-
dians for whom everything foreign is estimable, while any-
thing learned at the mother's knee is beneath contempt. If
I continued to run into no one but sycophants, I would never
learn anything about India. I reflected sourly on the babbittry
that made the man wear western clothes, necktie and all, in
19


Krishna Smiled

this heat for which dhotis had been invented. Let him be
an Indian!
My companion now introduced himself as an inspector
of railway signals, and I had to backtrack. His English and
his western clothes were marks of office. Coincidentally, I
had a library with a morbid taste in railway publications,
which it consumed at a faster rate than the Indian govern-
ment could turn them out. My library was forever demand-
ing titles which no one in Delhi had ever heard of. It hadn't
occurred to me before to look for them in the provinces, but
here the inspector had been dropped in my lap, as it were.
So I let myself be drawn into a discussion of Sinclair Lewis.
Arrived at the caldron of Banaras railway station, Ram
Chand saw me to a cycle rickshaw. He told the undernour-
ished cyclist to take me to the H6tel de Paris, and offered to
accompany me there. Like most people I met in India, he was
appalled at my travelling alone.
I declined an escort, but the inspector had not exhausted
his hospitality. He whistled up a wizened old man in blue
denim pyjamas with a massive scarlet turban and white han-
dlebar moustachioes, who loped over on springy bare feet and
nestled on the footrest of the rickshaw. "Hotel-ko ja," ordered
Ram Chand, and we set off at a good clip while he bowed
goodbye, arriving shortly at the hotel, where the proprietor
welcomed me effusively, as I was the only guest. Tika Lall
was accepted as part of my baggage, and for the duration of
my stay in Banaras, he slept across my threshold.
I spent the next days rooting through Banaras looking
for bookstores, which of course I had to locate before I could
buy any books. The hotel desk clerk could tell me where the
bookstore was, but that wasn't the one I wanted, because all
of its stock was equally available in Times Square or Totten-
ham Court Road. The major Indian bookstores leaned heav-
ily on the English publishers, and seldom deigned to carry
native writers.
It was Tika Lall who pointed out the street where my
miserable bookstalls were hidden, stuffed with ill-printed
books and flimsy pamphlets which no one at the Department
20


I fall in with Everyman
of State would ever have seen if I hadn't made the trip to Ban-
aras. My smidgen of Hindi enabled me to pick out individual
words of book titles, not always accurately. Tika Lall, of
course, could not read at all. But I drew pretty good crowds
wherever I stopped, among whom there was always at least
one college student in clean white shirt and pressed ducks
who was eager to exercise his English, heavily flavored with
Victorian phrases. Once I persuaded him that I really was
looking for books by Indian authors, about India (apparently
an unheard-of request from a foreigner) he would knock him-
self out helping me to select titles.
Often enough it was Tika Lall who clambered up the
rickety, dusty shelves on his good bare feet that had the char-
acter of hands, to reach the volumes we wanted. It was also
he who carried back to the hotel the books I purchased in a
wicker basket on his head, shooing away from us as we went
the hordes of children who followed and hooted at the large
foreign woman.
Banaras's claim to being the oldest city in the world may
be true, judging from the amount of garbage that has had
time to pile up there. The bazaar is an enormous midden, the
houses and shops collapsing under the weight of their own
refuse and getting rebuilt with the same material. Until I saw
Banaras, I could not understand how ancient cities had be-
come buried and built over. Now it all came clear to me as
the garbage mounted in visibly agitated piles up the door
jambs and over the lintels, preparing to engulf the families
within.
The atmosphere was of one glorious hullabaloo, the noise
and smells of masses of people jangling for attention. Every-
one was selling something to everyone else. The contents of
shops spilled out onto the dusty, dungy street, while back in
dim interiors families ate and slept on top of the merchandise.
Out front, women sat barefoot under faucets, washing their
groceries. The cloth merchants sat cross-legged on platforms
before their shops, tape measures hanging from their necks,
and the cobblers, who are Untouchables, tapped-tapped-tap-
ped their lonely lives away on little shelves. A cotton ginner
21


Krishna Smiled

passed, carrying his peculiarly musical-looking instrument on
his shoulder, twanging the single string. Rickshaw coolies
waiting on corners clanked a stone against the metal shafts
of their buggies in a distinctively hurried, insistent, rhythm.
A snake charmer blew three agonized notes from his swell-
bellied pipe. Of all the people on the crowded street, he was
the only one with plenty of elbow room.
Only about half the shops were standing in one place;
the rest were walking about on racks rigged to their proprie-
tor's backs. The hawker of coal, the man who sells plastic toys,
pinwheels, and kites, the sellers of sweets, milk, bread, mel-
ons, water are peripatetic, and each has a different call that
blends into the cacaphony of the market.
The fastest-moving item in the market was an object I
couldn't identify at all. Apparently an emblem of the city, it
was represented in a variety of sizes and materials; but no-
where could I see the original. Apparently, no tourist should
leave Banaras without one-so I bought one and took it back
to my hotel room for scrutiny.
It was an orange-painted cylinder embedded in a con-
cave base not unlike an old-fashioned candleholder, but with
a funnel leading from it. To my untrained eye, the object
which I held with increasing reluctance in my hand appeared
to be a male organ in the process of penetrating a female. This
rather took me aback until I recalled purchasing a replica of
the Washington Monument while on a schoolgirl visit to our
nation's capitol. No country should be without a father! The
reference books told me that what I had bought was a lingam,
a representation of the god Shiva in his formless manifesta-
tion. Shiva creates, Shiva destroys; and I suppose a lingam is
as good a representation of that process as anything else.
I could not pay my respects to Shiva in person, as a ban
against foreigners was strictly enforced in Banarsi temples,
but I did surprise one in the act of making up. I was walking
past one of those imposing structures of stone in which he re-
sides, the facade of it alive with sculptured gods and demons.
Tides of orange paint had washed over them. The effect was
as though a child had taken a bucket of paint and thrown it at
God.

22


I fall in with Everyman
As the temple gate was ajar, I glanced inside to see a
large courtyard, its cobblestones awash in urine, pulverized
flowers, incense, and broken crockery. Across the littered
yard a little room, a man crouched with a bucket of paint,
and Shiva himself.
He was a sturdy three-foot-high cylinder not unlike the
markers we use in the United States to mark the limits of
parking lots. I had never thought before that those things
might be alive. The god had already been painted orange,
and now the man was drawing him a blue face.
"Sh'ma!" I cried in terror. "Hear O Israel, the Lord thy
God, the Lord is One!" The lingam did not splinter, Banaras
stayed where it was, and the man painted in the other eye.
Old Adonai was fooling. He'd known about this place right
along.
One morning I hired a barge for a view of the city from
the river. We embarked in clear dawn, before the sun should
have a chance to beat life back into the dust from which it
springs lustily each day. Poled by a tall black man whose
dhoti, tucked up around his haunches, revealed knots of mus-
cle on fleshless thighs, we floated between high banks of
temples. Some were palaces, others as small as sentry boxes,
and they shoulder one another on their way down to the sa-
cred river, jealous of the drops of water that lave one another's
foundations. The bullies among them seem to have pushed the
weaker ones in. Actually, the changing level of the river un-
dermines them, leaving the smaller temples askew.
Each temple is topped by a conical or a wedge-shaped
dome, fantastically carved with gods, men, animals, men-
gods, god-animals, and animal-men, writhing in the steam-
ing heat. It is not too hard to imagine all these creatures con-
verging on the waterfront in the flesh for their ceremonial
bath. In addition to them, there were probably ten thousand
people in the water.
Each man prays for himself, standing knee-deep in
Mother Ganges and clasping his hands together or sprinkling
water over his shaven head. Some stand and stare into the
sun. Prayers finished, a man ties a clean dhoti over the one
he has on; slips that out from underneath, washes it, washes
23


Krishna Smiled

the sacred thread that encircles his body from right shoulder
to left hip, and climbs back up the ghat. He reapplies his
caste marks to face, chest and forearms; horizontal lines for
Shaivites, vertical for Vaishnavites.
All this while, groups of women, hopelessly entangled in
six yards of sari, contrive to bathe themselves, demurely slip-
ping bars of soap under their clothing, then immersing them-
selves to the chin. Children run naked in the sun, or dive off
the ledges of temple windows streaming suds, unmindful of
their proximity to the infinite.
In a recess of a temple wall, a man defecates and washes
his privates in the river, ignoring the row of flush toilets stand-
ing doorless and open-and vacant-several steps above him.
A few feet away, laundrymen and women flail great knouts
of cloth against upturned slates. A simultaneous ugh arises
from them; then the slap of wet cloth upon stone. And this is
another Indian tragedy, for people are forever bathing and
laundering, and achieving only a redistribution of the dirt.
Some yards beyond the bathing ghat, continuous smok-
ing accompanies the departure from this and all possible
worlds of those Hindus fortunate enough to have their re-
mains brought here for cremation. The ashes are then thrown
in the river and the soul freed from karma, the inexorable fate
that condemns one to countless rebirths as man or animal un-
til the soul shall have purified itself sufficiently to achieve nir-
vana.
The Ganges runs swiftly and thickly at Banaras, rushing
to heave its burden into the Bay of Bengal. For me, its heav-
iest burden is the continual reminder that, though man be
part divine, he is at best part animal.
Landing at one of the ghats, I paid off the boatmen and
started up a broad flight of stairs leading between the river
and the town. The lepers, forbidden by law to touch anyone,
parted their rags for me to see their fingerless joints, their
shining stumps of elbow. A baby nursed distractedly from its
father's dry teat. In the shadow of a temple wall, another
father was teaching his son's arm the shape of beggary. It was
the only trade he would ever have. Here lay a woman with a
24


I fall in with Everyman
leg larger than her entire trunk, and insects dwelling in it.
And there were two.., human beings.
A foetus. When he was an infant, his parents, who be-
longed to the caste of beggars and who therefore could be-
queath only the occupation of beggar to their son, had
doubled his arms against his breast, drawn his knees against
his stomach, and bound him with cord. After some years, the
cord was no longer needed. He remained permanently in the
foetal position. The only way he could get about was to have
someone roll him like an egg.
He found as companion a man whose parents, likewise
at their wits' end to provide their son with a trade, had
scooped out his eyeballs and left the holes untended. These
two humans teamed up so that the blind one could trundle
the giant foetus along the ground with his foot. Down below,
the seeing one could tell the blind man where in this curiously
revolving world, they were going. The trickle from the sewer,
the jagged shells, the droppings of men and animals, the
cobblestones and curbs and mud must all be rolled through
by the foetus; while he who walked erect like a man extended
the half of a cocoanut shell to collect rice or alms for them
both.
Though the blind man's feet were horny as any in India,
the foetus's were soft and pink.
In a courtyard, flower vendors sit, threading sweet-
smelling jasmine and peppery marigold into garlands to be
hung around the necks of gods.
The flower sellers are Moslem, as are the bangle-makers
and brocade weavers. The most famous products of the most
Hindu of cities are manufactured by non-Hindus. Difficult
to understand, until one realizes that most Moslems are con-
verts at some generations' remove, who sought to escape
karma by denying it. As castes essentially represent divisions
of labor, and have strong clan ties, it is not too much to sup-
pose that at one time or another whole castes have gone over
to Islam, bringing their trades with them.
I was introduced to Banarsi brocade by one Moham-
med, the dispossessed son of a weaver. A Moslem and an
25


Krishna Smiled
orphan, he was bitter against this city redolent of Hinduism
and the joint family. He used to hang around the H6tel de
Paris preying on the guests, filling them with libels against
the Hindus. One afternoon, when I had returned triumphant
from a joust with a communist bookdealer, I allowed Mo-
hammed to coax me into visiting the home of his uncle, evi-
dently the man who had cheated him of his inheritance.
Leading on through streets of dust, Mohammed brought
me to the weavers' quarters. The hard mud walls of the houses
on either side of the walk seemed like a continuation upward
of the ground on which we walked, and equally dusty chil-
dren blended like chameleons into them.
Then we came upon the outposts of the weavers, like
Cleopatra's barge upon the sand: rows of stakes set into the
ground, from which hung hundreds of yards of silk thread
drying luminously in the sun. Startling as a peacock un-
skeined, scarlet and sea blue, emerald and gold, the threads
glistened in the sun like something only recently alive.
Stooping through an entrance, Mohammed led me
through a mean courtyard and thence into his uncle's (his?)
home.
Coming from the street, at first I could not see. Then I
made out the room, which was unlighted, unfurnished, and
perhaps ten by ten feet. In a corner, a boy was drawing.
Opposite him in another corner, an old man was sitting
shrouded and withdrawn, having given up the conduct of
business, and of life itself, to his son, who kept the center of
the floor.
Seeing me enter, the neighbors came too, and pan was
distributed. The betelnut is hard as a rock and tastes like de-
tergent. It is demolished with a hammer before the bits are
placed, together with a smear of damp lime, on the center of
a green betel leaf. The leaf is then folded into a triangle and
held fast with more lime. (By "lime" I do not mean the citrus
fruit, but calcium oxide.) When chewed, it is claimed to have
a prophylactic effect on the stomach.
Legend has it that maharajahs used to grind pearls into
their pan. Ground pearl is reputedly aphrodisiac. I myself
26


I fall in with Everyman
have seen pan eaten with a silver foil wrapping. I do not
know about the aphrodisiac qualities of silver. The pan itself
gives the system a lift comparable to that obtained in a good
Coke.
Now in the weavers' hut large bundles were dragged in.
Delicately, Mohammed's uncle undid the grimy knots, and
exposed upon the floor the wealth of Ind. Shimmering lengths
of silver there were, cunningly intersticed with lapis birds and
scarlet ladies; blue silk, gossamer as a dragonfly's wing; pearl
grey silk woof, with silver warp so pure the cloth could be
burned and the silver retrieved; plain gold-six yards of plain
gold-to wrap a princess on her wedding night. All this on the
floor of that hovel.
The place was so bare, so innocent of contrivance, I
could not believe such craft was worked here. The weavers
enjoyed my astonishment and invited me into the second
room.
Again, I could see nothing at first. The only light came
from a slit in the wall just under the eaves. As my pupils
dilated, I made out a monstrous wooden machine struggling
in a net of cords that fastened it to a beam in the ceiling.
Perched on the beam, a man arranged the cords so as to
evolve the pattern which he held between his toes. Below
him, in a seated position unusual among Indians, a man
worked the shuttle and pressed home the threads. Below him
on the floor, a boy on all fours worked the pedals. It was too
dark in the room for me to distinguish the color of the cloth.
In this family, the labor of all its members does not suf-
fice to enable them to buy decent clothing, let alone one sari
from among the hundreds they have created. It is the banya,
the village moneylender, who holds the threads, and pays
them out as a fisherman pays a fish enough line to choke itself
with. First the banya lends thread and food to the weavers.
The weavers produce the cloth while consuming the food.
When they deliver the finished work to the banya, he credits
the cloth toward payment for the food and thread, and pays
a small amount as wage-minus interest on the loan.
The wage, as Karl Marx calculated, is enough to enable
27


Krishna Smiled

the weaver to work and to reproduce the next generation of
workers. The weavers have to go back into debt in order to
get more thread and more food so they may continue to work.
The brocade sells in the bazaar, at the banya's shop, for prices
only the wealthiest can afford.
Generations ago, the weavers tried to free themselves
from the unwritten law that keeps them chained, starving, to
their looms. The entire weavers' caste embraced Islam, which
has no karma and which teaches the brotherhood of man, or
at least of Moslems.
Unfortunately, the weavers hadn't identified their real
problem. The banyas continue to control the credit. So al-
though the weavers cut themselves free from the doom of
reincarnation, yet in this life they remain trapped in the tra-
ditional society as surely as their giant looms are trapped in
the glorious fabric which they weave.
Every morning, Tika Lall brought me a note from "Mas-
ter," meaning Ram Chand the railway signal inspector. I do
not know how or when the two used to meet, for I never saw
Ram Chand near the hotel. But there would be a note every
morning on my breakfast tray. Once I found, stacked upon
my bedside table, three sets of the railway publications which
I had been seeking.
By the time Sunday came, bringing with it an invitation
to tea, Ram Chand had acquired some of those aspects of
familiarity with which a few days previously I had invested
Main Street. Accordingly, I accepted.
Ram Chand arrived in a cycle rickshaw, which waited
while he rang my room. I hesitated to climb into the rickshaw
with him, and was so quickly misinterpreted ("Of course, a
foreign lady would not want to be seen riding with an In-
dian"), that I immediately got in. What was concerning me
was that our combined weight was in the neighborhood of
three hundred pounds. The cyclist may have weighed ninety.
For hauling us around Banaras the better part of six hours, he
was later to receive the equivalent of two cents. Having en-
joyed the ride, however, I rationalized: if he had not been
hired, he would not have earned the two cents.
28


I fall in with Everyman
Through the busy bazaar, in the cool succeeding the set-
ting of the sun, the cyclist drew Ram Chand and me. Lights
were being lit as the second round of business began. Mer-
chants open their shops at dawn; close up against the heat of
the day; then reopen at dusk to do business through the long
evening till everyone has left the streets except for the people
who sleep on them.
We climbed a rickety stair to an English tearoom, a re-
treat in other days for British and Anglo-Indian railway per-
sonnel. It was deserted now and looked as though it would
soon be engulfed by India.
Over tea, Ram Chand picked up the thread of our con-
versation on the train a week earlier. Pearl Buck. Ernest Hem-
ingway. Coleridge. Lord Byron. And. . . He hesitated before
naming "the greatest author." I wondered who he could be,
and why Ram Chand spoke of him with such reverence. I
asked him about himself.
He was born, Ram Chand said, in one of those little
houses that guard the level railway crossings. His father was
the man who lowers the rail when the train is due to pass, and
raises it after the train is gone. There is a book fastened to
the wall of such houses in which travellers can write any com-
plaints they may have about the service. These are regularly
inspected by the railways. Perhaps it was this that instilled
an atmosphere of rectitude in the household.
Ram Chand's father was killed at the crossing, and the
son received a scholarship in compensation. In due course,
Ram Chand entered the railway service too, but he rose
higher than his father and spent most of his adult life travel-
ling up and down the lines of Banarsi District. He had never
been outside the boundaries of the district.
At twenty, he married a girl of a neighboring village. At
twenty-three, he was a widower with two infants. His in-laws
offered and certainly expected that he would accept a sister
in place of his dead wife, but Ram Chand refused her.
The inspector looked at me, anticipating my surprise.
"Why did you not remarry, then?" I asked gently. I was
moved by the thought of the two motherless babies. Who
29


Krishna Smiled
would marry these girls, if they had never had a mother to
teach them the household skills?
"You see," Ram Chand said shyly (he was a big man,
and his shyness like his ugliness possessed him physically.
How could I have taken him for a sycophant?), "You see, I
loved my wife."
I really was surprised. Love is not absolutely unknown
in India, but it is a disease which is usually confined to the
wealthiest upper-class, who can afford it.
Ram Chand continued. "I have discovered a wonderful
man, the greatest writer who ever lived. He is scarcely known.
Undoubtedly, you have never even heard of him. He had
many things to say about women. Revolutionary things that
have not been said before in India. When I married, I tried
to put these things into practice, so that my wife would be
more than a wife to me, but a woman too, a person. We were
very happy."
The unknown writer was Henrik Ibsen. Of course "no
one" had ever heard of him. Only the English writers are
taught in Indian schools. Ram Chand gave me his copy of
the Everyman edition of Ibsen's plays when I left Banaras.
The notations he had made in the margins of A Doll's House
show clearly that Everyman includes an Indian railway in-
spector held incommunicado in Village Suriawan, District
Banaras, Uttar Pradesh.
"Let him be an Indian!" I had thought on first meeting
Ram Chand, without realizing that he, like so many educated
Indians, was two people. Half of him lived within a tradition-
al society, where everything is foreordained and predeter-
mined, the individual lashed to the wheel of karma by the
accident of his birth; the other half has betaken himself upon
the perilous journey of Everyman, a journey that can only be
made by a free and independent mind.
While all his old friends were standing around in sacred
rivers washing their sins off onto one another, Ram Chand
set out toward enlightenment, Everyman his guide, and be-
gan to blossom into an autonomous human being. But his wife
died; and he refused the substitute which the wheel of karma
30


I fall in with Everyman
would have thrust upon him. As a result, he experienced bit-
ter personal suffering as well as social ostracism in his village.
The penalty for being an individual was terrible: rejection
by the only society he knew.
Was the effort worthwhile? I wondered as I parted from
Ram Chand at the railway station. Would India emerge into
the twentieth century only at the cost of so much ambivalence
and heartache?
A basket of mangoes preceded me to my flat in New
Delhi. I never had eaten the fruit before, which tastes like a
cantaloupe that has been injected with turpentine. Its effect
was toxic, and I swelled up like a dirigible.
("It is well known that one does not eat the mango be-
fore monsoon," said my friend Bijay, who came from Mysore.
"You know little of such things in the south," retorted Jivraj.
To me he said, "You must eat only mangoes which come from
Saharanpur. These may be eaten either before or after mon-
soon without heating the blood.")
At the time, it was hard for me to appreciate the note
which came with the mangoes. But after my allergy subsided,
the words continued to echo.
"I am so happy to have met you," Ram Chand wrote.
"Now I know that I was right. Something good becomes of
Nora when she leaves her doll's house."

31


3
I fail to procure the Bhilsa telephone directory,
but live to fulfill other intelligence missions
All my libraries lusted after telephone directories,
which they consumed in industrial quantities. Washington
researchers dredge through these directories in search of
nourishing particles of information in much the same way
that giant whales sieve the sea through their baleen in order
to retrieve the tiny plankton on which they feed.
It was largely the demand for phone books which drove
me the length and breadth of the subcontinent, into country-
side I would never have penetrated otherwise. So I am truly
grateful to whoever those people were who read my phone
books; if indeed they did. I sometimes wonder, since I never
received a complaint about Bhilsa. I didn't acquisition that
one, and never will, for I won't go back. The good citizens of
the town might succeed in killing me the third time 'round.
The post-World War II concept of intelligence requires
field agents who are willing to behave like vacuum cleaners,
sucking up scraps of information which lie about the land-
scape either free of charge or for a nominal cost (my first
32


The Bhilsa telephone directory
year's expenditure for books was less than $600). These are
transmitted through the diplomatic pouch for evaluation by
I & R. It is the function of the Intelligence and Research peo-
ple to fit all this waste paper into a collage, or perhaps I
should say trompe d'oeil, from which intelligence forecasts
can be projected. For this reason, nothing is too trivial to be
forwarded, as long as it falls within the perimeters of general
instructions; the merest scrap of printed matter may find its
small place in completing an intelligence estimate.
There was one popular Indian general who couldn't be-
lieve I was as naive as I appeared to be, and concluded I was
Mata Hari. He had me followed around by the secret service,
all of whom were his relatives, when I visited his home state
of Coorg. But actually, as publications procurement officer, I
was not officially encouraged to fool around, and I seldom
mixed pleasure with business.
Much of the work was routine, as vacuum-cleaning is apt
to be. An order for Bombay telephone directories, for ex-
ample, could be filled by mailing a request to the Bombay
post office, with money order enclosed, in the reasonable ex-
pectation that the directories would one day arrive. Very dull.
But occasionally some Washington-based researcher,
possibly pregnant, would develop a craving for exotic di-
rectories pertaining to towns which no one in the embassy
had ever heard of. Towns, moreover, whose postmasters did
not answer their mail. A town like Bhilsa had to be spotted
on my inadequate map, and as occasion arose, I would try to
work it into one of my field trips. I am one of the very few
people in the world who ever went to Bhilsa on purpose.
This particular scavenger hunt began in Vindhya Pra-
desh, in central India. I was probably the only member of the
American Embassy to penetrate so far into the interior that
year, as the rest of the staff was busy reading the publications
I procured. Since I travelled incessantly, I never could take
a newspaper subscription and was forced to rely upon first-
hand observation of the country, a circumstance which dis-
connected me from the embassy's interior lines of communi-
cation.
Vindhya, for whom this province is named, was the wife
33


Krishna Smiled

of Hanuman the Monkey God, who gained the gratitude of
Hindus by linking his subjects together in a living monkey
chain to form a bridge between India and Ceylon over which
Rama was enabled to pursue Ravenna, who had abducted
his wife Sita. The romance is recorded in the Ramayana, an
ages-old epic poem. Although the events took place a long
while ago, monkeys remain enshrined in the hearts of Hindus,
who worship them in much the same way that we worship
dogs, crediting them with personalities, as well as specie traits
such as fidelity and cunning.
Vile-bottomed baboons and hyperactive langurs are
draped all over Vindhya Pradesh. They brachiate joyously
through the trees, keeping an eye on the humans below who
toil to produce the food which they, the monkeys, will eat at
their leisure-at the rate of 15 percent of the crop each year.
Entire troops will drop down to forage unmolested in the
fields for grain, the attitude of the farmers being that, after
all, the monkeys must eat too. At the intersections of roads,
hundreds of baboons may be seen gathered in convention,
making speeches, breaking up into committees, dining, pick-
ing lice out of one another's hair, sleeping, suckling, and
carrying on with one another's wives. Apparently, monkeys'
reflexes are quicker than dogs', for I never saw one flattened
by a car.
Coming southward from Gwalior, I was driving too fast.
Forty-five mph is too much for a one-and-a-half lane dirt road
with no shoulders, covered in a foot of powdery dust. Also,
no AAA, no telephone, no garage, no ambulance. But I was
exhilarated, for I had just stumbled upon the tomb of Tan
Sen, outside Gwalior Fort.
The fort itself left me cold-a monstrous stone heap that
must have been the death of thousands of laborers. King Man
Singh diverted the River Rai so as to flow through the fort,
in order to please his Queen, Mriganayana the Fawn-eyed,
who once vanquished a wild buffalo in single combat. She
attributed her strength to drinking the waters of the river,
and it seems to me that under these circumstances Man Singh
would have done all he could to keep her away from it.
34


The Bhilsa telephone directory
The tomb of Tan Sen, on the other hand, is small and
homely, overgrown in prickly cactus and thorn bushes. It is
said that the poet-composer-singer, who was court musician
to the Emperor Akbar, quelled wild animals by his singing,
lighted a candle by the force of prayer, and opened heaven
so that rain might fall upon a passion-parched lover.
It was the melody of the latter song that I was striving
to reconstruct as I drove headily along beneath a canopy of
baboons. If I had but known of the tamarind tree that grows
beside Tan Sen's tomb, I might have chewed a leaf of it and
thus developed a capacity to sing Indian music. Alas, I was
back in Delhi before I learned about the musical properties
of the tree, and so I was reduced to playing and replaying my
78 rpm until the grooves were worn through and I still hadn't
learned to sing the melody, which continues to haunt me.
Ahead of me, the monkeys frolicked, cannily swinging
up into a branch just in time to let the car pass, then dropping
down again behind me in the space just vacated.
Suddenly, a few yards in front of me, I saw a tiny morsel
of baboon, all eyes and fur, sitting on the road staring stupidly
as I bore down upon him. I think all babies are cute, but I
knew in a flash I was not going to kill myself for this one by
going off the road. Inexorably, my Vauxhall closed the dis-
tance between us, me not daring to apply my brakes on the
powdery sand. At the last moment, a great brown mother
swung down from the trees directly in the path of the car,
something no sane baboon would do. Scooping her baby onto
her abdomen, she swung up and out of the way. I was tre-
mendously relieved, and resolved to write a letter home to my
own mother that very night.
Central India is a different India from the India of the
north. The north has a thick crust of Islam over it, the major
structures are Moslem, and all the ancient Hindu gods have
been decapitated and castrated.
But the Moghuls were driven from Vindhya Pradesh in
the early eighteenth century, and the victorious Marathas
ruled here until they in turn fell to the British. So there has
been time for Hinduism to reestablish itself upon the hilltops.
35


Krishna Smiled

People here worship on the high places, and every little hill
is crowned by its temple. Every temple has its god, every god
has his head and his lingam and his half-dozen manifestations.
Every manifestation has a ramekin of biographies and names.
The Lord X of this town is the Lord Y of the next town over;
and the temple dedicated to Shiva by the classical texts is
well known by the townspeople to belong to Kali. One simply
has to take the temples at skin value, allowing them to enter
the nervous system by osmosis, sans intellectual analysis. It
all defies reason, logic, and order. One has to shed such wes-
ternisms in order to enter a temple.
Once, back in the capital, when the embassy closed for
Janamasthmi (the birthday of Lord Krishna) I put on a wine-
red sari of the cheapest cotton, draped the tail of it over my
face, slipped into leather chaplis and dotted my forehead
with lipstick. Then I drove to Old Delhi, parked, walked over
to Chandni Chowk, and entered the holiday on what I hoped
were honest terms.
As I entered the chowk I was caught up in a current of
humanity such as I had never experienced. The crush was so
great that I could not direct my own movements. Knees, el-
bows, feet, pushed, kicked, and gouged while we milled to-
ward the temple. Despite my sari and every attempt to be
inconspicuous, I was the object of gibes and lewd remarks,
some extremely imaginative. Locked in by the crowd, I could
not say whose hand was against me; so I kicked at random all
the blank-faced youths behind me.
The police dammed us at the foot of a long stair leading
up to the gate of the temple. All the while, new arrivals piled
up behind till the crush made it impossible to move in any di-
rection. When the pressure seemed more than I could bear,
unexpectedly, a whistle blew, the police leaped aside, and
the crowd stampeded up the stair.
Tripping on the unaccustomed sari, I churned up the
stair with the others, since there was in any event no way to
turn back. We entered a large anteroom where sandals had
to be left with the shoe-check boy. Up and on then we were
rushed, bare feet squishing on the slushy floor. To fall would
36


The Bhilsa telephone directory
mean to be trampled. In the darkened room we now entered,
I was pressed up against an iron grill that barred us from the
main hall. On the other side of the grill, in jail as it were,
Krishna and Radha his wife, idols about the size of five-year-
old children, were seated at table. Conspicuous in the corner
was a doll-sized double bed with gingham spread covering an
overstuffed mattress. Opposite was the hearth, stacked with
kitchenware.
At the sound of a policeman's whistle, the human mill-
race resumed its onward course, forcing me willy-nilly into
the dark interior of the temple. Had there been a way to turn
back, I would have done so, for the noise was inhuman. Each
person was praying, crying, wailing, singing, chanting to the
music of a different star, straining with tremendous effort to
make God hear. The result was as if all the elements had been
trapped inside a dark tunnel.
The curtain in the second room was drawn, and as we
waited for it to open, the young men in the crowd amused
themselves by pitching pennies against it and by calling out
to me in English: "Good morning, Madam." "Hello, darling."
"What time is it?" Intermittently, there were shouts of "Kolo!"
-the rude form of "open up!"-directed at an old man in a
filthy dhoti who sprawled listlessly on the proscenium, raking
in coins with the handle of his umbrella. Meanwhile, the
crowd poured in in ever greater numbers, pushing the fore-
most against the rail. Beside me, a man was singing quietly,
hands clasped to his forehead, oblivious to the bedlam around
him. Perhaps he was the one who made contact with Krishna.
The cry of "Kolo!" having reached the desired pitch of
ferocity, the deacon rose and drew the white flowered curtain
aside. Cries of "Ram, Ram," (God) arose and the hail of
marigolds and pennies grew thicker. Immediately, the police
blew their whistles and commenced shoving the crowd out.
For that one moment we had glimpsed a doll-sized
Krishna, his face painted the traditional blue, clasping the
hand of one of his wives. Beatific smiles illumined their
wooden faces.
A similar display awaited us in the next room, but here
37


Krishna Smiled

Krishna was represented as a baby in a hanging cradle, the
endearing Balakrishna. Again, the police permitted us only
a moment's prayer before whistling us forward.
We now faced the greatest danger: descending the
twenty steps to the street. I had counted them on the way up,
anticipating the blind rush down. As desperate as the crowd
had been to get in, the same people now seemed twice as des-
perate to get out. Two policemen stood with arms locked
across the doorway, permitting only a dozen or so to leave
at one time. Each time they broke their grip, the front stand-
ers were propelled through the doorway by the pressure of
the crowd behind. At one point, several people jammed in
the opening. When one man tugged loose, the whole lot tum-
bled down the flight of stairs into the street.
When my turn came, I tried to anchor myseif to the door-
way to withstand the initial thrust. Despite my best efforts,
I found myself ejected with such force that I barely managed
to keep my feet. At the bottom of the stairs I was welcomed
by a fresh band of hot-blooded youths with further clever
things to say. Struggling upstream to my car, I reflected on
what a dismal failure had been my attempt to blend into the
scene. I would not have been more conspicuous if I had gone
naked.
It was always with relief that I turned toward open coun-
try. Even the temples were quiet here, the women padding
softly to them in the dawn, the floors clean-swept, the sweet
odor of the perspiration of herbivores lingering in the corner
closenesses, the field smells coming in through arcaded walls.
The city corrupts, and big cities corrupt absolutely.
By contrast, villagers were invariably polite and gentle
to me. One time, I was invited to break my journey and turn
aside into a village for refreshment. I did, and was offered an
immense copper beaker full of milk. When I asked where it
came from, a villager pointed to a mountainous black water
buffalo which loomed nearby. Straight from the tap. I drank,
muttering an incantation intended to ward off undulant fever.
I would not have refused for the world: it was my first real
Hindustani conversation with people who spoke no English.
38


The Bhilsa telephone directory
As we chatted-who was I, where was I going, who was
my father?-I started to sit down on a charpai. A man stepped
forward and touched my elbow. Pulling aside a blanket that
lay crumpled on the wooden cot, he revealed a sleeping baby.
I apologized, and the man smiled gently at me. It was the
smile I had seen on the face of Krishna.
Somewhere between Gwalior and Jhansi, I saw a white
herd upon a grey hill. From the road I thought, "white cows."
But so still? Then, "a deserted town." But whitewashed?
Gleaming against the grey hill of rock and grey sky of cloud,
a white town, still, deserted.
I swung off the road, where the gullies end in scrub top
and bottom, and followed a cart-track that wound between
high hedges, cutting the little town from view. Freshly white-
washed, and deserted? No soul moved up here save peacocks'.
I could hear their shrewish call on the wind that smelled of
rain. That could be used, too; the dust rose wheeling round
the car; my face was caked with it and it gritted under my
clothes.
The track gave no hint of where it was going, then sud-
denly stopped at a neat, whitewashed gate with a freshly
painted sign: JAIN TEMPLE. There was no one about, just
a large black umbrella leaning in a corner of the courtyard.
I borrowed it, leaving three annas and my sandals, and started
up the hill as the first drops fell.
The path, steep, stepped among tiny temples. Some were
marble and some whitewashed stone, but identical. And mini-
ature. With their elaborate roofs and sculpted arches, they
would have been imposing had they been more than four feet
in height. Some were no more than cameos. Inside, shadow.
About, silence and the snapping of peacocks' fans.
After the fourth, the fifth, I steeled myself to turn aside
and enter. If it was a tomb, there would be bats. But I found
instead a white marble, clean-limbed Tirthankara, a Jain saint,
vigilant, naked and erect in his sanitary shrine.
Square brows, earlobes distended to square shoulders
set high above a slender waist, the torso supported on round
pillar legs, the feet bare and square. A mating of Hindu and
39


Krishna Smiled

Buddhist beliefs created these Tirthankaras upon a hill, for-
bearing, like all observant Jains forbear, to end the life of
plant or animal in order to provide mere clothing. Eighty-
eight temples, eighty-eight Tirthankaras, identical.
On up the hill. Its crest had been levelled. Paved in mar-
ble, it was a platter for the grey meat of the sky. Under a
marble canopy stood an eighty-ninth Tirthankara, against the
sky, sky-clad. Perhaps, I thought, he is Mahavira himself,
Great Hero.
The marble platter is forecourt to a temple where my
eyes cannot see in and so miss the step down. But eyes see
out. Rubies pierce the head of Mahavira (now I know that
I am seeing Mahavira) rising enormous out of a pit to con-
front me at eye-level with fire set in ice.
I cannot see the marble vines I know must grow about
his feet. He endured all. I cannot hear the gong my scalp de-
tects. He endures all. I cannot smell the jasmine. He endures.
Say yea, say nay: Endure.
I ran outside onto the marble plate. The rain had started.
The eighty-nine Tirthankaras sheltered their stainless bodies
in their marble huts. An incandescent sky transfixed the
shrines like insects in grey amber. Peacocks spread enamelled
fans on porcelain roofs. It was their voices charmed the herd
of temples on the hill.
Having made a clean sweep of Vindhya Pradesh in terms
of publications, I wandered over into neighboring Bhopal
where I acquisitioned some little boys' embroidered skull
caps and vests which were not to come into fashion in the
United States for another fifteen years. Bhopal did better by
embroidery than by books, and I got restless after an hour or
so. It was then that I looked over the map and saw, with a
shock of recognition, the name of Bhilsa, somewhat off the
main highway which would take me back to Delhi. Checking
my little black notebook, I ascertained that this was indeed
one of those miserable towns someone wanted the phone book
of, and I thought I might just have time to make it over there
before five o'clock closing.
As I set out northeasterly along the country road, the
40


The Bhilsa telephone directory
cattle were already returning from the fields. Next to mon-
keys, who don't use the road itself very much, cattle are the
principal travellers of provincial highways. Gaunt and hump-
backed, xylophone-ribbed, horns upswept like lyres, they haul
their cumbersome carts along, raising clouds of dust in which
the road disappears. It is useless to honk; the driver is asleep,
the bullock knows where he is going and will not alter course
to oblige you. It's into the dust with you, spinning your wheels
on the edge of the shoulder. The smell of hay passes gently
in the hot air.
The bullocks make up in beauty what they lack in road
courtesy. Their eyes, larger and more limpid than cats', pick
up your headlights at night, weaving luminously out of dark-
ness. They are gentle, oh so gentle, that a child can control
them, and frequently does by bunching up the tail and
squeezing it, or ramming a pole up the anus.
Cattle, like monkeys, are sacred, so it is best for a for-
eigner not to tangle with them. But their exalted status does
not keep them from a life of hard labor.
Across the road from a flat I temporarily occupied in
Karolbagh, a suburb of New Delhi, there was an open, rocky
field with no blade of grass. All night the sound of bawling
came from there. The field was a dairy, I learned, and the
bawling came from hungry calves tethered away from their
mothers so they wouldn't drink too much milk. The cows had
to be bred in order to produce milk, but the milk couldn't be
wasted on feeding the calves. The result is generation after
forlorn generation of starving cattle with a very low milk
yield that hardly repays upkeep of the animal. The cows
udders are so small that they are not visible to an observer.
It was getting on toward five as I approached Bhilsa, so
I whanged into town somewhat incautiously, to find myself
running a gauntlet of somberly drunk men whose faces were
painted allover blue, hanging from the closed shop fronts
singing, shouting, and banging garbage can lids together in
martial rhythm. The street being narrow, two men leaning
over from either side could clasp hands in the middle, or
throw buckets full of colored water down on the car, which
41


Krishna Smiled

they now did, along with rocks, dust, garbage and anything
else that came to hand. I didn't think I should stop to ask the
way to the post office, but assuming as pleasant an expression
as I could, kept going. Realizing how badly outnumbered I
was, men began dropping down from the shop shutters onto
the street in front of the car. I figured that if I stopped, I'd
had it, and if I went too fast, one of them would have it, so
I kept a light but firm foot on the gas.
Some of the more educated fellows now ran and fetched
a newspaper, which they applied, wet, to my windshield.
Unable to see out, I kept going blindly, tensed to hear the
thud which would announce I had run over someone, prelude
to my own lynching.
A breeze lifting one corner of the paper showed me that
I had come to a triple fork in the road. Undoubtedly one led
out of the town and back to the highway, but which one?
My forty-mile-to-an-inch road map wouldn't have helped if
I had had time to consult it, which I didn't. So I chose the
middle course, and dead-ended. In front of the post office,
which was closed.
Now I had to back out, toward the crowd which awaited
me at the fork. Knowing of course, that the road came to an
end, and that missahib must return, they had whistled up
more of their jolly company and were ready for me now.
I backed out gently. I still didn't want to be first to draw
blood. As I reached the forks, my rear car door was wrenched
open. I could almost feel the cold knife striking home. I re-
gretted not having accelerated right into the crowd.
Instead, I heard a voice in schoolboy English saying from
the back seat, "Keep going, Madam, I will tell you the way."
And he did, with his head out the rear window, between
curses at the crowd. "Faster, you may go faster, Madam," the
youth said to me, and I took his word for it. As the crowd
loped alongside, I accelerated blindly, and left them behind.
I turned to thank my benefactor. But he would let me
stop only long enough to remove the newspaper from the
windshield and insisted that I drive another two miles to
make sure we were not followed by the panting crowd. He
of course would have to walk back.
42


The Bhilsa telephone directory
At last, we stopped beside a pasture, got out, and intro-
duced ourselves. Krishna was a student home on vacation
from Allahabad University. He apologized for his fellow
townsmen: "They are adivasis (aborigines), you know, and
they should not drink, but this is their holiday and one cannot
stop them."
"How long has the holiday been going on?" I asked him.
"Four days, so far," Krishna replied.
For me, the measure of this young man was not that he
had rescued me-saving a damsel in distress might fulfill a
raft of romantic dreams-but that he now insisted on helping
me to wash the car. "If not," he pointed out, "it will present
an invitation to the people in the next town." Students gen-
erally do not soil their hands in India, for manual labor de-
classes one. It can fit into no romantic dream.
After I was miles from there, it occurred to me that, in
the line of duty, I might have asked Krishna to buy my tele-
phone books for me when the post office reopened, if it ever
did. But that would have been scurvy reward for his gallantry,
and I preferred to let the State Department limp along with-
out the directories.
How could one thank such a man? We said goodbye in
the pasture and clasped hands a long moment. Bells tinkled
on a herd of cattle that pastured nearby, the same bells that
are now sold at every restaurant along the Pennsylvania Turn-
pike. The cows you pass in Pennsylvania dairy country have
great drooping bags of milk such as were never seen in India.
But nowhere in Pennsylvania can I find a country Krishna,
his faced streaked ceremonially blue in honor of the blue
Krishna who lives in that god-forsaken temple in Old Delhi.
That idol, of course, stands in lieu of the real Krishna, who
was a great lover, who lifted a mountain once to let the dairy-
maids he adored shelter under it from a rainstorm, and whose
face was a heavenly blue.
So when I said goodbye to Krishna, I smiled, and I tried
to smile the very smile I had seen on the face of Radha.

43


4
Awash in Delhi, Pepsu, and Punjab
Pepsu may sound like a stomach remedy, but the
name was actually an acronym for Patiala and East Punjab
States Union, a ramshackle federation of former princely
states which were glued together for the purpose of forming
a unit of independent India in 1947, and which came unglued
ten years later, having lived and died without distinction.
I had to visit the capital city of Patiala in order to start a
flow of publications from the Pepsu state government to the
Library of Congress. When I learned that the train would
leave me for three hours in the middle of the night at Ambala
railway station, both coming and going, I mounted my Vaux-
hall and headed north by road.
Leaving New Delhi at dawn, I passed the regal govern-
ment buildings, a heritage of the British Raj, which will one
day take their place among the rest of India's magnificent
ruins. My route lay alongside Yamuna Canal, beside the or-
chard where Krishna, on a lazy afternoon a year before, had
revealed himself to me, smiling. Farther from Delhi, the or-
44


Awash in Delhi, Pepsu, and Punjab
chards gave way to fields of reeds fifteen feet high, bearing
silvery heads that bent and whistled in the wind, spreading
like mercury across brown velvet fields. Crossing the canal,
I could see but three feet of water in it, which turned out to
be lucky for me.
Now I entered Sikh country, historically Punjab, Land
of Five Waters. In the eighteenth century, Guru Govind Singh
tried to link Hinduism with Islam in order to heal the breach
between India's two major communities. He failed magnifi-
cently, bringing forth instead a third, and completely distinct
religious community, with its center at the market town of
Amritsar in the Punjab. His followers today are distinguished
by their brawny build, their monotheism, their untrimmed
beards, their swords, steel bracelets, and undershorts (which
are de rigeur).
I made my home among displaced Sikhs in the Jangpura
district of New Delhi. Three and a half millions of farmers,
merchants, and warriors fled the western half of Punjab when
that was allotted to Pakistan amidst some of the greatest
bloodletting of all time. Now, Sikhs were pouring into New
Delhi to begin new lives, turning the city's suburbs into boom
towns that evidenced more vigor than anything that had been
seen around here since the death of the Moghuls.
Jangpura was still building when I moved in. Electricity
had not penetrated as yet, and although there were pipes,
there was no water. It was hard to tell at times where the
desert left off and my house began, for the sand was continual-
ly blowing into my bed.
Even without electricity and water, my flat was an im-
provement over the back seat of my car, which I had been
sleeping on since the hotel bills outstripped my pay check.
The embassy maintained a well-equipped barracks, with an
air conditioner in each room. (It was said that the "Taj" con-
sumed more electricity than the entire remainder of the city
of New Delhi.) Rooms at the Taj were available at reasonable
rent to embassy clerks, but not to officers (except unmarried
males, as determined by the barracks housing committee,
composed of the residents).
Late in my stay, the embassy began to provide housing
45


Krishna Smiled

for officers, beginning with the highest rank and working on
down. The two housing plans met in the middle, which was
me, and I was thrown on the local housing market, where I
found that I had little to choose between a castle, which I
couldn't afford, and a chawl, which I couldn't bear.
It was at this point that Krishna began smiling, having
assumed for this purpose the body of a tall, soft-spoken army
captain from the Karnatak who was stationed in New Delhi.
He was named Krishnamurti, meaning Idol of Krishna, but
he was called Kitu. Kitu had won a medal for gallantry in the
"police action" by which Hyderabad was brought into the
Indian Union, and I believe he killed some people in that
connection. But he would not kill animals, and he had never
eaten meat in his life. Indeed, in his family tomatoes were
not eaten, since when one is cut, it bleeds. How Kitu achieved
his magnificent physique on a diet of rice and peas is one of
the mysteries of Asia.
Smiling, Kitu taught me several dozen things all at once
and endlessly on forever, so that I left India a better woman
than I came.
First, there were survival instructions for the westerner
stranded in Asia: Take your liquor straight, preferably Scotch,
and no more than two chhotta pegs (small shots) at a time;
play squash or swim each day, and if that is not possible, per-
form setting-up exercises; stay out of the noonday sun; and
think healthy thoughts at night.
Secondly, Kitu undertook to provide me with decent
housing. This was the first mothering I had had since leaving
home, and it left me gasping with gratitude. After some pre-
liminary scouting around, Kitu drove me southward out of
New Delhi past Purana Qila (Old Fort) whose majestically
crumbling walls sheltered refugee families, and suggested I
anchor my sheet there with the rest of them. But he continued
past the fort, past the open-air cinema which was showing
Alomna of the South Seas, past the turnoff to Humayun's Tomb
and the Ambassador Hotel where the wealthy Americans
stayed; past Khan Khanan's Tomb, and turned down Hospital
Road, euphemistically named for an eye and ear clinic, to the
46


Awash in Delhi, Pepsu, and Punjab
alley where lived the Delhi truck drivers and their trucks, all
Sikhs. Here he again offered to let me out.
About a block behind the truck drivers' alley, we passed
a muddy field or a dry river bed, I never discovered which, in
use as a public latrine; and stopped finally at Jangpura Exten-
sion, an encampment of middle class Sikhs. There, Kitu had
found a displaced Punjabi with a second story to rent.
I looked around the house, and it seemed very alien to
me. It was U-shaped, built around a courtyard which was
Sri Puri's. My rooms were on the second floor, and each one
opened onto an outdoor balcony that overlooked the court-
yard below. What finally won me over was that each room
had a window of its own. Up till then, I hadn't been able to
find quarters with windows for the amount of rent I was able
to pay. And Sri Puri, my landlord, seemed very decent.
He was a widower who had fled to Delhi with his twelve-
year-old daughter, remnant of a large family that had lived
for three hundred years in the West Punjab, but now would
live no more. He was enlightened; had declined to engage
the girl in infancy, and would allow her to choose her own
mate when she finished high school. As an interim precaution,
he did not let her eat eggs or pulses lest they heat her blood.
Since the family was also vegetarian, I do not honestly know
what the child ate.
Sri Puri was a strong Congress Party member, and ex-
plained to me (after I moved in) that, having refused to pay
a five rupee bite to a local official, our water would not be
turned on for some time to come. "It was not for the increase
of graft that we have achieved our independence, isn't it?"
he asked, and I had to agree.
Meanwhile, it was the public water tap for me, or rather
for Emmanuel, my bearer, or rather for the bisti (water
carrier) he hired to do it for him, for no man will do another's
work in India, and take his livelihood away. So the bisti for-
sook his cow's stomach and accepted the missahib's bucket,
which he filled at the public tap, waiting his turn among
women washing laundry and babies in toe-deep mud.
In the evenings, the men would come to bathe at the tap,
47


Krishna Smiled

stripping to their shorts, soaping all over, and luxuriating un-
der the flowing stream. Sikhs, being omnivorous, present a
solid front of sinew to the rest of India, supplying their coun-
try with soldiers, policemen, truck drivers, hackies, carpen-
ters, and emigrants to California. Their physiques are great,
but I never could get past that waist-length hair dressed in
mustard oil.
While the men bathed, the swine of the neighborhood
would come down to enjoy the resulting wallow, and there
carry out the commandment of their lord to increase and
multiply. They were of an enormous size, their bellies ar-
mored in grey bristles, pendant from razor-sharp spines. They
filled their bellies through narrow questing muzzles, and all
in all were the ugliest monsters I had ever seen. Nevertheless,
they found favor in one another's angry pink eyes, and were
constantly pregnant or in the act of becoming so.
At some distance from the tap there was an animal
trough, and here the water buffalo ranged, their black hides
glistening with fresh mud or dull with dried muck, for they
too wallowed to escape the heat of the sun. Scattered among
these were the ivory white bullocks who pull the drays. An
occasional horse joined the throng of animals at the trough,
but these always looked out of place. Delhi is really too hot
for horses, as indeed, it is for human beings.
Around this historic site of the water tap and trough,
adobe houses were going up, thick and quick as mushrooms.
You never knew where another house might appear. For ex-
ample, after I'd gotten used to Jangpura, I used to sleep on
the roof like everybody else, in order to take advantage of a
slight pre-dawn breeze. But one morning, waking with the
sun, I found a row of turbaned faces chinning and grinning
on my parapet. The house next door had unexpectedly
reached the same height as mine, and I was forced to retreat
indoors until its construction was complete and the laborers
had departed.
The houses in Jangpura were surrounded by thick adobe
walls. The narrow street-level windows had bars cemented
into them against bandits and kidnappers. Everything looked
48


Awash in Delhi, Pepsu, and Punjab
as though it had been built by blind men, and only Sri Puri
had planted geraniums in front of his house, in little rows that
marched stiffly beside the brick pathway to his door. And I
liked him on that account, because he had seen the destruc-
tion of everything he owned, yet he still wanted to grow
flowers.
That first night in Jangpura, lying in my bed of sand
sleepless, fanless, and lightless, I tried to feel at home in India.
It was good to have a place of my own. Stripping the mattress
and sheets from my charpai, I threw them on the floor and
slept on the webbing that was strung across the wooden bed
frame. In this way, the air could circulate under my body as
well as over it. Freed of the serpent embrace of my bedding,
I dozed.
Suddenly, I was jolted from sleep by the most hideous
noise I had ever heard. Speeding to my window, I saw don-
keys below, tethered next to the bricks which they would
resume hauling in the morning. They were browsing and hee-
hawing over the straw that leaked from the bricks.
While I cowered at the curtainless window examining
the wildlife below, something which appeared to be a lynch
mob turned onto my street. I had no way of interpreting this
mass movement of armed men, but they were clearly heading
toward my house, which was at the end of the lane. Why had
Kitu abandoned me? Sri Puri might have felt called upon to
defend his tenant, but he had gone out for the evening. Em-
manuel, who was a Methodist but who surely would have
known, had gone home long ago. And anyway, it was too late.
Two hundred bearded, sworded Sikhs surrounded my
house, brandishing flaming torches. Had I violated some tabu
by moving here? Had I defiled someone's food by looking at
it, or given the evil eye to a baby? How could I know? I was
only looking for a place to live, like everybody else. Was it
possible that, in the space of ten hours, I had become known
as the Great Anti-Sikh?
As the robust men clustered about my house, chanting
ominously, I wished to God that Guru Govind Singh, to whom
I render all respect, had not lifted the tabu from meat. Alter-
49


Krishna Smiled
natively, I wished all Sikhs in the San Fernando Valley, to-
gether with their swords. These swords were real, and clacked
in their scabbards, unlike the atrophied little charms which
citified Sikhs wear on chains around their necks.
Determined to know why I should have been called upon
to die by the hand of Sikhs, I remained crouched below the
windowsill trying to make out the words of the chant.
Then, amid the shouting, I distinguished the words
"nikel aje, nikel aje!" (come out, come out). I relaxed. They
would never have used the polite form of the imperative had
they meant me harm. A warm rush of gratitude replaced my
fear. These wonderful, gentle, men had come to welcome me
to Jangpura. I began to prepare my speech, in rudimentary
Hindi, which is quite similar to Punjabi except that the one
is written in Devanagri and the other in Gurmukhi, which
looks like Urdu to me but apparently isn't, because Em-
manuel couldn't read it. But the press releases would come
later. Now there would be garlands of marigolds.
My neighbor in the other half of the duplex relieved me
of speechmaking by stepping out on the balcony to the ac-
companiment of hosannahs and making one himself. There-
after, the crowd lifted him from the balcony, beard and all,
and carried him off to their temple. He was a Sikh saint.
Mahan Singh, who worked for the embassy as a chauffeur
and was a Sikh, but no saint, who changed a tire in three min-
utes by the clock and opened Coca Cola bottles with his Sikh's
steel bracelet, thought I was very lucky to live next door to
this unusual person. I agreed. In addition to all the traffic he
attracted, his daughter was teaching me folksongs. Mahan
Singh thought this was the wrong reason, but allowed as how
the sanctity would affect me anyway. The saint's blessing had
brought Mahan Singh home safely from Mitzri, where he
went to fight Rommel. Oh, those Mitzr-they couldn't fight
at all.
The Sikhs had a dual reputation in Delhi. On the one
hand, they were aggressive go-getters, more like Americans
than anyone else around. Mahan Singh, for example, saved
up enough money from his salary to buy a taxi and go into
50


Awash in Delhi, Pepsu, and Punjab
business for himself. On the other hand, Sikhs were the Poles
of the world of humor. It was alleged that the noonday sun
boiled their brains under the thick padding of hair and tur-
ban. The observation was fortified when a Member of the
House of the People, who was a Sikh, addressed the Speaker
of the lower house of Parliament as "Madam." Unfortunately,
it was exactly 12 noon.
Northward through Ambala I penetrated deep into Sikh
territory, or at least that part of it which had fallen to India
in the Partition. I would have to approach the western half
of Punjab via Karachi, since border communications were
still disrupted. Patiala and East Punjab States Union was com-
posed of the former princely states of Patiala, Nabha, Kapur-
thala, Jind, Faridkot, Malerkotla, Nalagarh, and Kalsi. It may
well be asked what a princely state was, let alone a former
princely state.
The British penetrated India during the reign of the first
Elizabeth, just about the time that British settlers began to
appear in North America. But instead of an unpopulated con-
tinent and virgin resources, they found ancient, settled civili-
zations exhibiting a staggering diversity of cultures. The first
contacts were mercantile; but toward the end of the eigh-
teenth century, the British government took a hand in matters.
The unequal contacts between technologically superior Euro-
peans and the Indians, who were demoralized by the decay
of Moghul government and fragmented by caste, language
and religious differences, led to the gradual absorption of
India through conquest, purchase, commercial penetration,
and treaty alliance with native princes. But despite their long
rule, the British never succeeded-any more than the Moghul
or Chandragupta or Maratha empires succeeded-in turning
India into one nation.
By the time the British left India, they had annexed 55
percent of the country and 76 percent of the people. This
territory was organized into provinces administered by the
Crown with varying degrees of Indian participation. Some
of these provinces, Madras, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, had huge
populations and distinct personalities of their own, including
51


Krishna Smiled
extensive written literatures. They varied from such as the
highly literate and politically vocal Bengal, which had pro-
duced an internationally recognized body of art and litera-
ture, great scientists and a representative legislature; to the
Northeast Frontier region, where headhunters held sway, and
which was ruled directly by British district commissioners,
insofar as it could be ruled at all.
The British provinces were of immensely uneven devel-
opment not only between themselves, but even within their
own borders. Most contained congeries of clans and tribes
and cultures which differed radically from the majority popu-
lation. These provinces were not the result of natural devel-
opment or growth around a central core, but had been pieced
together over the ruins of countless native kingdoms and
fiefs. The organization of provinces corresponded to no "na-
tionalist" feeling on the part of the Indians; they were put to-
gether to serve the empire's strategic, political, and economic
needs. This lack of inner cohesion was to assume importance
after independence.
In the British provinces, British standards of behavior
were introduced. Schooling followed the British model, eluci-
dated by Thomas Macaulay in his Minute on Education in
which he advocated creating "a class of persons Indian in
blood and colour but English in taste, in opinion, in morals,
and in intellect." English was a required subject after the
fourth form. Police and army were trained and led by British
officers and non-corns; and at later stages, British style legis-
latures were introduced in order to give those Indians who
were considered to have reached the requisite stage of so-
phistication the opportunity to participate in government.
These provincial legislatures and the political parties
which organized them became the basis for parliamentary
government in independent India.
As for the remaining 45 percent of the territory and 24
percent of the people who were not under British rule, at the
time of liquidation of the Raj these were organized into an
amazing 562 independent kingdoms-the "princely states."
The princely states varied in size from Hyderabad, with
an area of 82,000 square miles, a population of 16 million
52


Awash in Delhi, Pepsu, and Punjab
and an annual revenue of Rs 260,000,000; to the "state" of
Vajanoness in Kathiawar, with an area of 0.29 square miles,
a population of 206, and revenue of Rs 500 a year, not enough
to keep its rajah in betel nuts. Many of the princely states
were fragmented: Baroda had, in addition to the area around
its chief city, dozens of tiny enclaves embedded among other,
equally fragmented states of Gujerat.
In the princely states, Britain operated in only four fields:
communications, defense, foreign affairs, and succession to
the throne. Unless conditions within a state became anarchic,
it was not British policy to intervene between the prince and
his subjects. Consequently, the level of enlightenment in the
princely states was extremely ragged. There was one state-
Mysore-where a start had been made toward the growth of
responsible government; but for the most part, the principles
of Louis XIV held sway.
The reason for the continued existence of the princely
states well into the democratic era lie twisted in the Mutiny
of 1857 (or the First War of Indian Independence, depend-
ing on which side you were on). When large numbers of In-
dians, including a goodly percentage of the army, rose against
British rule, the Indian princes "served as breakwaters in
the storm which would have swept over us in one great wave,"
according to Lord Canning, then India's governor general.
The princes by and large stood fast by the British, for they
stood to lose as much through the rebellion as their imperial
masters did.
As reward for princely loyalty, the British ceased annex-
ing India directly to the Crown and concentrated on main-
taining the little princes on their thrones. Let them keep order
among their own. So long as the princes kept furnishing troops
for the imperial armies and gold for the imperial treasury,
the British guaranteed the loyalty of their subjects and kept
the princes on thrones that otherwise might have toppled to
democratic movements. The result was that, while all over
the world feudalism was dissolving in the elixir of nationalism,
in India the princely class flourished and grew fat, and India
remained divided.
There was no neat cleavage between "British" and "In-
53


Krishna Smiled
dian" India. The territory of each lay intertwined and circum-
scribed by territory of the other. The states lay frozen in a
pattern which had been reached by accident and perpetuated
by exigency. The Indian peninsula looked as the European
peninsula might have, had some superior external military
power conquered it during the age of feudalism, annexing
counties here and there, but confirming hundreds of petty
princelings in their fiefdoms as agents of its paramount con-
trol.
This was a nightmare legacy for leaders of the Indian
independence movement. As V. P. Menon put it in 1955, in
the opening sentence of his book The Integration of the In-
dian States, (a process in which he played a key role): "India
is one geographic entity. Yet, throughout her long and cheq-
uered history, she never achieved political homogeneity."
When discussions opened on the transfer of British pow-
er, the problem was: To whom should power be transferred?
The program of the Indian National Congress (Nehru's
party) was One India. The Moslem League, led by Moham-
med Ali Jinnah, held that Hindus and Moslems form distinct
nations and were therefore entitled to form two countries.
From the first point of view, independence would pro-
vide the first opportunity in history to create a single, united
nation on the entire subcontinent. Mahatma Gandhi in par-
ticular believed that communal differences must be sunk in
order to achieve this unity.
But many Moslems believed that communal differences
ran too deep to be bridged by any mere political process.
They perceived Moslems and Hindus as two distinct peoples,
with exclusive culture and habits, who had never coalesced
despite more than a thousand years of inhabiting the same
territory. Since Moslems constituted only a quarter of the
population, they foresaw that representative government
would condemn them to a perpetual minority position.
It all boiled down to a question of trust. But the history
of India, like the history of Ireland, has not been one to en-
gender trust between religious groups. The impossibility of
reconciling the two parties-backed up on each side by in-
54


Awash in Delhi, Pepsu, and Punjab
flamed religious sensibilities-led to the decision to create two
countries: Pakistan and residuary India.
But this did not touch the question of the princely states.
The lapse of British paramountcy meant the lapse also of all
those treaties establishing special relationships between them
and the British. These principalities would now find them-
selves at loose ends, without legal affiliation to any sovereign
state.
It was obvious from the start that an India composed of
the former British provinces alone would not be a feasible
unit. It was even more obvious that the majority of the Indian
states could not stand on their own. Most of them were in-
capable of governing themselves in a manner adequate to the
modern age. Lines of communication ran through provinces
and states alike. And defense concerned everyone-a point
which became appallingly clear as communal rioting broke
out during the Partition.
The fact that most of the princely states were not eco-
nomically viable helped them to merge peacefully with either
India or Pakistan, depending upon their geographic location.
The princes had served their historical function as agents of
imperialism; when independence dawned, they passed quiet-
ly from the scene. Their departure was eased by consummate
statesmanship on the part of the successor governments,
which pensioned them off liberally in order to prevent the
formation of a powerful dissident faction of princes who, in
certain areas at least, might have carried their hereditary sub-
jects with them.
Thus passed from the scene the rajahs, maharajahs,
khans, sardars, nawabs, nabobs, and nizams of yesterday. The
extinction of their states was accomplished peacefully: a crop
of dragon's teeth sprang up in only three instances-Kashmir,
Hyderabad, and Junagadh. Otherwise, the basis had been laid
for the launching of the dual entities of India and Pakistan.
Whereupon, the new governments had to do precisely
what the British had done before them: combine fistfuls of
little states into viable provinces. The particular mixture
which was Pepsu proved ungovernable and ultimately had
55


Krishna Smiled

to be divided between its Sikh and Hindu communities. To a
traveller from the Delhi plains, the Sikhs were definitely the
more prominent figures on the landscape.
For one thing, they wore all green and blue: green sa-
rongs and bright blue turbans. Then there were those swords
dangling down behind from a strap worn over the shoulder.
Files of men could be seen along the highway; also entire
families balanced precariously upon a single bicycle, camels
on their way to pull the Persian wheels, ox carts lumbering
down the middle of the road with the driver asleep on top
of a load of hay. Taken together, they presented some traffic
hazards. But they weren't a patch on the truck drivers.
When Sikhs switched from their ancestral profession of
war-making and took up truck-driving, they lost none of their
elan. They tend to charge their lorries down the center of the
road, yielding for neither man nor beast, scorning brakes,
rear-view mirror, and other appurtenances of the soft life.
Forty years' growth of beard and two yards of gingham turban
insulate them from the dust of the road, the curses of other
drivers, and the sound of desperate horns behind them. In
Delhi, they may have been the butt of jokes; but here in Pun-
jab it was Sardarji, King of the Road!
Every time I tried to pass a truck, my car would slue and
slough in the deep ruts it left behind. These ruts, which were
a permanent yet ever-changing feature of the road, were par-
ticularly troublesome when crossing rivers. That is to say, the
road ended at a river bank and picked up again at the other
side, leading me to believe that I could drive across. Although
the bed seemed dry, the thalveg turned out to be spongy, and
it was ridged high between the ruts left by trucks with a wider
chassis than my Vauxhall. So I mired like a turtle on its belly,
all four wheels in the air. I suppose I was lucky there wasn't
more water in the river. I was also fortunate not to have read
the current report of the chief of police of Pepsu, from which
I now quote in part:
The Punjabi is losing his national characteristic and is be-
coming more and more of a thief and a cheat and cowardly
56


Awash in Delhi, Pepsu, and Punjab
when dealing with his enemies, and is definitely becoming
more of a cheat than a murderer or a dacoit (bandit).
Presumably, the latter two are ancient Punjabi virtues, the
cheating is something new.
But I was at the time more concerned about the possibil-
ity of flash floods and winding up in the Arabian Sea. A man
who was bathing nearby obligingly bound up his hair which
had been hanging out to dry, and together we heaved and
hawed, but it did no good. I might have been there yet, were
it not for the sunny nature of Punjabis, which gives the lie to
their old chief of police. A truckload of laborers approached
the ford. Seeing me pancaked in the middle of the river, they
vaulted out of the van, picked up my car, and carried it across.
I kept blundering into dry river beds all over Pepsu and
neighboring Himachal Pradesh. Most maps of India were
classified, and the only one I was able to buy was drawn at a
scale of forty miles to the inch, not terribly useful for actual
contact with the countryside. Also, the cartographer had an
aloof attitude toward topography, tending to ignore such fea-
tures as mountains and rivers, particularly if there was no way
over them.
I will say this about dry river beds: they provide a great
vantage point for viewing a solitary water buffalo which has
wandered over to the twenty-foot high embankment. Fore-
shortened by perspective, it looks like a hippopotamus.
The road was well travelled despite its rugged features.
Each time I stuck, a King of the Road would pull me out.
The Sardars were always cheerful about giving me a push,
or clearing my fuel line with the aid of a bicycle pump, chang-
ing a tire, or showing me how to dry out my plugs. At one
point, I stalled trying to pull up onto the top of a riverbank.
A driver parked some distance away eating lunch in his cab
roared with laughter at the silly missahib and her silly little
car, which couldn't straddle the ruts made by his big, mascu-
line truck. Suddenly, he jumped down from the cab, leaped
in front of my car which was struggling like the first salaman-
der ever to burst out of its watery home, and tore the hood
57


Krishna Smiled

open. He snatched the turban from his head and clamped it
down upon the carburetor, which had set itself afire. After
that, he hooked up a winch and pulled me out. All very good
humored, but I'll bet he was a cousin of that fascist beast who
charged up the mountain on my side of the road the next day
and flattened me against a cliff.
After all this, Patiala was a washout, so far as publications
went. The state was then at the beginning of its short and
bootless history of governmental ineptitude, corruption, and
the corrosive religious rivalry which ended by tearing it in
two. I doubt that I was able to accomplish anything of lasting
significance for the Library of Congress. So the highlight of
my visit there must be the bathroom of the State Guest House.
The Chief Secretary had me put up in this dreary large
mansion, thus saving me from the dreary small travellers'
bungalow. My bedroom measured forty feet (my feet: it was
my only means of measuring) in each direction, including,
but here I cannot be exact, up. The bathroom was just half
that size in its horizontal dimensions, and it contained a sink,
a tub, a separate stall shower, an Indian toilet (in the floor,
with a water tap beside it), a European toilet (on a pedestal,
with paper beside it), and a bidet that spouted from every
direction of the compass. It was the most fully equipped
bathroom I encountered on the continent, with the exception
of the one imported by the Morrison-Knudsen Company and
erected in the middle of the desert for the benefit of its men
who were working on the Helmand River Valley dam in
Afghanistan. And that one didn't have a bidet.
The only other bidet I saw in my travels was torn out of
Bahawalpur House in New Delhi when that building was
refurbished for embassy use. Though I pleaded with our ad-
ministrative officer to save it, he sadistically forced it to stand
outside in the brutal sun day after day. At first, the women
hod carriers used to leave their babies in it. Then someone got
the idea of mixing mortar in the bidet, and evicted the babies.
The poor thing stood up to this abuse for a few weeks, but
one day its porcelain bowl cracked and it shuddered to the
ground far from its native soil of Wisconsin. The whole per-
formance was typical of American insensitivity.
58


Awash in Delhi, Pepsu, and Punjab
From Patiala, I pressed on to Bhakra-Nangal, where I
made a killing in dam specifications.
The five rivers of Punjab: Jhelum, Ravi, Beas, Chenab,
and Sutlej, together with their network of canals, provided
the greatest area of irrigated land in pre-Partition India. But
India and Pakistan divided on communal lines, the irrigation
system was fragmented, and many parcels of dry land were
left on one side of the boundary, with the water intended to
irrigate it hopelessly on the other side. Indeed, though India
received 45 percent of the population of the province, she got
just 28 percent of the total irrigated area.
Bhakra-Nangal, projected to be the largest hydroelectric
system in Asia, was intended to repair some of the damage.
I refused to believe it could do this when I first laid eyes upon
the construction site. Hundreds of thousands of men, women,
and child laborers were crawling up and down a mountain-
side, carrying platters of dirt and rock upon their heads. All
the mechanical ingenuity known to Ramses II was obviously
being employed here. Only the great-grandchildren of these
workers, it seemed to me, would live to enjoy the waters of
this dam. For the record, the dam at Bhakra now stands as
the highest straight gravity dam in the world (740'), has 652
miles of canals and 2,200 miles of subsidiaries, in addition to
numerous smaller dams and hydroelectric stations.
The project was being supervised by an American named
Harvey Slocum who had learned his trade toiling on some
of the great dams of the world. Having dropped out of school
at age twelve, he provided a wicked contrast to the dam's
P.R. man, a Bengali whose B.Sc. in civil engineering from the
University of Michigan had failed to overcome his brahmini-
cal distaste for manual labor. It was a peculiarly disjointed
world at Bhakra-Nangal: the lowly hod carriers and the
mighty American engineers all immersed in the strain of great
physical exertion-yet separated by a cultural gulf so deep
there seemed no chance of bridging it. And the Bengali, the
educated elite, who scorned physical labor, but who would
inherit its products. I wondered whether, in that human chain
conveying platters of dirt up and down the mountainside,
there lurked an Indian Slocum.
59


Krishna Smiled

My return to Jangpura Extension was a joyous one. There
was a wedding in progress down the block, and it remained
in progress three days longer, with two bands and a victrola
hooked up to a loudspeaker system that was the granddaddy
of the one later employed at the Electric Circus. Emmanuel
had prepared a special dinner for me: peahen, shot not by
Kitu, who couldn't bring himself to do it, but by a soldier un-
der his command. There were bushels of flowers on the table,
Tan Sen's prayer for rain was on the phonograph, and seated
on the divan was Krishna himself, in his human manifestation.

60


I spend a night in a Moslem graveyard,
collecting ephemera for the Library of Congress
My tour of India was a success in that I managed
to avoid the Taj Mahal. The Taj-Imagined is a ravishing poem
to immortal love. The Taj-Arrested-in-Marble, with German
tourists in lederhosen at work with their cameras, and the
Air India swami bowing beside the lotus pool, seemed sure
to be intolerable.
I was not alone in this sentiment. A girl at our embassy
gave up a perfectly acceptable Nawab solely because, on ar-
rival at Agra for some hanky-panky, he sent out for ice-cold
coke. It is depressing to go in search of India, and find oneself
in America.
I preferred the homelier monuments anyway, such as
Fatehpur Sikri, an improbable fortified castle not far from the
more celebrated Taj. Its medieval walls humpback up and
down several hills, enclosing what is left of the Emperor
Akbar's pleasure dome. Akbar took it upon himself to marry
the world's major religions, and he ordered to be built here
61


Krishna Smiled

sumptuous apartments, each individually styled to the re-
ligious and ethnic tastes of one of his wives. From my ob-
servation, this eclectic approach is rather more typical of
India than is the monogamous love commemorated over at
the Taj.
At any rate, I was going through my own sari phase when
I visited Fatehpur, because there is a little of the eclectic in
me. Consequently, I was swathed in six yards of brilliant and
highly unmanageable purple silk when I climbed the mruined
walls above the Moslem wife's quarters. So it was inevitable,
and I knew it was inevitable, that having achieved the top
of the castle despite the best efforts of my sari to throw me,
an American tourist should dart out into the courtyard below
and furtively-because she didn't want to infringe my caste
rules-snap a picture of me.
So I am enshrined in some midwestern living room, in
the photo album underneath the end table, as "a Hindu
woman visiting Fatehpur Sikri."
The North Indian plain is littered with the remnants of
the Moghul Empire, which had its stronghold here. On either
side the highway that runs between the seventh and eighth
cities of Delhi ("Old" and "New" we call them now, but there
are others older, older) stand twin relics. To the west is the
Jamma Masjid, its triple onion domes ballooning above the
squalid Moslem sector of the city. To the east is the Lal Qila,
the Red Fort of Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal.
Along this road one day passed a procession of villagers.
By the look of their dusty dhotis and turbans, the blankets
and pots slung across their shoulders, they had trekked a long
way. They were evidently headed for Nizamuddin.
To a foreigner, Nizamuddin is a garish modern suburb to
the south of New Delhi. Its houses, functional, unsightly and
luxurious beyond the dreams of 99 percent of the population,
sit uncomfortably upon the countryside, as though they had
been dropped there by some absent-minded roc. Behind Niza-
muddin was my less fashionable suburb of Jangpura.
From my front window, in the middle distance, I could
see the tomb of Safdarjung, in whose shadow lies the airport.
62


A night in a Moslem graveyard
Taking off, planes fly over the Nizamuddin of the Moslems,
their twentieth-century roar drowning out the rather an-
tiquated howl of hyenas which sometimes come from the
cemetery.
Studded with tiny houses of the dead in ruin and dis-
repair, the Durgah of Nizamuddin lies obscured by scrub
brush and a farm for retired cows. The vanished Moghul aris-
tocracy is buried here, but their tombs (since most of the
Moslems were driven out in the riots that accompanied Par-
tition) seem important now only to bats and browsing goats
and scorpions which shelter in them from the broiling sun.
Most are just large enough to accommodate an oblong grave-
stone. A few are two stories high, with a cellarful of fetid air,
and towers at each corner. By night, their domed roofs blot
the full-starred sky like voluptuous breasts.
So far as I knew, no one went there to stir up the crazy
old shammus who kept the place. I was all the more surprised
to learn that the trekkers I had seen were headed there. I had
once made the mistake of talking to the shammus, and from
then on he would visit me occasionally, bringing me loath-
some pies with unknown substances baked into their interiors.
It got to the point where, when I saw his fez coming down
the street, I would lie on the floor of my living room until he
quit leaning on the bell and went away. Unable to overcome
my fear of what exactly this keeper of the cemetery was bak-
ing into his pies, I avoided the whole neighborhood and gen-
erally couldn't have cared less what was going on over at the
Durgah.
The trekkers were something else again, however. So
many people might mean books; or possibly ephemera, as the
Library of Congress wanted me to call those insignificant
throwaways they so loved. The thought of cataloging these
ill-printed sheets undated, unnumbered, and unnamed, in
dim-lit dusty stacks at the end of grim corridors once again
made me realize how lucky I was to be out acquisitioning
them instead.
The newspaper informed me that this day was the 500th
anniversary of the death of the poet Hazrat Nizamuddin. In
63


Krishna Smiled

a bid to improve Indian-Pakistan relations the government
of India had dropped passport restrictions, thus enabling
Moslems to come in over the border for the celebrations.
These were the trekkers.
After dinner, I drove down the familiar road past the
open acreage which was used by the neighborhood as a la-
trine, past the spigot where women lined up with their bul-
bous brass and clay jars, to the entrance of the cemetery where
a large crowd milled. Men only, as one would expect among
Moslems. I parked where rickshaw coolies and tonga-wallas
(drivers of horse-drawn carriages) vied for space under the
eye of a laconic policeman and the chauffeur of a Cadillac,
who was above all this.
Dark came, and the crowd moved down a funnel of light
cast by Coleman lanterns hung from trees. I looked for the
adorable clay figurines which are always offered for sale at
Hindu fairs. But, of course, there would be none here as Mos-
lems are forbidden to mould the human likeness.
Wooden shacks bearing signs such as KHAN HOTEL,
LAHORE GUEST HOUSE, and WELCOME, bade the
travellers make themselves at home among the tombstones.
Shills lured the bearded men over for food and a draught on
the water pipe. Pancakes big as cartwheels were sizzling in
enormous cauldrons of ghee; orange-colored sweets that
looked like french-fried onion rings swung from sticks; kebab
was roasting on long iron pikes; and everywhere the panwalla
did big business.
Most of the fair-goers looked exactly like the rest of the
Delhi population. There is no cultural or ethnic difference be-
tween the Moslems of the northern provinces who became
Pakistanis, and those who remained Indians. Nor is there any
obvious physical distinction between Moslems and Hindus
native to the same area. Of course, we may rely on time and
war to create differences where none existed before, as each
side assumes the burden of hatred appropriate to its citizen-
ship.
In addition to the olive-skinned, slight men of north
central India, there were darker men in the black caps
64


A night in a Moslem graveyard
characteristic of Bengal; and large-boned semitic types from
the North-West Frontier Province. These Pathans, rough and
surly-looking, shoved among their smaller brethren holding
one another's hands like schoolgirls.
The crowd between the lanterns moved slowly forward,
and suddenly I emerged through the wall of darkness that
rose abruptly at the end of the path. I was alone. I could not
see. I appeared to have left the fair behind. Then I stubbed
my bare toes against a stone sill. Beside me a repulsive voice
requested me to remove my sandals. It was the shammus'.
Clutching my sandals in my hand, I stepped through an
aperture in the thick stone wall, aided by that dreadful hand.
Then-to be sure, I had seen the cemetery before, that thorny
field of monuments-but nothing I had seen in daylight could
be related to what I was seeing now. Lanterns hanging from
trees and tombs illumined the grandeur of a decaying mosque,
made that decay entrance and dance, till the mosque seemed
to be melting. In the inconstant light, pyjamaed men roamed
the courtyard or slept in companionable heaps. Their families,
asleep in chambers hollowed out of the walls, appeared to me
like marionettes left jumbled on their little stages after the
audience has left the theater. Here and there, at irregular
intervals above the ground, a campfire was lit and pots
stewed, and women huddled together. Only the very young
and the very old lifted their burqas to peep at passersby.
At midnight beneath the trees beside the tomb of Niza-
muddin, the people seated themselves on stones and steps,
with musicians in their midst-a blind singer, a drummer with
his two clay pots, and a flutist.
A moment's stir was caused by a young Sikh student who
placed his sandals upon the ground. A clean-shaven man
reached over, placed the sandals on the Sikh's lap, and smiled
a cautionary smile. Religious passions were not going to flare
here, thank God.
I climbed the stair and sat down on the marble floor of
the tomb, which is a filigreed cockleshell of white stone,
through which I looked out as a Spanish lady might peer
through her fan. The tomb smelled of marigolds the pilgrims
65


Krishna Smiled

had strewn on the marble sarcophagus, where an oil lamp
flickered. Mumtaz, who lies buried at thirty-three in the Taj
Mahal, caused these lines to be engraved above her:
Let no candle burn here
lest some moth, venturing too near
should, like myself, meet
untimely death.
Just outside my tomb, facing inward, burqa thrown back,
an old woman was reading the Koran. She was the only Mos-
lem woman I ever saw read.
I could have gone on enjoying the scene and the singing
all night; but now the shammus glided to my side. I wasn't
going to share a tomb with him, if I could help it.
"How do you like it here? It is our little birthday party,"
he said in tones that suggested he had some interesting post-
cards to sell.
"It is very nice, very nice indeed," I replied.
"You are American, isn't it? do you like what you see
here? you are American? you are alone? you are not married?
where is your father? do you like our little birthday party?"
"Yes, yes, yes" I gasped, holding my breath. I knew if I
once smelled him I would never get him out of my nose. The
shammus closed his eyes in bogus religious ecstacy, raised his
scabrous face to the candlelight, and joined his voice in the
song the devotees were singing outside our tomb. I took the
opportunity to flee him.
Threading my way out among the singers, I left the
square by a passage cut through the thick wall of the mosque.
Here the grasping hands of beggars rose up out of the dark to
clutch the ankles of fleeing wealth. Casting my shadow on the
walls of the cave, I fled from there and arrived at a huge
square tank where lights were reflected in water like tennis
balls that have stopped rolling in wet grass. Mud underfoot.
I buckled on my sandals and headed for the roadside lights
near which I had parked my car.
But as I walked, a thought struggled to make itself
66


A night in a Moslem graveyard
known to me through the flood of impressions that swamped
me.
The dance! The dance! Where were the dancers?
Or, more accurately, the trekkers? Where were the long
processions of villagers I had passed earlier in the day? The
pilgrims were expected to sleep at the cemetery: witness the
signs... too many signs for so few customers. And the thou-
sands of Moslems who live in the shadow of the Jamma
Masjid? It was too early for them to have returned home.
Yet the courtyards I had passed through were nearly deserted.
Reluctantly, I turned back. To find publications, I must
first find the public. Stepping back over the stone threshold,
I found myself once more at the tank with its depth of stag-
nant water that was once the liquid heart of some caliph's
pleasure dome. A wall. I ran my forehead against it in the
dark. Groping toward a ray of light, I came to an arched gate-
way in the centuries-old stone.
Beyond the wall, thousands of men were seated on the
ground. They sat so quietly that I had been unaware of them
from ten paces away. Their black eyes were upturned toward
the speaker, a man I knew very well. It was the Afghan Am-
bassador, the owner of the Cadillac.
I was moved by this evidence of the universality of
Islam. A common language, a common culture. The organi-
zers of Nizamuddin's birthday party had invited a distin-
guished foreigner to speak. Yet, he was no foreigner.
I wished desperately that I could understand what the
Ambassador was saying. Usually I had no such problem. His
Excellency was equally at home in English, French, and Per-
sian, and was well-versed in Judaica as well. We had whiled
away many a boring diplomatic-do discussing the Babylonian
Talmud and Martin Buber, subjects he understood quite a
bit better than I. But here at Nizamuddin I could not pene-
trate his Persianized Urdu.
I supposed he was praising the art of the poet. But were
these students? Surely not, by their clothes. Their faces and
hands were work-worn. They were farmers. What could hold
them so intensely?
67


Krishna Smiled

Was His Excellency extolling Islam? The speaker was a
secular man, not a mullah. Wait! Did I catch the word
Pukhtoonistan?
Pukhtoons (Pathans) have some of the attributes of na-
tionhood, but their traditional homeland is split by the
Afghan-Pakistani border. There was strong division of opin-
ion as to whether or not any nationalist sentiment existed
among them, but every once in a while someone would re-
print a hoary old story to the effect that an independence
revolution was brewing among the Pathans of Pakistan's
North-West Frontier Province. Should that ever happen, it
would be a toss-up as to whether Pukhtoonistan would attract
the southern provinces of Afghanistan to itself; or, what is far
more likely, Afghanistan would end by absorbing Pukhtoonis-
tan. The example of Texas may be remembered. Since India
was wooing Afghanistan's support in her growing quarrel
with Pakistan, it made sense for her to support Pukhtoon
separatism, leaving the ultimate disposition of these people
to time and the Afghans.
My job being to collect literature, I strained to see if
there was any lying about. There was, quite a lot. Some yards
away, against the inside wall, were stacks of pamphlets and
newspapers, displayed on a tarpaulin in which they had prob-
ably been brought. I could not tell whether they were re-
prints of Nizamuddin's poems, essays on soil conservation,
or a call to arms on behalf of the people of Pukhtoonistan.
The people back at the Library of Congress would have to
figure that out.
Crouched on the rocky ground, I scrunched slowly over
to the stack of publications. What the hell would I do if Khan
Najib-Ullah stopped in mid-sentence and called me by my
name? Stealthily, I loaded my shoulder bag and both arms.
Then, of course, I could not scrunch out again. I had to stand
and saunter to the gate hunchbacked. This I did, my ephemera
clutched to my bosom. The weight of large quantities of
ephemera is not ephemeral.
At the roadside, the kerosene lamps still flickered. The
coolies slept in their rickshaws, awaiting passengers home.
68


A night in a Moslem graveyard
Policemen in their khaki shorts and red-rimmed socks leaned
angularly against the night on their six-foot staffs. The enig-
matic Cadillac was being polished by the chauffeur.
As I drove home, my headlights picked up a strangely
ruffed beast with vicious eyes, that not so much fled from my
car as skulked away from it. Puzzled by it, I called the em-
bassy's science attache the next morning and described the
phenomenon.
"That animal," said the doctor, "is called a hyena."
I thought that it was very nice to have a definite name by
which to call things. Once having been told the animal was
a hyena, everything fitted into place, including the oft-heard
fact that hyenas skulk.
But what to do with a phenomenon like Nizamuddin?
I had passed it every day for a year, and thought I knew it.
I had visited it once by day, and thought I knew it. Now I
had peered into its liquid heart by night, and I would never
know it.
What, in fact, had I seen?

69


Into the Tower of Babel and out by that same
door where in I went
Dictionaries are the seeing-eye dogs of research.
The field of Indian studies is a veritable obstacle course of
languages, which can defeat the most intrepid researcher un-
less he possesses suitable dictionaries to use as guides. So I
bought word-books no matter how primitively compiled or
printed. When my budget was down to the last few pice, I
spent these on dictionaries.
Sometimes I wished for a dictionary of dictionaries.
Strange new languages were constantly thrusting themselves
at me, looking quite self-assured in their well-tailored scripts,
and confident that they belonged there, as indeed they did.
As I am no linguist, each new language I encountered
launched me on a scavenger hunt of continental proportions.
One of my libraries once asked me to procure a title
which was picturesquely sent me in the script of the language
itself. Across the page of the State Department memo rolled
a neatly penned line of ohs and ahs, dragging their tales be-
70


Into the Tower of Babel
hind them. There was no doubt in the mind of the person
writing that this was a language, though he might have taken
the time to identify it. I could find no one at the embassy nor
among my acquaintances who would hazard a guess as to
what the name of the language was, let alone the name of
the book. It looked a little like Burmese, but comparison
showed it was not. And then, French "looks like" Rumanian,
but one would not normally go to Bucharest in order to pur-
chase a book published in Marseilles. I was a little embar-
rassed to query my home office; it seemed like the sort of
thing I ought to know. So I stapled the memo into my little
black book and hoped for the best.
Some months later, being in Bhuvaneshwar, I was de-
lighted to recognize the script on storefronts in the bazaar.
Whipping out my little note, I confirmed that here indeed
was my mystery language, all wrapped up in its mystery
script.
Striking up conversation with a bookdealer-in English,
of course-I purchased what may have been the American
government's first acquisitions in the Oriyan language. I even
found my wanted title, by comparing it oh for oh and ah for
ah with my ordering memo. I then bought some Oriya-English
dictionaries, just in case the recipient of this order should be
as puzzled by the language as I was.
I had trouble getting through at the post office, however,
as English is spread a little thin in Bhuvaneshwar, and Hindi
(or at least my Hindi) failed to wash, whatever professional
linguists may say about the two languages being related. So
I had to carry the books back to New Delhi with me to mail.
There I handed them over to my secretary, who was a Kash-
miri Brahmin and by definition a scholar.
"Whatever language this is?" he marvelled as he ac-
cepted the books.
So much for Oriya and its thirteen million speakers. It
was rather as though an educated Italian had never heard of
Portuguese; or a Russian being ignorant of Polish.
The languages of India constitute a great romantic epic
and repay any amount of study. Sir George Grierson worked
71


Krishna Smiled
for thirty years compiling the nineteen volume Linguistic Sur-
vey of India. It reads like an oriental Gone with the Wind. In
1903 Grierson wrote that a man walking from Assam to
Saurashtra (straight across the broadest part of the subconti-
nent) would be unable to identify any place where the lan-
guage changed-he would imagine himself to be hearing the
same language on the entire course of his journey. Yet, taking
cross-sections of speech located a hundred miles from one an-
other, he would find them mutually unintelligible.
Fourteen languages are recognized by the Constitution
of India. They account for the speech of 95 percent of Indi-
ans. Thereafter one must confront the ineluctable fact that
there are 47 more languages spoken by 100,000 people or
more; and-hang onto your dictionary-720 languages spoken
by fewer than 100,000 people each. Many of the smaller
groups are located in Assam. There the Nagas, some of whom
are still headhunters, lay claim to greater autonomy on the
basis of their linguistic precocity.
Pakistan was set up with Urdu, Punjabi, and Pukhto
components in the West, and Bengali in the East, a combina-
tion which proved to be indigestible. Then there are the peo-
ple who live within India and Pakistan but who speak lan-
guages indigenous to areas which lie mainly outside their
political boundaries; such as Baluchi and Persian on the
northwest boundary, Tibetan on the north, and Burmese and
Karen on the northeast.
Placing the point of a compass in New Delhi and draw-
ing a circle round it, you can enclose all the modern Indian
languages which are descendants of Sanskrit. These include
Hindi, Urdu, Hindustani and Punjabi, Rajasthani, Bihari,
Pahari, Kashmiri, and Gujerati. These relate to one another
approximately as do French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
to one another.
At a somewhat further remove in derivation, and in dis-
tance from Delhi, there is an outer circle of Sanskritic lan-
guages which includes Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, and Mara-
thi. These languages are first cousins to one another and
second cousins to the first group. Taken altogether, they are
72


Into the Tower of Babel
collateral relatives of all the languages of Europe except Fin-
nish and Hungarian, which are not related to anything but
each another.
The Sanskrit, Slavic, Teutonic, Celtic, and Romance lan-
guages all find a common ancestor in a language putatively
spoken 5,000 years ago by people who inhabited an area south
of the Ural mountains. In successive migrations, these hypo-
thetical Aryans invaded and populated Europe, to the west;
and India, to the southeast, bringing their victorious language
along with them. Naturally, the language underwent modifi-
cation whenever it came in contact with tongues already in
use elsewhere. Then, developing in isolation from one an-
other, dialects diverged even more, which accounts for the
strong differences among them today.
By train from Delhi, it takes three days to escape the
world of Sanskrit. Heading southwesterly, I travelled on
through miles of Hindi variants until I reached Bombay. The
second day was spent wading through Gujerati and Marathi.
The night was given over to Urdu while I crossed old Hyder-
abad. On the morning of the third day I woke to find I had
left the world of consonants behind and entered the melli-
fluous world of Dravida. I had also left behind the burning
plains and starved-out vegetation of the north, exchanging
them for the greenly undulating hills and palm trees of
Mysore.
It was to this area south of the Deccan, where India nar-
rows drastically, that the original inhabitants of India, the
dark Dravidians, were allegedly pushed by the invading
Aryans. Here the Dravidian languages survive, totally un-
related to all other Indian or European languages.
In 1948 the Dravidian language groups stuck with the
north to create independent India (Partition occurred within
the Hindi-Urdu and Bengali language groups). But the mo-
ment the country was free, voices were heard saying that the
people would not really be free so long as they were domi-
nated by the Hindi speakers of Delhi. In particular, Telugu
speakers launched a violent campaign for the formation of a
distinct state within the Indian Union.
73


Krishna Smiled
The campaign was climaxed by the self-immolation of
an elderly gentleman who could no longer abide sharing his
citizenship with speakers of Tamil, from whom he was in
many ways indistinguishable. His sacrifice was validated in-
sofar as it forced the government of India to form a Telugu-
speaking state of Andhra Pradesh out of what used to be the
Madras Presidency, later adding to it much of Hyderabad as
well. Far more importantly, the style had been set for a gener-
ation of political activists.
Taking their cue from Andhra, other linguistic groups
began nationalist agitation against the capital and forced sev-
eral redrawings of state boundaries to conform to the patterns
of speech. Thus Gujeratis and Marathis convulsed and split
old Bombay Presidency; and Malayalam speakers tore away
bits of Madras, Mysore, and Travancore-Cochin to create
Kerala.
Within a decade, the Indian map was redrawn to cor-
respond to major linguistic divisions. (Of course, it is no more
possible to draw a neat line of cleavage between Tamil and
Telugu, Gujerati and Marathi, Malayalam and Kannarese,
than it is to draw one between French and German, Italian
and Swiss, Slovene and Slovak. Whenever one language of
a multilingual area is recognized as the official one, millions
of other people are automatically placed in the minority. For
each group whose language is privileged, there is another
which is handicapped.)
Pakistan was in the same manner forced to yield Bengali
equal status with Urdu. Observers tried to predict whether
these concessions to linguistic nationalism would ensure the
respective unities of India and Pakistan, or undermine them.
It is not unreasonable to refer to these language groups
as nations. They share a collective sense of national identity
and have historically been settled in well-defined territories
which they regard as their homelands. Some of these regions
have larger populations than do many independent countries.
Compare Egypt's 31 million with Tamilnad's 33 or Andhra
Pradesh's 36 million. Ghana, after all, boasts a bare 8 million
people. Indian Bengal has 35 million, and the former East
Pakistan (largely Bengali-speaking) over 70 million.
74


Into the Tower of Babel
India attempted to bring order into the Tower of Babel
by adopting Hindi as its national language. But taken to-
gether with Urdu and Hindustani, this is the mother tongue
of only 40 percent of the population. These languages must
be taken together because they share a common vocabulary
and grammar. But they are written differently: Hindi in the
Devanagri script from left to right; Urdu in Persian script
from right to left; and Hindustani, so far as I could make out,
not at all.
Hindi is the modern incarnation of Sanskrit, and opens
up the great Hindu classics such as the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana. It thus links India to the Hindu and Buddhist cul-
tures farther east, particularly those of Burma and Indonesia.
Urdu is a kind of switchboard into which Arabic, Per-
sian, and even Pukhto can, in emergency, be plugged, con-
necting the Moslems of India and Pakistan with their co-
religionists in the Near East, Africa, and Central Asia.
During the campaign for independence, Hindu patriots
sponsored attempts to "purify" the language by purging Ara-
bic and Persian elements and delving into Sanskrit for the
new words which were necessary to update the language. The
campaign carried a message for Moslem patriots. As Persian
script fell from favor, dictionaries began to appear in Deva-
nagri. It was in its latter form that Hindi became the national
language of India; Urdu was made the national language of
Pakistan.
I had studied Hindi in its Sanskrit form for six weeks at
the impatient knee of the Foreign Service Institute in Wash-
ington. I was also taking lessons from a munshi when I was in
Delhi, which wasn't often. As a result of my spotty education,
I could ask about train schedules, read book titles, and make
primitive conversation with friendly persons who were will-
ing to meet me halfway. I was only semi-literate, and often
could not understand what I managed to read.
My bearer, on the other hand, could understand what I
read out loud but he couldn't read much of anything that was
useful to me even though he was literate. His mission school
had taught him Urdu, which was now going into discard.
While I was in Delhi, All India Radio took to using ex-
75


Krishna Smiled

tremely sanskritized Hindi for its broadcasts. Emmanuel, who
was a native speaker of the language, complained that he
could no longer understand the programs. He was, neverthe-
less, closer to the national linguistic standard than 60 percent
of the population.
Urdu lies like a blanket over the many tongues of India.
The British used it as an instrument of imperial rule, as the
Moghuls had before them. It was the language of administra-
tion, law courts, and the army, with the result that five years
after independence it was still spoken by every taxi driver,
hotel clerk, civil servant, railroad official, soldier, former sol-
dier, teahouse proprietor, and airline stewardess (except the
Goan girls, who had a language all their own).
After independence, the Paks naturally started house-
cleaning too, evicting Sanskrit words to substitute Persian
ones. So these languages which, like a revolving door, facili-
tated entry into a joint Hindu-Moslem culture, may be ex-
pected to rigidify into something more like a fire-door with
crash bar.
At any given moment, either of these languages may be
referred to as Hindustani. Like all great languages, this one
is a bastard. Out of Sanskrit by Persian, it accepts all loan
words freely. Taking on the coloration of its locale, Hindustani
can be used, as I used it, selectively from the Soviet border on
the north (where the matey at the State Guest House at Ma-
zar-i-Sharif conducted me to the bathhouse in it) to the island
Ceylon on the south (where a moneylender of unknown eth-
nic origin changed my currency for me in perfectly accept-
able Uttar Pradesh-type Hindustani), making it the language
with the third widest distribution in the world.
It should be clear by now why dictionaries were impor-
tant, and why I had to travel to find them. Perhaps I have
given some indication of the ferocious administrative prob-
lems which exist for any national government of India or Pak-
istan, of whatever stripe. Just holding the country together
on a routine basis is difficult, and when local nationalism be-
comes inflamed, administration breaks down.
In many ways, the British approach was simpler. They
76


Into the Tower of Babel
ignored all Indian languages (except for their scholarly in-
terest) and concentrated on English. In the bad old days of
the British Raj, if you wanted to get along, you learned Urdu;
if you wanted to get ahead, you jolly well learned English.
English imposed on India the first unity it had ever had.
For the first time in history, a northerner could talk to a south-
erner without an interpreter. And both could talk with the
outside world. A person who spoke English could conduct a
government office or transact business in any linguistic area.
As a lingua franca, English facilitated trade, made possible a
national civil service of high calibre, enabled the ruling class
to ally with the British, and opened India's windows on the
world.
For a language, after all, is far more than a system of
sounds. It is a storehouse of culture. When English was in-
troduced into India, it brought along the Renaissance, the
Reformation, and the concept of self-government; the worlds
of science, technology, and rationalism; Locke, Shakespeare,
Darwin, Einstein, Marx, Freud, and Jesus Christ. The Indian
who learns English transcends the provincial world of Malay-
alam or Baluchi, and the spiritual concerns of Hinduism or
Islam, and becomes the inheritor of the western world as well.
The British realized this, and they made English a re-
quired subject from the fourth form on. They thought they
would educate an endless supply of clerks and subalterns who
would be able to smooth the process of administration, under
British command, of course.
What the British did not foresee was that the European
inheritance to which India now fell heir included nationalism:
the idea that nations of distinct culture have the right to gov-
ern themselves. Once Indians became literate in English,
they studied not only general accounting procedures but the
Declaration of Independence. In one of the great dialectical
shifts of history, nationalism was injected into the colonies
through the efforts of the imperialists themselves, and the
medium which carried the message was English.
Ultimately, Indian nationalism (combined with the weak-
ening of England through two major world wars) brought the
77


Krishna Smiled

empire crashing down. But when the dust cleared and the
British were gone, the English language remained.
Many Indians and Pakistanis wished to retain English
as the official language. The entire educated class knew it al-
ready; it was neutral coinage in the interchange between
Sanskritic north and Dravidian south; between Urdu west
and Bengali east. And English would keep the continent in
touch with the rest of the world. In fact, English was the per-
feet language for all practical purposes.
But at an emotional level, English was unacceptable.
How could newly independent states adopt the language of
their former master? Many patriots who knew English better
than I, and with a better accent, refused to speak it.
English had one fatal flaw. It was foreign. Nationalists
argued: so long as we speak the imperialists' tongue, we will
think his thoughts. How can we be free until we drive this
language out of our minds as we drove the English out of
our land? To the argument that successive generations of
Indians would lose contact with the rest of the world, nation-
alists returned the classic reply of the patriot: our own culture
is superior. What has England to offer?
Both India and Pakistan retained English for substan-
tial periods of time in order to give people time to learn the
national language. When the Indian period of grace was up,
all hell broke loose.
The speakers of Dravidian languages wanted to hang on
to English. They had always regarded Hindi as a weapon of
(north Indian!) imperialism, dating back three millennia to
the Aryan invasion. The adoption of Hindi meant that a Dra-
vidian child would have to learn Hindi at school; if he wished
to enter a profession, he would then have to master English
as well. At a rational level, the three-language requirement
handicapped southern intellectuals. At an emotional level,
they hated Hindi. It was a foreign language.
Widescale rioting broke out all over South India in 1965,
causing millions of dollars worth of property damage and
sixty deaths, some from self-immolation and others from mur-
der, police or otherwise. Since it was obvious the language
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Into the Tower of Babel
was splitting the country instead of uniting it, a compromise
was reached: the national standard (as observed in examina-
tions for civil service posts) now requires that each candidate
show proficiency in two languages besides his own. One must
be English. The other, for a Hindi speaker, must be a Dravid-
ian language; for the speaker of a Dravidian language, it must
be Hindi.
This formula stopped the rioting and arrested the drift
toward separation. It also reinforced the principal that, if a
section of the country wanted something badly enough, it
could force the national government to accede, through the
threat of violent secession.
The classic instance of a nationalism that would not be
contained is Bengal. It can be argued that the Bengali lan-
guage area has suffered more vicissitudes than most, despite
the fact that its national character is most clearly defined.
The British split Bengal in 1905. They did it to increase the
efficiency of administration; but they also no doubt intended
to curb the influence of militant Hindu nationalists who were
most active in Calcutta. By cutting off the eastern provinces
which held a slight Moslem majority, the British provided the
kind of electoral breakwater which Moslems demanded as
protection against the Hindu majority. The Hindu nationa-
lists of West Bengal never forgave the British for this exer-
cise in divide and rule, even though Partition was reversed in
1911, which naturally alienated the Moslems.
Probably, the 1905 partition itself came to be a factor in
the growth of Bengali nationalism, which, sparked by ter-
rorism and the brilliance of its leaders, stoked the fires of the
entire Quit India movement. When independence was won
in 1947, many Bengalis, Hindu and Moslem alike, were dev-
astated to learn that freedom would renew the partition of
their homeland.
West Bengal, containing the city of Calcutta, fitted easily
into the Indian Union. East Bengal had a harder time getting
along with Pakistan. With its factories and port cut away,
East Bengal was left with only jute fields and the farmers
who cultivated them. With no cities of any size, no industry,
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Krishna Smiled
and no known resources, there was no productive base onto
which to graft the hordes of refugees who poured in from
Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. In the sixties, a United Nations
Commission reported that "the problems of economic devel-
opment posed by East Pakistan's rapidly growing population
are of a kind and dimension hardly encountered in any other
part of the world."
The East Pakistanis blamed the West Pakistanis for their
problems. Contributing more than their share in tax revenues,
they believed themselves to be discriminated against in the
allocation of federal funds and appointments to civil service
positions. When the expected benefits of self-rule failed to
materialize, the Bengalis turned to the time-honored Indian
remedy: religious persecution. Unutterable numbers of per-
sons were expelled from both Bengals and forced to find ref-
uge behind their own religious lines. But twenty years of
communal riots failed to change the facts: the truncated
economy of East Pakistan could not function, and the area
was becoming less competent to feed or to govern itself with
each passing year.
Heading into Dacca by plane, I looked down to see old
Ganges mate with Brahmaputra, spawning rivulets, streams,
brooks, and the river Padma. The unbelievable amount of
water-reinforced periodically by tidal waves and daily by one
of the highest rates of precipitation on the face of the globe
- has created a vast swamp. This swamp contains the densest
concentration of farm people to be found anywhere in the
world: 1,073 per square mile. Considering that much of the
land is under water much of the time, that doesn't leave much
farm per family.
Dacca itself was a cloaca through which swirled the ref-
use of a continent on its way to find an outlet to the sea. The
city was a recent growth, a product of Partition chaos, and it
lacked the organization, the energy, the leadership, or the
capital to make anything of itself. All it had was people and
water.
Largely because no other publications procurement of-
ficer had ever gotten his gorge up sufficiently to visit the city,
80


Into the Tower of Babel
I was able to obtain bales of literature there and arrange for
its transmittal through our consulate. I then got out as quickly
as I could, but Dacca stayed with me as the absolute nadir
of human existence. After seeing it, I too was ready to quit
India.
Had I known that in 1971 India and Pakistan would go
to war over East Bengal, I would have assumed each was
fighting in order to force the enemy to keep the godforsaken
place.
During the sixties, East Pakistanis concluded that self-
rule was a chimera, that they were in fact being ruled by
their Urdu-speaking co-religionists over in the west. Religious
affiliation, it turned out, was not sufficient to define a nation,
particularly where that nation was split into regions so dis-
tinct from one another in other ways. The seething of the dis-
satisfied easterners grew beyond the powers of the Pakistani
government to control, and led first to the abandonment of
Dacca as provincial capital, then to the downfall of the na-
tional government. Nationwide elections in which the Bengali
candidate gained a majority posed the possibility that now
the West would be governed by the East; so the elections
were disavowed and the winner jailed. This led to civil dis-
order, brutal repression, and the flight of ten million refugees
into India.
India's response was conditioned by all that had hap-
pened since the first partition of Bengal in 1905. Still per-
suaded that Bengal was one nation, and fired by the militant
Hindu revivalism that has been so characteristic of Bengali
nationalism, India invaded and snuffed out Moslem sover-
eignty in East Pakistan.
Is Bangladesh to be absorbed into Mother India, so that
1905 may be completely reversed? Or will Bangladesh her-
self act as a magnet, pulling its western half away from India
in order to complete Bengal as an autonomous nation? To
put the question another way: will the centrifugal force of
Bengali and other nationalisms overwhelm the centripetal
force of Indian union?
The question can be asked of many linguistic areas. An
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Krishna Smiled

interesting comparison can be made with Coorg, which is
one area with a history of sticking to the Union. Throughout
the Mutiny of 1857 its people remained loyal to the British,
and under the Disarmament Act which followed, they were
the only clan permitted to retain personal weapons. Yet to-
day, while Bengal is resurgent, Coorg has disappeared from
view. I think it is because it had no dictionary.
I clanked into Mercara, capital of Coorg, aboard a mori-
bund bus one rainy afternoon and stepped out under a ban-
ner reading WELCOME, which turned out to be not for me
but for the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Armed Forces,
who was coming home on leave. The Kodagus, who claim to
be the original settlers around here, still provide India with
some of her most distinguished soldiers. Apparently unre-
lated to other ethnic groups, Kodagus form a separate caste
only partially within Hinduism, and retain unique traditions,
social customs and dress. Among other peculiarities, the wom-
en wear their saris backwards. Naturally, when I heard of
them I felt I must obtain a dictionary of their language.
After handshakes all around from the welcoming com-
mittee, who were really rather surprised to see me instead of
the Commander-in-Chief (he arrived a few minutes later, by
jeep) I was invited to stay at the palace of Tipu Sultan.
This palace, which contains the jail, the press, most gov-
ernment offices as well as the guest house, must be seen dur-
ing the monsoon to be properly appreciated. That means
about any time of year, for this part of the coast benefits from
all the monsoons India can conjure up, regardless of season.
The fortress's grey stone walls are covered with slime
from incessant damp weather; the windows are small and
suitably defensible. In the courtyard, stand twin reminders
of Tipu Sultan's humor.
It was the custom in the Sultan's court to waken the mon-
arch each morning with a blast from his favorite elephant.
One night the Sultan caroused late and left orders not to be
disturbed, but no one informed the elephant, who appeared
in his accustomed way. As he knelt beneath the Sultan's win-
dow, his trunk raised in loyal salute and a cheerful reveille
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Into the Tower of Babel
bursting from his heart, His Majesty, who was hung over,
shot the beast and went back to bed. But remorse seizing him
upon awakening, he caused the elephant and his mate to be
immortalized in stone.
Looking out my bedroom window on one side, I could
see the ill-fated elephant lovers. On the other side, I could
see down into a smaller but equally grey courtyard which was
also occupied by something of an elephant.
This one was upright, potbellied and sloshed with orange
paint: Ganesh, or Ganapati as he is sometimes known. As I
understand it, this god once enjoyed human form even as I
or you, but was decapitated by his father Shiva. Thereafter,
in response to the mother's pleas, Shiva seized the first head
that came along, which happened to be an elephant's, and
placed it on the child's neck. Ever since, this haphazard god
goes galumphing through the Hindu pantheon quite hap-
pily. Ganesh is sagacious and wise, remover of obstacles;
people pray to him before starting out on a new enterprise.
He is also a roly-poly gourmand.
Anyone named Judith has a natural interest in decapi-
tation. I knew Ganesh's story better than some others. One
night, he was returning home on mouseback from an orgy
with friends when he slid off his gaadi and fell into a puddle,
splitting his trousers. The moon, who happened to be look-
ing, forgot to show the respect which is due the gods, and
laughed. For this, Ganesh cursed him. Ever since, it has been
bad luck to look at the moon on the night of Ganesha Chat-
urthi.
As luck would have it, that is the night on which I landed
at Tipu Sultan's palace. When the moon rose, about a hun-
dred worshippers crowded into the tiny courtyard below my
window to wreathe the idol in chains of marigold, ring bells,
burn incense, and ostentatiously refrain from looking at the
moon.
Child of the West as I am, I was curious to learn whether
Ganesha Chaturthi coincided with some natural phenomenon
(I had already realized that Hindu Holi coincided with Jew-
ish Purim, and the ten days of Dusserah run from Rosh Ha-
83


Krishna Smiled

shonah to Yom Kippur). I naturally looked at the moon. It
looked like any other moon, but I knew I had drawn upon
myself the curse of Ganesh. I could be freed from the curse
only by being slandered.
I spent the following day dodging a host of men named
Appiah who darted out from dark corners of the fort each
time I tried to leave it, holding vast black umbrellas over me
and protesting that I must not expose myself to the inclement
weather. Whatever else you can say about Coorg, it sure
isn't clement. Politely but insistently I was kept incarcerated
in my room until afternoon, when I had an appointment to
see the Chief Commissioner, who ruled the state on behalf
of the central government. It was clear that I would not be
allowed to move without his approval. So I sat and listened to
the shouts from the women's prison, spied on an army re-
cruiter at work up the hall, and watched the rain ooze down
the sides of the two massive black elephants below my win-
dow.
The Chief Commissioner, to my surprise, was a Sikh;
somewhat far from home, I thought. We spent the afternoon
sparring over whether or not I would be allowed to buy any
books in Coorg. He claimed there were none published
there; but I was not to be permitted to find out for myself,
since our embassy had not notified him, through the foreign
ministry, that I was coming. Someone else had, however: the
Dancing General whose tete-a-tete I had fled some months
earlier in Delhi was of course a Coorg, and he had sent ad-
vance warning of Mata Hari's arrival. Presumably this was
why I was being sequestered. It did no good to explain that
I wanted only to buy such harmless items as a dictionary of
the Kodagu language and copies of the local newspaper. I
had wounded Coorg's amour propre, and it would take a
while to recover from the blow. Meanwhile, would I come to
dinner that night?
A banquet was being given by the CC in honor of the C-
in-C, to use the language of the area, largely composed of ini-
tials. This was precisely the kind of event I usually tried to
avoid. But it seemed preferable to hanging around the fort all
84


Into the Tower of Babel
evening. Anyway, I was practically ordered to appear, pre-
sumably because the people keeping an eye on me wanted to
go to the banquet themselves. I fretted because I had left my
luggage in Mysore (beautiful, happy, cheery, green Mysore!)
and travelled up to Mercara in a sensible suit and oxfords,
never dreaming I would hit the cocktail circuit here, of all
places. There was no railroad, no airport, no telephone, only
one all-weather road. But there were cocktails.
I need not have worried. During siesta, the wife of the
Deeyem (after some time I realized this was Coorg for Dis-
trict Magistrate) appeared with servant. Opening a box, she
displayed a complete outfit for me, including red powder to
rub in the part of my hair. So I went to the banquet wearing
a gorgeous red, pink, orange, and red sari, a garment which
covered me as amply as it did her. The lady wrapped it round
me Kodagu style: gathering it at the back of my waist, she
wound it tightly upward so as to flatten my bosom, pinning
it tightly at the shoulder in the way a gift wrapper at a de-
partment store adds the final bow. She topped me off with a
little kerchief bound too tightly round my head, which sub-
dued my hair that had frizzed up in the rain but did nothing
for my ears. I tried to poke these inside the scarf but the DM's
wife disapproved. Perhaps ears were sexy here, as bosoms
elsewhere.
The banquet got underway lugubriously beneath a great
tent that had been erected on the palace grounds. It looked
to be a dull affair. The C-in-C resumed our conversation about
the weather where we had left off in the gardens of Rashtra-
pathi Bhavan. I wondered where the witty CC could be. Late
to his own party.
I was happy to see a platoon of bearers descending upon
us with drinks. Coorg not only had continuous monsoon, it
had Prohibition as well, and so managed to be both sopping
wet and howling dry. The DM had kindly provided relief for
us, since he gave out the drinking licenses around here. Nat-
urally, under the circumstances, everyone felt honor-bound
to drink as much as possible.
When all the guests were seated, the air rang with the
85


Krishna Smiled
flourish of imaginary trumpets and in swept what looked like
the royal family of Yehupitz. It was the CC himself, Colonel
Daya Singh Bedi, or else it was Ronald Colman pretending to
be Daya Singh Bedi. His turban rode high on his head, its
starched tail stiffly erect and its silver tinsel showering out be-
hind him as he marched. Waxed moustachioes framed a most
aristocratic sneer of the kind you seldom see any more. In his
wake glided the heir apparent, followed by a morbidly beau-
tiful girl in gold.
Daya Singh Bedi rearranged the seating so as to place me
on his right. Ignoring the C-in-C, he proceeded to talk to no
one but me, paying me the most effusive compliments. Sud-
denly, he switched to Hindustani and, calling across my lap
to the C-in-C referred to me as "esa larki" ("this maid") with
all the mixed connotations the English phrase has. It was
clear he was socially isolated, and easy to understand why.
I turned to my host and asked him why he was living in
the south, among people who didn't care for him too much.
The Kodagus, after all, are a distinguished warrior caste with
an ancient lineage, and might not care to be governed by a
Sikh.
He smiled his winsome smile, which made him look like
a boy of twelve: "True enough, but how can I return home?
I would surely be hanged."
The banquet proceeded through pilau and curry, with
yoghurt to cool the flames and cardamum seeds to extinguish
the fumes. Our table was lined with scholarly-looking gentle-
men wearing black tunics over white pantaloons, curved dag-
gers thrust into their wide sashes, and neat red and white tur-
bans which they bound evenly over their brows. I always
found it difficult to talk to a man who wears his hat straight
on, like the lid of a pot. So I turned to a man seated across
from me who was wearing a western suit and no hat.
He had recognized me, for we once spent the night to-
gether. Air India used to arrange its schedule so that at 3
A.M. planes zeroed in on Nagpur, Central India, from the four
major cities of Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. While
the planes refuelled, passengers played musical chairs, dis-
86


Into the Tower of Babel
embarking from the plane which had brought them and
boarding the one which had just come from their destination.
Then the planes turned around and went home.
The arrangement usually worked well, and when it broke
down, travellers had the opportunity of meeting anybody
who was anybody, because all cross-country traffic funnelled
through Nagpur. Of course, since these encounters occurred
in the middle of the night, you didn't always carry away a
clear memory of them.
This was a newspaperman, however, and he had total
recall. "I was about to read your hand, Laikinji," he said.
(A mental image of the mists lifting from Nagpur airport, the
last bushels of pan being hoisted aboard, hurried goodbyes
and exchange of addresses.) "May I see it now?"
The proposal was met with interest by others seated near-
by. Palmistry is a science; people assumed they would learn
real things about me, and of course I was as much an object
of curiosity for them as they were for me.
I had no fear, regarding palmistry as a harmless parlor
game. So I extended my palm, and the journalist read the
truth from it easily and accurately.
"You came close to death within your first three months
of life. You have five different given names. You resemble
your father's family more than your mother's." He hesitated,
then continued. The leap into the future. "After returning
home, you may go to England. You will probably marry when
you are thirty-one."
There was a gasp from the DM's wife. "That is not a nice
thing to say to Judy," she said. The other women nodded
agreement when the prophesy had been translated. In this
country, a woman who remains unmarried to that age is a
social disaster. They felt I had been slandered.
But I was quite happy with the prophecy. Being "slan-
dered" relieved me of the curse of Ganesha Chaturthi, in-
curred by looking at the moon the night before. And so far
as the events which were foretold, everything came off on
schedule.
I left Mercara in the usual driving rain, travelling down
87


Krishna Smiled

the mountain with my bag no heavier than when I'd gone up
the mountain three days earlier. The CC had seen to that.
He had prevented me from buying any books in the Kodagu
language, if indeed any existed. The whole damn place mea-
sured eighty miles by thirty, and I shed not a tear when its
cockleshell of state got zapped in the 1956 states reorgani-
zation.
My experience in the Indian Tower of Babel persuaded
me that you can diagnose a case of nationalism by counting
the number of dictionaries in print. Where there is no diction-
ary, there is no nation: Coorg slipped wordlessly off the map
despite the ancient lineage of its founding clan.
The situation was quite different in Pepsu, where the
citizens dismembered their state along lines imposed by com-
peting Hindi and Gurmukhi dictionaries, each side then re-
tiring into the privacy and spoils of its tribal dream. Their
languages had always been heroic, but now they felt called
upon to demonstrate that fact. The linguistic rupture was
even more traumatic in Bengal, where the secession of Bangla-
desh called into question the very survival of the rump state
of West Pakistan.
A new era of self-celebration begins when dictionaries
make language accessible to all. Universal languages such as
English or Latin are scorned, and vernacular artists praised.
Native encyclopedists burst into print, proudly displaying the
tribe's heretofore secret artifacts to the sunshine of world
opinion. Native poets extoll la belle Patrie, or female circum-
cision, or the goddess Kali. Bengali literature has been famed
for at least a century; during much of that time, Bengalis have
been staggering through havoc toward self-determination.
Nationalism begins with dictionaries, goes on through poetry
and song, and proceeds by way of cracked skulls and burned-
out homes to independence.
The question of identity was at hazard from the first
moment of creation of India and Pakistan. Could these new
states create a sense of national identity which would be
strong enough to override the powerful nationalisms crammed
within their borders? Or would the regional nationalisms with
88


Into the Tower of Babel
their roots in language and historical association overpower
the newer concepts of India, of Pakistan?
Pakistan, starting from a weaker position, has not been
able to withstand the centrifugal pull. May she not try to con-
sole herself in Kashmir for the loss of Bengal (and of Hyder-
abad before Bengal)?
India has met successive tests brought on by dissidents
from within and by a series of confrontations with Pakistan
and China. She has remained intact and even extended her
influence among Bengalis and Pukhtoons. None of her lin-
guistic or ethnic groups has utilized periods of stress to bolt
the Union.
But we have not seen all the spin-off yet. There are lan-
guages still to be heard from, dictionaries yet to be published,
anthems yet to be composed. Only when all the myriad lan-
guage groups of India and Pakistan have roused themselves
to awareness, will there be a lasting answer to the riddle of
the Continent's unity.

89


7
Inadvertently, I introduce Henry Miller to the
Defense Minister of Nepal
I am unclear just which General SJBR was De-
fense Minister of Nepal in 1953, but perhaps the right one
will read this and send me back my autographed copy of
Tropic of Capricorn. Although I have never met the General,
I rely on his taste: he can see for himself that this book is not
the sort of present likely to be sent to him by the United
States Library of Congress.
The ploy by which Henry Miller was introduced to the
reigning family of Nepal through the facilities of the Library
was the result of the determined one-up-manship of my
British friend and fellow bibliophile, Thackeray.
Thackeray was one of those detached Caucasians who,
unable to bear the loss of Empire, continued to float about the
Orient for no discernible reason. I believe he was at that time
retained by the University of the Wittwatersrand to investi-
gate the influence of altitude on extrasensory perception.
His researches led him quite naturally to Nepal. This
90


I introduce Henry Miller
was in the palmy days before Cinemascope and hippies had
reduced that kingdom to a series of commonplaces. At that
time, Nepal was almost inaccessible, and Thackeray bicycled
in, or something, across the mosquitoed plain and trackless
jungle, making good his boast that with his inoffensive phy-
sique and devious mind, he was indistinguishable from an
Indian.
He didn't die of malaria, and he did meet the General,
one of the Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana generals, and a good
man with a palm leaf. The SJBRs have been prominent in
Nepalese politics for centuries, making and breaking kings
with word and sword much in the manner of the Medici
maneuvering the Papacy.
Thackeray, with his keen nose for rumor, managed to
get in and out of the country during one of those lulls in the
processes of government formation which periodically reduce
the numbers of the clan who are available for cultural activity.
Later, sitting over a lemonade at the Delhi Gymkhana
Club, Thackeray expressed to me his complete satisfaction
with his Nepalese excursion. Not only had he conducted a
series of controlled experiments (on sherpa guides who, he
thinks, developed extrasensory perceptivity through centu-
ries of communicating with one another from mutually iso-
lated Himalayan peaks. It was like Swiss yodelling, or the
whistling of Basque shepherds); but...
Thackeray went on to describe the market place at
Kathmandu, which he claims is overlooked by a magnificent
pair of purple eyes mounted on a tower. These eyes look
directly into the living room of that General SJBR who was
Nepal's Minister of Defense at the time of Thackeray's visit.
The two of them became friendly, and it seems they spent a
great deal of time on the floor sorting palm leaves.
The palm leaf is Nepal's answer to papyrus. It is dried
and accordion-pleated before being inscribed, so that, as
Thackeray showed me, each manuscript looks rather like a
tongue depressor. These particular manuscripts dealt with
science, history, and astrology, all of which are related in
the sight-or insight-of those great purple eyes.
91


Krishna Smiled

Forgetting just how expert a Lifeman Thackeray was,
I allowed my empathy to run away with me, and therefore
merited no better than to be selected for carrying out that act
of retaliatory generosity without which Thackeray could
never have persuaded himself to accept the palm leaves as
a gift from General SJBR.
Evidently, Thackeray passed these along to the United
States Library of Congress, and arranged for the library to
send the General a fifty-foot shelf of books for his birthday in
exchange. But I knew nothing of the arrangement, having
lost track of Thackeray when he left Delhi.
I continued peaceably about my business buying books,
and eventually wound up sightseeing along the Ganges with
a bookdealer named Kapur, who wanted to make sure I hit
all the architectural high spots before leaving Banaras.
It turned out that his favorite spot was the Temple of
Love, built some centuries ago by a compassionate Nepalese
prince who considered Indians unimaginative, though ad-
mittedly they functioned all right. The tiny building, insig-
nificant as it appeared from the river bank, proved on closer
inspection to be swarming with miniature stone voluptuaries
disporting in convivial groups of three and four.
Having ordered the boatman to dock, Kapur urged me
up a disused stairway cut out of rock and shored up by chunks
of stone. When we arrived before the Temple of Love, a hefty
young monk crawled (literally) through a low doorway of
it, dragging his pointer behind him. With his grizzled beard
and torn orange sarong, he looked as though he had been lost
in the temple for some weeks.
IHefting his ten-foot pole at the overhanging eaves, he
pointed at the elaborate carvings, intoning a text imperfectly
memorized and partially obliterated by the passage of years.
Ignoring the religious aspect of the sculptures, the monk
got right down to business.
Monk: "Here, two lady, one gentleman, bftsk wallag-
mala."
Kapur: "Gentleman is taking enjoyment of one lady,
while other lady holds lantern for them to see."
92


I introduce Henry Miller
Monk: (moving on to next tableau) "Here, three lady
achabatnaguptaghy."
Kapur: "Fat lady in middle is not satisfied with passion
of husband, so two ladies, one each side, with bamboo
sticks . .."
When the recital was finished, the monk offered to show
me his giant lingam for ten rupees. I declined, not knowing
whether the lingam was alive or not, and dragged Kapur
back down the rocky steps to the relative safety of the river.
Kapur, in a mood of religious elevation, persisted in ex-
plaining the temple tableaux to me all the way to the railway
station. Once there, we had a final set-to about a compendium
of neo-Sanskritic anatomical terms which he was trying to
pawn off on me, and then the train started.
Waving somewhat exaggeratedly, I thought, he tossed a
book through the window onto my lap, where a note fell out
reading "Come back soon to Banaras." It was a lovely book,
the pages still uncut except for the autographed frontispiece,
and the soft Swedish cover so seductive that for a moment I
honestly regretted that I would never come back to Banaras.
That was how I acquired the unexpurgated Tropic of
Capicorn back in the primitive days before Roth v. U.S.,
when Miller was proscribed in his native land. I read it on
the trip back to Delhi, but it seemed quite tame after Banarsi
temples.
One acrid June day a yoke of oxen carted an immense
crate up to my doorstep in Jangpura Extension, and made as
if to dump it on Sri Puri's geraniums.
There was not then, nor at any future time, a bill of lad-
ing, and not being gifted with extrasensory perception, I
seized upon the excellent opportunity offered by the bullocks
and had the crate drawn and quartered.
There were books inside-one hundred of them. As near
as I could make out, they were a tribute to me from the Li-
brary of Congress. This was puzzling, since the library had
up till then displayed no particular affection for me. They
were willing enough to shelve my acquisitions, but we never
reached the point where we shared intimacies.
93


Krishna Smiled

My neighbors took a utilitarian view of the books, and
soon came round asking when the "library" would open. It
seemed the books could serve no better purpose, so I set up
a card index and opened another front for capitalism.
The doubt which lurked in my mind was activated by a
telegram from the library six months later, asking whether
the "representative collection of Americana" (I thought then,
and still think, this an extravagant description at cable rates)
would reach Kathmandu in time for General SJBR's birthday,
by inference a day on which he was likely to miss his palm
leaves. The date they gave me was one week later.
Thackeray was by then among the Basques, so I con-
sulted Flagstaff of the American Express. He was a conscien-
tious fellow; had sold me a plane ticket once, and the train I
had intended to take fell into a gully. Flagstaff confirmed that
there was no easy way into Nepal. The automobiles Thackeray
had reported seeing there had been dissected and carried up
the Himalayas on the backs of porters. Clearly, I would have
no time for this sort of thing.
There was still Jaya Narayan, my dancing friend at the
Nepalese Embassy. I always thought of him as my dancing
friend because it was his invariable custom, whenever our
crowd went nightclubbing, to wait until the food was served
and then invite me to step out onto the floor. I owed many
cold dinners to his love for the dance, which he executed
abominably, his round face resting on my shoulder, his ear
attuned to the music of distant gongs.
J. N. informed me that His Highness King Tribhuvan of
Nepal was accustomed to flying down to Calcutta for the
weekend, and if I could get the crate across country by Fri-
day, he would make sure it got on the royal plane for the
journey back to Kathmandu.
The next morning I went on a raiding party, beating up
the streets a house at a time, seizing from terrified and non-
English-speaking women the books their husbands had bor-
rowed from me. Most of my neighbors were refugees from
the partitioned Punjab, and there is no telling what scenes of
violence and looting were recalled to their minds as I pounced
on my books.
94


I introduce Henry Miller
Eventually, I was only one short, and throwing in my
own cherished volume of Cotton Mather's Sermons, I sum-
moned the carpenter, the cartman, and the bullocks. The
books were crated and started on their six-mile journey to
the railway station. It would take them six hours to get there.
I hesitated to calculate the time to Calcutta, a distance of
nearly a thousand miles.
That was the last I saw of the representative collection
of Americana, and incidentally also of Henry Miller. Pre-
sumably he got into the crate and was smuggled into Nepal
by the King, who would have handed him over to the Defense
Minister, who, if my history is right, is a lineal descendant of
the prince who built that cunning little temple in Banaras.
The way I feel is that this particular gentleman is un-
likely to be upset by Tropic of Capricorn. Nevertheless, mis-
representation has taken place, and I believe the library
would not want to include the book in its birthday presenta-
tion. So if someone will pay my way, I'll go up to Kathmandu
and retrieve the book myself.

95


0
Touching the Untouchable
I was returning from a successful raid on Bombay
with a carload of books. At 1200 Fahrenheit, I kept the car
windows closed. To open them was to open a blast furnace.
Nevertheless, the car was inches deep in dust, grey powdery
dust that found its way into my palate, my inner ear, my
navel, and my nerves.
As dusk began erasing all those milestones which had
not yet been uprooted by the government in accordance with
its pledge to extirpate English from the countryside, it seemed
best to find a place to spend the night. I felt fortunate when,
at the outskirts of Dhulia, I came upon the Khan Hotel.
It wasn't much of a hotel as those things go, but I rented
a room and set the water to running deliriously cold from the
spigot which was set at knee height in the wall above the
slimy concrete floor of the washroom. I stripped my clothes
off, and then I heard a cough outside my door.
96


Touching the Untouchable
The cougher was Emmanuel. In all the months he had
worked for me as my bearer, he had never come to my door
uninvited. His demeanor was most circumspect. Once when
I came upon him smoking, he swallowed the cigarette. So
when he coughed audibly, I figured the hotel must be on fire.
I got back into my blue jeans and hair shirt. I didn't have
anything else to put on because the lock of the car trunk had
jammed, depriving me of clothing, toothbrush, and five
pounds of Viennese chocolate which I was importing into the
Delhi desert. When I got back home and had the trunk pried
open, I laid the whole sticky suitcase tenderly in the refriger-
ator. My clothes were a total loss, but I had what was the
largest chocolate bar ever seen east of Suez.
"Is the hotel burning?" I asked.
"Missahibji," said Emmanuel, shifting his bantam weight
from one foot to the other, hands clasped behind his back,
meaning he was going to ask a favor, "is better go."
I closed the door on him and returned to the washroom.
The spigot shined in the dark like Parsifal's vision of the Holy
Grail. But as I turned the water on once more, Emmanuel
made distressed sounds from behind the bathroom door itself.
"Missahibji, is better go. Go to Hindu hotel."
This interested me, for I had never known that Emman-
uel had a preference for Hindus. In fact, I believed his family
were originally Moslems before they became Methodists.
Again, I put on my jeans and shirt and went into the bedroom.
"Why?" and I fixed him with what I hoped was an im-
perious stare. He wasn't going to get me back out into that
dustbowl again without a pretty good reason.
"This Moslem place," Emmanuel kept on, giving me half
a thought at a time and letting it sink in.
"It looks clean enough," I said, and indeed it did, espe-
cially since I had asked the hotel sweeper to remove the
chamberpot full of urine that had been standing on the win-
dowsill when I arrived. At the time, I wondered whether the
urine was placed in the pot before or after the pot was placed
on the sill.
97


Krishna Smiled

"I went down kitchen, Missahibji, speak to cook for your
dinner. Cook smoking pipe with sweeper. Is better go to
Hindu place."
I sat down. "Jesus Christ, Emmanuel! Is this what Christ
died on Calvary for?"
Emmanuel knew me for the two-faced cad I am. He had
never seen me go to church. But he looked uncomfortable
enough for me to follow up my advantage with a lecture on
the Brotherhood of Man, the Iniquity of the Caste System,
and Emmanuel's personal duty as a Christian to help break
down the barriers that separate man from man.
At the end of the lecture, Emmanuel shifted his weight
back to the other army-booted foot and said, with more than
usual outspokenness, that I was missing the point. If the cook
shared his pipe with the sweeper, then the two men would
eat together too. That meant the sweeper ate in the kitchen.
"Oh, Lord, Emmanuel, he should eat in the kitchen. He's
a human being, you God-damned Indian."
"While he eat in kitchen, sweeper help Cook peel pota-
toes."
I began to feel a tiny doubt. "Yes?"
"Sweeper peel potatoes. But every day he go clean cham-
berpots. And he no have soap, Missahibji." Smiling shyly,
Emmanuel scooped up imaginary faeces from an imaginary
pot with his hand and plopped them softly on the ground.
Then he wiped his hand on his trouser leg.
We went out and found a Hindu hotel, where chamber-
pots are also in use, but where the people who clean the pots
are untouchable. Not just their presence, but their shadow is
untouchable. No caste Hindu would allow an Untouchable
or his shadow into the kitchen. No matter how I felt about
caste, I was less likely to contract amoebic dysentery, liver
flukes, jaundice, or hookworm among Hindus than among
casteless Moslems.
Reclining in the upper branches of the caste system is
very pleasant. You need never bother about waste disposal,
not even to diaper your own baby, because there are untouch-
able people to do it. They enter your home by a special door
98


Touching the Untouchable
and leave by that same door where in they went taking your
excreta with them. You don't ever have to worry about plumb-
ing. Your toilet may not run, but your Untouchable will. He's
been running for centuries.
It takes awhile for an American to realize that an Un-
touchable really is untouchable, no matter how democratic
the American may be. We are accustomed to prejudices which
evaporate when confronted with reality; "contact and ac-
quaintance" is our social workers' prescription for eroding
social barriers.
But Indian prejudices turn out to be based upon reality.
Fantastically inhuman reality.
An American Embassy officer, recently arrived in India,
was stalking some new construction being erected for the
embassy. The entire exterior of the building was scaffolded,
with women and children clambering up and down bearing
heavy baskets on their heads. Bill deplored child labor, and
the caste system which decrees that certain little girls are
born to be hod carriers and toilet cleaners. He called over a
little worker of seven or eight years of age and patted her on
the head. Then he smelled his hand and peered into the bas-
ket, which was wicker and leaking. She was thoroughly un-
touchable, a veritable pradigm of the sociologist's self-fulfill-
ing prophecy.
In India, human beings take the place of plumbing. In
the absence of the latter (which you can't afford), you use
the former (which are plentiful and cheap). But you don't
pet your sewer pipe, or act as though it were human.
I never acquisitioned any literature on the caste system.
This may strike the reader as a strange omission. But it is as
difficult for a Hindu as for a Scotch Presbyterian to see him-
self as others see him, and what was written about the Indian
social system while I was in India came mostly from foreign-
ers who were not themselves hobbled by the system they
were writing about. This is not surprising: Americans, in
search of an adequate conceptualization of our racial dilem-
ma, commissioned a Swede, Gunnar Myrdal, to carry it out.
Caste determines what a person is: what he may eat or
99


Krishna Smiled

not eat, whom he may eat it with, what clothes he wears,
whom he may marry, what job he will hold, and where he
may live. No matter what a man's merit, he may not rise to
a higher caste in this life, nor sink to a lower one through
bad hiuck.
As an adjunct to this system, millions of people have no
caste. They are outcastes, untouchables, or as Gandhi called
them, Harijans, Children of God. In some areas, Harijans
could not walk the streets of their home towns. The only jobs
they could hold were loathesome ones such as scavenging
and leather tanning. When they sallied forth to work, they
had to announce their contaminating presence in a loud voice.
They could not draw water from the village well, nor eat
with caste persons, nor attend school, nor enter a temple to
pray. Nor has there ever been a way for a man to acquire
caste. The most he could hope for was that if he played his
cards right, he might be rewarded by a better birth in his
next incarnation.
There have been instances in which Harijan groups have
adopted the customs of caste Hindus, moved out of their
"polluting" occupations, and successfully projected them-
selves into the caste hierarchy. It is also not unknown for a
caste to move into a more prestigious occupation and, by its
collective efforts, rise on the social scale. Efforts to climb the
hierarchy, of course, are predicated on the legitimacy of that
hierarchy.
My experience with caste and outeaste persuaded me
that, whatever "democracy" may mean to us, it cannot mean
the same to an Indian. The rigid social compartmentalization
and hierarchic relationships blessed by religion are as far re-
moved as one can get from the American ideal-breached, it
is true, but the ideal-of equality.
Yet India has been working a representative system of
government for more than two decades. One way to under-
stand this apparent anomaly is to see caste associations as
interest groups which enable their members, many of them
political illiterates, to participate in electoral politics in a
meaningful way.
100


Touching the Untouchable
Chauvinists sometimes claim it was the British who im-
posed caste on India, following their policy of divide and rule.
The claim cannot be supported historically. It is more likely
the result of an ages-long process which had completed its
evolution long before the British had heard of India.
According to the most likely theory, the original, dark-
skinned Dravidian inhabitants of India were overwhelmed
by successive waves of light-skinned Aryans from the north.
Defeated in war, the Dravidians were pushed to the southern-
most tip of their peninsula (where their languages survive
today) and likewise to the bottom of the social system. In
short, they were enslaved; bound in some cases to the land,
in others to particular trades. Thereafter, the conquerors kept
them in check through a system of rigid rules determining all
aspects of behavior, and stabilized the system by giving it the
sanction of religion.
Untouchability was outlawed by independent India.
Harijans were enfranchised along with everybody else in
1948 and guaranteed their rights as equal citizens before the
law. It is a crime now to enforce caste rules. But as every
American knows, establishing a legal claim to equality, and
enforcing that claim, is a man of a different color.
i never took kindly to criticism of American racism as
levelled by an Indian. As contemptible as it may be to refuse
service to blacks at lunch counters, I know of no one who has
regarded his food as polluted through the shadow of a black
falling across it. Nor can segregated bathrooms compare in
viciousness with denying people access to the village's only
source of water.
Although the question is boggled in India, I formed the
impression that caste is also a matter of race. Upper castes
tend to be light-complected, lower castes dark. In fact, the
Indian social system is like a poorly dyed garment-the top
has faded, draining all the color to the bottom. The lower you
are in the social scale, the darker your color is likely to be.
There are, of course, enough exceptions to prove the rule.
I had an acquaintance who was Undersecretary to one
of the ministries in the government of India. One day while
101


Krishna Smiled

we were having tea at the Swiss Coffee House on Connaught
Circus, he told me he was planning to marry. He was thirty
years old, well above the age at which most Indians have
founded their families. Naturally, he would consider marry-
ing only within his own elite caste, and preferred a girl from
his ancestral village.
But Shyam Lall had been cut off from his home by Parti-
tion. Now that things had calmed a bit, he planned to go to
Sind on his annual leave and bring a bride back to Delhi. He
had already written to the village elders asking them to scout
up some suitable candidates.
I wished him luck, and told him I would be very happy
to see him back in Delhi soon, decently wed. And Shyam Lall
did, in due course, return to Delhi, but without a bride.
There were very few single girls available of the right
specifications. I commiserated. Not even one? Well, perhaps
one. She was literate, the right age, and the dowry would
have been sufficient to enable him to study in U.K. for a year
.... Shyam Lall's voice trickled off into uncertainty.
"Why didn't you marry her?" I prompted. "She sounds
perfect."
"She was very dark," Shyam Lall replied.
I couldn't bring myself to look at him. On the surface of
the black formica table top where I looked instead, my face
appeared reflected as a dull blob. There was nothing but a
shadow of Shyam Lall, for he was black, as black as the for-
mica.
In the centuries-long process by which caste has become
linked to color, it is apparent that the British and the Aryans
had some help from the Indians.
Some change is taking place: as landless farmers migrate
to the cities, as workers on factory assembly lines rub shoul-
ders, as children crowd into city schools, caste rules blur
over. And as in our own country, the weight of law makes a
difference.
The first week of my stay in India, a Harijan was arrested
for attempting to enter a temple. During my last week in
India, a similar incident occurred. But in the later case, the
102


Touching the Untouchable
Harijan complained and the complaint reached the Chief
Minister of Bihar. Gathering the entire cabinet about him,
the Minister commenced to walk from the State House to the
temple, gathering Harijans behind him as he went. Knocking
at the temple gates, he demanded admission. The priests re-
fused to open the gates, whereupon they were arrested.
The story should sound not unfamiliar to us now, but it
happened in India before it happened in our own South.
How does a person who is without caste find his place in
a caste society? How does one sniff out barriers in order to
avoid them, and at the same time retain one's status as an
acceptable guest? Caste was here before I was. And of course,
a diplomat's mission is not to reform, but to make contact with
the society in which he finds himself.
I was standing on the Mall at Darjeeling, when my friend
Shankar, a former Chief of Intelligence and a Kashmiri Brah-
min, sailed up to me in his Cambridge boating jacket and his
paisley cravat. We fell into conversation about Indian ethno-
graphy. Shankar claimed that he could look at any man or
woman in India and spot his caste and where he came from,
within a radius of twenty miles.
Studying geography in people's faces was a hobby of
mine too (one that was to get me into trouble later in Afghan-
istan), so I readily accepted instruction from Shankar who,
God and the British knew, was an authority.
First he picked a Bhutia-close-cropped Mongolian head,
calf muscles as big as my waist, bulky yellow and red kimona.
Next, a covey of Buddhist monks in saffron robes on a pil-
grimage to some holy glacier a hundred miles into the moun-
tains. Then a train of Tibetan yak wallopers, big smelly swag-
men swinging down through the passes to trade their
gewgaws in Delhi.
The majority of people passing by were sherpas, the
beasts of burden of the Himalayas. Men, women, and others
who elsewhere might have been children, labored up and
down the mountain with loads the size of their own bodies
strapped to their backs, saddled cruelly round their fore-
heads. They wore rags of no nationality, and they all looked
103


Krishna Smiled

alike in the way that cattle all look alike. There was a deadly
uniformity in their gait and a tremendous nothing in their
eyes. You looked at them and nothing looked back at you. For
them there was no beauty in the mountains, which were their
doom and which I had travelled a thousand miles to see. All
they saw was the spot eight inches in front of them where
they had somehow or other to put the other foot.
Then this Mona Lisa appeared, mincing along in a grey
nightgown sort of thing with a striped apron over it. As cool
as Kanchenjunga, I thought to myself, and as inaccessible.
"That," said Shankar, "is a Lepcha." Not: "She's a Lep-
cha," or "What a remarkably handsome woman, isn't it?" or
anything else to indicate she was human, but "that" as though
he were back in the police station among his files. I began to
realize how aloof Shankar felt from these costumed natives,
he in his Cambridge boating jacket and properly tied cravat.
He had photographs of all of India's fantastic variety of hu-
manity cataloged and filed in his orderly brain; and each pho-
tograph was stamped "Wanted."
Darjeeling is one of those Ararats of privilege which were
left protruding when the British tide receded from India. It
fronts on a stupefying range of the Himalayas, placed there
by a beneficent Raj to shield Europeans from the summer of
the Indian plains. Every street seems to run slambang up
against the flank of Kanchenjunga, only Kanchenjunga is fifty
miles away.
The monstrous overstuffed hotel where both Shankar
and I were staying had fine vantage points for painting the
mountains without getting in the way of the breeze that comes
from the shanty town below the Mall. You could still be
borne along this Mall at a trot by six uniformed Indians with
bells on their feet that jingle quicker than the mules' bells do
as the caravans pick their mountain way at a pace less likely
to kill the animals.
In the days of the British Raj, hill stations such as Dar-
jeeling, Mussoori, Simla, Shillong, Ootacomund provided the
exiled administrators and their families with a refuge from
India. There they built little cottages right out of Teddington-
104


Touching the Untouchable
on-Thames and stone churches that were pure Stowe-in-the-
Wold. God was generally believed to be still alive, and the
monarchy certainly was. Billiard tables and polo ponies were
ever at the ready, and only on Sunday was curry served at
the Club.
The receding tides of Empire left the hill stations stran-
ded like Noah's Arks. A few of the old inhabitants lingered
on, afraid to go home because their money wouldn't go as far
in England, and besides, they had been so long away that
"home" was nearly as strange to them as India was.
So the half-empty grand hotels were home to the sur-
vivors of the flood of independence: herds of old warhorses
and army mules, giant panda lady missionaries who still used
the word "native," bilious giraffe-like planters wandering mo-
rosely about buying drinks for anyone who would listen to
their labor problems, and the British Colonel (Ret.) and his
lady, complaining about their livers loudly over dinner: the
hippopotamus and his mate.
These creatures were remnants of the old ruling caste,
and "caste" must be taken seriously in this country of caste.
The western visitor must decide upon arrival whether to
throw his lot in with them or go over to the unknown, to the
Indians.
Going over to the Indians is not easy, because then the
whites write you off. The white man who has never before
thought of caste may panic at the prospect of losing his. And
for what? The Indian Indians won't trust you anyway, and
the Kept Indians have been admitted to the Club.
It is very trying to be white in Darjeeling. You feel guilty
of some terrible crime. But you look around, and there is no
crime. Just these beautiful mountains which no one can climb.
Practically.
A man approached the point where Shankar and I were
standing. He had the blunt, bronzed face and squared-off
hands of a sherpa; he wore western trousers and a zipper
jacket. His clothes were not in themselves so unusual that
one would pick him out because of them. Nevertheless, Shan-
kar and I noticed him at the same instant. My friend, the
105


Krishna Smiled
former Chief of Intelligence, scrutinized him. Then, dismiss-
ing him with a gesture of the hand said, "That man is a
Nepalese."
"Don't be silly!" I replied. "It's Tenzing." It wasn't his
nationality I was talking about-Tenzing is a Nepalese and a
Sherpa-but the man was transcendantly Tenzing.
He walked erect, his arms swung out unencumbered, his
eyes moved brightly from point to point, and when I smiled at
him, he smiled back. In order for a sherpa to look one brightly
in the eye, there had to have been an act of God in his life.
The sort of act of God that hauls a man to the top of Mount
Everest and places the arm of his white, educated, wealthy,
European, sophisticated, simple brother around him. It was
Tenzing all right.
Tenzing headed toward us-though Shankar hadn't ad-
mitted yet that it was he. I sensed his dilemma. If the man was
Tenzing, he was a sherpa and practically an Untouchable.
Gandhi had called Untouchables the Children of God; Bryl-
cream and Rolex had plastered photos of Tenzing all over the
countryside; and my friend of the intelligence was educated
at Cambridge.
But how in the name of all that's holy could he shake
hands with a sherpa? So he said it wasn't Tenzing at all;
Tenzing was in Delhi.
Tenzing wasn't in Delhi, and here he put his hand out.
I shook it and reassured myself superfluously: "You are Ten-
zing, are you not?"
He smiled a tremendous smile whose beauty erased the
impression of duplicity instilled by the ads, and said he was.
Shankar also shook hands. We asked him how he was, and
Tenzing asked us how we were. Then he invited us to tea.
I was overwhelmed. Tea with the conqueror of Everest!
We accepted and arranged to meet later in the afternoon at
his mountain hut. Tenzing looked at his Rolex watch and
moved off.
"Shall we go together?" I asked Shankar. "Oh," said the
former Chief of Intelligence. "I shan't go. Whatever would
I say to the fellow?"
106


Touching the Untouchable
He smoothed his silky white hair back from his handsome
face that had almost the features of a European, and said
good afternoon.
After Shankar left me-he was due for billiards at the
Club-I stood there with my elbows on the railing of the Mall
that deceives one into thinking that Darjeeling is a pleasure
ship in the trough of gentle waves. From the Mall I could
see Kanchenjunga without straining myself. From a nearby
hill, I might have seen Everest itself, if I had gotten out of
bed in time.
Only two men since Creation have trod the nakedness of
Everest, and one of those two had just invited me to tea. You
know, I couldn't have invited Tenzing to the hotel; they
wouldn't have let him in. And I: did I belong in Tenzing
Norkay's hut? or at that dreadful Noah's Ark of a hotel with
Shankar, sifting through his bushels of cephalic indices?
I would like to know what Tenzing saw from the top of
Everest. Was it dangerous?
I couldn't figure the whole thing out, and allowing my-
self to get engaged in bookstalls, teatime passed and I did
not go to Tenzing's.

107


Beware the Orakzai, my son

One night, as I was hiking barefoot out of Afghan-
istan's Desert of Death, a monstrous mouldering mud ruin
rose hulking against the earth's curve, across the dry bed of
the Helmand River. It was all that is left of Qala Bist, the
Twentieth Fort that Alexander built on his march from the
Oxus to the Ganges. Now there was a march! Above the fort's
miles of thick mud walls, Orion lay stretched out upon his
side, his dagger as ready as ever the Macedonian's was to
pierce the night now settling down upon the Hindu Kush.
We had left the jeep with its nose buried in a sand dune,
and our Pathan scout Faqir-jaan hanging loose on the back
seat with his rifle across his knees. We would have to hike
back to Ch'angiers. It was twenty-six kilometers across the
desert as the vulture flies, and there were plenty of them fly-
ing. Others just hunched about expectantly, looking as though
they remembered us. Earlier in the day, when the jeep was
still operable, Ransom had charged a distant vulture, not
108


Beware the Orakzai, my son
knowing, or not caring, that the giant birds need a fifty-yard
run before they can get airborne. The result was that the
vulture rapidly closed the distance with us, getting bigger
as he neared, and only just cleared the top of the windshield
when he took off, spraying his filthy reek all over us. Was it
possible that same bird was watching us now, ready to chal-
lenge us to another game of chicken?
All this had happened before the motor shook itself loose
from its moorings and left us stranded miles from anything
but Alexander's ghostly fort, and without the two-way radio
which everybody else had sense enough to carry along. There
was nothing to do but walk, leaving Ransom's man behind
to prevent the jeep from falling salvage to wandering tribes-
men.
The night was clear and dark. There were no cities within
a thousand miles, and without their reflected glow, the sky
took on an aspect which western man has not seen since the
Industrial Revolution, but which Afghans are privileged to
see every night. Unbelievable cascades of stars lighted the
sky; occasionally there came an answering sparkle from un-
derground rills which emerged momentarily to the surface of
the desert, then flung themselves once more under the sand.
The water was conducted here by the Persians thousands of
years ago, no one knows how, and it is sweet and safe to drink.
What would pollute it but man? and here there are no men.
Just one. A figure appeared on the track ahead of us, his
rifle bumping against the starbright sky. A man would no
more go forth in Afghanistan without his weapon than he
would without a certain other, less detachable feature of his
anatomy, which he uses as readily.
Ransom shifted his own hand to the pistol in his belt. I
hoped he was getting ready to follow rule number one, which
is to hand over your gun on request. Afghans shoot straighter
than anybody, and a gun is the thing they will shoot you for
quickest. (The others are zar, zan, zamin: gold, women, land.
We had neither gold nor land, and I had no illusions that
Ransom would die protecting me. All things considered, it
seemed best to give up the gun.)
109


Krishna Smiled

The figure drew abreast of us, uttered the words "salaam
aleikum" to which I had the wit to reply "aleikum salaam,"
and melted into the magical night behind us. Suddenly I
understood those words for the first time: "Peace be with
you" is a declaration that you do not intend to shoot.
Now a more pedestrian problem assailed me. My feet
were being flayed by the shoes custom-made for me in Pesha-
war by a Chinese communist (I know he was Chinese: I
assume he was some kind of degenerate). I took them off and
walked barefoot in the ankle deep dust. The November day
had been hot, but once the sun went down, the heat quickly
dissipated and the dust was as cool and soothing as talcum
to my raw sores. The air began to grow rather chilly, and I
wondered just how cold the night was likely to get.
Then we hit gravel. I walked till I couldn't take another
step, goaded by Ransom's observation that the women of the
Coochies, Afghanistan's nomads, go barefoot all year round.
These fantastic women, unveiled and breasty, march the
length of the country from spring to fall, and then from fall
to spring they march it back again, driving herds, loading
and unloading camels, pitching and unpitching tents, cook-
ing over open fires, bearing babies by the roadside and hurry-
ing to rejoin the line of march which never waits for them.
While he talked, Ransom slashed my shoes fore and aft,
lashed them to my feet by means of strips which he tore off
his shirttail. "You would have made a lousy Coochie," he
said. "Coochies make lousy Coochies," I answered. "Have you
ever seen an old woman in their caravans? The ones you
think are old are twenty-two."
I don't know where the Coochies draw their strength
from, but I drew mine from my disdain of Ransom. He had
done nothing all week but bitch about being saddled with a
woman, though it was my understanding that he had agreed
to my coming along on the trip. He never thought I could
make it over the rough spots, and was always ready to extend
a sardonic hand, which I was equally ready to bite.
Machismo was Ransom's long suit, and he wore it like
a hermit his hairy shirt. But nothing is more offensive to me
than the cult of masculinity, which poses with rifle in hand
110


Beware the Orakzai, my son
and its foot upon the neck of a woman. Ransom was in his
element among Pathans, to whom the attitude comes natur-
ally.
Ransom and I met through no fault of ours when our
charge d'affaires in Kabul told him to pick me up at the hotel
in Peshawar on his way up. Transportation in and out of
Afghanistan was pretty chancy, the British diplomatic courier
had been shot up the week before and his secrets scattered
over the mountainside with the largesse of the illiterate. The
embassy tried to provide escort service for all official Ameri-
cans coming into the country.
Ransom and I took an instant dislike to one another de-
spite the fact that there was a limited selection of American
bachelors around. He hated my independence, which seemed
to threaten his superiority; and I hated his superiority, which
threatened my independence. We maintained a state of war-
fare throughout my stay in Afghanistan. He was demonstrably
stronger than I, but I was quicker witted. Each time he lost
a battle, he would sic Faqir on me, who was smarter than he
was. I worried about that at first. Faqir was on his home
territory, and he was a bit more than six and a half feet tall.
But the Pathan knew a winner when he saw one, and soon
began to side with me against his boss. That was when I be-
gan using the second half of his name, which means some-
thing like "dear heart." Faqir-jaan made all the difference be-
tween my killing Ransom and my not killing him.
From Peshawar, Ransom and I set out northward through
the Khyber Pass, which turned out, to my surprise, not to be
a large oaken door fitted between two mountains. Somehow,
that is how I pictured it all through my childhood reading of
Kipling. The pass is thirty-two miles long and follows the
meandering Kabul River as it cuts through the mountains of
the Hindu Kush. It is a beautifully engineered all-weather
highway, and at all the places where the road bends and
bulges out above the valley, there are rock cairns with little
flags poked in them, graves or shrines of Moslem saints. It
was from behind these that Kipling heard the telltale rifle
snick that comes a moment before the bullet's whine.
At Landi Kotal the twentieth century stopped, and
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Krishna Smiled

abruptly we were riding on an unpaved track that crosses the
southern ranges of the Hindu Kush to Kabul. The mountains
are rugged and bare as the face of the moon, rock and sand
and dust unrelieved by vegetation, or anything reminiscent of
life on earth. By jeep, it is a twelve-hour journey of arduous
climbs, sudden descents, and close steering between white-
washed rocks that are all that differentiate the road from
the wastes around it. Camel caravans traverse this stretch in
a week or a month; how long the pedestrians take, and there
were a good many of them, is a matter for conjecture. Who
among them would care to measure it?
Like a dirty, buff-colored rug heaped carelessly on a
scarred cement floor, the Hindu Kush rises convoluted and
riven by erosion. The road follows the mountains' contortions
where it can, and bridges ravines where it must. Strewn across
the infrequent plateau, rounded boulders attest to the flash
floods that tear down without warning from the mountains
to engulf, briefly, the plain; and sieve themselves into the
sandy soil leaving no trace of green.
These mountains shield India from the warlike and no-
madic tribes of Asia, who traditionally make their living by
looting the bucolic plainsmen to the south. The passes are
crucial: whoever holds them controls the fate of India. While
the British ruled India, there were continuous border skirm-
ishes, since immortalized by Shirley Temple as Wee Willie
Winkie.
At the time of my visit, the borders were quiet. The gov-
ernment aimed to keep things that way, and that was the ma-
jor reason, apart from poverty, that there were no paved
roads in the country save for the one through Khyber and
another that ran from the center of Kabul out to the King's
Palace. As one government official put it to me, "Why should
we build highways? So the Russians can march through?"
Times change. With Soviet assistance, the Afghans have
now laid paved roads all over the place, spoiling the terrain
for future writers.
The view from Lataband Pass had not changed much
since the British stood there-or Alexander, for that matter.
112


Beware the Orakzai, my son
Kabul lies in its saucer depression, a hive of mud houses, each
with its own protective mud wall with a chute that empties
the latrines into the street.
The Kabul River curves through town, and the townsmen
sit on its dike sunning themselves, gloriously unoccupied save
for gossiping and polishing their rifles. Afghans are great
fighters, and this leaves them little to do in time of peace.
A traveller who passed through Kabul in 1333 wrote that
the city is inhabited by a tribe of Persians called Afghans:
"They hold mountains and defiles, possess considerable
strength, and are mostly highwaymen."
And so they are: in a country without natural wealth,
and where constant invasions raise doubts that a man may
live to reap what he has sowed, the people began to harvest
their invaders. This is dangerous business, and no one ever
accused the Pathans of being pantywaists. They are great
guerrilleros, and one of the problems of modern government
is to acclimatize the citizens to peaceful occupations.
The Pathans believe themselves to be the lost tribes of
Israel. Unlike their decadent relations, they retain their tribal
organization. Nevertheless, their names are not so well known
to history as are those of the sons of Jacob, so a poem has
been devised as an aide memoire:
'Twas Ghilzai and the Yusufzai
Did Dir and Wazir on the way
All mimsy were the Qizilbash
And the Mohmands are grey.
"Beware the Orakzai, my son,
Durrans that snick, Baluch that Swat,
Beware Afridi and Mahsud,
The frumious Khatak!"
A man's whole loyalty is absorbed by his tribe. Against
this claim, neither considerations of family nor patriotism
toward the sovereign state Afghanistan can make much head-
way. Rather, it is a matter of the loyalty of one tribe to an-
other, and to the throne. Despite the considerable amount of
113


Krishna Smiled

propaganda generated by the government press-and-trash de-
partment, I found no evidence of a separate Pathan nation-
alism. The romance of Pukhtunistan (to be carved mostly
out of Pak territory) seems to have been hoked up by the
Afghan government with the connivance of India.
Likewise divided into warring tribes were the European
types in which the city abounded. These were people who
had opted at the close of the second World War more or less
willingly for the Free World, whatever that could possibly
mean in relation to Afghanistan. They imparted a continental
flavor to the provincial scene, adding a touch of weltschmerz
to the shish kebab. Every single one of them would have de-
parted on a moment's notice, if he had had anywhere to go
and a visa to get him in.
There were a number of Free Poles, so free they didn't
know what to do with themselves. Mostly they tutored the
children of wealthy Afghans. Armenians there were, refugees
from both the Russians and the Turks. Personable young Ger-
man engineers who had fought in the Wehrmacht, never in
the SS, and had had no idea what terrible things the Nazis
were doing. ("Do you know what is going on in your prisoner
of war camps in Korea?" one asked me.) Americans, Ger-
mans, French, Poles, Russians, we were all Europeans, no
matter how terrible recent history had been; and we have
so much in common in an alien and barbarous land, nicht
wahr? Hans, stocky, virile, good-looking, smelled of death.
There were Jews, too; but I took care not to meet them.
Their situation was precarious enough, without being con-
tacted by foreigners. Two weeks before my arrival, the
bodies of two Jewish men were found stuffed down a well.
The system of justice had not yet raised itself from the tribal
level. But Jews do not participate in Puktunwali, the tribal
code by which Pathans extract an eye for an eye, a life for
a life. So there was no one to avenge their deaths nor appre-
hend their murderers. The Jews just went silently about their
daily lives, only more silently than before.
Kabul wears quickly. Not because it is small, nor be-
cause it is drab. The city has charm, and we know that the
114


Beware the Orakzai, my son
Emperor Babur on his peacock throne at Delhi mourned his
Afghan capital. The difficulty which Kabul presents for the
foreigner is that there seems to be no way of establishing con-
tact with people. The mud walls and burqas have been there
so long, that they have taken root in people's minds.
Even those foreigners who had lived a long time in the
city told me that nothing was published here. But the em-
bassy interpreter, he whom I dug out from under the news-
papers of yesteryear, found me a bookshop and helped me
buy a pretty good assortment, which can now be consulted
at the Library of Congress.
But when my acquisitions had been bundled and sent
out by plane (there were no railroads nor any road to the
sea), my previously vague sense of frustration crystallized.
Walking dusty streets hemmed by dusty walls, I saw a door
open at the end of a lane. A man, perhaps six and a half feet
in height, a sombre man but wearing a brilliant orange turban
wound around a skull cap sewn with golden sequins, stood
poised in the doorway. Then, closing his home behind him,
he strode off the dusty stage and into his world. For me, all
doors seemed closed. As so often in this country, I remem-
bered Omar Khayyam:
There was a door to which I found no key:
There was a veil past which I could not see ...
Perhaps things would be different outside of Kabul.
Everyone agreed that city Afghans were but a pale reflection
of their country cousins, who exhibited more of the virtues
and fewer of the failings of primitive man. I was at a loss as
to how to justify further travel, however, since, with govern-
ment control of the presses, I was fairly certain I would find
nothing in the provincial towns that differed from what I
had procured in the capital.
But our charge d'affaires was one who thought it a good
idea in principle for officers to see as much territory as they
could, regardless of any immediate profit to be gained there-
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Krishna Smiled

by, and suggested a trip to Ghazni. I quickly accepted, even
though it mean putting up with Ransom and more machismo.
As agricultural attach6, Ransom's purpose in making the
trip was to estimate the size of the wheat crop. That was how
I got to see village Afghanistan. We drove in a southwesterly
direction out of Kabul, never beyond sight of mountains.
Sometimes they were just a purple rim on the horizon; some-
times, crowding in close, they squeezed the road between
them.
The villages stand fortified and withdrawn a discreet
distance from the highway. Their mud walls are slotted for
firing through, and at each corner of town there is an observa-
tion tower. I didn't see any provisions for pouring down
molten lead, but I wouldn't have been surprised to see them.
Ransom would pull the jeep in through the village gates
(open during the day, but barred at night against raids of
neighboring clans), and in a moment we would be surrounded
by the men of the village who, it seems, have no work to do
since women do it all. Ransom would engage them in a dis-
cussion of the crops, through the medium of Faqir-jaan. I
would remain inside the jeep, sitting aloof and akimbo, one
of Faqir's turbans on my head.
Women's faces are an obscenity here, and the penalty
for indecent exposure was instant death. None of us was sure
how much latitude might be allowed a foreign woman. Ran-
som wanted to find out, but I didn't think the effort was
worthwhile. Nor would I have gone under a burqa, even as
a joke. It was no joke to me. The alternative was to face the
world like a boy.
In one village, an elderly man invited us into his home
for tea. Passing between mud walls, we found ourselves on
a pleasant verandah overhung by grape vines. The crowds
of children with skin as tough as elephant hide and coated
all over in excrement were shooed away. Only one young boy
remained to serve us, a pretty, well-cared for lad who poured
water for us to wash our hands by. He was apparently the
old man's mistress. We were served tea and a bowl of fruit,
including the most voluptuous melon I have ever tasted; then
Ransom ordered us out and on to the next village.
116


Beware the Orakzai, my son
Judging from the presence of children of all ages, there
must be women living in Afghan villages. I never saw any.
They don't even have the right the camels and donkeys have,
to walk free in the sun.
Along the road, Ransom felt compelled to shoot at every
bird that flew by. Since he also insisted on driving, and the
road was bumpy, he wasn't having much luck.
I offered to drive, because I could see that if he didn't
shoot anything he was going to go into an awful pet. But the
S.O.B. wouldn't yield the driver's seat; it was beneath his
dignity to let a woman drive. Instead, he bade me steer from
the passenger side. So, trundling along at fifteen miles an
hour, I held the wheel while he bagged a few see-see. These
are tiny fowl about the size of cornish hen, except that Victor
Borge wasn't along to disembowel and process them and we
got to do that ourselves. We roasted and ate them along the
roadside at whatever hour Ransom happened to feel hungry.
It was pathetic to see how happy he was.
The result of all this lolly-goggling was that we pulled
into Ghazni late at night. This town was built a thousand
years ago atop a 7,000 foot high conical mountain; it was
once one of the magical cities of the world; but it is my duty
to report that things have gone downhill since. The precipi-
tous streets are more like walls than streets, more ruin than
wall, as the bricks which pave them have worked loose over
the course of centuries. Ghazni has, in fact, largely fallen
apart and rolled down the mountain.
At midnight the streets were deserted, as well they might
be, and a cold wind whistled down them, cutting us to the
bone. From a speaker mounted in the market place, a radio
blared as though warning the soundless night to stay out of
town. I recognized the music right away: it was whatever
Aram Khachaturian listened to with his inner ear that caused
him to write the "Sabre Dance."
There reputedly was a hotel in Chazni, and Faqir ques-
tioned a pair of policemen about it, out patrolling their beat
with Russian rifles on their backs, the barrels stuffed with
cotton wadding. Yes, there was one, sort of. The Hotel Ad-
dams, we named it when we found it. There was one room,
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Krishna Smiled

a large anteroom, and a raft of servants. Ransom ordered
them to pull one cot into the bedroom (for himself) and one
into the anteroom (for me). I countermanded the order. There
were just too many unknown characters around for me to
sleep in that anteroom, and too many windows and doors
(all windowless and doorless) for them to come in by. I was
going to sleep with either Faqir or Ransom, I didn't care
which.
So Ransom and I continued our war of nerves in the bed-
room, which had just one door that needed watching, and
Faqir gratefully moved into the anteroom. Ransom didn't
need watching. He was the kind of man who likes limp women
with wispy hair and no mind.
I was the first to wake next morning, and ordering the
servant to bring me a bucket of water from the jooie (the gut-
ter which supplies both intake and outlet for Afghan towns),
splashed around a bit to start the sap running. We break-
fasted on hot tea, boiled eggs (chicken, I suppose) and
yesterday's nan. Then I put on Faqir's turban once more
and went out into the bazaar, while Ransom sat down on a
rock to clean his rifle. He was immediately surrounded by
a crowd of admirers, all eager to show off their own rifles,
largely handmade: rifle-making is a sort of cottage industry
in Afghanistan.
Ghazni is the town where Sultan Mahmud reigned in
the eleventh century, turning his court into one of the great
intellectual and artistic centers of the East, a gathering place
of poets, artists, historians, and philosophers. In between
poetry readings, Mahmud invaded India sixteen times, ac-
complishing his work of destruction with such energy that
he became known as the Idol Breaker. He was immortalized
a generation later by Omar Khayyam, who dedicated the
Rubaiyat to one of Mahmud's successors, and incidentally
gives the old rogue honorable mention. Today, I am sorry
to say, the lion and the lizard keep the court where Mahmud
gloried and drank deep.
I found no clue here to the greatness that was Ghazni.
Only the bazaar stalls were still busy, selling sugar cane and
118


Beware the Orakzai, my son
silver and wheat and sheepskin jackets and karakul (persian
lamb) skins and spices and turbans and burqas and camel
dung to tribesmen muffled in skins and cloaks and cloths and
padded Tartar kimonas. I could have looked and touched and
smelled and listened for days without tiring.
But Ransom had said one hour: the great man wanted to
hit the road for Kandahar and shoot his idiot gun again. Since
he was quite capable of going off and leaving me stranded,
I kept an eye on the time. I did manage to buy myself a sheep-
skin jacket with the fur side inside and the leather side fanci-
fully embroidered. Then I hightailed it back to the hotel, just
in time to catch the last jeep for Kandahar.
Fifteen years later, this jacket appeared on the cover of
Harper's Bazaar, even more fancifully priced. Soon the psy-
chedelic clothing shops were filled with them. But even after
they had become a cliche of the fashion-ridden, I could not
put mine on but that I would smell camel dung burning,
grate my feet against ancient brick, and see a lone rider on
a high-stepping mare come out of the desert, a beautiful child
perched like a bird behind him, her eyes as empty as her
world.
Kandahar is supposed to have been founded by Alex-
ander the Great. Later it became the center of the Gandhara
school of sculpture that wed Greek and Buddhist traditions.
In the twentieth century, it graduated to factories. Now it
was the base of operations for Morrison-Knudson Afghanistan,
under contract to build dams for the Afghan government.
With typical American brashness, the company advertised
that it had moved more earth than anyone else since time
began.
Quite possibly it has. Near Kandahar, at a place called
Kajakai, you drive through miles of dry-as-bone mountains,
rocks, brambles, thorns, no blade of grass; then up a hill,
through a canyon at the end of which is a mammoth cement
wall, just tacked to the mountains. You drive up on top of
that wall, and over on the other side of it is the bluest blue
lake that ever was, water where no water could ever be,
rising step-by-step up the sides of the mountains, burying
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Krishna Smiled

hills, creeping through gullies, and finally washing up against
little subsidiary barriers. So blue, it should have been a mirage,
except real ducks were circling it, and Ransom shot one for
our lunch.
We pushed farther west, Ransom investigating reports
that the filling of the dam had increased salinity in the soil,
rendering it useless. Every few miles now we mired in sand-
dust, rather-as we penetrated the Dash-ti-Marg. Each time,
Ransom managed to free us by means of the winch on the
front bumper and a chain attached to-what? That was al-
ways a problem, for there were no trees. Usually, it meant
digging a pit, throwing the spare tire into it with a chain at-
tached, and covering it with sand and boulders; then en-
gaging the winch and slowly pulling the car out, me steering
and the two men pushing. In this way, we ultimately reached
the Morrison-Knudsen camp at Ch'angiers. It was worth the
effort.
The camp was filled with hardworking, healthy Ameri-
can proletarians who walked in dignity, grease-stained and
smelling of sweat. They talked bluntly and with honesty to
one another and to me. Isolated in this vast desert, they made
me homesick for all those splendid hardhatted fellows walk-
ing steel beams back homrne, who whistle when a girl goes
by, not because she's pretty but because she's there and life
is good.
How long it had been since I had seen a working man
who was not servile! An Indian worker is scum. He is treated
like scun, he lives like scum, he believes himself to be scum.
American dam builders in India resisted hiring Indians in
managerial posts, whatever their academic accomplishments,
because they would not soil their hands. They were afraid of
becoming scum. The Indian worker has no dignity. And with-
out dignity, what is a life of labor worth?
The Afghan, on the other hand, is full of dignity, but
he does not work. To be a Pathan and to hold a job is a con-
tradiction in terms. Men are for fighting; women or other
inferior tribes do the work.
At Ch'angiers I was stunned by the sight of a man wear-
120


Beware the Orakzai, my son
ing trousers, shirt, hat, and shoes, carrying a piece of heavy
equipment on his shoulders. Why was such a rich man work-
ing?
Having been reminded that the laborer is worthy of his
hire, I had to take my whole world apart and put it back to-
gether again. It was a reminder I sorely needed, for caste is
contagious.
There wasn't a single American woman within miles of
Ch'angiers, and when word got around that I was not Ran-
som's property, the men threw a square dance. They scared
up an accordian, a ukelele, a caller from Iron Mountain, and
as much wine as we could hold.
The wine was by courtesy of the company's chief me-
chanic, a paisan of superb moral fiber who couldn't bear to
see good grapes go to waste. It was an offense to the gods to
eat them raw, as the Afghans do. Louis had put together
a winepress and a still, with the help of an inner tube and
a feather pillow, so that we had both wine and grapa, which
is a kind of Italian slivovitz. The band tuned up, we filled
our cups, and in the fires of spring the wintry garments of
repentance flung. Omar, you were right: wine tastes sweeter
out here in your desert!
Ransom retired early with a good book. He couldn't
stand seeing me behave like a girl when I hadn't allowed
him to patronize me. So the next afternoon he dragged me
away from my new friends to tour the surrounding country-
side and we broke down near Qala Bist.
I have always been glad we did. One must walk the
earth in order to become real, and I walked a good bit of it
that night. I had flown over that desert once before in a
DC-6, and the heat waves rising above the contoured earth
bounced the plane so that the ceiling came down and hit us
on the head, then dropped us into a bottomless pit. The pilot
vomited at the controls, the rest of us at our seats. It was
all a maniacal amusement park ride, but I never felt it had
anything to do with Afghanistan or with life on earth.
Walking the desert on my bare feet, following along
beside the dry bed of the Helmand River, I felt more alive
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Krishna Smiled
than I have ever felt before or since. My feet were on an age-
old track; my safe arrival subject to my own control-my en-
durance, my wits, my courage, my stupidity. I thought of
Alexander, dead with all his legions; Timur the Lame, Geng-
his Khan, and all the rest who harried this land. Over at
Bamian, giant Bodhisattvas stand rooted to the mountain-
side, their noses knocked off by Moslem iconoclasts. What-
ever else intruders have wrought, they have proved that, in
one area of the world, the sword is mightier than the pen.
Sighting dead Qala Bist bearing Orion on its battlements,
a song of myself arose within me and will not be quelled until
I die. I am I, I sang wordlesslessly, and though the mountains
didn't care and the desert did not respond, it was all that
mattered to me.

122


Wandering through Pomegranate Bazaar,
I eat one seed too many
Lack of a Pukhto dictionary constituted an in-
tolerable lacuna in the Asian collection of the Library of Con-
gress. It didn't seem right to slight the Pathans. Not only are
they the dominant people of Afghanistan and the North-West
Frontier Province of Pakistan; they are the only people in Asia
who look like me.
The most accurate and comprehensive Pukhto diction-
ary was published in Lahore in 1877 and sold out at once to
all those stalwart, Pukhto-speaking officers upon whom the
Empire depended. It was hard to see how anyone could take
up where Kipling had left off, without a good dictionary.
But I never came close to one in over a year of searching
my territory, including Afghanistan itself where of course
only trash could survive the total government control of the
information media.
A possibility opened up when Ramamurthi, my book-
dealer in Delhi, told me that when he fled Lahore in 1947 he
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Krishna Smiled

had left behind his entire stock of books. His brother Gopal
stayed on in the old university town and in due course re-
opened the store. Perhaps Gopal, I reasoned, would be able
to locate a copy of the dictionary in the very city where it had
been published.
So I went to Lahore, something which Ramamurthi him-
self had not done since Partition. But even Gopal was unable
to turn up a copy, though he did sell me a set of gazetteers.
These must have held the secret of the lost Atlantis, for I re-
ceived a special commendation from the Secretary of State
for having acquired them.
That came months later. At the time, I was depressed.
I wandered out through Anarkali, Lahore's famous Pome-
granate Bazaar. This city had had the most tightly-knit Hindu
and Moslem communities of pre-partition India. The multi-
religious fabric came unravelled in 1947. In some sectors, not
a stone was left on a stone, nor a book upon a shelf, as neigh-
bor slaughtered neighbor in a fraternal bid to liberate the city.
The wreckage was still being offered for sale by sidewalk
vendors.
Anarkali yielded a splendid catch of books, scavenged
from the scorched remains of other people's libraries. Lahore,
the ancient seat of culture, had been turned into a slaughter
house and then a bargain basement by its loving inhabitants.
Here was I to profit from the destruction, and lured on by the
richness of the offerings. I plunged deeper and deeper into
the old city until I lost my way.
The streets were no help. Instead of heading in a specific
direction, they dissolved witlessly into one another or allowed
themselves to be devoured by tenements that ravened around
them. The houses were windowless for six feet up, but their
second stories bulged with balconies which met above my
head. As the afternoon heat waned, the prostitutes came out
to display themselves just above the heads of the pedestrians.
They sat on their balconies fanning themselves, chattering
six to a dozen, their bulls-eyes of kohl set wide in faces
streaked red with pomegranate juice.
I stopped at a cloth shop where a Sikh was sitting tailor
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Wandering through Pomegranate Bazaar
fashion (how else?) among his bolts of cotton, measuring
tape draped around his neck. Where, I asked, was Kashmiri
Gate? The gate led, I hoped, to the cantonment (modern
Lahore), where I had a room at what was recognizably a
hotel. Confidently, the tailor pointed west. A few blocks later,
a second Sikh pointed east. I was lost. Possibly so were they.
I thought I should throw away the pomegranate I was munch-
ing on. If I had to remain one month for every seed I ate, I
would spend half my life getting out of this place.
From behind mud walls, musicians began to tune their
instruments-or, for all I knew, were already playing. There
was some question in my mind concerning the forms of Indian
music; but I responded like a snake to its rhythms. Somewhat
mesmerized, I walked the narrow street, imagining the six-
teen-stringed sitar, prostrate on its master's knee, the tabla
responding to the stretch of its skin and the beat of calloused
fingers. Now, the first courtesan began to sing. It was the song
the sirens sang to Ulysses.
Months before, in Karachi, I had persuaded Hashmi to
take me to see the nautch girls. Hashmi had been very kind to
me since my arrival in Pakistan. He was now ready to draw
the line somewhere, but wasn't sure just where. I had ejected
myself from a rickshaw, leaving the seat of my dress behind;
and Hashmi took me to his mother's dressmaker. I wanted to
bathe in the Arabian Sea; and Hashmi took me fifty miles
across the trackless desert to see the turtles lurch up out of
the sea to lay their eggs by cold moonlight. I wanted to see
the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro; and Hashmi changed five tires
along the way.
But nautch girls! This was too much. Only when I threat-
ened to ring in Jehangir did he consent. Hashmi was a city
man, the inheritor of civilization (and a sizable fleet of taxis).
Jehangir was a Pathan, without civilization or scruple. He
would stuff me into a burqa and carry me off to Fort Sande-
mann. So Hashmi took me to the Peshawar Tearoom. (The
Peshawar Tearoom is in Karachi. The Karachi Tearoom is in
Lahore, the Lahore Tearoom is in Delhi, and the Delhi Tea-
room is in Peshawar.)
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Krishna Smiled

From behind beaded curtains, the proprietor sized us up.
In the old days, he would have gratified us with ghazals, those
haunting Urdu sonnets dedicated to the fleetingness of life
and love. Nowadays, no one knew the difference. With one
of those crazy American women present, it would be suffi-
cient to parrot the latest film hit. He would send Sultana out
first.
Sultana, adjusting her voluminous white satin pyjamas
over her billowing hips and pulling a pink tunic down over
all, enters. She is barefoot, and has learned the weighty walk
of elephants. Around her ankles are leather straps sewn with
bells, which jingle provocatively when she walks, and turn
a man's spine to jelly when she stamps. Sultana's hair hangs
loose, framing in thick black clouds her enormous kohl-en-
circled eyes, which she rolls violently.
Without caring that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Father of
Pakistan, glares down upon her from the wall, she opens her
betel-red mouth. A banal film song burbles forth. Around the
room, men lounge on canvas mats, coax bubbles through their
water pipes, sigh, and remember the Moghul Empire.
It was thanks to Hashmi's kindness in taking me to the
tearoom that I was able to recognize the sounds when, six
months later, I lost myself in Anarkali. This time, Hashmi
was not around, however. And as I had bought as many books
as I could carry, it really seemed time for me to get out of
here, if only I could find the gate.
Around the corner came a wedding procession, tangling
with the flow of pedestrians who already filled the narrow
street. Musicians marched before, and the family came after.
Between them sat the groom on a hired white horse, a sword
in his belt, his head smothered in a fall of jasmine. Riding
pillion behind him was a little boy. He was a decoy: a kid-
napping must not prevent the groom from reaching his bride's
house. The smell of jasmine overwhelmed us.
Behind, along, and between the marchers flitted a mad-
woman, attracted by the noise and lights. Barefoot and in
rags, her hair starched upright with filth and her eyes wide
staring-"Bibi!" she called to me. "Princess!" and danced her
crazy dance around me while the procession laughed.
126


Wandering through Pomegranate Bazaar
White horse, musicians, wedding party, and beggar dis-
appeared around another corner, led offstage by their acety-
lene torches. Their noise disappeared with them, and the
quiet street now seemed ominous. The day too had passed, as
though it were a marcher in the procession. There was a quiet
moment; then through an open window above my head, I
heard once more the strangled song of the nautch girl.
I came to a place where the walls of two opposing build-
ings bulged into the street, looking as though they were, like
giant paramecia, about to mate. At the same moment, a small
English car appeared at the other end of the passage. I flat-
tened myself against the betel-stained wall to let it pass.
A handsome head leaned into my abdomen and asked:
"I say, may I give you a lift?"
"No, thank you," I replied, comparing the fire of the
street with the frying pan of the Austin.
"Don't be a fool. Get in," Handsome Head said.
Once in the car, I discovered two other heads, less hand-
some, in the penumbra of the back seat. It is always a mistake
to enter a car without checking out the rear first. However,
in this case, the street had been so narrow that I was physical-
ly unable to bend down and look in the windows first.
Number One Head introduced me to Heads Two and
Three as a friend from Karachi. We had met at a dance. I was
grateful for the respectable introduction; it augured well. By
coincidence, I had been in Karachi last June, though I hadn't
gone dancing.
I nodded and smiled toward the rear. "Yes, wasn't it a
pleasant evening?" I simpered in cocktail party jargon. I must
establish myself as part of the In crowd, so they would know
my presence would be missed if I failed to return to the hotel.
I wondered how I would look in a burqa, whether I could
survive the heat of the North-West Frontier Province behind
mud walls, and how I could smuggle a message to Jehangir...
Heads Two and Three got out at Kashmiri Gate, which I
immediately recognized since I had passed it twice already.
I suggested that I might now be released.
"Karachi, in June, at a dance," the young man repeated,
as though he believed it. I was equally certain we had never
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Krishna Smiled

been introduced, but determined to keep the conversation
friendly until I was back at my hotel.
"What on earth are you doing here anyway?" my ab-
ductor asked, in flawless Etonian. Another point in his favor,
surely. I explained that my employer was languishing for lack
of a dictionary with which to translate some letters he had
received, and had sent me here to look for one. I always stuck
pretty close to the truth in these matters, without feeling it
necessary to intimidate people by mention of the United
States government. This was even more the case since my
recent visit to Peshawar, where I had let it be known I was
collecting books for the Library of Congress. I then heard my-
self denounced on the radio as an intelligence agent of Con-
gress (meaning the Congress Party of India). In a region
where nightly rifle fire still proclaims the settling of family
feuds, this was not a good reputation to have.
"Well," said Malik, for by now we had introduced our-
selves, "this is certainly a harebrained scheme, sending a
young girl to Anarkali to fetch a book. Hasn't he any peons?
Tell me what it is you want, and I shall get it for you."
The specifications having been noted, we arranged to
meet at my hotel the next afternoon. Malik did indeed ap-
pear, with two copies of the Pukhto dictionary, one well-
worn, the other with the pages yet uncut. Apparently one
British officer had done his homework, while the second had
found other things to do in Anarkali.
By this time, we were good friends, and Malik took me
to see the Mirror Palace, where there is a stone that never
grows cold. "Just like a heart that is true," he said predictably
as we sat in a marble gazebo over a stream that flowed
through the Shalimar gardens. He was certainly not original,
but dark and handsome he was, and with a better accent than
I had. He owned a few thousand acres somewhere near
Quetta, which wasn't saying much, since I had seen Quetta
once rather by accident, when an ancient DC-3 failed to fly
me from Karachi to Kabul and let me down there instead,
gently, Praise be to Allah! No books for sale there, either.
Like all Moslems I met, he confided that we (meaning
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Wandering through Pomegranate Bazaar
Jew and Moslem) had far more in common with one another
than either of us had with Christian or Hindu. Out here in the
desert, it was easy to agree.
In fact, Malik was a most agreeable companion in many
ways, the chief one being that I never knew whether he had
a wife. One could assume he did, being of age, but if she ex-
isted, she lived in that same limbo to which I had committed
my fianc6, who was said to be alive and well in New York
City. These shadowy figures could be called upon for aid,
when needed; but at the same time were conveniently im-
palpable.
At the races that night (Malik's horse won) he took up
an old theme. Why did he have to dress up in pretty words
what had essentially been a pick-up?
"Karachi, in June, at a dance," he repeated with good
humor.
"June," I answered, "was Ramadan, the month of fast-
ing." (How well I remembered Hashmi racing his taxi through
Karachi streets at three in the morning shouting, "Get up!
Get up! It's time to eat!!" It was Ramadan all right, or some
glorious scenes of chaos had gone for nought.) "There were
no dances in Karachi in June."
"Ah," said Malik, "unfortunately there are some people
who would dance at any time, at the very brink of the grave,
one might say. But you should stay away from them; you will
get a bad name."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Peshawar Tearoom," Pluto said, offering me a bite of
pomegranate.

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Maidens
My first few months in Delhi, until the money ran
out, I lived at the Maidens Hotel in a clean, cool room with
exposure fore and aft, overlooking a nicely landscaped court-
yard. Like any new "European" (i.e. non-Asian) girl, I was
quickly sucked into the social whirlpool whose vortex was the
nightclub on the main floor of the hotel. There in the heart
of Old Delhi one could dine on chicken Kiev, coquille St.
Jacques, or steak Chateaubriand, prepared by the former
chef of the former Emperor Bao Dai; and dance to the latest
hit tunes as perpetrated by a band of renegade Goans only
partially under the control of a Sicilian bandit. They were
fond of the songs of Piaf and Trenet, which they played be-
tween showings of the newest and the oldest nightclub acts
from the Continent-the new ones which were trying out, and
the old ones which had hit the skids.
The Maidens decor was ornately Victorian; black tie and
floor length evening gowns were required after 7 P.M. Most
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Maidens

of my gowns were waltz length, except for a Jacques Fath
original I had purchased in Paris on the way over. In time,
pulling on the heavy black satin sheath became as routine as
putting on blue jeans, and so far as trained dog acts go, I
don't care if I never see another.
I had no sooner checked into the Maidens than I became
the darling of Manoel and Iqbal, who were First Secretaries
of the Portuguese and the Turkish embassies, and who shared
the kind of friendship that can only blossom from the com-
post heap of long historical enmity. One might say that these
two had buried the Battle of Lepanto. Or sunk it. Old resi-
dents of Delhi and of the Maidens, they were connoisseurs of
food and wine, topazes and star sapphires, carpets, currency
regulations, and-since they were no longer young-new
women. It was their custom to move in on newly-arrived fe-
males while they were still befuddled by the time change,
and provide them with a mind-blowing introduction to Delhi
life, beginning with Chtteauneuf-du-Pape and ending with
(when they hit it lucky) star sapphires. Each accepted gra-
ciously whatever favors the girls, many of them away from
home for the first time, might care to bestow upon them, un-
der the impression that this was living. Ultimately, they
would watch with resignation as the girls moved on to
younger, if less sophisticated men. But as embassy and.busi-
ness staffs were then growing in accord with Parkinson's
Law, the airlines continually off-loaded new crops of girls to
replace those who were graduating from Manoel and Iqbal's
tutelage. It was a satisfactory arrangement for everyone, and
good for business at the Maidens.
Physically, Manoel and Iqbal were quite different types,
and this enhanced the symbiotic nature of their relationship:
for what the one wanted, the other didn't. So they hunted
comfortably in tandem. Manoel was slim and adorable. He
danced an insinuating pasa doble in which he would twitch
his little hips just slightly but with unmistakable intent,
never abandoning the aristocratic sneer which adorned his
pretty features under the thick thatch of grey hair. He was
perfumed, one suspected, all over.
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Krishna Smiled

Iqbal had the build of a rugby player who has stayed too
long on the field; and the mind of a customs collector. His chief
weapon was a tango which can only be described as menac-
ing. Since I had wasted my college years studying, I had
never learned to dance. Now I took up the art on Iqbal's arm,
there beside the Yamuna.
Both Manoel and Iqbal lived in terror of being called
home for reassignment. Manoel because his womanizing
would not have been tolerated in the repressive atmosphere
of Lisbon; Iqbal because he would no longer be able to post-
pone marriage to the woman his parents had set aside for him
in Ankara long ago, and who would soon be beyond child-
bearing age.
In addition, like most diplomats, they lived far better
abroad than they could at home. Most of our currencies went
so far against the rupee that we were incomparably better off
than either our homebound colleagues or our Indian counter-
parts. We were not subject to local taxation or local law.
Delhi, for instance, was moving over to Prohibition, but we
had no difficulty in buying liquor, at prices far lower than
stateside.
Traditionally, diplomats are outside the jurisdiction of
the government to which they are accredited, and for good
reason. It wouldn't do, after all, if one's government should
send the message "We surrender!" only to have the emissary
who carried it beheaded before he could deliver it. So the
diplomat is immune to domestic law and cannot be tried in
the courts of any nation but his own. Indeed, in the famous
case of V. vs. D., heard by the Tribunal of 1st Instance of
Geneva, 10 June 1926, the court held that a diplomat could
not even be sued to establish paternity of a child.
Occasionally, a diplomat does something which is privi-
leged but embarrassing. A Latin American ambassador who
pinched a lady cabinet secretary was called home the next
day. A diplomat is unreachable by his host government, but
totally vulnerable to his own.
As necessary as diplomatic immunity may be for the con-
duct of international negotiation, it had for us, and at that
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Maidens

time and that place, the effect of freeing us from the bonds of
civilized society. We were aristocrats in a country with a long,
hallowed tradition of debauched aristocracy. It was easy to
slip into a pleasure-seeking pattern, because the pattern was
there waiting. Perhaps, for some, the pleasure was heightened
by knowledge that all around us, people were starving. At
least, the existence of a huge and hungry populace made it
urgent to join the Jet Set, and cheap to stay there.
My new friends Manoel and Iqbal gave parties several
times weekly which began downstairs at the Maidens and
adjourned at midnight to the Brazilian Embassy compound.
Such was their adaptibility that they never objected when,
having been invited to join them, I brought a date along. They
lived in hopes of a later rendezvous. From their point of view,
the more attractive young people who clustered round them,
the better. For the young girls would attract young men, and
the young men would attract new young girls, and new young
girls have been known to flip their wigs by moonlight when
they have quarreled with their young men, and gone to seek
comfort in the arms of an understanding, older man.
On this particular evening, Iqbal invited me and I in-
vited Simon Birdsall, who was Second Secretary of the Aus-
tralian High Commission and my best source of publications
on Burma. Simon had been a civil servant in Rangoon after
the departure of the British, and retained the custom of wear-
ing a sarong when at leisure. After all, a sarong is not so dif-
ferent from the kilt Simon's ancestors wore. Whether attired
in a sarong with his knobby knees jutting out, or in a tuxedo
that showed his knobby wrists, Simon looked somehow acci-
dental, which was the way he felt. He had brilliant red hair
and that white skin which is either sensuous or repulsive,
depending on how its wearer feels about it. In this case, Simon
loathed it, for it had failed him completely under the tropic
sun. He had survived the fall of Singapore by floating away
from it on a raft on which he lay exposed for two weeks be-
fore being picked up by a Chinese junk and taken ashore
where he was wrapped in Tiger Balm and banana leaves un-
til his skin grew back.
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Krishna Smiled

He had a well-founded hatred for the English, who had
pigheadedly kept Singapore's guns pointed the wrong way,
convinced the fort would be attacked only from the sea; and
he despised Indians pretending to be English.
I myself was deeply surprised to find how many Indians
admired their former masters and sought to imitate them. I
should have thought they would hate them, since they were
but five years out from under the yoke. But many looked back
upon the days of Empire with nostalgia, and for an Indian to
tell a foreigner that he was "almost British" was a compliment.
It took me a while to realize that Asians suffered tre-
mendous feelings of ambivalence toward the West. They
could not help but admire our superior technology; at the
same time, they felt keenly that this technology had been
used to exploit and humiliate them. Often, a refuge from this
humiliation is found in an appeal to Asia's greater spiritual-
ism. The Beatles and various maharishis have kindly intro-
duced some of this spiritualism to the western world; but I
confess its impact upon me was at all times negligible. I was
unspeakably repelled by naked gurus smeared with the ashes
of corpses, and by a pantheon of gods so jumbled that its dev-
otees differ on their names and functions. My own expe-
rience was that the comparative wealth which we foreigners
exhibited was not so much rejected as envied.
Many middle class Asians, of course, refuse to ape west-
ern styles and strive to retain their own cultures. Unfortu-
nately, diplomatic life brought us into touch mostly with
sycophants, the Kept Indians, or as Simon called them, the
running dogs of the capitalist-imperialist warmongers. When-
ever Simon felt himself surrounded by them, as tonight at the
Maidens, he tended to become ferocious. That was when he
danced best.
"What a charming fellow," the maharajah whispered to
me, his watery eyes focused on a point just above my left
shoulder. "Such a charming blend of British intelligence and
American vitality."
For me, Simon was the only live person on the dance
floor. The Indians danced jerkily, like puppets. It was not
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Maidens

their dance, not their music. What on earth are they trying to
do? I asked myself on first seeing Indian couples dancing.
They certainly were not enjoying it. Nor were they being
artsy-craftsy. They were dancing because dancing suited their
image of what they would be doing if they were English. And
so they wandered over dance floors looking for a home. This
night at the Maidens they had all they could do to keep out
of Simon's way, for he liked to show off his restless energy
among these peaceful, herbivorous creatures.
I watched as he clasped to his starched and studded
chest the skinny maharani, who was wrapped in a black sari
as in a shroud and wore a diamond stud nestled in the cleft of
her nostril. She held a long jet cigarette holder clenched be-
tween her pointy teeth, dangerously close to Simon's ear. If
she burned him, I'd smack her.
There was something wrong with Simon this evening, I
thought. His smile hung slightly askew, though he didn't seem
to know it. He was dancing even more ferociously than usual.
But I didn't have time to observe him, for I had to rise to the
challenge of Jagbir Singh.
Jagbir was a displaced Rajput with a heart of gall, a
clever businessman who had bought his way into the capital's
diplomatic circle. He had two wives, the second being his
English nanny, but he used to bring the Indian one along on
these romps, for she was more readily disposable.
Jagbir reached almost to my bosom, and sometimes I
was afraid he would. His purple turban tickled my chin, and
the silver sparkles he liked to scatter through the turban's
folds made me sneeze. He had learned his English at dance
halls on Piccadilly Circus, his dancing at George Raft movies,
and he loved, not dancing, but to be seen dancing. He trod
the floor like a rooster on a pile of manure. "Look at me, look
at me, everybody," his eyes were crowing, and I am afraid
many people did look at us, for I could not bear to follow his
lead and we were constantly tripping one another up.
While I fended off Jagbir, Simon returned the maharani
to our table and checked out the boyish Third Secretary of
the German Embassy. She was wearing leather, but had left
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Krishna Smiled

her whip at home. She was moderately successful in leading
Simon, who didn't look as though he cared. The band played
"La Vie en Rose" but it might as well have been the Toccata
of Galuppi:
Dear, dead women, with such hair, too,
-what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms?
I feel chilly and grown old.
From across the dance floor, a strident voice shouted at
the cook in French, berating him for the poor quality of the
lamb chops. It was the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps pre-
siding over his nightly banquet. Judging from the size of his
parties and the amount of food and liquor consumed, the
Ambassador must have been the chief source of income for
the Maidens.
The little cook nearly fainted while visions of his liveli-
hood vanishing danced in the air. Trembling, the Annamese
bowed nearly to the floor and made to remove the offending
lamb chops. "Wait, you fool," cried the Ambassador. "Leave
these. I will eat them while you prepare the others."
It was said that His Excellency had never set foot in his
chancery. Instead, he held court every day but Friday in the
swimming pool of the Delhi Gymkhana Club, mooring his
vast bulk, of 350 pounds displacement, in a corner at the shal-
low end. There, resting his elbows on pillows which his ser-
vants placed on the tiled floor behind him, he allowed him-
self to float at anchor in the harbor, as it were, while the lesser
tenders and pilot boats of his staff hovered round the shore to
service him.
Despite appearances, he was a wily pro. He served many
years in New Delhi. Then his rotten old king was deposed,
and he was naturally called home. We were all certain that
the hot young colonels' clique would stand him up against the
wall. Not a bit of it. Within a month he was back in the Gym-
khana pool, and once again the water level had to be lowered
to take his bulk into account. Either he had something on the
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Maidens

colonels, or they figured it was worth keeping him on because
of his position as dean of the corps at New Delhi, which he
held by virtue of his seniority in residence. A new man would
have gone to the bottom of the diplomatic totem pole. It was
a pivotal position to hold, and one which he utilized to form a
relationship between his country and India which was to
prove enduring.
One by one or in pairs, Delhi diplomats came to have
audience with His Excellency, most of them wearing pin-
stripe cutaways for the occasion. They lent a sombre aspect
to the pool. Some of us, after all, went there for healthy out-
door exercise, which we badly needed in that climate, and
we did not enjoy being appraised by these gentlemen, all of
them buttoned up to the gills, a large number of whom con-
tinued to seclude their own wives and daughters in purdah,
and for whom a woman in a bathing suit was no better than
a whore.
Apparently, Moslems never take their clothes off except
for immoral purposes. A girl in a bathing suit is as good as
nude; therefore, she must be immoral. Q.E.D. It is therefore
permissible to stare at her in lewd fashion, whereupon the
girl, who is ordinarily quite at ease in a bathing suit, suddenly
feels nude and immoral.
Even Hashmi, over in Karachi, having driven us all to the
Arabian seashore in one of his taxis, refused to join Charles,
Raoul, and myself when we went surfing. He just sat up there
on a dune with Tewfiq, the tortured Jordanian who had a
dreadful case on me, but was ashamed of it (they'd string
him up to a lamp post back home in Amman if he brought
back a Jewish wife, he told Raoul, which is nothing compared
to what my mother would have done to him), and the two
of them kept their Korans dry while we decadent Europeans
frolicked innocently by moonlight.
The well-known Dancing General now entered Maidens
dining room in company with the Iraqi Ambassador and his
party. The Ambassador's wife was wearing a spectacular
gown cut from a purple and gold sari. Her dressmaker was a
little crippled Polish refugee whom she kept sequestered in
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Krishna Smiled
the embassy compound so that no one else could make use
of her talents. There was some question as to whether the
little seamstress had been crippled before she arrived under
Madame's protection. The party was seated across the dance
floor from us. The General bowed in my direction and ar-
ranged his expression in what may have been a smile. Un-
doubtedly, we both recalled that on the first day of summer
he had invited me to his home for dinner. Delighted to be
noticed by so august a personage, and wondering who the
other guests would be, I arrived at his home to find myself
alone with the General and a cozy dinner set for two. His wife
had gone up to Ootacamund for the season. Exit one Third
Secretary chased by a General.
I had not had time to finish my tournedo when Simon
asked me to dance. A joyous shout went up from the band and
they broke pell-mell for "Jalousie." A fortnight back, Simon
had leaned me into the final dip of this tango and busted my
placket. Now it was apparent that "Jalousie" was to be our
theme song.
Tonight, however, Simon responded poorly to the goad-
ing of the band. Something obviously was on his mind. As we
danced, he clutched me to him with the desperation of a may-
fly who knows his end is near, but who would not trade this
May for all the Junes and Januaries. His face was flushed from
exercise and wine, and I wondered just how good he would
look to me if I had more to choose from.
"I've been transferred," he muttered in my ear. "To Lon-
don."
Now I knew just how good he looked to me. My heart
sank. The whole thing was done and gone. Goodbye, Simon.
There weren't many people in New Delhi I could talk to, and
Simon had been one. Not that we'd really understood one an-
other, for he was as reserved as the English he hated so heart-
ily. But he was civilized. He knew Brahms from Bart6k and
El Bosco from El Greco; he read things he didn't have to read,
and he played a heroic game of tennis. "Richard the Lion
Hearted," he dubbed me the first time we played doubles,
and we became cobbers. Additionally, Simon was extremely
knowledgeable about Burma, and I had been counting on his
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Maidens

help when I went there on an acquisitioning trip. I leaned
my head momentarily on his shoulder. There wasn't an ounce
of comfort on that knobby frame.
"Well," I said, "you could do worse than London," think-
ing how all his provincial innocence would go unadmired
there, until some sophisticated Englishwoman who under-
stood his weakness intuitively would move in bloodlessly and
make hash of him. "Damn!" he exclaimed. "I've been asking
them for years to assign me to Burma or Malaya. You'd think
they could use someone there with some knowledge of the
area. Anyway, my regular tour here wasn't supposed to be
up for another year."
I figured it would have taken him about another year to
open any meaningful conversation with me. Nothing lost
there. "They must have needed someone for the Colombo
Plan," I said. He had the lightest blue eyes I had ever seen.
You almost wondered at first if he could see.
"They need someone, all right, but they're putting me
into emigration. Just stuffing a body in a slot, as usual." To
that, there could be no reply. It was every diplomat's night-
mare, to get put into a passport or visa post where there were
lots of headaches, but no honor to be won. "Anyway, that's
that, and I'm leaving next month."
We jalousied back to our table. Jagbir gave Simon a
wicked leer, meant to elicit from the Australian whether or
not I had agreed to go on to the swimming pool with the rest
of the crowd. He had already sent his silent wife home with
the chauffeur, and was organizing a d6marche on the Brazil-
ians.
Simon and I thanked Iqbal for his hospitality and left.
I knew the Turk would be cut, but it didn't matter. Iqbal
never thought of women as actual human beings, not in the
same sense as he regarded himself as a human being, so any-
thing I did could be chalked up to feminine caprice and
would only lead him to redouble his efforts with more wine,
more parties, and more displays of jewels. There was no way
on earth my behavior or my words could affect him, unless I
gave him what he wanted. So I left with Simon.
Coming out of the hotel, we were mobbed by beggars
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Krishna Smiled

who clustered at the restaurant door. They were all there: the
shoeshine boys, the tiny abandoned girls, the man nursing an
infant at his breast, the silent shrouded women. A Sikh rushed
up to tell our fortunes, and the amount of private information
he shouted after us made it plain he was either clairvoyant
or a transom snooper. It was worth a rupee to shut him up.
He glided off with his painted eyes glistening.
Beggar children besieged us, and the half-eaten tournedo
turned over in my stomach. "Jao! jao!" Simon shouted at them
in time-honored Indian fashion. "Scram!" but he threw them
money at the same time, so it did no good. No Indian gives
alms. If people are wretched, it is because of sins committed
in a previous existence, which they must expiate before they
can be reborn into a better life. One cannot change the decree
of fate with a few pennies, so Indians curse the beggars and
cuff them away. Only the crazy, guilt-ridden foreigners try
to buy off their consciences by giving alms.
Simon eased his little Hillman-Minx through the crowd
of beggers. We were quiet a few moments, while our dinners
did battle with the sights and sounds of beggary. Finally, since
we were young and healthy, our digestive tracts won out. But
this sort of thing played havoc with the soul. Perhaps it would
be better to imitate the Indians and become callous toward
the poor. Then it wouldn't hurt so much to see them. But
speaking for myself, when the day came that I got mad at the
beggars because they had ruined my dinner, I knew it was
time to go home.
The Hillman-Minx tooled along Alipur Road toward
New Delhi, a green and pleasant city where the beggars hard-
ly ever came, and where one could believe that India was a
wonderful place to live.
"How about a swim at Rashtrapathi Bhavan?" I asked
Simon.
"How do you plan to get in?" Simon answered a question
with a question.
"Oh, can't everyone?" A question inside a question in-
side a question.
My first night ever in Delhi, the man I was replacing (he
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Maidens

told me he was humiliated; it was like a frontline soldier being
replaced by a WAC) took me to a cocktail party. There I ex-
perienced real culture shock, for I met all the types I thought
I had left behind me in Washington. The intrusive, person-
able journalist; the world renowned statesman who was not
above goosing a girl behind the grand piano; the doctor hop-
ing to land a contract to examine embassy employees; the
beautiful, beautiful girls who could hold their liquor-any
amount of liquor-and who were aging right before your very
eyes.
One type I was unprepared for, however, was the hand-
some young Indian pilot in gorgeous white uniform and gold
braid, who invited me to a party the next evening over at his
place. His wife smiled silently beside him. Had I ever worn
a sari? No, I had not. The next morning, he appeared in an
equally gorgeous blue uniform at my hotel room door with a
suitcase full of his wife's saris, and his wife's maid. He left all
with me so that I might become familiar with Indian dress.
I spent a few hours trying them on, then sent them all back
by tonga to the lieutenant's wife.
For casual dinner at my new friend's house, and my first
essay at representing the United States, which after all is a
diplomat's primary function, I thought I ought to wear Ameri-
can clothes. Envisioning a barbeque on some suburban veran-
dah, I put on a cute peasant blouse, dirndl skirt, and sandals.
Outside the Maidens, I handed the lieutenant's card to a taxi
driver. The card said simply (or unsimply) "Rashtrapathi
Bhavan." "Do you know where that is?" I asked the driver.
"Oh, yes, Missahib," was the reply, with a military salute.
I should have suspected something was wrong because
the driver drove straight across the city without detour, into
a large estate bounded by thick red stone walls surmounted
by pudgy elephants. By the time we reached the house, or I
should say palace, my little peasant blouse and skirt were
burning holes through my skin. But as a round trip to the ho-
tel and back would take forty-five minutes, and I had been
warned to be punctual, I pressed on to the front gate, where
I was admitted by an armed guard.
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Krishna Smiled

It was the home of the President of India, and Lieuten-
ant Jha was his aide-de-camp for Air. The company dined
on bone china with sterling silver flatware, and were served
by a battalion of servants in blindingly white uniforms with
red and gold embroidered vests, and bare feet. There were
several English women present whom I never met elsewhere
in Delhi society, and with whom I found it absolutely impos-
sible to talk, shielded as they were by startling floral print
gowns of some impermeable material that fell from the neck
straight down to the floor, without pause for bosom, waist, or
hips. It was inconceivable that they possessed any of those
things. Everyone, including the soup and fish, was dressed
in formal attire.
Whether out of compassion or because he was genuinely
taken by my American informality, about which so much may
be read in books, Lieutenant Jha welcomed me to New Delhi
with a marvellous present: he gave my name to the palace
guard. Henceforth I could go and come on the palace grounds
at will.
The chief attraction here was the lovely, secluded swim-
ming pool embedded in roistering clouds of brilliant red-
blossomed vines. The pool had not been used since President
Rajendra Prasad, an elderly and a religious man, had been
persuaded to occupy the palace. It had not been well riled
since Partition days, when Pandit Nehru used to come to cool
off with Lady Mountbatten. In fact, I was told that if the two
of them ever showed up, I should scoot. But here I came
every day I was in Delhi, and never met a soul till Krishna
materialized.
As Simon and I entered the hidden doorway into the
pool enclosure, the moon rode high overhead and the jasmine
breathed a heady perfume. We swam lazily in the tepid
water, stirring little ripples that broke up the reflection of the
pillared colonade which ringed the pool.
Later, we went for a stroll in the formal gardens and
plucked tiny oranges from dwarf trees, which we ate peel and
all. The garden was so precisely laid out, the trees standing
so modestly in their Buster Brown haircuts, that I half ex-
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Maidens

pected a deck of playing-card gardeners to come rushing out
with their ladders to paint the white roses red. But there was
only the cooing of doves and the gurgling of water that criss-
crossed the garden in miniature canals.
The flowers were deep and deeper shades of grey and
black under the moonlight, but by day they were a melange
of red, purple, pink and orange such as I had never seen else-
where. The Moghul gardens were the scene of frequent im-
mense diplomatic receptions, and then the flowers had to vie
for attention with brilliant saris, obis, and dashikis. Orange
punch was served and Pandit Nehru circulated argumenta-
tively among the guests, who included the diplomatic colony,
cabinet members, writers, artists, members of Parliament, and
visiting dignitaries. Tito was a favorite guest of the time, run-
ning second only to Adlai Stevenson in charm. Every con-
ceivable language was to be heard in the garden, but only
one topic: the weather.
Now here was Simon and here was I, walking hand in
hand through the Red Queen's garden. The crowds had fissi-
parated; Nehru and his eternal bumbershoot gone to bed; and
for all the hours I had spent in that garden I could remember
just one conversation that was not as insipid as the punch.
Sarevapellai Radhakrishnan, India's great philosopher
and at that time her Vice President, had offered me a brief
disquisition on the status of women in India. Although wom-
an's scope has traditionally been limited, he pointed out, still,
within her sphere of family and the home, she is supreme.
"My own name," he said, "signifies the esteem in which
woman is held, for Radha's name is placed before that of
Krishna." And he smiled that beneficent smile that always
seemed to flit before me.
It perched now in little trees, that disembodied smile
that Alice saw, and watched events take their course toward
romantic self-destruction. The executioners were approach-
ing, and I could feel my exequator slipping right off my wall.
Simon felt it too. So he asked what I thought about going
to London with him. I said "Not much," and the smile ex-
tinguished itself.
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Krishna Smiled
I liked Simon well enough. But was liking a substitute
for being? I was far too involved in unravelling my own life
to consider giving it up for someone else's version of life. God
knew who Simon really was; for that matter, who was I?
Could I accept him, before I had accepted myself?
And there were corners of Asia I hadn't entered, lan-
guages I hadn't heard uttered, foods I hadn't tasted, diction-
aries I hadn't caught up with, and lots of telephone directories
still to be acquisitioned. I hadn't even approached Angkor
Wat. How could I give up this great scavenger hunt and be-
come a found object?
And of course, marrying a foreign diplomat was an em-
barrassing proposition, for the American Government is a
jealous Government, and suffers no other Governments to
come before it, or even with it.
So I said, "Not much."
"Well, in that case," said life's escapee, "how about a
brief encounter?"
This was a more viable proposition, and all there was
time for. No commitment, no regrets. Just a little Australian
comfort.
There are advantages to slicing up your life in two-year
segments: you can experiment with impunity. You can try
everything. Why not? The rule book is back home, and its
precepts don't apply here.
But what if a person existentially becomes what he does?
In that case, there is danger of turning into someone other
than you thought you were.
Well, if you don't like the person you become, you have
only to sweep the character under the rug as you go out...
And I liked Simon well enough.
But liking was the last thing I would need once he was
gone. The least dependence would penetrate my self-control,
and I could no longer accept the isolation of my life, which
was the only way that I could live it. Liking was the last thing
I would need when Simon was gone. Better to leave him with
moonlight and jasmine. Let him fret over me.
In driving me home, we passed the Brazilian Embassy
144


Maidens

where there was a sizable convention of mayflies. They might
burn for a day only, but what a day they would make of it!
At the rear of the embassy grounds, a graceful brick building
housed a swimming pool where, in accordance with ancient
lusitanian tradition, swimsuits were not worn. One might say
the Brazilians had dispensed with the convention that so dis-
turbed those orthodox gentlemen around the Gymkhana
Club pool. I shuddered to imagine the scene within. Iqbal
and Jagbir appearing simultaneously in the altogether was as
upsetting to my digestion as the beggars had been; and I
could scarcely have endured the unveiling of the flat fraulein,
who probably was even now giving her all for the Vaterland.
But to whom? And for what?
As for the skinny maharani, she would be in her element.
All Delhi knew, because she told them, about the peephole
and mirrors her husband rigged in her bedroom in order to
watch her cavort with her lovers. The maharajah was impo-
tent as the result of excesses made available to him by his
household staff when he was a boy. But he had the legal limit
of four wives and still managed to get his jollies.
After Simon dropped me off, I lay in bed and thought a
long time, while dance music continued to drift upstairs
through the open courtyard. In the morning, I would be
awakened by doves.
Living like a mayfly is all right for a man. You burn your
candle to the stub, and when the pace catches up with you,
you marry someone congenial who is willing to pack your
bags for you every two years, and from then on you carry
your home and your heart with you when you are transferred.
Your private life stays intact, wherever in the world you may
happen to be.
But consider a woman. One day she looks in the mirror,
the pace has caught up with her and it is too late. That little
bitch Snow White is alive and well in the forest. Our lady of
the world, still handsome and full of spunk, may not relish a
lifetime of meeting airplanes to pick off the new arrivals. In
any event, they are bound to run into Snow White sooner or
later. As for marriage, the market was always limited, and a
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Krishna Smiled

woman's valuation does not rise with the years. If lucky, she
finds someone congenial and (in my day) has to quit the ser-
vice. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 purports to rectify
this situation, no legislation can alter biology. A woman stays
with her husband, or there is no point in marrying. And she
can hardly expect him to abandon his work in New Delhi be-
cause she is transferred to Oslo.
The career woman Foreign Service Officer is on her own,
single, transient. That would mean a parade of Simons and
Iqbals and Dancing Generals reeling in and out of my life.
I could not, as Simon would one day, choose one companion
to take along with me. Mine would be a life of permanent im-
permanence. At each post I would have to work out a whole
new web of personal relationships as well as professional
ones; only to see it destroyed two years later. At least, a man
could maintain continuity in his emotional life.
The obvious conclusion was that I should limit my for-
eign service career. Perhaps one more assignment...
Or did they all say that, all those women who were pre-
serving themselves in alcohol and exotic objets d'art?
Well, as long as I was here, I was going to do a good job
of it. I got out of bed and started getting my papers in order.
Maps, passport, carnet, insurance, check book, book lists,
journal... Funny, I could have married Simon without effort,
but it took some doing to get to Sikkim.

146


I climb a Himalaya and miss a coup d'etat

The stream, ripped from the belly of some Ti-
betan glacier, was boisterous and frigid where I bathed in it.
Ignorant of the wild life of Kashmir, I kept an eye out for
leeches, lobsters, and piranha, but what I felt were a million
tiny electric shocks as the icy water dashed over me. Five
minutes of scrabbling for foothold on the slippery rocks was
enough for me. I could imagine myself tumbling downstream
to be chewed up by jagged rocks and digested leisurely in the
fields below.
Awkwardly-I came to being a nature sprite late in life-
I slogged over to a boulder in midstream and hauled myself
out.
At that moment, three men came trotting out of the
woods, propelled downhill by the loads they carried. The
first two bore a massive tree trunk on their shoulders. The
third was bent double under a basketful of logs. He was using
his arms as a stirrup under the load and, since the basket was
147


Krishna Smiled

lashed to his forehead as well as to his back, he could not toss
his head to shoo away the flies that clustered on his face.
If they saw, or thought they saw, a naked white and pink
woman on a rock, they gave no sign. I imagine it would have
been too hard to check the momentum of their loads.
Pulling on my clothes, I was ashamed. Not at being
caught naked, for these mountain folk might have thought I
was a gopi waiting for my divine lover, Krishna. But because
here were men loaded like mules, running doubled through
the wood; and here was I, who had climbed their mountain
for pleasure.
Drying my skin roughly, I jumped to the bank, and en-
tered the greenly fragrant wood. Here the gothic trees con-
tained the air in upright shafts, still and warm. Through
stained glass leaves the sun broke in quick, sharp blows from
which sprang purple flowers. The breeze cozened me under
light cotton. My skin, sensitized by the icy bath, felt each
blade of grass growing.
From a precipice I looked down on the valley below.
Three thousand feet down, the mountain stream had been
domesticated, so that it flowed tamely in canals, flooded
obediently into pools of paddy, drooled over rocks, and ed-
died greenly around the stilted houses. The green was mar-
vellous, as though I had uncurled a single lettuce leaf and
now looked into its secret convolutions, hidden, mysterious,
and unknown to anyone but myself. Across this valley, a dike
was flung. Atop it, poplars feathered a road.
Farmers, shin deep in mud and anonymous as insects,
transplanted paddy, sparely, stem by stem beneath the water.
Ahead of them, the rice was poisonously green, dotted, when
the wind passed, with poppies. Where the farmers had al-
ready worked, the rice plants were mere brushstrokes on a
Japanese screen.
Lying flat on my back, I could see a complete 360° range
of mountains hemming the horizon. The snow which they
stored on their crenelated peaks traced them whitely against
the clear blue sky. Thus, the morning. By afternoon, there
would be showers. At sunset the sky would clear, the peaks
148


I climb a Himalaya
turn briefly incandescent, apink with light as banal as a pic-
ture postcard.
I was visiting Kashmir despite some unencouraging cor-
respondence on the subject of publications which had passed
between the U.S. Embassy and the government of Jammu &
Kashmir State some months previously. An Economics At-
tache had written to J & K for books, and received back three
slim pamphlets comprising, said the accompanying note, the
"entire stock" of the government book depot, and requesting
a goodly list of titles from the United States.
After that it was hard for me to get the go-ahead for a
personal reconnaissance of the area. But I knew that cor-
respondence of this sort was an unreliable guide to the real-
ities of the situation, and one of my Washington libraries had
a penchant for forestry reports. I figured there must be some
available somewhere in Kashmir, and ultimately I wrangled
permission from the embassy, which was never quite certain
what I was up to on these trips anyway.
Once having actually gotten to Kashmir, I should not
have been lying around mountains and bathing in glacial
streams. The fun part of my trip was due to the whim of the
charmingly obdurate Chief Secretary of Kashmir. He was the
man without whom nothing got done, and I wasn't going to
get my forestry reports or anything else until I had his per-
mission. Sophisticated and handsome, he served me coffee in
his office, ascertained that I was not bright enough for espio-
nage and was therefore engaged strictly in overt intelligence
collection, and then authorized me to procure whatever books
I might want from the government printing office, but . . .
Here, as so often, I was up against the pun on my name:
but is rendered laikin in Hindi. A communist newspaper edi-
tor over in Bombay used to call me the prime minister's favor-
ite word. "The country is progressing along all fronts," he
would mimic Panditji. "But . .."
"Laikin, Laikinji, you must see our hill stations. I cannot
possibly allow you to leave Kashmir having seen Srinagar
only! No, no, my dear Laikinji, it is quite impossible. I won't
hear of such a thing.
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Krishna Smiled

"Look here, today is Friday, everything will be closed
soon, and you can't possibly get your books from the press
at Jammu over the weekend. So you just run along and enjoy
yourself. I have made reservations for you at our new hotel
at Pahalgam. I am most interested in your opinion of it."
To make certain that I would in fact spend the weekend
at Pahalgam, Mr. Kidwai took the precaution of withholding
my exit permit. I was, whichever way you looked at it, his
prisoner. But as it was a weekend, and Kashmir is beautiful,
and Mr. Kidwai so very, very nice, I drove compliantly up to
Pahalgam and never regretted it.
In Srinagar, I had come to hate Kashmir and the Kash-
miris. The town defaces the landscape it sits on. The despica-
bility of men in their struggle to survive at the expense of
other men shows up in peculiarly Brechtian terms there
against the majesty of the mountains.
Srinagar is built on a chain of glassy waterways. Few
sights are as soothing as a shikara flitting over Dal Lake, or
moored beside the gardens of Nishat Bagh. The little boats
bear such names as Blue Jay or Humming Bird or Inner
Springs, and they are paddled by small grey men in coarse
grey nightshirts. Occasionally, a girl sits in the bow, plucking
water lilies while her father guides the boat.
The tourist is gulled by false idylls. For the shikari is not
drifting, he is gunning his motor and scanning the horizon
for prey. He may spy a covey of American being wafted across
the lake toward the floating gardens. Or he may startle a flock
of An grezi diving from the roof of an anchored houseboat
named lonolulu or Beau Rivage or Severn Side, into the
w._edy waters. Or, far up on Shankaracharya Hill, he may
descry through squinted eyes a party of Frenchmen, deter-
mined on pilgrimage to the temple of Shiva, erected, says our
guidebook, in 200 BCE.
The shikari now takes off after the tourist, his cockleshell
loaded with fresh fruit and vegetables, scarves of flowery
crewel embroidery, cunning all-of-one-piece wood carvings
that are timed to spring apart during the next rainy season,
and the calling cards of merchants in town who might be will-
150


I climb a Himalaya
ing to part with star sapphires, karakuli lamb skins, elephant-
print prayer rugs and ivory furniture. The shikari himself is
loaded for bear.
It is uncertain whether the tourist is at a greater disad-
vantage on the mountainside, where he is bound to be winded;
or in the water, in which case he can be prevented from get-
ting a grip on the side of his boat; or in the water taxi, where
he is at the mercy of another shikari, the brother of the man
who is chasing him. But as a matter of historical record, no
tourist has ever won a skirmish with a shikari, including the
American I saw who pushed his tormentor over the gun-
whales of his houseboat. In that instance, the American's wife
was so upset over her husband's boorish lack of culture that
she bought half the peddler's stock.
What the summer tourist, fighting to rid himself of this
perpetual nuisance, cannot know, is that he is up against des-
perate men. Tourists in vacation mood are no match for Kash-
miris, whose wits are sharpened by generations of preying on
that canniest of prey, other men.
For the Kashmiri knows that the short summer will end
and the wild flowers die. The tourists will retreat southward
through the airfields and mountain passes, to their homes in
Delhi and Buffalo and Leeds and Munich. The Himalayan
wind will come spiralling down out of the mountains and
freeze the lakes. The shikaris, who have no home but their
boats, will pull these up on the bank and hibernate in them.
There is nothing to roof them with, so they grip their shins
with their arms and pull a poncho-like garment over their
heads. At the pit of their bellies they place a small earthern
jar, which is filled with live coals. If they don't move too
much, it keeps them from freezing to death.
Shikaris are tanned - literally tanned - a crackly black
from chest to groin.
There is a lot of literature available in Kashmir concern-
ing the atrocities perpetrated by one side or the other in the
fighting which has gone on intermittently since 1947 over the
question of sovereignty of this wretched state. But the great-
est atrocities are committed in Kashmir not by marauding
151


Krishna Smiled

tribesmen, nor by disciplined armies, but by the ordinary
good citizens of the town who make a living out of one an-
other's flesh. So far, the problem of Kashmir's pulverizing
poverty has received rather less attention from either India
or Pakistan than has the "nobler" problem of sovereignty.
I had my relaxing weekend at Pahalgam and, on my way
down through Srinagar, attempted to call Mr. Kidwai to
thank him. He was not, however, in his office, and I continued
to Jammu. There, at the government press, I found my books
waiting for me as Mr. Kidwai had promised - over 300
pounds of them, including several generations of forestry re-
ports. I also incidentally cleaned out all reports concerning
the administration of the area during the nineteenth century,
and these should provide someone with material for a very
interesting doctoral thesis.
The tail of my Vauxhall dragged considerably under the
weight, but even so I made good time going down. I was ea-
ger to get back to Delhi and unload my cargo on the desk of
the Economics Attach6. As I drove, I wondered about the
ponderous convoys of Indian army trucks, all driven by stone-
deaf Sikhs, which had so impeded me on the way up the week
before. Where were the trucks of yesterweek?
The question was not impertinent. Kashmir was under
what amounted to a military occupation, and the Indian gov-
ernment had built this road expressly for the purpose of field-
ing its troops there. For the Kashmir that is beloved by poets
for its beauty, by women for its wool, by men for its women,
and by travel bureaus for its tourist appeal, is also a festering
sore in the severed bodies of India and Pakistan.
This quarrel, like so much else, has its roots in Partition.
Pakistan was split into two wings with a thousand miles of In-
dia between, because the densest concentrations of Moslems
were in Bengal on the east, and Sind, Punjab, and North-West
Frontier Province on the west. Two other areas, by virtue of
their large Moslem populations, might well have gone to
Pakistan: Hyderabad and Kashmir.
These were the largest and richest of the princely states,
and possessed distinct "national" cultures. Hyderabad actu-
152


I climb a Himalaya
ally had a Hindu majority, but a Moslem ruling class. India
feared the possibility that the Nizam might try to take Hyder-
abad into Pakistan: not so much because of the potential loss
of a large Hindu population, but because Hyderabad is situ-
ated right in the middle of India. A three-piece Pakistan, tri-
angulating in on New Delhi from the east, west, and south
seemed a menace the new government could not tolerate. In
a cynical "police action," India engulfed Hyderabad and
ended any possibility of a link-up with Pakistan. A decade
later, during the reorganization of Indian states, Hyderabad
was divided into its linguistic components, divvied up among
neighboring states, and lost whatever historical identity re-
mained to it.
Kashmir proved more intractable. Contiguous to both
India and Pakistan, it might logically have gone to either,
had logic had anything to do with it. Kashmir is also next
door to China and the USSR (across the panhandle of Af-
ghanistan), and this does nothing to desensitize the issue.
So far as a decision on communal grounds goes, 80 per-
cent of the population are Moslems. Aha! cries the observer.
Let them join Pakistan. But to accept religion as the sole basis
for national affiliation would be to decree the end of India:
for India at Partition retained more Moslems than there were
in Pakistan. Many stayed because they could not leave; but
many others favored a secular state over the theocracy which
Pakistan became. Within Kashmir itself, Sheikh Mohammed
Abdullah, the great charismatic leader, never pronounced in
favor of Pakistan.
Furthermore, the ruling family of Kashmir were Hindus.
Both sides had agreed that, in the princely states, the decision
to adhere to one country or the other was to be left up to the
ruling prince. Possibly, had the maharajah acceded to one
side or the other without tergiversation, Kashmir might not
have become the running sore it did become.
From all accounts, the lapse of British rule found the
maharajah paralyzed by indecision. Perhaps he hoped that
by playing a waiting game and refusing to accede to one side
or the other, he could make a successful bid for independence.
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Krishna Smiled

Whatever may have been going on in his mind, he hadn't
made it up yet when Pathans of Pakistan's North-West Fron-
tier Province began pouring in over the border to help him
decide.
He did. The maharajah acceded to India. By that time,
the road had been cut and the Indian government had to air-
lift its soldiers into Kashmir. Battle was joined.
A United Nations ukase halted the fighting at a line
which left the Paks in occupation of the northern, wooded
part of the state and India in control of the south and east,
including the fabulous Vale with the capital city of Srinagar
and the storied gardens of Shalimar: the tourists' Kashmir.
An international team of truce observers was sent up to patrol
the line. The road which India built into Kashmir became the
focus of Pakistani attacks in the war of 1965, and again in
1971. Cutting it would render the Vale of Kashmir vulnerable
to Pakistani absorption.
The stakes in Kashmir are doubled by the fact that the
Indus River rises here, before forking its five arms across Pun-
jab. The food supply of millions of people in both India and
Pakistan depends on Indus water. This may not have been
uppermost in the minds of the seminomadic tribesmen who
charged into Kashmir to aid their co-religionists; but it was
certainly the motivation of the government of Pakistan when
they dug into the "liberated" areas and refused to leave. Con-
trol of "Azad" (Free) Kashmir assures Pak control of two
Indus tributaries.
When the smoke of Partition cleared and the blood
stopped running, the economy of the entire area was in sham-
bles. Much depended upon the willingness of India and Pakis-
tan to share the waters of the Indus between them-to stop
cutting off one another's water to spite their own fields, as it
were. Eventually this was accomplished, through the media-
tion of the World Bank. But the sovereignty of Kashmir re-
mains at hazard.
Probably no one knows what the Kashmiris themselves
would prefer. There may once have been a nationalist senti-
ment holding together all Kashmiris regardless of religion,
154


I climb a Himalaya
but it is likely that tribal butchery and civil war dissipated
all that. Holding a referendum on the matter, following so
many years of off-and-on warfare and inflammatory propa-
ganda, would be all too likely to end up in another Partition,
on a smaller but equally bloody scale. On each side of the
border, large minority groups are hostages for their co-re-
ligionists in Kashmir, and any communal rioting that erupted
there could spread all too easily to the rest of the continent.
It was discovered in 1947 that the easiest way to win an elec-
tion was to murder your neighbor or burn him out, so that he
could not vote, and I had seen the wreckage of Lahore. So
India, in particular, is reluctant to redeem its pledge to hold
a plebescite in Kashmir, for a resumption of religious warfare
could destroy its nature as a secular, multireligious state.
Meanwhile, both India and Pakistan have integrated
their zones of Kashmir into their respective countries. And
both continue to fear a Kashmiri bid for independence, each
believing that such a move would benefit its opponent.
When I arrived in Delhi I learned of the coup d'etat
which took place in Srinagar while I was up in the hills. No
wonder Mr. Kidwai hadn't answered his phone. Sheikh Mo-
hammed Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir, had been deposed
and incarcerated by his old friend and fellow freedom-fighter,
Jawarharlal Nehru.
The charge against the Sheikh was that he was plotting
to end the partition of Kashmir by declaring its indepen-
dence. In this venture, he was alleged to have the support of
the United States, which was to get some air bases out of the
deal. It was pointed out in the popular press that we had his-
torical precedent for this move, having split Panama off from
Colombia when we wanted to build the Canal.
Every American who had been in Kashmir that weekend
was implicated in the plot, with the exception of myself, ob-
livious in Pahalgam. The highly pregnant wife of an Ameri-
can Embassy official, whose doctor had recommended the
cool air of Kashmir, was touted as the Mata Hari of the
manouevre. An American diplomat, returning from a mush-
room-picking expedition along the Jammu road that Saturday
155


Krishna Smiled

(the road Mr. Kidwai kept me off of) was charged with hav-
ing subverted the Sheikh to the American scheme. Mission-
aries, anthropologists, and a rather kooky lady journalist were
all pressed into service as spies and provocateurs, with Adlai
Stevenson, Chester Bowles, and Moral Rearmament cast as
the heavies.
The only way in which I was affected was that I never
again saw a good friend of mine. He was an American naval
officer who was stationed on the armistice line with the U.N.
truce observation team. It got pretty lonely up there in the
Himalayas with only Abominable Snowmen for company,
and Tom used to call me up when he got down to Delhi on
leave. Now, with an American plot afoot, it was too risky for
him to contact anyone from the embassy lest he compromise
his position on the team. So goodbye, Tom, wherever you are.
Had anyone asked me for my solution to the tangled
Kashmir question, I would have said: turn the place upside
down and shake out the political and religious leaders of all
denominations. Then return the country to the raving black-
eyed girls with their hair done up in a hundred pigtails, wear-
ing coin-sewn skullcaps. And to the farmers, patiently trans-
planting rice knee-deep in muck. And to the little boys who
go blind doing crewel embroidery. And to the shikaris, who
die of skin cancer.

156


11L3
Through Kerala with coir and cashew
The panty raids which were pulled off at the Uni-
versity of Michigan in 1953 were a propaganda windfall for
Asian communists. Widely distributed photographs in Life
and other magazines showed coeds welcoming the men stu-
dents aboard through dormitory windows, in what was ob-
viously the first stage of mass rape, while the rest of America,
including the girls' maternal uncles whose duty it should be
to protect their nieces' virtue, stood by and laughed. Nothing
could show more clearly the decadence of American society.
Or, as the communists put it, the irreconcilable contradictions
which would lead inevitably to the collapse of the capitalist
system.
Nothing that we Americans did during the two years I
was in Asia-not the alleged attempt to take Kashmir, not
arms aid to Pakistan, not the refusal to repatriate Korean
prisoners of war-caused as much furor as these innocent col-
legiate games.
157


Krishna Smiled

In vain did I try to describe to friends and communists
the jolly atmosphere of a large coed campus, the easy fraterni-
zation between sexes, the freedom of girls to accept or reject
what men would thrust upon them. Even sober friends of the
United States found in the panty raids an argument against
the American custom of coeducation. You see what happens
when boys and girls are allowed to mix. It is far more civilized
to seclude your women and marry them off at the onset of
menstruation.
I spent a lot of time talking to communists (Harry Tru-
man once scribbled a note in the margin of a document writ-
ten for his signature, to the effect that he saw no reason to
capitalize the sons of bitches) because commie propaganda
was a staple in the diet of some of my libraries. The stuff was
widely available all over India. At any bookstall or bus stop
one could buy the Life of Stalin, or Lenin's Complete Works,
or the latest Stalin Prize Novel, or other hardbound classics
for the equivalent of thirty-five cents. Topical pamphlets sold
for a penny or two, used ones for a farthing. Most of this
literature was published by the Foreign Languages Press,
Moscow, or its up-and-coming competitor, the Foreign Lan-
guages Press, Peking, the foreign language in question being
English.
All this was sent into the country free, courtesy of the
Soviet and Chinese diplomatic pouches. It was then con-
signed without payment to the large communist book depots
spotted about the country. The personnel of the depots were
thus subsidized by, and acted as agents for, the Russians and
Chinese.
The depots in turn consigned the books to local retailers,
allowing them a one-third cut, which was more than they
could make on any other type of publication. Communist lit-
erature thus was a good source of income for the bookdealers,
so most kept it in stock whether they were sympathizers or
not. They were rewarded by brisker business than was done
by those few holdouts who declined to handle communist
publications.
The Soviet pamphlets were a taxidermist's dream. Stalin
158


Through Kerala with coir and cashew
was shown stuffed and painted a healthy pink, looking quite
pleased with himself and with the toiling Soviet masses. The
pamphlets were immediately identifiable by their covers: if
it wasn't Stalin, it was an earnest young man gazing hard at
the horizon as though in imminent expectation of the arrival
of Socialist realism; or a muscular young girl with a kerchief
on her head and no makeup, reaping sheaves in communal
fields. They were identical with the pamphlets currently
available in Hong Kong, Copenhagen and Marseilles. We also
got the current editions of For a Lasting Peace, For a People's
Democracy, which tied us in to the party line that girdled
the globe. It gave some country boys quite a cosmopolitan
varnish, to be able to read the same literature that the big-
wigs in Paris and Moscow were reading.
The Chinese output tended toward the pragmatic. In
addition to the authorized biography of Mao Tse Tung (the
Little Red Book had not put in its appearance as yet) there
were various pamphlets of the "how to" variety, advising
peasants how to wrest control of the land from their land-
lords, and women how to gain freedom from their men. A
runaway best seller was the novel, The Girl with White Hair,
which combined both these themes against the background
of the Chinese revolution. This is the same story which was
performed as a ballet for President and Mrs. Nixon on their
visit to China in 1972, attesting to the vigor of the theme of
sexual revolution within communist revolution.
Indian communists were also hard at work translating
such documents as Fundamentals of Marxism, the Soviet
Constitution, and the Directives of the XIX Party Congress
for the Fifth Five Year Plan of Development of the USSR.
Additionally, one could choose from among a fistful of lan-
guages in which to read about the agony of Indochina under
the French, Malaya under the British, or the Negro under the
Americans. Paradoxically, there was no communist literature
available on India. It seemed that the hardest thing for an
Indian to get to read was a Marxist analysis of his own situa-
tion.
This information gap may have been due to lack of funds
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Krishna Smiled

among the local party cadres to support research and publi-
cation (although there was apparently plenty of money
around to do translations of Russian and Chinese documents
into the vernaculars), or it may have been due to lack of
originality among Indian communists. With unbelievable
docility, they flocked to their bookshops to buy and study the
various party directives, or the latest report on progress of
construction of a hydroelectric dam in Bulgaria. The titles
alone were enough to put one to sleep.
Meanwhile, their noncommunist buddies were flocking
to college classrooms to study such timely works as Wuther-
ing Heights and the Mill on the Floss. While all about them,
the country was crying out for engineers, entreprenuers, sur-
veyors, agronomists, accountants, and even intellectuals with
the ability to criticize constructively, the bulk of the young
intellectual class was burying its head in Victorian sands. It
made one think their slogan should be, "Backward into the
future," or perhaps, "Forward into the past."
Once, while travelling in the countryside of Uttar Pra-
desh, I picked up a young man who was walking beside the
road. He had just graduated from the university and was go-
ing home to his village to visit his parents. Then he would
take up a position teaching. Teaching what? Victorian litera-
ture. He was the counterpart of the young communist clerk
in the bookstore near Lukri Bridge in Poona, whom I asked
for a copy of Bukharin's works. ( Bukharin was read out of the
party and destroyed in the great Soviet purge). Oh yes, he
had heard of Bukharin. Oh no, unfortunately he had none of
his works in stock at the present time. Certainly he would be
glad to place an order for me. Ours not to reason why.
The largest infestations of communist bookshops were
around the colleges. It was physically impossible for an In-
dian student to get to class without running a red zone of
bookstalls set up to waylay him. On my visit to Allahabad
University, a century-old institution in the north, I was asked
by one of my libraries to photograph all the buildings, which
I did, but I could only feel that someone was missing the
point. Not only because all the buildings look alike, but be-
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cause stone walls do not a college make. The libraries and
bookstores do. No one ever asked me to photograph a book-
stall, but this was where the students were to be found, and
the students were the next governing generation.
Of course, not everyone is rich enough to go to college.
Some people are so poor they would even feel uncomfortable
venturing into a store. So the communists picked up little
boys (one of the cheapest commodities in India) and trained
them to hawk the party line on street corners, bus stops, and
boat jetties. They permitted the boys to keep the entire pro-
ceeds of their sales, and thus bound them to the party with
ties of income and loyalty, presumably in readiness for future
use when they were grown. It is fair to say that every com-
munist publication sold at that time served a dual purpose:
it was, in itself, a vehicle of propaganda; and it was a liveli-
hood, often the only source of livelihood, for the vendor.
At one point I thought I would give my libraries a thrill
by providing some Marxism a la Malayalam. In order to pro-
cure this rare treat, I travelled by motorboat through the
canals of what used to be called the Malabar Coast, was at
that time called Travancore-Cochin, and is now called Kerala.
Sometimes, in India, the toughest thing is just finding out
where you are.
Kerala is what professional travellers call a tropical para-
dise. I coasted southward through cerulean lagoons bathed
by waves of color. The water is incredibly blue, the land and
all its little islands sensuously green and skirted by blinding-
ly white sand, the sky nearly white with the tropical sun that
has no counterpart in temperate climates. To our right, the
combers of the Arabian Sea susurrated gently; to our left,
palm trees dipped and bent over the inland lagoons, which
naturally cause the area to be known as the "Venice of the
East." This is misleading. Malabar is much cleaner than
Venice.
I boarded the little boat at Alleppey at nine in the morn-
ing. Though I did not know it at the time, I would not reach
Quilon, fifty-seven miles down the line, until seven that night.
I was in no hurry. Never did twelve cents stretch so far.
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Passengers, including myself, travel in motor launches,
in the absence of roads. Freight is carried in long narrow
canoes with thatched roofs, called vellums, which are poled
by a man at either end. These men always seemed blacker
than anybody else, as though natural selection had been at
work. As I sat in the rear of the line boat, islands seemed to
float past us, laden with families, huts, cows, and naked chil-
dren. As it was a school holiday, canoes shot past loaded with
brown-skinned youngsters vigorously paddling, red flags fly-
ing, chanting "Inqilab zindabad!" ("Long live revolution!")
Most adults seemed to be sitting slumped against trees,
unpleasant caricatures of the lazy southerner. Put large straw
hats on their heads, and they would look like the Mexicans
of the cartoon strips. Closer inspection revealed that they
were anchored to the ground by prodigious legs which had
swollen and decayed with elephantiasis, forcing their owners
to lie around watching the disease spread to their arms.
There was no known cure. Other people were bathing in the
lagoons, which is probably where the disease incubates, bath-
ing with their clothes on and washing these clothes while they
wore them, for they had nothing to change into. Children
under the age of puberty ran naked because their parents
could not afford to clothe them.
At noon I bought a coconut to go with my can of tuna.
Usually I ate off the countryside, but in Kerala I was put off
by the smell. Coconut oil is favored for cooking, rather than
the ghee (clarified butter) of the north; and for me the effect
was of biting into a bar of Palmolive. Had I been travelling
by train, a three-course meal would have shown up at one
station or another. But then I would not have had the pleas-
ure of this leisurely trip; nor would I have acquisitioned any
communist literature in the railway stations, because the gov-
ernment of India banned their sale there.
Not so the jetties, which are the bus stops of rural Kerala.
At each one, there stood a lad with a stack of fascinating and
incomprehensible publications spread out for sale on tarpau-
lin. I would jump out each time the boat stopped, but always
with trepidation that the boat would leave without me, since
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I couldn't communicate with the pilot. I had no idea when
another boat would come through. But the little sons of com-
munists who were selling the pamphlets didn't want anything
to do with me, and for the first time in my book-buying career
I was thwarted. I could not speak or read Malayalam. I had
no wish to burden myself with a pony for the Merchant of
Venice or even a novel by C. P. Snow, who was very big just
then. I wanted communist propaganda, but without pictures
on the front covers I couldn't tell the sheep from the goats.
At one jetty, a boy came aboard and sat down next to me
with a great deal of self-possession. "Good morning, Madam"
he saluted me. "My name is Joseph. May I be of assistance to
you?"
As these were the first English words I had heard all day,
naturally I was curious about the youngster. He was twelve,
an orphan, and was being raised in a Catholic mission in
Alleppey. He had heard of the United States; his school re-
ceived books and clothing from America. When he asked me
who I had come to India with (again, the assumption that a
woman does not act autonomously) I told him, in the sim-
plest way I knew how, "I am with the American Ambassa-
dor."
"Mr. Chester Bowles!" Joseph exclaimed, and wrung my
hand. What was I doing here for Mr. Bowles? Was there any
way in which Joseph could serve Mr. Bowles too? "Well, I'm
buying books for him," I said. "Mr. Bowles wants to learn all
there is to learn about India."
"He is such a wonderful man," replied Joseph. "He is so
good. But he will not like the books you bring him back from
Cochin. They are all communist."
"I suppose he wants to read even those books, Joseph,"
I said. "It's a good idea to know what other people are think-
ing."
From then on, Joseph hopped out at every stop and
bought me an armload of pamphlets with the money I gave
him. We spent the time between stops translating the titles.
So we acquisitioned a variety of primitively printed pamph-
lets, distinguished by the vitality and originality of their texts.
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Krishna Smiled

Kerala was the only place in India where I found Marxist
minds turning their dialectic upon their own lives.
My most interesting acquisition (interestingly, this was
in English, for an Indian author who hopes to reach a nation-
wide audience must write in English) was a booklet called
The National Question in Kerala, presenting a case for crea-
tion of a Malayalam-speaking state. The communists learned
through their Russian experience that the quickest way to
arouse the peasants, dull and conservative as they are, to
political action, was by appealing to their national loyalties.
As Stalin said when he was Commissar of Nationalities: "the
national question (is) virtually the peasant question."
The Indian National Congress did not organize in the
princely states prior to independence, and so the communists
had a relatively clear field in Travancore-Cochin. From the
start, they espoused the cause of a separate Malayalam-
speaking state, and succeeded in identifying themselves as
defenders of local interests against the imperialism of the
Hindi-speaking north.
In 1956, the communists won their point: the old prince-
ly state of Travancore-Cochin was joined with parts of Mala-
bar, some Tamil-speaking areas to the south were shifted
over to Madras, and the new state of Kerala came into being,
with Malayalam as its official language. The communists rode
to victory in the first state elections on a wave of communism,
nationalism, and gerrymandered districts. At their head was
the author of National Question in Kerala. To my knowledge,
the people of Kerala were the first on the face of the earth to
use free and secret balloting to elect themselves a communist
government.
Several factors predispose any underdeveloped area to
communism; they were all at work in India of the 1950s, and
in Kerala they happened to find congenial conditions. Per-
haps primary among these was reaction against the imperialist
world of Britian, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and
Portugal (all United States allies). Any state which opposed
them on the international scene automatically reaped the
friendship of the former colonies. The Soviets, whose imperial
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gambits had never taken them into Southeast Asia, were able
to pose in Asia as friends of the downtrodden. Naturally,
there was great interest in the philosophy which seemed to
motivate them. At this period in history, that philosophy
happened to be communism.
The communists, of course, worked at developing this
friendship, because of their belief that the western world can
be brought to its knees through being severed from its col-
onies, its source of wealth. In the case of France battling to
retain Algeria and Indochina, the theory came very close to
the mark. In the case of Britain, which relinquished control
of India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon in a semi-voluntary
manner, collapse was averted, at least for some decades, by
rational provisions for continued trade relationships.
The experience of capitalism which the underdeveloped
world has had, has been almost totally negative. It was the
capitalist world which colonized the southern hemisphere,
exploiting natural resources and labor, selling back manu-
factured goods at prices which constantly advanced as the
western economies expanded. For over a century, the terms
of trade went against the primary producers, for reasons they
could not control, and in favor of the industrialized countries.
So far as foreign trade is concerned, many Asians, Africans,
and Latin Americans experience capitalism as a form of pi-
racy, in which technologically superior industries move in
and loot the national resources, then turn around and sell
luxury goods to the elite.
So far as domestic trade is concerned, capitalism as prac-
ticed by local elites too often displays those features which
Europe discarded after Dickens: child labor, debt bondage,
maximum hours of work at minimum wages. I had seen the
weavers chained to their looms by debt; I knew there were
places in India where farmers who had tilled the same plot
for generations had to pay 90 percent of their crop to the
landlord as rent; I had seen the workers of Calcutta go from
air-conditioned factories to homes you wouldn't keep a pig
in. In Coimbatore, where the ordinary people stood in line
for hours to get a jug of drinking water from the municipal
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Krishna Smiled

truck, the industrialist who invited me to his home for dinner
boasted of his spacious green lawn, freshly watered.
Even those Asians who bear no grudge against capitalism
aver that the developing nations have neither time nor wealth
to allow themselves the costly detours inherent in a free en-
terprise system. How can they allow scarce investment funds
to pour into a hula hoop factory, when there are hydroelectric
stations to be built? The market may "demand" hula hoops,
but the country needs electricity and water. How can a re-
sponsible government permit capital to be wasted in building
competitive railroad lines which duplicate one another's ser-
vices, when, with a little planning, rail networks might open
up all sectors of the country for development? Developing
nations are too hard pressed by accelerating population
growth to waste time in competition.
But, asks the western liberal, if you permit government
to plan the economy, won't you lose your personal freedom?
Of course, as American farmers have learned. But the
issue of planning is not all black and white, as the rest of us
know. You can plan certain aspects of the economy (in the
developing countries today, this would include construction
of the high-cost, long-term social overhead such as highways,
schools, hospitals, harbors, railroads, etc.) while allowing the
rest of the economy to remain competitive, operating on the
profit motive.
To the degree that planning is involved, the citizen does
become subject to the demands of his government. But here
one may stop and ask: who formulated these demands? Elec-
ted representatives of the people who are responsible to
the electorate for their actions? Or despots accountable only
to themselves? There is a world of difference. The latter is
the road to dictatorship; the former, one way for society to
reach decisions for the common good.
It is apparent that a person living within a traditional
society may be more willing than ourselves to accept pater-
nalistic government. One who has always lived subject to the
authority of father, village elders, caste, has simply never
experienced personal liberty in the sense in which we enjoy
it. Where tradition takes precedence over individual desire,
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people are subject to such strong social control that, even if
they possess certain liberties by law, they are unable to ex-
ercise them. Thus, many persons in a traditional society ex-
perience, or believe they will experience, the shift from an
authoritarian family to an authoritarian state as progress. To
them, the shift of power to the state represents moving with
the times.
One cannot speak of loss of freedoms to people who have
never exercised any. For most Indians alive today, their oc-
cupation, marriage, social status, were dictated by birth, from
the time of birth (and before). What is freedom?
If the state is to proceed along authoritarian, or at least
paternal, lines, it might as well proceed intelligently. For
this purpose, it is useful to study the experience of other so-
cieties which, beginning from an agricultural base, have suc-
ceeded in turning themselves into first-rate powers. So, the
Soviet Union and China provide relevant patterns. The main
thrust of communist propaganda in India was that the Soviet
Union had not only organized substantial economic growth
starting from an agricultural base, but that this had been
accomplished in a multilingual state and had resulted in the
resolution of all national tensions.
What kind of example can the United States provide,
with our unimaginable wealth? Or European countries, which
derived their wealth from plunder of the colonies? In the
1950s, communism was a most attractive alternative.
In Kerala, there were special forces urging toward a
communist solution. Unbeknownst to the theatergoing pub-
lic, Kerala is the cashew capital of the world. It is also big on
coconuts, from which is manufactured coir, the stuff our door-
mats are made of. Speaking for myself, I can take coir or
leave it; and sometimes I prefer walnuts to cashews. A lot of
people feel the same way, and so Kerala is at the mercy of
the consumer's whim. When we eat lots of cashew nuts and
remember to wipe our feet, there are jobs for the people of
Kerala. When our demand drops, prices slump and factories
close. Employment rises and falls in a way which is not con-
trollable by the people most concerned.
There are other social factors urging people toward rad-
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ical restructuring of their society. Malayalees, like all the
people of India, are divided by caste; but the inequality
among these castes is far more acute here than anywhere
else in the country. In this agricultural state, at the time of
independence, 40 percent of the farmers owned no land, and
another 37 percent owned a half-acre or less. Almost all of
the landless Lelonged to specific depressed castes. At the same
time, the high caste farmers tended to own land in larger
acreages. Kerala as a whole produces only half enough rice
to feed its people. The implications for low caste parents of
little children are terrifying. It was upon them that the com-
munists concentrated their efforts, and they succeeded in
translating ancient grievances into substantial political clout.
Perhaps not irrelevantly, Kerala also has the highest per-
centage of Christians of any Indian state, accounting for 35
percent of the population. Christians are queer fish. They
believe in the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of
Man-a subversive notion, as the Romans found. If Christians
go around propagating their theories, a lot of people may
get the idea that they are just as good as anybody else. Al-
though Kerala's two million Syrian Christians generally
stayed within the ranks of Congress, the communists were
able to take advantage of spreading notions of equality to get
Hindu outcastes to go to the polls and vote against domina-
tion by higher castes.
Over half the population of Kerala can read and write.
This introduces a volatility which does not exist elsewhere in
India. Ignorant peasants starve to death quietly. If they rise
in desperation, it is easy to shoot them down. They are, after
all, savages.
But the man who has learned to read and write is a
human being and must be reckoned with. He knows some of
the causes of his misery; and he can learn techniques for rid-
ding himself of these causes. Educated men expect more
from life than a sentence of hard labor on short rations. Edu-
cated men demand jobs, and in a pre-industrial society, these
may simply not exist.
With more than half the population able to read and
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write, they longed for a meaningful text. There had been a
message long before: a message of brotherly love. It offered
infinite hope, but no means of implementing that hope. A
promise of life eternal for those meek enough to sit under
their palm trees waiting to die of hunger and bilharzia may
fail to satisfy some. Is it conceivable that a religion which
inspires hope, but which makes no change in the objective
conditions of life, may actually pave the way for a new re-
ligion?
The new, like the old, came from out of the west. Like
the old, it too promised justice and equity. In this life. "Ex-
propriate the expropriators!" is not a cant phrase in India.
It is an anguished cry for justice.
In 1910, the first translation of a life of Karl Marx into
any Indian language was published in Malayalam. By the
time I arrived, communist publications were rampant.
Ernakulam boasted one of the large bookhouses which
the communists located around the country in the major
linguistic areas (in Madras, Kerala, Bombay, Bengal, and
Andhra). Uniformly clean, neat and efficient, they were ob-
viously closely supervised. The party workers employed there
were young, serious, and dedicated to Truth. Very polite,
and very belligerent.
At the book depot named Truth (Prabhat), I was chal-
lenged: "You are an American lady, isn't it? Please, tell me
why your government melted down the Statue of Liberty to
make munitions?"
"What about the Scottsboro boys?" a bystander asked.
"And the panty raids?" demanded another.
I was exasperated; yet it all seemed unreal. These were
wealthy young men who were challenging me, judging by
their clothing and their language. What were they doing for
their country? As for me, I had never heard of the Scottsboro
boys (although I read about them that evening in a pamphlet
I picked up that day). And I had taken on protective colora-
tion to the degree that I was as horrified about the panty raids
as they were.
About the only charge I was equipped to fight was the
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Krishna Smiled

one about the Statue of Liberty, since I had seen her recently.
But who was prepared to reason? I began picking out my
books.
The crowd was mollified by that action. It appeared
that I was an American who was willing to learn. So they
scrambled about bringing me all sorts of titles and translating
their contents for me in brief. In no time at all, I had a pretty
good selection and may State have joy of them.
In a friendly mood now, the crowd insisted that I come
along with them to the street of the ivory carvers, and I did.
Personally, ivory interested me a good deal more than ill-
printed communist pamphlets, but I was going to have to
watch my spending because I had only about ten dollars of
my own money along.
This posed another problem. How do you explain limited
funds to these young men who think all Americans are mil-
lionaires? Or, if you succeed, how do you avoid cultivating
the opposite idea, implanted so cunningly by the communists,
that American affluence is a myth, and ordinary people do
not share in it? There never seemed to be any middle ground:
either Americans were fabulously wealthy (as indeed we
appeared to be, by comparison with Indians) or the whole
thing was a lie.
Eventually I found the perfect piece: a little dancer of
Bharatanatyam trailing scarfs of ivory, her delectable derriere
cunningly worked from a slight defect in the material. Having
liberated her, I lingered in the shop over some jewelry which
I also coveted but could not afford.
Among the jewelry under the counter were certain small
triangles of silver, no more than an inch along each side, with
holes bored at two corners and a string run through the holes.
I asked the proprietor to show me one, which he did. I asked
him what it was. and, though he probably told me, I could
not understand him. No one in the crowd offered an explana-
tion. It certainly seemed to be jewelry, but it didn't fit any
portion of my anatomy.
Thinking it might be a tiqa, I took it up by the string
and tied it around my forehead, the triangle just over the
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bridge of my nose. The crowd, which had by now grown so
as to fill every corner of the shop, went into hysterics. Good-
natured, but hysterical. I removed the dingle-dangle from
my forehead and tied it around my ankle. More laughter. At
last, an earnest young man came forward and said, "Madam,
that is a modesty, to be worn by very small girl children." As
I say, the children go naked.
At Quilon, at night, a deputation of Englishmen arrived
at my traveller's bungalow to invite me to the Planters' Club
for dinner and dancing. I accepted, although, usually, I
avoided the English. I didn't want to be tarred with the
imperialist brush and spoil my welcome by Indians. But I
was lonely, and though it may be true that the English and
ourselves are separated by a common language, the gap is
nowhere near as wide as the one which separates us both from
Malayalam. That good language is so mellifluous that it
quavers in the air sans consonants, melting away without
leaving behind a single consonant for the listener to grapple
and imitate.
In a pleasant palm-fringed bungalow, I found a bachelor
colony of British planters, as isolated as though they had
been living beside the Mare Imbrium among little green men,
rather than beside the Arabian Sea among little brown ones.
They wore black tie for dinner, summoned the servants with
a peremptory "Boy!", and referred to local citizens as "na-
tives," a word that had long since gone out of the language
up north. The servants in turn addressed the white men as
"Master," a reasonable translation of the northern "Sahib"
but a good deal more offensive.
They had a joke about an Englishman, newly arrived in
India, who was invited to the Club. (It didn't have to be this
Club, it could be any Club, they were all alike). Sitting
around after dinner, one of the Old Hands called, "Boy!" A
moustachioed old man appeared. "Cross my right leg over
my left knee," the Master ordered. The bearer did so, saluted,
and left.
The newcomer stared in astonishment at his host. "Oh,
I beg your pardon," the Old Hand muttered, realizing he
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had committed a faux pas. Calling the bearer back, he or-
dered, "Boy, cross this Master's legs too."
It was gallows humor. As representatives of the old or-
der, these men were doomed, and they knew they were
doomed. Sooner or later they would have to go back home
and live like other mortals. How much longer could they
hang on here, now that the country was independent and
the school children were paddling around the lagoons yell-
ing "Inqilab zindabod?" The whole trouble was that the
British should not have yielded power. Whatever happened,
they should have stood firm. It was obvious the Indians were
incapable of governing themselves; only the presence of the
British had prevented the niggers from killing one another
off. Now there was only chaos, and the communists would
reap the whirlwind.
We danced to Noel Coward records, and for a while for-
gave one another our political sins and pretended. When Mr.
Jones (a real Jones, a Welshman) placed his hand around
my waist to dance, I pretended he was that boy back in
college who had the great sense of humor; and I suppose he
pretended I was that girl from Cardiff with frizzy hair and
no sense of humor. At least, it never occurred to him that
having his arm around my waist gave him a license to place
it somewhere else. It seemed to me that Indians could never
grasp this subtle distinction. If a woman allows a man to
touch her at all, what then can she possibly forbid him? In
a moment, she is prostrate across an easy chair.
There was a piano and I played some Chopin. Blue-grey-
cool ballerinas in icy tutus glided across the frigid stages of
my memory. The carnation-scented perfume which my mother
gave me for my twelfth birthday and which I always and
only wore to concerts, insinuated itself into my nostrils. The
ballerinas' faces were aloof, their toes disdained to touch the
floor, but shifting harmonies suspended them bodily over the
stage in their subtle tights.
There is an awful lot of commotion in India.
We all went swimming the next day on a spectacular
white beach that the waves soothed as gently as a sleep ma-
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chine. The palm trees were painted on the sky. The waves
rolled gently in upon us, washing the waters of the Arabian
Sea around the sweep of Comorin and into the Bay of Ben-
gal. At the cape, I was told, there stands a castle whose walls
are painted with a mixture of sugar and egg white so that
the whole thing looks like a frosted wedding cake. The ma-
harajahs at least don't worry about hunger.
It was all so lovely, the whole world so beautiful, except
for the people in it: the starving, disease-ridden Indians, the
boring, self-satisfied Englishmen.
Long after I had left India, and a scant two years after
the communist government was voted into power in Kerala,
the people threw the rascals out. By means of a passive re-
sistance campaign, yet, the very technique used by the Con-
gress coalition to evict the British. In power, the communists
had behaved very much as their predecessors had, even or-
dering police to shoot at striking workers in order to protect
the property of the factory owners. There was some land
reform, but probably no more than there would have been
under a Congress government; much corruption, probably
no less than there would have been under a Congress govern-
ment; and there was a divisive school reform, riddled with
the same errors the Congress party might have made. In the
end, the people threw them out: not because they were com-
munists, but because they could not do the things that needed
doing.
Communism was no more a panacea for the area's ills
than capitalism had been, or feudalism or monarchy or a re-
public or Christianity or Islam or the matriarchal family, all
of which have had their turn in Kerala. It is just possible that
conditions there are past mending by any ideology.
I headed inland by train for Madurai and Tirruchchi-
rapolli, two fabled temple cities where I saw nothing, heard
nothing, smelt nothing, and certainly ate nothing. Away from
the moderating winds of the coast, the heat was unendurable.
I slept in railway dormitories, all the women and babies piled
in there on their bedrolls and locked in for the night with
barbed wire strung across the doors, and no one speaking to
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Krishna Smiled

me nor I to them. By day, like an ox harnessed to a water
wheel I plodded through bazaars, desperately in search of
enough books to justify my having made the trip, buying all
I could carry, feeling like a nail being hammered into the
ground by blows of the terrible, terrible sun. My only thought
was to buy my books and get out of here, if I could, alive.
The fabled temples would have to find another explorer.
In Madurai the temples have roofs like cake wedges
standing on end, intricately carved, garishly painted, more
alive than the streets below them for the gods don't mind the
heat, and I did not stop to look. I passed a temple on whose
terrace horses of white stone plunged and reared, while under
their pawing hoofs tailors sat oblivious and cross-legged, turn-
ing the wheels of their Singers with their toes, and I did not
stop to look. To spend one unnecessary moment in that heat
was unthinkable, though I might go ten thousand miles,
ten thousand years, and never come again to such a sight. I
wondered how human beings could think or dream or plan
in heat of that intensity. Of what importance is dialectical
materialism or the categorical imperative, the duality of mat-
ter or free will, when one cannot breathe? The body wants
to survive, so one must drag it up and down streets, exposed
to the sun like a chop upon a grill. There had been no rain
in five years, and nobody knew of a philsophy which would
change that.
The Colombo plane touches at Trichy, and I got on it
hot, dusty, my toes caked in dirt within worn sandals, loaded
with books packed into haphazard packages. Decently dressed
tourists enroute to Tokyo draped in cameras stared at me cool-
ly. I hadn't had the decency to dress.
The plane rose from off the baking, drought-stricken
land. Ventilators poured cool air into the cabin. A good fairy
appeared, bearing lemonade. My gills twitched. I wanted to
jump right into the glass. For the first time in days, I breathed.
Looking out the porthole, I could see India narrowing,
narrowing, till it slipped into the sea. The water was fawn-
colored, then tan, then light blue, dark blue and the blue of
Ocean. A breath of a moment, then Ceylon appeared dangling
from a chain of islands that drops from Dhanushkodi.
174


Through Kerala with coir and cashew
An embassy car, complete with Singhalese chauffeur and
American girl, awaited me at Colombo airport. The embassy
had reserved a room at the Galle Face Hotel, with a hot bath
and a window looking out over the harbor, through which
blew delicious sea breezes, containing moisture enough to
sustain mammalian life. I believe, I believe, I believe, Man
is descended from aquatic creatures! I showered South India
off me, shampooed, breathed, showered, shampooed again,
and breathed. The airplane had wrought a miraculous de-
liverance.
That night when I looked out my window while dress-
ing for dinner, there was this absolutely improbable four-
masted frigate riding in the harbor among the much larger
passenger liners and freighters. She was a-glowing like a jewel,
her masts and sails outlined in strings of electric pearls. Der
Flugender Hollander, perhaps? Darwin's Beagle? Captain
Kidd? It certainly was a four-master, but what time was it?
Over dinner in the elegant dining room, a naval officer
approached me, not in pantaloons but in a natty blue uni-
form. Dark, well-built and handsome, his eyes glistered and
danced, but his tongue was curiously slurred. I could not un-
derstand a word he said. Verbally, that is.
Then he asked, "Castellano?" Si, I could speak Spanish.
He beckoned the waiter and ordered champagne. "Drink a
few copas," he said in horrible Spanish. "Then you will speak
Portuguese like me."
Aristotle-an improbable Greek name went with the im-
probable Brazilian frigate-suggested in pantomime that I
change into an evening gown (oh, evening gown with the
crumpled crinoline that sailed the Malabar coast rolled into
my bedroll, and slept on the floor of Madurai railway station
with me, Arise! Awake! And sing a new song!)
At nine, Aristotle appeared at my hotel room door. We
laughed all the way to the harbor, laughed at the Old World
which is too old, laughed at the New World, which was us,
we two Americans who could not understand each other but
who understood each other very well, and took a cycle rick-
shaw to the quay. I suppose the sun still shone hot in Madurai,
and the communists continued to march in Ernakulum, but
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Krishna Smiled

we were picked up by a little boat that took us out to sea.
The wind ruffled his jacket as he straddled quay and boat to
hand me down, and I could see a luger packed in close to his
groin; ruffled my hair, which Aristotle, his hands deep rooted
in it, declared to be like a goat's; ruffled the sails of the jewelled
ship as it lay pinned to the dark waters of the harbor.
We climbed the Jacob's ladder and were piped aboard
this toy ship, which was rocking like a live thing as five-
hundred Brazilians, maddened by the rhythm of a Dionysian
band, sallied her from side to side. Champagne was the only
cargo she carried, and handsome men who lined up to dance,
but always Aristotle waited, glass in hand, to cut back in. He
was first mate of the Almirante Saldanha, on a goodwill cruise
around the world. It would take them two years to circum-
navigate the globe, a little less than it took Magellan, and
just in time they reached Colombo. I needed all the goodwill
I could get.

176


114
The good servant, Jesus Christ
When Emmanuel came to work for me, he asked
whether I could help him not have any more children. I made
an appointment for his wife to see the doctor at Lady Har-
dinge Hospital, and gave him ten rupees to pay the fee.
A year later I paid for Salome's confinement, and after
some discussion, for the baby's baptism as well.
Although Emmanuel explained to me it was not a baby
-"Just girl, Missahibji,"-he nevertheless insisted on giving a
party in her honor. I pointed out all the other good uses to
which he could put his money, but to no avail. He would
feed all his relatives and neighbors, and it would cost him-
or me-a month's salary.
I am not suited by nature to the role of fairy godmother.
When I first realized that, like other foreigners, I would need
to hire a bearer to mediate between me and India, I had looked
for a woman. Impossible, I was told. No woman works out-
side her own home (except for college graduates, and they
177


Krishna Smiled

are all physicians or Members of Parliament). It had to be a
man. Well, a bachelor then. But where are the bachelors of
India? Gone to marry, everyone. There are in fact no bache-
lors, nor spinsters either, save for the pathetic virgin widows
who were engaged in infancy but whose husbands died before
coming to maturity, condemning them to a life of isolation
and taboo. So I ended up hiring Emmanuel although he had
a wife, six children, two nieces, and a mother to support.
Emmanuel turned out to be a good servant. He kept my
various dwellings clean and guarded my belongings while I
was on the road. He hired, as needed, laundrymen, carpenters,
gardeners, taxi drivers, guides, tailors, water carriers, and once
even dancing boys. He was a great cook, having learned the
art from a thugi, one of the caste of murderous highway rob-
bers whom the British weaned from their ancestral vocation
and resettled in kitchens throughout the land. He translated
back and forth between English and Hindi (or Urdu or Hin-
dustani, whichever it was that he spoke) with a fine sense of
impartiality and a heavy reliance on the literal. When I hired
him, I asked him what his name meant. He replied: "Jesus
Christ."
Considering Emmanuel's many virtues, I donned my
fairy godmother outfit and accepted an invitation to the nam-
ing party. On the appointed night I headed for the pink
gingerbread spires of Lakshminarayan Temple, turned down
Panchkuin Road, and sought out the barracks in which my
bearer's family occupied a room.
If I expected the string of parti-colored lights which
adorn Hindu festivals, I had to be content with one bare
electric bulb which, hanging from the limb of a tree, illumined
half the barracks and obliterated the rest. In the bright half
of the compound stood our host, a bantam black Methodist
with a crucifix tattooed on his right forearm, a bleeding heart
on his left, and no front teeth, the result of a bet one of his
sahibs had made that his bearer could beat the next-door
sahib's bearer.
By the time I arrived, the compound was already filled
with men in white ducks or dhotis, squatting over bowls of
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The good servant, Jesus Christ
curried mutton which they scooped up with wheat chapatis.
They were being served by little boys. The poorest Indian
family never lacks servants, because children wait on their
elders and are in turn waited on by toddlers.
Among these I recognized Emmanuel's, for they mostly
wore fragments of my clothing. A particularly favorite skirt,
which had seen the pine forests of Maine, the sands of Jones
Beach, and the Arboretum at Ann Arbor, was now running
in several directions around the compound, covering tiny
brown bits with bare bottoms for whom U.S.A. would always
be a clutch of half-understood stories brought home by their
father.
Against a wall the women sat, obscure in a muddle of
saris and tumbling infants. I scrutinized them for one who
might be Salome. In vain. I should have thought that, as
Emmanuel's employer and sole sustainer of eleven Christian
souls, I would have had some consideration in this matter.
But though I visited the household several times, Salome re-
mained for me an unembodied biblical reference.
My dinner was served to me by Salome's father, the
blackguard who had conned the family into arranging this
marriage many years ago, thus withering Emmanuel's ambi-
tion on the vine.
"I never want to marry," Emmanuel told me toward the
end of my stay when we were driving down from Simla.
"Woman be big trouble. My father, he work always for other
people, he be bearer too, Missahib. But I want to be for my-
self, and woman, she be big trouble."
He looked at me to see whether he had offended me.
Emmanuel did not consider me a woman, since I was a boss.
"I live then by Amritsar and work very hard with my
big brother. My brother not smart, Missahib. Is something
wrong with head, he cannot think. But we be working hard
and soon we be having one cow, three buffalo, many chickens.
We sell butter, ghee, milk, eggs make some money.
"One day my big brother he take my jacket and my tie
and is say is going to town. I say, 'Why you dress up to go
to town?' He say, 'Our Daddy he write go take my picture.' I
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Krishna Smiled
say, 'I take my picture too. Why you pay three rupees, I pay
three rupees? We brothers, we take one picture together.'
"We take picture, send to Daddy, I be getting letter, come
home. I come Delhi, Daddy he say to me, you make marriage,
I be having nice girl."
Emmanuel's daddy had made a match with a "very big
man, a kabardi, and a good Christian." A kabardi sells old
bottles and rags. They made the deal for Emmanuel's older
brother, but that lasted only until the kabardi saw the photo-
graph. Then he rejected the weak-minded son in favor of
Emmanuel. "Daddy say, 'I take a thing which is freely given',"
and the bargain was sealed.
Emmanuel protested briefly. But "I always do what Dad-
dy say."
"Day after I be married, Missahib, I go Nucklow ('Luck-
now'). I never be taking my wife to me." There he got a job
as bearer to a red-headed Scotsman who promised to appren-
tice him as a mechanic if he stayed two years. Emmanuel
passed a year of happy servitude. "He be fierce, Missahib,
one time he come home from barracks, Memsahib not there.
When she come home, he take all her clothes off and lock
her out of house." Thus, life in the cantonment.
One day a telegram arrived. Emmanuel's mother was
dying. His master gave him leave grudgingly, paid his return
fare but withheld his salary.
On arrival at the Delhi railway station, Emmanuel was
met by the wedding party. Naturally, it included his mother.
Again Daddy won out; Emmanuel wrote his Scotsman, who
cursed him and sent two months' pay.
"And now I be having six kids."
"But she's a good wife, isn't she?"
"Oh, Missahib, she be talking very much."
Now the paterfamilias welcomed his guests to his front
yard. People moved into blackness and reappeared outlined
by the single electric light bulb. Time passed slowly for me as
I sought but could not find a pattern to their movements.
Silently, girls sat shrouded in their saris. Old women hissed
to one another, young men giggled, infants sucked with little
choking noises.
180


The good servant, Jesus Christ
It was midnight before the religious service began, the
sermon and the hymns in Hindi. It was two in the morning
before the infant had been named after the Hindu goddess
of the dance.
As the congregation broke up and the minister departed,
I staggered onto feet numbed by hours of sitting tailor fashion,
my senses equally deadened by the assault of liturgical Hindi.
Emmanuel forestalled me. "Wait, Missahibji. Is Bengali
dancer. Is come all the way from Calcutta. Is very good."
"Where?" I asked. "I don't see any dancer." Emmanuel
shifted feet. The Bengali couldn't dance without a drink.
Liquor couldn't be allowed at a prayer meeting. So the
Bengali had been sent out in the care of a neighbor's son to
tie one on discreetly.
I was sceptical of the Bengali's artistry, drunk or sober;
but Emmanuel had a roguish look to him. He knew something
he wasn't telling me. From behind him came an artlessly
tricky arpeggio chased by a double entendre on a drum. I sat
down.
A young man with clipped moustache had taken over
the harmonium that had been used to accompany the ser-
vice. Gone were the four-square phrases of the hymns. In
their place I could hear the casual fall and languid rise of
Indian music. The tabla player, as though ignoring his com-
panion, yet mysteriously in tune with him, beat his spatulate
fingers on the two resonant tubs he clasped between his legs.
I had already learned to enjoy Indian music by sup-
pressing what I took to be the melody and following the
beat. Percussion is the essence, melody only an accompani-
ment. Listening to the repetitive scales of Indian music leaves
a westerner as bored as an Indian is when he listens to western
music, for he finds our rhythms unbearably monotonous, and
the melodies go right by him.
A man began to hum and then to sing, weaving between
the syncopated tablas and the seemingly casual harmonium.
He did not strain his voice as the academicists do, and he
avoided the tawdry quavers of the film singers. This was the
voice of the folk without foreign improvement. This was the
rhythm children beat out on curbstones with sticks-but I
181


Krishna Smiled

could not. This was the rhythm the garbage collectors bang
out on lids as they ride into Delhi on the backs of trucks at
five in the morning and I never minded when they wakened
me (cousins of the Italian garbage collectors of New York,
who wakened me with La Traviata on Mondays and Thurs-
days). This was the music I had heard before on hot nights
from across the garden, but always when I crept up on it, it
had disappeared.
But now the Bengali was here! Excitement stirred the
people apart, clearing a space some ten feet by ten. I won-
dered how a man could dance in so small an area. A jingle of
bells sounded inexplicably from Emmanuel's doorway, the
sort of bells that are fastened to a horse's harness. The har-
monium player ran his fingers up an erratic scale. Shhh! A
bare foot slapped the ground. I wheeled around. The Bengali
stood in the doorway.
He was dressed as a woman. Her sari was orange, the
color of happiness. Her face was powdered white, and sprin-
kled with glistening bits of silver dust. On her arms were
bracelets, on her ankles leather straps sewn with dozens of
little bells. Her face was haughty as a camel's.
She stamped once more. The twittering of the guests fell
away. Once in command, she took her time, adjusting the
folds of her sari as a queen might adjust the order across her
breast. With one arm, strangely thin and muscular, she sig-
nalled the musicians.
A sinuous rhythm began on the tablas, the harmonium
pattering aimlessly behind. The Bengali walked proudly into
the cleared space, her ankle bells becoming the third instru-
ment of the orchestra, and slowly began the dance. The extra-
ordinary ugliness of the man cried out through the glittering
ornaments of the woman. A proud sneer filled the large
painted lips.
I had seen popular dancing in India before, as it is done
by the sluts who are all that remain of a splendid courtesan
tradition. They are clumsy and indifferent; they tug at their
underwear and clean their ears with their fingernails, and
roll their vulgar mechanical eyes at the men who lounge
182


The good servant, Jesus Christ
about on canvas pillows trying to copy the sly remarks heard
at the movies.
This man was more girl-like than the nautch girls, with
the grace of a woman and the hauteur of a princess. He
swayed and writhed, stamping his belled feet, flirting the
tail of his sari. He was female, not effeminate; artful, not arty.
And somehow, despite his appalling vulgarity, he was not
vulgar.
Apparently the slow dance ended. The artists seemed
to have failed to agree when to stop, one finishing and then
the other, and then the Bengali melted into the doorway.
Some discussion brought him out again. He had drawn
the sari between his legs and hooked it at the waist to make
a dhoti of it, that bulky loincloth made known to us by Gandhi.
Unexpectedly, to a hesitant rhythm, the Bengali was
making his way through jungle. The mime of the dancer
evoked heat and tangled brush, thorns, and immediate dan-
ger. A tiger was spied, a spear flung, a fight fought to the
death, the beast's neck broken. The hunter bathed in a clear
running river, flinging himself into its cooling waters; and
triumphantly dragged the carcass home.
Howls of delight demanded another performance. The
Bengali was reluctant, as though distasteful of further con-
tact with us. He leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette,
holding it upright between his knuckles in order to draw the
smoke through his fist more deeply into his lungs.
By this time, the dark around us was rimmed with pas-
sersby who had stopped to watch. From the darkness of the
street, two policemen came, leaned on their long sticks an-
gularly, the whites of their eyes gleaming from dark brown
faces. Emmanuel served them cups of tea and they drank,
patterned against the black sky.
Now the harmonium player swished his fingers down
the keys, enticing the dancer, who seemed reluctant. The
tabla player hammered the pegs that held the skins taut on
the little drums, dropping their pitch two full steps. I realized
for the first time that they are tuned, like tympani. As though
he couldn't care less, the Bengali jingled into the center of
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Krishna Smiled

the square. Taking a handkerchief, he hung it by a corner
from between his clenched teeth. A shout of recognition went
up from the crowd, and then we were still.
As the musicians organized themselves, I recognized the
snake charmer's rhythm. The Bengali, manipulating the hand-
kerchief, seemed to be playing a pipe. His entire body played,
rising and falling with the notes soothingly, enticingly. His
eyes focused on a spot of bare earth at his feet.
Across from me, a man got up, removed his turban, and
placed it, still bound, under the snake charmer's stare. He
took his own handkerchief, knotted it so that one point stood
up, and placed it inside the turban. The cobra was in his
basket.
The coaxing cadences of the music changed, tightened
up, put more pressure on the senses of every living being
present. The Bengali was kneeling beside the turban, sup-
plicating. Whatever was inside the turban rose inquiringly.
The Bengali rose with it.
And now they danced together, the charmer on his forked
legs, the cobra like some hideous flower that had its blossom
in the menacingly spread hood.
The music was spiralling faster and faster, and the snake
was visibly agitated. But it calmed as the charmer slowly
sank to his knees again, his eyes always focused on the deadly
spot. The cobra sank too, withdrawing almost from sight
beneath the folds of the turban.
At the height of the cobra's fascination, the charmer took
his pipe from his mouth and extended a hand over the rep-
tile's hood. The cobra braced itself to withstand the loathsome
approach of a human being.
The charmer breathed deeply and resumed his playing.
Then again he passed his hand over the hypnotized snake,
and again the cobra remained transfixed by remembered
rhythms.
On the third pass, the spell broke. So swiftly my eye
could not see it, the cobra lunged. The charmer, fatally bitten,
flung away his pipe, thrusting his hand upward to heaven in
a gesture of terror and betrayal. He danced a wild dance
of fury and writhing. And then he died.
184


The good servant, Jesus Christ
We sat stunned. I wondered what Emmanuel would do
with this dead snake charmer in his front yard. But even as
we sat silent, the melody which the charmer had played crept
back to life slowly, slowly. The Bengali stirred, and slowly
rose. Dazedly he footed the old rhythm again until faster,
faster he whirled with joy to live again. With a tremendous
jingling of bells, he leaped over our heads and disappeared.
I was sweating. Across the circle a matter-of-fact young
man unknotted the cobra and returned it to his pocket. He
rewound the turban on his head and, chattering, went his
way.
It was full morning. The bells of Lakshminarayan were
clanging, barefoot worshippers climbed the temple steps with
offerings of marigold and pice. In the yard next to Emman-
uel's, a woman was building a fire and mixing the day's
chapatis. Children were running and crying in the streets, and
on Panchkuin Road the nighttime train of bullock carts had
yielded to the day's stream of bicycles. New Delhi was coming
awake. Was I?
Emmanuel thanked me. The neighbors were satisfied by
his generosity that he was in fact the father of the new baby,
a point which I now learned had been shrouded in doubt so
long as he held off giving the party. I was out a month's salary,
but he and Salome could hold up their heads again.
As a last favor, would I drop the Bengali off at Connaught
Circus? I agreed with surprise-surely he had already left,
for he was nowhere in sight.
But at Emmanuel's nod, a man detached himself from
a nearby group. He was sallow and pockmarked, his teeth
rotted, his eyes lack-luster. He walked with one shoulder
slightly forward of the other. Hangdog. Bengali.
We got into my car. I asked him his name.
"I have no job Missahib," he said in the small voice of
shame. "I very good cook, Missahib. Do you know anyone
needs cook, I work for him for very little money. I read, write
English, Missahib."
"Cook?!" I said, "why don't you dance?"
He looked at me, flattered but unbelieving. "Dance?
Missahib, this first time dance in four, five month. Nobody
185


Krishna Smiled

ask now. Is no good time for dance, Missahib. But I very
good cook." He looked at me hopefully.
I stared back at him. The haughty curve of his lip had
never existed. His head had never sat on his neck like a
camel's. Face powder would be an obscenity here. He was
hungry. He had never been a queen; he was only just alive.
The Bengali had no bundle with him. I suppose he had
borrowed the sari from Salome. I gave him ten rupees when
I let him off, then sped back to my apartment. Emmanuel
was already there, waiting to cook me breakfast.
I was surprised at the calibre of the musicians who per-
formed at Emmanuel's party. He really knew music, as I
learned one day soon after. I was reading in my living room,
the winter sun streaming through the window lighting up the
embroidered Kashmiri shawl which Captain Kitu had given
me. Suddenly, it seemed that the crewel flowers were quiver-
ing in a breeze such as comes before the rain. I even smelled
freshly watered earth, though winter is dry in Delhi. Goose-
flesh sprouted along my arms. Through these bumps I be-
came aware that All India Radio, to which I had been only
dimly listening, was broadcasting a song which descended
upon me like rain upon parched earth. It took an effort to
raise my voice in order to call Emmanuel into the room. With
one finger I bade him listen.
"What was that?" I gasped when it ended. I thought he
would listen to the announcer and then translate, but he
answered right away.
"Ah, Missahib, that very fine tune," he began, then lapsed
into Hindi (or Urdu or else it was some pretty high-class
Hindustani). I rushed him to the car before he should have
time to forget the name of the very fine tune, and headed
for a record shop in Chandni Chowk, where he picked it out
for me. It was a setting of a poem by Tan Sen, court musician
to the Emperor Akbar; a prayer by a maiden for water to
descend from heaven to quench the flames that parch her
lover.
("I want no woman, woman be big trouble," Emmanuel
told me on the way down from Simla.)
186


The good servant, Jesus Christ
Generally I preferred to travel alone. That way I attracted
a good deal of attention and never wanted for help. In fact,
I had come to depend upon ad hoc acquaintances to locate
my books, particularly in non-Hindi areas. The presence of
my bearer, on the other hand, would indicate to strangers
that I had the situation well in hand, and no help would be
offered.
But Emmanuel always badgered me to take him along,
possibly because of the intolerable overcrowding in his home.
So when I went up to Simla to negotiate a book exchange
with the state press there, I took Emmanuel along since we
were staying within the Hindustani linguistic area anyway
(ignoring Pahari, a variant of West Hindi). It worked out
all right, and between us we managed to buy a racy collec-
tion of government reports as well as some ancient phono-
graph records and hand-copied folksongs of the Himalayas.
Who knows? We may be partly responsible for the in-
vasion of American pop music by Indian modes.
Heading back to Delhi, later on the road than I had
planned, Emmanuel began to reminisce about his life before
coming to work for me. He was at that time thirty-eight years
old, old enough in Indian terms to be my father.
The land he had farmed with his brother fell out on the
wrong side of the border and had to be abandoned. The ani-
mals went the way of all flesh when some Sikhs ran them off.
Partition presented him instead with two children, when his
sister and her husband were killed.
His capital gone, and with no trade-he lost out on the
chance to be a mechanic when he quit his job at Nucklow
because of having to stay with his wife-Emmanuel did what
the depressed classes do everywhere: he turned to housework.
He became bearer to a succession of Americans. But he vowed
his sons would have a trade.
For a while, it was quiet in the Vauxhall. The road was
long and late, and though I disliked the smell of Indian
tobacco, I told Emmanuel he might light up. He had eaten
nothing that day; he never did until he boiled some tea down
to tannic acid at 4 P.M. and drank that. But we hadn't stopped
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Krishna Smiled

for tea. With a sigh of relief, the unknown black man stuck
a bidri upright between his third and fourth fingers, lighted
it beneath his cantonment moustachioes, and sucked the
smoke deep into his lungs. In Hindustani, we drink cigarettes.
The first two children born were boys. This was a good
thing. Since he never could earn enough money to save any,
and since there was no such thing as Social Security, the
boys would provide for him and Salome in their old age. He
thought one might be the mechanic he never was; the other
a carpenter.
He enrolled them in the same mission school where he
himself was educated. They did so well that the school re-
duced their tuition. He transferred to his sons all the hopes
he had once had for himself. They would not be servants.
Of course, he wanted to educate the girls too. But there
was not the same urgency about it. He would have to fur-
nish dowries for them, and then when they got married they
would take their earning capacity to their husband's families.
Nevertheless, it would be good, he felt, if at least two of
them could become nurses. That trade was open to Christians
because Hindus and Moslems refused to let their daughters
into it. "They t'ink, Missahibji, that nurses be same as Hindu
widows (prostitutes)."
One night when the boys were eight and nine years old,
they died. In the evening they were running through the
streets of Panchkuin in the shadow of Lakshminarayan Tem-
ple; in the morning they were dead on Emmanuel's floor. He
did not know what they died of. "Maybe they go eat some-
t'ing."
They died, and I suspect, all the moxie went out of Em-
manuel. From then on it was just a matter of feeding his
family one day to the next. With everyone piled into one
room, without electricity or money to spend on entertain-
ment, their numbers increased each year. Separation was the
only form of birth control, and there was no room to separate.
One time, when he took to sleeping outdoors to escape the
marital embrace, the neighbors so taunted his wife that he
had to move back inside.
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The good servant, Jesus Christ
And now Indira ("not child, Missahib, just girl"). All the
others had Christian names, but he called this one Indira.
He was going under. Smiling, honest, courteous, loyal, in-
telligent, christian, desperate, going under.
Life had made Emmanuel a good servant.

189


15
After two years, I finally acquire
some intelligence
Newspapers provide the foreign observer with a
sense of touch. No one is better equipped than local journalists
to put their fingers on the native pulse. Reading, the diplomat
can get a feel for the local scene, and possibly even make it.
It is a truism of the intelligence community that you can
learn more about a country through its newspapers than you
can from all the top secret intelligence operations ever moun-
ted. A controlled press, on the other hand, shuts the diplo-
mats out, leaving them to grope around in the dark with the
aid of ouija boards.
Since factual information has got to be at the base of
any workable foreign policy, embassies consume newsprint
voraciously. It was part of my responsibility as publications
procurement officer to purvey the necessary newspapers for
use in the embassy as well as for shipment to my client li-
braries in Washington. The business part of this was handled
commercially by a newsdealer whom I taught the trick my
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I acquire some intelligence
home office taught me: all around his warehouse walls we
posted mastheads and calendars, beneath which his em-
ployees stacked the matching newspapers for labelling and
dispatch. Although between them they knew eight or nine
Indian languages, they couldn't really be expected to read
all 845.
From my office I handled the accounting, and seldom
had to soil my hands with newsprint except on such occa-
sions as my visit to Kabul, where I found an embassy inter-
preter almost buried under a two-year accumulation of
"news." He had been told to subscribe to the papers, but not
where to send them. So I dug him out from behind his desk,
and taught him the trick too.
Occasionally, newspapers would swim past my ken which
had never entered regular commercial channels and which
the newsdealer, consequently, never called to my attention.
These were always of special interest since they reflected
new political views just beginning to appear over the horizon.
With a change in the political situation, minority voices could
achieve importance, and I regarded it as a coup when I could
pass such a newspaper along to Washington for inspection,
together with information on who was publishing it and why.
One such arrived at the embassy one day, and was kicked
to my desk by the mailroom because they didn't know what
else to do with it. It was printed on a single sheet of hand-
made paper folded over once so as to produce four pages.
The print appeared to have been set by hand with wooden
type. Somewhere out there, Johannes Gutenberg was at work.
The language was something else. Research at the em-
bassy library and among our small staff of interpreters re-
vealed it to be Tibetan. In the upper right hand corner there
appeared in English the date (several weeks in the future)
and the name Kalimpong. That sent me back to the library,
and the atlas.
I had never acquisitioned anything in the Tibetan lan-
guage. The Library of Congress was always pestering me
about some Tibetan palm-leaf manuscripts they wanted, but
they seemed unable, or unwilling, to provide me any clues as
191


Krishna Smiled

to where these might be found. The palm leaves were appar-
ently inscribed with religious verses, or tantras, and I con-
sidered them secondary to my main effort, which was directed
toward political reporting. In that context, Tibetan was a very
interesting language, and my blood tingled as I located
Kalimpong within spittin' distance of the Tibetan border. If I
could locate this newspaper and throw a tantra towards the
Library at the same time, the trip would pay off.
The next time I was in Calcutta, I took a plane to Bag-
dogra, a way station distinguished only by the passage through
it weekly of the late king of Nepal, bound for fun weekends
in Calcutta. En passant, I flew the plane over Mount Everest,
which from that height is a mountain like any mountain.
From Bagdogra I travelled by jitney to Darjeeling, then by
Land Rover to Kalimpong, driving through a remarkable rain
forest of giant trees hung with moss and bedight with orchids.
Incredible butterflies floated in the air, as though entire flower
beds had become airborne. At 3,500 feet, the Himalayan
foothills were smothered in poinsettas, azaleas, rhododendron,
and cherry. One could weep to think what the twentieth
century will do to this place when it arrives.
But the twentieth century was arriving already, hard on
the heels of the army of the People's Republic of China.
China had just reconquered her old vassal state Tibet, an
action which won the acclamation of the Chinese not only
on the mainland, but on Taiwan as well. And the Indian
Prime Minister, in a fit of absent-minded generosity, had
acknowledged its right to do so. The troops now stationed on
the roof of the world were badly in need of consumer goods
which the conquered countryside could not produce. Coin-
cidentally, Nehru and Mao agreed upon Panch Sheila, Five
Principles of Peace, one of which was free trade between their
countries.
As a result, the border was wide open along the Kalim-
pong-Gangtok-Gyantze road. The entire area was booming,
and more Tibetans were at large than had ever been seen
before.
They were marching their yak trains up and down the
192


I acquire some intelligence
mountain trails, bringing up supplies for the Chinese garri-
son: mill cloth, boots, and kerosene from India; and Chinese
rice, which had to be shipped by rail from Chinese farms to
Peking, by sea to Calcutta, then forwarded overland to Kalim-
pong whence it went up the Himalayas by animal or human
pack, because there was no railroad or even highway across
mainland Asia to Lhasa. The yak trains returned southward
with that ages-old export of Central Asia, raw wool. Of late,
the southbound caravans were also bringing down brass pots,
mountain horns, jewelry, the lootings of Tibetan households
for sale to the gewgaw hungry Americans in New Delhi.
Kalimpong itself had the bustling air of a frontier boom-
town, like Peshawar in its time, or Carson City in its. The
Tibetans, larger than life, loped through the bazaar buying
bars of Cadbury chocolate and cans of Yardley talcum pow-
der which they stuffed into their wide leather belts, whether
for themselves or for their yaks, I could not know. Treading
softly in soft leather boots, they let their full-skirted coats
hang down behind them in the soft November air. High bro-
caded caps with fur earflaps covered their braided hair. In
every right ear, a turquoise stud; in every left, a golden hoop
from which a lump of coral or turquoise was slung. (Where
do you get coral, as far inland as anyone can get inland?)
Their resemblance to American Indians was startling.
But our Indians lived in a hospitable land compared with the
one Tibetans call home. According to some royal anthro-
pologists who were living in the hills above the town and
who were making a study of the matter, these lusty men
usually shared one wife among a family of brothers. Life is
expensive in Tibet, and polyandry is one way to keep the
birth rate down.
Pandit Nehru had recently observed that Kalimpong was
a hotbed of spies. The name of the hotbed was Himalaya
Hotel, where I stayed. The air of the little inn was thick with
the smoke of intrigue, some of it produced by enigmatic
Tibetans meditating in rocking chairs, some by equally opaque
Englishmen striking their national posture in front of the
fireplace. The proprietress was the daughter of the former
193


Krishna Smiled

British trade agent at Gyantze and a Tibetan. She arranged
nightly games of cards and dice among her guests, who in-
cluded not only Indians of every style but some Europeans
of a kind I hadn't met yet: a frowsy, blowsy White Russian
who sculpted outlandish busts in the garden and was rumored
to have been an enchantress under, literally, the Czar; a really
smashing British army captain who was recruiting Gurkha
soldiers to fight communist Chinese in Malaya; and the
daughter-in-law of the King of Bhutan who had just then
departed on a six-week funerary expedition, his own. The
shadowy world of espionage lurked ready to pounce, and for
a moment I regretted not belonging to it. If you're going to
be a lady spy, Kalimpong is a lovely place to practice your
profession.
A little discreet inquiry enabled me to locate the press
of the Tibetan newspaper. Walking over to the print shop,
I introduced myself to the editor, an ascetic looking gentle-
man in conservative grey kimono and braids. I gave my full
identity since he seemed to want recognition from us; besides,
I suspected that in Kalimpong there were no secrets.
This Tibetan Gutenberg considered himself a refugee
from his homeland, a ludicrous idea on the face of it since
everyone in India knew the Tibetans were grateful to the
Chinese for having liberated them from an oppressive theoc-
racy. But the editor saw things differently, and told me of
Chinese massacres of civilian populations, the starving out
of monastaries by siege, and the building of military high-
ways and airports, which he thought should be of especial
interest to the Americans.
I thought so too. Our sources on Tibet were preternatu-
rally thin. Of course, I was in no position to verify either his
information or his pedigree. But he looked interesting. I
placed three subscriptions to his newspaper, not because I
expected it to be published regularly, but as a token of in-
terest. It was a way of keeping him on the phone until the
regular intelligence types could talk with him.
That was an error on my part, because nobody in Wash-
ington was interested in him, and he may be on the line yet.
194


I acquire some intelligence
I found this out a few weeks later while being debriefed by
some intelligence types back home. During our session I men-
tioned the Tibetan newspaper and its editor, and was met
by a deep freeze. In fact, each time I tried to discuss any
possible source of intelligence on the communist side of the
bamboo curtain, my interlocutors changed the subject.
What kind of intelligence, I wondered, were they inter-
ested in? Only news which had already appeared in the New
York Times? Only news from our side? Only good news? The
answer, I realize in retrospect, to all these questions, was
Yes.
Back in Intelligence Acquisition and Distribution, I men-
tioned this peculiarity to members of my own office, all of
whom were now strangers to me. My old boss had died; my
immediate superior had gone on to his reward in Stockholm;
everyone was new, due to mandatory shifts in assignments
every two years. I was now the old hand, the one who knew
what it was really like in the field.
But I was innocent as to the ways of Washington. When
I brought up the matter of the so-called intelligence debrief-
ing, I was met by warning hand signals and crossed eyes,
urgent messages telegraphed to me nonverbally. It became
clear they assumed the bug in the office wall was not friendly.
"My God, where have you been?" a colleague mumbled
thickly over lunch. Talking with his mouth full and his lips
shielded from possible lip readers, he spluttered, "You can't
talk about that kind of thing. Aren't you aware of what's going
on?"
"Of course I'm aware," I said impatiently, "if you mean
aware of the communist menace. Don't we want to know
more about the people who are menacing us?"
My colleague gave a derisive snort. "Keep your mouth
shut."
In Washington in 1954, a State Department officer who
expressed an interest in communism acquired a pink tinge
which made friends desert him as abruptly as the onset of the
plague. The anti-communist crusade of Senator Joe McCarthy
was in full cry and, though from the perspective of India it
195


Krishna Smiled

had seemed unreal, here in Washington it was the only reality.
I had thought that no one could take seriously the vague
charges of treason in high places, unsupported by evidence
and laced with inconsistencies. Despite two years in Asia, I
still did not recognize the power of irrational thinking. Mc-
Carthy's assistants, characterized by the press as junketeering
gumshoes, appeared on the world stage as latterday mani-
festations of Laurel and Hardy; impossible to take them
seriously.
Except that, here at home, everybody did. Heads were
rolling down the hallways of New State which, not unsym-
bolically, was really the cast off shell of the War Department.
Foreign Service Officers who reported on communist activity
were being accused of being communists themselves.
One political officer who correctly predicted the coming
to power of the communist party in Kerala was summarily
fired, without being advised of the charges nor being given
an opportunity to defend himself. We FSOs had believed it
to be our job to keep the government informed on develop-
ments abroad: to be the eyes, ears, sense of touch of the
American people. Instead, FSOs who filed reports concerning
communist activity were accused of being sympathetic to
the events they described. Anyone who reported the growth
of communist strength, must be a commie himself.
I looked this man up and had lunch with him in the
State Department cafeteria, at some risk, I suppose, to my
own career. His advice to me was to watch my step, since I
was Jewish.
It is not difficult to believe there was a loss of accuracy
in reporting under such conditions. No one dared report bad
news. Intelligence sources dried up for lack of tending. Sus-
picion flared among colleagues. Even those who were not
attacked directly lost their effectiveness, as it became ap-
parent to foreign diplomats that Americans could be accused
of disloyalty and destroyed overnight by their own govern-
ment. Our status was thus diminished within the diplomatic
colony, and this loss of confidence undermined our ability to
work and brought on a pervasive sense of futility.
196


I acquire some intelligence
Demoralization decimated the ranks of the service. Fully
one-third of the members of my entering class had left the
service at the end of four years. Recruitment could not make
up the difference: the elite would never join again. Men and
women of spirit will not compete for service in a corps which
offers its members up like lambs of sacrifice to any demagog
with sufficient gall to mention their name.
The harm which McCarthyism wrought on our foreign
service was doubled by the pusillanimity of the State Depart-
ment, which either could not or would not defend its officers.
We had all been investigated before being commissioned,
and were subject to frequent security rechecks. If any spies
had been found among us, it was the FBI which needed
looking into, not State.
For those FSOs who were accused of disloyalty, it might
be thought that the innocent could be vindicated by scrutiny
of their record of service. However, these officers were amazed
to learn that their personnel files had never been asked for
by the senators who brought the charges. A senator had only
to name an officer to damn him. Once named, he became
expendable in the eyes of the department, the press, and the
public.
An FSO is peculiarly incapacitated for the Washington
battlefield, because he spends his career in the political boon-
docks. Unlike other federal officials who are domiciled in the
capital, and for whom mending fences is a continual-in some
cases the only-preoccupation, the FSO cannot form links
with the people who count. Passing through Washington
briefly every two years, he may never even meet the men
who dominate his life.
Outside the State Department, the men who dominate
the FSO's career are congressmen. These fall into two cate-
gories: those who sit on committees which are charged with
legislative oversight of the State Department; and those who
represent the home district of the particular Foreign Service
Officer.
The chairman of the subcommittee which allocates funds
to State is and has been, off and on for a quarter century,
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Krishna Smiled

Congressman John Rooney of Brooklyn. Far from having re-
ceived any commission from a president to engage in the
conduct of foreign affairs, he has been known to decline in-
vitations from presidents to discuss such matters. When the
Democrats control the House, he is the most powerful man
in the State Department, and disposes of more influence over
American foreign policy than any FSO, or for that matter,
than any senator whose foreign policy views are a matter of
public record. No State Department official has developed a
power base to rival that of the congressman's, who has won
reelection thirteen times by showing his constituents that he
really knows how to keep the foreign service in line by trim-
ming its budget.
Two examples of congressional parsimony will suffice. At
the time of the increase in communist activity in Kerala,
budget cuts required our Dravidian language interpreters to
be laid off. From an intelligence point of view, the effect
would have been the same if the government of India had
closed down all the southern newspapers. We would have
deplored such an act of censorship; but our own action was
just as effective in screening our embassy from learning what
was going on.
Within the service, it is well known that some ambassa-
dorial posts are closed to career officers because pay and
allowances are not adequate for upkeep of the post. Down at
the Third Secretary level, my entertainment allowance the
first year was zilch, the second year, twenty-five dollars. Since
Congress grants tax breaks to businessmen for entertainment
expenses, the message is clear: it is more important to know
what's up with the Revlon account than it is to know what's
going on in India's parliament.
Accustomed to governmental parsimony, to which as a
taxpayer I could not object, I was startled when, on my first
run to the airport to meet a clutch of visiting congressmen,
I was handed envelopes of cash to present to them. I had
supposed they were submitting expense accounts to the Gen-
eral Accounting Office. Possibly they were. In that event, how
198


I acquire some intelligence
did they enter the cases of tax-free liquor which I, in my ca-
pacity as embassy duty officer, was told to deposit in their
hotel rooms?
Every congressman must serve his constituency if he
wants to stay in office. This constituency is domestic, rooted
in local politics. The congressman who is beholden to the
county courthouse or dairy farmers or aircraft manufacturers
or urban blacks is in no danger of losing votes when he un-
derbudgets the State Department, all of whose constituents
are foreigners who cannot vote, and most of whose employees
are overseas where they cannot defend themselves. State has
no domestic constituency, no group which can be counted on
to vote in its support; therefore there is no congressman who
can be counted upon to stand up and speak for it.
The position not only of the department but of the indi-
vidual officer is precarious. Typically, the last refuge of the
wronged citizen is his congressman, and that goes for federal
employees too. The lady who was assaulted in the file room
of the Central Intelligence Agency was quite correct in catch-
ing a train and crossing the country in order to hide out in
her senator's home. Only from this bastion could she defend
herself against the rapist's charge that he had caught her red-
handed in the top secret safe.
Plenty of foreigners have had congressmen go to bat for
them too. Italian prostitutes, Chinese ship-jumpers, Basque
sheepherders, and convicted felons of every and no national-
ity, have all benefited from congressional interest and gen-
erosity, provided someone in the congressman's district took
an interest in them. There are a lot of votes to be quarried in
the process of digging some unfortunate alien out from under
the legislation which Congress itself has passed.
But FSOs historically have found congressmen slow to
rise to their defense. Perhaps there is built-in antipathy be-
tween diplomats who make the world their home, and repre-
sentatives who must base themselves on local issues in order
to win election. The multilingual diplomat in cutaway and
top hat makes a strange buddy for the congressman who must
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Krishna Smiled

assume a drawl and a coonskin cap in order to persuade his
constituents that he is an American even if he was educated
overseas.
Consequently, although the diplomat may have a good
working relationship with foreign cabinet ministers and play
golf with the editors of powerful foreign newspapers, he is
apt to find, when the hot irrational glare of publicity is turned
upon him by his own government, that he is friendless and
alone.
Orphaned by a weak department, starved by misguided
congressmen, buffeted by political winds, the foreign service
never grew strong enough to dominate foreign policy making.
The State Department never became influential enough to
counterbalance the weight of other federal departments.
State became only one among many sources of advice to the
president, and by no means the strongest.
George F. Kennan, who rose as high in government cir-
cles as any FSO has, states in his memoirs that the State De-
partment was often pushed aside during the making of mo-
mentous decisions, while President and senators conferred
with the military. During the height of crises in Korea, Japan
and Germany, he continues, it was often difficult for State to
learn what was going on.
The influence gap which State could not fill was filled by
the Defense Department. Garlanded in its death-dealing
trinkets whose production is so important to the economy,
the Defense Department is infinitely more attractive to vote-
counting congressmen than the State Department could ever
be. How many jobs does State generate, after all? A vote for
the State Department budget is just a vote. State has behind
it no identifiable body of people whose support a congressman
must woo. But a vote for Defense Department budget means
jobs, factories, prosperity, and campaign contributions which
can be parlayed into reelection by those senators and repre-
sentatives who are canny enough to get themselves placed on
the right committees. Defense has the strongest clientele of
any federal department-industry: and Congress responds to
that clientele.
200


I acquire some intelligence
It is very fashionable these days to criticize industry for
its malevolent effect upon American foreign policy. But in-
dustry was never dedicated to anything but profit-making.
What is Congress dedicated to?
If, looking beyond the aggrandizement of their own dis-
tricts, congressmen had allowed the State Department to at-
tain a reasonable strength, we might today have civilian con-
trol over foreign policy instead of our present situation, where
much policy originates in the Defense Department, with State
providing apologies after the fact.
Electronic gadgetry would no doubt continue to exude
a certain glamour, and congressmen will never be totally im-
pervious to free flights on supersonic jets. But ideas are not
without their attractive powers, and leadership generated
within a strong State Department might have kept our for-
eign relations under civilian control, where the Constitution
says they belong. Americans have known from the beginning
that war is too important a matter to be left to soldiers, but
who is brave enough to tell that to the Pentagon now?
It is certainly paradoxical that we Americans, so per-
suaded of our peaceful mission in the world, have entrusted
the conduct of our foreign affairs to soldiers trained to search
and destroy, rather than to diplomats trained to reconcile dif-
ferences peacefully.
In its first destructive half-life, McCarthyism poisoned
the atmosphere of free debate and destroyed reputations. In
its equally poisonous second half-life, McCarthyism reduced
the State Department to the status of a despised and mis-
trusted servant. This was immediately apparent to a returnee
to the Washington of 1954. When I told acquaintances that
I was with the State Department, the standard comeback
was: "Are you a commie or a fairy?"
The necessary adjustments were far-ranging, and began
my first night in Washington. I called up my former chief of
mission, lost now in the anonymity of an apartment house on
Dupont Circle. In India he had been a big man.
"Ah, Judy," he said, "come along to a party I'm giving
tonight for the Chinese mission."
201


Krishna Smiled

I was stunned. I couldn't believe the Old Man was mak-
ing contact with the Chinese in the very shadow of the White
House. I dared not reply. Fyfe sensed my embarrassment.
He must have gone through the same process of re-think some
months earlier. "The Nationalist Chinese," he said drily. I
had forgotten about them.
In the real world of power politics, the Nationalists had
ceased to exist. It was not Nationalist China that had invaded
Tibet. There were no Kuomintang agents in Kalimpong.
Chiang Kai Shek was not breeding insurrection in Malaya and
Indonesia. Taiwan was not developing atomic weapons. But
in Washington Wonderland, the Nationalists were the only
Chinese we would deal with for the next eighteen years.
It was scant comfort to know that the Indians were suf-
fering delusions too. They were living a different fairy tale
than ours: that of the benevolent new government which had
come to power by the will of the Chinese people and there-
fore could do only good, not evil.
The Indians befriended the Chinese revolution early in
the game, which was their prerogative, even if it had fatal
consequences for Tibet. But then they allowed their enthu-
siasm for communist reforms to distort their assessment of
what was good for India. This was not their prerogative, since
their fundamental obligation was the defense of India.
So in the 1950s, India welcomed all sorts of Chinese cul-
tural missions to the country bearing an astounding message:
"Hindi Chini-ki bhai-bhai" ("Indians and Chinese are broth-
ers"). The communists actually managed to persuade thou-
sands of Indians, including many who should have known
better, that the two nations had enjoyed a long and fruitful
cultural association.
The basis for this extraordinary statement was found in
the journals of two travellers: Fa Hsien, writing about 400
A.D. and Hsuan Tsang, who wrote in 629, and who appear
to have been the only Chinese to venture into India during
the course of that millennium. They were on pilgrimages to
the birthplace of the Buddha, which is reputed to be near
Banaras. More than a thousand years later, they were put to
202


I acquire some intelligence
use in an intensive friendship campaign conducted by the
Chinese communists in what we can now see, with hindsight,
was a softening-up process for the attack on India.
Both the United States and India suffered the conse-
quences of their delusions. We thought that by ignoring
China we could weaken her, while she grew stronger in fact
and came to dominate the better part of Asia. Indians be-
lieved they could get along with China by befriending her
blindly, and found themselves instead the object of Chinese
aggression. Both the United States and India suffered reverses
because of a failure to assess realistically the China that is.
Both of us were blinded by preconceptions of what China
should be.
Having been employed for two years in providing the
raw material of which such assessments are made, I came
back to find Washington in the grip of a perverse know-noth-
ingism. I wondered whether my acquisitions had been worth
the money the government paid for them. I might have made
a more lasting contribution to American scholarship by ignor-
ing politics and pursuing the matter of the tantras. But in
this I was forestalled.
From Kalimpong I had gone up to Sikkim, a tiny moun-
tain kingdom as tall as it is wide, tucked into the Himalayas
between Tibet and India. From the jewelled gorge of the
Tista to the snowy spine of Kanchenjunga is a distance of five
miles-up. Sikkim used to be a dependency of Tibet, was
liberated by the British, passed under Indian protection in
1947 and now, in an inexorable process of westernization, has
an American queen.
I was the houseguest of the Dewan, New Delhi's man in
Gangtok. He and his wife gave a state dinner for me, the
state at that time comprising himself and Rajkumar Palden
Thondup Namgyal and his wife.
We dined off a wild boar the Prince had shot that morn-
ing on the higher slopes of the mountain, where snow already
lay. In Gangtok, the air was just getting nippy. A few miles
below, on my way up, I had seen oranges still ripening on
the trees. Sikkim's climate is vertical.
203


Krishna Smiled
The conversation and the wine sparkled, the humor and
the cigars were dry, and all in all we had around the table
the most elegant little government in the world. The life of
Sikkim swirled past the Dewan's picture window; from the
door, he dispensed paternal justice to complainants who
stopped by. The Princess, who was a Tibetan noblewoman,
sat wrapped in her unknown language, smiling and whisper-
ing with her husband. The Prince complimented me on my
dress, recognizing it to be handspun.
He was trying to revive Sikkimese handicrafts, and had
moved some village weavers into the royal compound where
they could teach their craft to young apprentices who might
in their time hold back the tide of Japanese and German tex-
tiles which were flooding the market. It may already have
been too late: the people of Gangtok were wearing European
milled cloth rather than their peasant weaves.
With all my heart, I wished him well. Once factory prod-
ucts come to Sikkim, the place will crumble and disappear,
like the contents of those melancholy pyramids the archeolo-
gists unwisely opened. Brocade flowers cannot compete with
mill cloth. Scarlet lacquered temples and golden dragons
crumble on contact with factory smoke. The benign expres-
sion on peasant faces is no match for the televised grimaces
of Lucille Ball. The next step is Kanchenjunga-Disneyland,
and then the gods will truly have no more home.
Of all the places I ever visited, Sikkim was the one where
religion, nature, and the life of the people blended most har-
moniously. Was this a foretaste of the mystery of Central
Asia?
I steered the conversation round to Tibetan tantras, and
the Princess, through her husband, let me know that my
British colleague, Thackeray, had made off with them. The
little gems which the Library of Congress was seeking were
even now on their way to the British Museum. I wasn't sur-
prised. Thackeray was closer in temperament to twelfth cen-
tury tantras than to twentieth century newspapers, especially
those printed with movable type.
By way of consolation, the Dewan presented me with
204


I acquire some intelligence
the first issue of the Darbar Gazette, published that afternoon.
He was trying to get a representative assembly going. This
was the first document ever printed in Sikkim, and the only
document of all I collected which I kept for myself.
The reason for this was the enchantment which Sikkim
had cast over me. It began with prayer flags planted round
the rugged hillsides, tattered banners inscribed with suppli-
cants' prayers, repeated ceaselessly as the cloth flapped in the
wind. And was repeated in the ragged white clouds drifting
in sky of flawless Meissen blue like prayer flags torn loose
from pine tree staffs. Sikkim is the Kingdom that Time Forgot,
the beautiful Shangri-La.
When I went to bed, I could hear winter scratching its
back against the Dewan's little cottage. Fires were banked in
each room; a guard huddled in his blanket on the verandah.
From my bed I could hear bells, the same harness bells of
those caravans I had first encountered on the Kalimpong road
that winds through the enchanted forest hung with orchids.
Across the Dewan's front lawn, as neat and well-tended
as the cricket fields of his native Lahore, a mule train was
making its way up the mountain, heading north to meet the
hardier yaks who would complete the journey to Tibet. The
giant muleteers strode beside, whistling through their teeth,
indifferent to the fantastic march ahead of them which would
take them across the toughest topography in the world. They
whistled, the bells clanged to a trot, and the caravan passed
beyond the flower bed and into Tibet.
I don't know what kind of publications I would have
found there, but I wished to God I could go find out.

205


l6
I become the first American girl to ride the
Afghan Mail to Mazar-i-Sharif-and return
All my life I have liked men; yet it never occurred
to me until I got to Afghanistan that I might become one.
My change of life took place in a hotel in Doab, and it
had a profound effect on me even though, unlike more widely
publicized transformations, mine was not permanent.
At the time I am writing about, I had been scavenging
books in India for about a year. I had my Hindustani down
pat and was beginning to run out of itineraries when my li-
braries discovered that their Afghan collections were wearing
thin.
So I made my way to Kabul, which is the capital of Af-
ghanistan and the home of the most exciting men in creation.
The Pathans or Pukhtoons or Pushtuns (you use your dic-
tionary, and I'll use mine) claim to be the ten lost tribes of
Israel. However, they have been Moslems ever since they
stopped being Buddhists, which was some time in the eighth
century.
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Riding the Afghan mail
During my first week in Kabul, which I spent walking
the streets, I learned a lot about Afghanistan. The comment
that I heard from every Pathan I met was: "You look just like
my sister." This I couldn't verify for myself, because at the
time all Pathan women were still kept in strict seclusion.
When allowed out of the house to shop or visit, they wore
an eyeless and airless canvas sack known as a chaudri. Women
have since been liberated by law, but only the young can take
advantage of freedom.
I once asked a Pathan lad whether, when faced by a
bazaar full of chaudris, he could recognize his mother. When
he grasped the question he started laughing so hard that he
fell down. I never did find out how a man recognizes his fe-
male relatives in Afghanistan.
Kabul homes are encysted in mud walls which provide
privacy within each courtyard so that the women of the
household can breathe. It used to be a capital offense to climb
your roof.
Although you scarcely see anyone in the mud corridors
which wind among Kabul homes, the bazaar is as vibrant as
the rest of the town is dead. The busiest sector is along the
curving Kabul River, where the townsmen sit on the dike sun-
ning themselves, gossiping, and polishing their rifles. Most of
the traffic is made up of tribesmen in from the hills, doing
their shopping in consultation with the tents who churn
along behind them.
Pathans are tall, fair-skinned, ruddy and muscular, with
black hair as coarse as goats', and eyes that are traditionally
compared with the eagles'. They are addicted to pyjamas that
run to about twelve feet in circumference, cinched in at the
waist by a cord. Shirts are worn loose, and topped by a sheep-
skin bolero. Pathans always keep their heads covered-first
with a skull cap that may be either boxy or conical; then with
a turban that gets wound in a manner characteristic of the
wearer's place of birth.
Afghans say that the history of their country is written
on the faces of her people, and I spent a lot of time studying
history in the bazaars-something that was to get me in trou-
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Krishna Smiled
ble later. Did you know that a shocking percentage of Pathans
are blue-eyed blondes? A souvenir of Alexander the Great.
Genghis Khan slept here too, and left the Hazaras to
prove it. These Mongolian people live on the mountainous
central spine of Afghanistan, the Hindu Kush (Killer of
Hindus). They are distinguished from Pathans by their olive
skin, flat noses and stocky build. The two races mingle in the
bazaars, but not in homes. Hazara women skip the chaudri,
wrapping themselves to the gills in brilliant shawls.
One day as I was walking through the grape bazaar,
where merchants were standing knee-deep in the gutter wash-
ing their wares and cursing the goats that splashed through
with little boys in hot pursuit, I came up against a camel cara-
van. It looked so real that I half expected it to lead me to a
movie studio lot. Instead, and more sensibly, it led me to the
Kabul bus station.
This is a converted caravanserai, and all the other camels
had already been converted into trucks. The open square is
walled by an adobe barracks, in whose dark cells grain and
camel gear have been replaced by spare parts and jerry cans.
The old camel drivers have become mechanics, and at that
moment there were numbers of them clinging batlike to their
front fenders, turban-side down inside their engines. They
have the local reputation of being able to fix anything with a
bicycle pump and a length of baling wire; and with the fever
of the open road rising in me, I hoped so.
As I stood in the arched entrance to the serai, most of
the men downed tools and looked back at me. Although I was
never stoned for going around with my bare face hanging out,
other women had been.
Deep in thought, I wandered back to the home where I
had been billeted by an unexpectedly solicitous American
Embassy, and broached my idea to my American host, Blu-
cher. He hesitated a moment, belched, did a passable imita-
tion of a raven, and croaked a word which I took to be
"Nevermore."
What I wanted to do was to travel by bus to the northern
border of Afghanistan, cutting across the trail Marco Polo
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Riding the Afghan mail
took between Venice and Peking. My announced purpose
was to procure more publications; my real purpose was to get
out among those handsome men.
Apparently no unaccompanied foreign woman had made
the trip before. Blucher prophesied death or dishonor. Then,
on the assumption that I would choose the latter, he predicted
that I would be stuffed inside a chaudri and carted off to
Tashkurghan or Herat or even Aq Chah, from which I would
emerge only as a legend to plague future female adventurers.
After all, even the British had failed to subdue these peo-
ple. The most they had ever been able to do about it was to
produce Kipling.
The next morning I went back to the bus station and
bought a ticket for the end of the line: to Mazar-i-Sharif,
where the Amu Darya marks the border between Afghanistan
and the Uzbeg Soviet Socialist Republic.
It was a keen December morning. Blucher took me by
jeep to catch the bus. At the last moment, he had contributed
his arctic bedroll which he prized second only to his psycho-
pathic dog. It was very nice of him since he never expected
to see me or the bedroll again. Into it I stuffed a change of
clothes, some souvenirs I had bought in the southwest of
Afghanistan, a comb, and a whopping big sandwich of roast
beef, for I had been assured that Afghan food was poisonous.
The Afghan government provided me with a safe-con-
duct, written in several languages with an equal degree of
illegibility (for me; I do not know either Farsi or Pukhto, the
two languages of Afghanistan). Somewhat fatuously, per-
haps, in a land more enthralled by marksmanship than by
literacy, I slipped it into the lining of my jacket, just over my
heart. An Italian switchblade knife completed my equipment.
Back at the caravanserai, a retired muleteer got me to
the right bus and bawled out Blucher for letting his "wife"
travel alone. Then he weighed my bedroll against a boulder
that hung from the limb of a dead tree which stood in a corner
of the serai. My baggage was then hoisted-together with tin
trunks, knapsacks, livestock, and rolled-up carpets such as
Cleopatra visited Caesar in-onto the roof of the bus, which
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Krishna Smiled

I now saw with horror was a sort of tin casket welded without
benefit of springs to a truck chassis. After that, the steerage
passengers climbed up. At times during the trip there were
more people on the bus than in it.
The bus was fitted inside with planks about eight inches
wide and scarcely two feet apart. A barrier separated first
class (next to the driver) from second (the next three or four
benches). I was in third class, where there were two rows of
tandem seats with space for livestock in between. The fare to
the end of the line and back (a week's journey) was four dol-
lars first class and two dollars and fifty cents by the time you
worked your way to the rear. Fifty cents topside.
The driver, a solid citizen in cotton pyjamas, white nylon
turban and U.S. army jacket, came back to where I was trying
to fit myself into a space not meant for the American femur.
He was a stocky chap with a happy, wide-open expression,
and pointing to his chest he bellowed "Khalifa" ten or twelve
times.
Khalifa wanted to say something to me; he wanted to be
friendly. But he soon saw that I was too stupid to understand,
so he laughed instead. That laugh revealed one of the sweet-
est natures that ever drove a bus, and I laughed back with as
much confidence as I could, considering that the benches had
by now filled up with men who might in childhood have re-
sembled my brother but who, let's face it, had grown into one
hell of a rowdy crew.
Probably Khalifa decided things would work themselves
out; because he got out the coach door, climbed in again at
the front, and established his authority with a lengthy honk
on the klaxon. Not for nothing was he called Chief. Then he
shouted to the wiper. This lad, who rode postillion with his
turban wrapped around his entire head as if it were a ban-
daged thumb, shouted to the stationmaster, who shouted
back to Khalifa. The passengers murmured a prayer, touching
their hands to their beards in graceful circular motion, and
the bus started.
Rather, it was let loose. Bellowing like a crazed animal,
the bus roared down the narrow mud-walled streets of Kabul.
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Riding the Afghan mail
Stampeded pedestrians fled down side lanes or jumped into
gutters. I soon discovered what a tenderfoot I was, as I bashed
and dashed against the bench, the window, and the floor.
Even the toughest old travellers were pitched into the aisle
or, on occasion, ricochetted off the ceiling. All at once I saw
turbans in their true light-as shock absorbers.
I looked furtively at my fellow travellers, and they
looked furtively at me. It was likely that many of them had
never seen a woman's face before, with the exception of
their own mothers', sisters', daughters' and wives.' Certain-
ly, they had never seen an unaccompanied woman. In Af-
ghanistan, a woman is an appendage of the man. An American
would be rather surprised to see an unaccompanied leg or
collarbone get on the bus and occupy a seat.
For my part, none of my well-wishers in Kabul expected
me to survive the trip intact. I knew nothing about Afghanis-
tan, and not a word of the language. I was setting out for a
city whose existence I had learned of for the first time the day
before. Until I got back to Kabul, I would be completely out
of touch with anyone I knew, dependent on the mercy of men
who have an international reputation for acting like Errol
Flynn, but for keeps.
Looking at my fellow travellers in their voluminous py-
jamas, their turbans like unmade beds, moustachioed, un-
shaven, and earringed, I wondered if they would like me.
What if they didn't?
What if they did?
While I was searching for a key to the situation, the bus
lurched into a crossroads to pick up an old man. Since Khalifa
considered it beneath his dignity to stop for just one passen-
ger, he only shifted gears. The old man couldn't get his bal-
ance and pitched into the aisle, fetching his skull a nasty
crack against the bench. Everybody laughed fit to bust. It
made one think.
Evidently what I needed in order to get along in Afghan-
istan was a sense of humor. Waiting for the next big bump
in the road, I bounced high on the bench and gave out with
what I hoped was a carefree whoop, while shooting off imagi-
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Krishna Smiled

nary six-guns. The passengers got the idea right away, and
whooping and howling and shooting we roared along the road
in what must have been the noisiest passage since the Third
Afghan War. Khalifa gave us a rhythmic tattoo on the klaxon,
and I was in.
For the first time, I relaxed and looked out the window.
Leaving Kabul for the north, we had entered a great plain,
its edges stained by the distant mountains of the Hindu Kush.
The country markets were glutted with grapes, apples,
pomegranates, gourds, melons and nuts of all kinds. All the
kids we passed had sticky red faces. Pomegranate juice. They
eat them like apples.
Pressing north, we came to the sudden foothills: rock in
a variety of savage forms-boulder piled on boulder, red-
streaked buttes, lopsided pillar formations, smooth cliff faces
cleft as by a titanic blow. The bright unmisted sunlight var-
nished the mineral veins in them, clothing the rugged moun-
tains in unlikely pink, purple and red.
My first lunch was unpleasant. All the passengers de-
barked and entered a dark, cavelike building from which
came a concatenation of smells that started my salivary glands
working. Unfortunately, all they were going to have to work
on was the roast beef sandwich; my friends in Kabul had
primed me well with stories of typhus, undulant fever, and
amoebic dysentery.
A tall heavy-set man in western clothes came out of the
cavern once and waved a steaming dish in front of my nose.
I waved my desiccated sandwich back at him, and declined
with a smile. But I wondered what I would eat the next day.
Our comfort stops were anywhere along the highway.
Each time we came to a halt, the men would clamber down
and stretch, relieve themselves and smoke. Shepherds would
come tumbling down from the grassless cliffs where they
grazed their sheep and goats, keeping a weekly rendezvous
which was their only contact with the world. The passengers
were very nice to the young boys, ruffling their hair fondly,
and asking them questions to which the boys responded po-
litely.
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Riding the Afghan mail
As we climbed, the air chilled and the mountains coming
into focus had their first light cover of snow. By midnight, a
blizzard was blowing. I did not know if we would stop for the
night, or ever. The bus grew dank and miserably cold. No
matter where I put my head, it banged against something
hard. I eyed the large, padded Tartar shoulder next to me,
and then decided against it. I closed my eyes and prepared
to die of multiple contusions and uremic poisoning.
We stopped at the Sheiber Pass, and under cover of
night I did what the men had been doing all day long.
Black and blue and frozen, I returned reluctantly to the
torment of my wooden bench. It seemed preferable, but just
barely, to dying of exposure on the mountainside. On the
bench, I found a chappan, one of those quilted robes the
Uzbegs wear. I looked around. The nearest Uzbeg was a
slight, austere man on the bench ahead of me, whom the
others addressed respectfully as Hajji. He had earned the title,
and the right to dye his beard red, by making the pilgrimage
to Mecca.
I tapped the Hajji on the shoulder and smiled. He smiled
back, not speaking. He was the only person I met on the trip
who was sophisticated enough to realize that I could not un-
derstand his language even if he shouted.
Wrapping the chappan around my aching bones, I set-
tled back and watched the full moon appear and disappear
behind mountains. It was Halloween, but I didn't know
whose party this was. The silhouettes of the passengers and
their bundles appeared and disappeared with the moonlight.
Talking and joking and singing died out. Only here and there,
tired arms rewound an endless turban around a bruised head.
It was three in the morning when we reached Doab,
which means "land between two rivers." By night, the adobe
hotel is clothed in a sort of Egyptian grandeur which is for-
eign to it in the daylight. It seemed to loom forbiddingly and
my first crisis loomed with it. Unknown hands grabbed my
bedroll and sprinted into the night.
Since most of the passengers were sprinting too, I joined
the rout. We headed pell-mell into the hotel, funnelling down
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Krishna Smiled
the corridor like sheep into a dip. Suddenly a fearfully strong
and unnecessarily handsome young man grabbed me by the
wrist, flung me into a bedroom, and slammed the door.
"Lie down," he commanded me in English. "These are
the only two beds in the hotel."
That was how I met Abdul Hakim Waziri, a fine broth of
an Afghan lad. But before I could answer, there was a knock
at the door and the rest of the passengers and crew came in.
Lips curled as they saw Hakim and me reclining on our re-
spective cots. It was the floor for them. I realized how lucky
I was to have a bed for the night, but I did marvel over the
speed with which the reservations had been made.
There was a Franklin stove in the center of the floor, and
when it had been got going, we all had tea. For someone like
myself, a recent escapee from caste-ridden India, the sight
of everyone drinking out of the same two cups did my heart
good. The wiper poured an extra cupful, fished the carburetor
out of his trousers, and washed it in hot tea.
After some chitchat, the men moved off to other rooms
and a night on the floor. A bit leery of the fellow on the other
bed, I unrolled Blucher's arctic bedroll on my cot and lay
down, pretending I had my magic chaudri on.
Suddenly I heard my roommate get out of bed. I pressed
the button on my switchblade, and wondered if I would have
the courage to press the cold steel home, and if so, on whom.
Apologizing politely, Abdul Hakim made his way to the table
and blew out the kerosene lamp. He sounded as anxious as
I.
Sometime later I was roused by an argument, not at all
to my surprise, and got set for the final chorus of "Sixteen
Men On a Dead Man's Chest." Opening my eyes a crack, I
saw Khalifa trying to pull Abdul Hakim out of bed. Since
they were knocking some of the furniture over in the course
of their discussion, I just lay still inside my magic chaudri.
Then they both approached my bed and suddenly I
realized that the debate was running along chivalric lines.
I ruled that Abdul Hakim should stay in his bed, and Khalifa
should have my air mattress to sleep on beside the stove. So,
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with one to watch me and the other to watch him, we all
fell asleep happily.
It was, inevitably, the wiper who woke us, after water-
ing and fueling the bus. This unfortunate, who was about
eighteen, also had to keep the bus clean, inside and out and
under. He loaded passengers and baggage onto the roof and
handed them down as they left. After every hill he had to
fetch water for the radiator, first chocking the wheels of the
bus to prevent us rolling backwards to our destruction. He
changed tires and checked the oil and ran errands for Khalifa.
And he rode outside all the way, standing on a ladder that
clanked along behind the bus.
Still, Khalifa shared his cigarettes with him and threw
his arm around him when they walked. The passengers treated
him as a friend, with that fine lack of class distinction that
stamps the poorest Pathan a free man.
This, I thought first thing on waking, was just what I
was missing. The men had shown themselves kind to me, but
no one would talk to me-quite apart from the language diffi-
culty, for even Abdul Hakim was silent. To speak or to be
friendly to me would violate some other man's right in me.
That my man was not present and not even known, was
surely the ultimate test of their chivalry.
However, this created a number of other problems for
me. I was afraid to enter a teahouse, where strangers might
object to me. I didn't have a moment of privacy. Gradually,
I could feel myself being pushed into that limbo which Afghan
women ordinarily inhabit. This was a man's world, and I was
on the outside looking in.
Not that there weren't others looking right back out at
me. I drew capacity crowds at every stop. The stares were
sometimes hostile, sometimes inoffensive-as open and cur-
ious as the glances which we might direct at any two-headed
giraffe. But it was only with effort that I could move down a
village street.
Something had to be done, and it was done in Doab.
Waiting for the others to leave our bedroom, I hauled my
souvenirs out of the bedroll. First I plunked a sequined skull
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Krishna Smiled
cap on my head. Then I wrapped an orange and purple tur-
ban around it, in what I fancied to be the style of Kandahar,
a district safely in the south. I let my shirt tails flap out over
my trousers and covered the rest of the evidence with an
embroidered sheepskin jacket that came from Ghazni. As a
last touch, I jammed a cigarette in my face, and issued forth
into the dusty square. Abdul Hakim walked right by me.
No one else greeted me either, and I was beginning to
feel downright lonely when evidently someone spoke to me.
Naturally, I could not respond and the next thing he did was
punch me in the nose. I yelped and the other passengers,
recognizing me, came to my rescue. Soon they were dropping
to the ground helpless, in paroxysms of the purest, happiest,
and most uninhibited laughter it has ever been my joy to
witness.
There I was, arms and legs akimbo in the public square
at Doab, Afghanistan, the proudest Pathan of them all, with
my nose bleeding and forty adult males rolling at my feet.
I had certainly been right about their having a sense of humor.
As they struggled to their feet, each man readjusted my tur-
ban and said something encouraging. If clothes make the
man, I was in business.
They do, and I was. From then on, the men talked cease-
lessly and good-humoredly. Only a little bit of what they
said got through to me-accompanied by pantomine and
scatterings of Arabic, Urdu, and German-but the whole at-
mosphere had changed. Of course, anyone who took a second
look at me knew I was a woman, but we simply conspired
to suppress that knowledge, and this enabled us to talk with
one another without breaking the code. So far as I could tell,
they also kept my secret when we stopped, with the result
that for the first time I was able to walk about freely without
gathering a crowd.
That morning I learned that a teahouse is a chai khanna,
and I had my first meal in one. We breakfasted on slabs of
nan, a heavy tortilla that tastes like what passes in America
for Russian rye. There were curds, as white as the white-
washed walls, and tea. We had our choice of green, which
tastes fishy, or black, which is a solution of tannic acid. The
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Riding the Afghan mail
early morning sun shone through the narrow slits of windows,
turning the nan to gold, and Sharif, the man who had tried
to lure me into my first Afghan meal the day before, per-
formed a mime to let me know that he was rich, and travelling
third class to escape the attention of bandits, and owned
thousands of karakul sheep, and would I like to visit his
ranch? (It was all right, he assured me; he lived with his
mother.)
Back aboard the bus, the tarantella began again, as
Khalifa showed us no more mercy than he had the day be-
fore. But now I looked forward to the stops we made at
villages for rest and refreshment. The bazaars were alive
with activity; everything moved with a zing which was totally
absent from the scene south of the Hindu Kush. My fellow
travellers bought me nuts and fruits of every description,
which they jammed in my pockets. I was never allowed to
return the treat. That would not have been polite, and any-
way Pathans don't have pockets. One object on the fruit
stands puzzled me-a lump of mud the size of a football.
When pantomine had been exhausted in trying to explain its
use, Sharif bought one and split it open against a rock. Grapes.
They keep all winter long when treated this way.
The larger towns have jewelry marts, displaying ear rings,
nose rings, lip rings, finger rings and toe rings; silver chains
and girdles, armlets, wristlets and anklets, and the large
jewelled tiqas that Pathan ladies dangle right in the middle
of their foreheads. Some of the nose rings are so heavy that
they have to be suspended by a strand of hair or by a silver
chain hooked over one ear.
Underfoot clomped always the ubiquitous fatty-tailed
sheep. Their deceased brethren, flayed and impaled upside
down, mark the entrances to butcher shops. Next to them,
streaming in the wind, are turbans in every sort of plaid, and
woolen afghans-made in Germany. Soap that looks like
bricks, and cheese that looks like soap; woolen sacks that
serve as gloves or socks; rock salt, coarsely refined sugar (jag-
gery) and snuff, all are common to every bazaar. I saw nary
a book between Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif.
Most men carry snuff in little tin or silver boxes, sneezing
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Krishna Smiled

happily in groups or with great melancholy all alone. I begged
a pinch from one passenger and tried to savor it pasted to
the roof of my mouth, but Sharif made me spit it out before
I could get the hang of it.
Although my get-up as a Kandari baccha (a young man
of Kandahar) seemed garish to me, it provided the means
of getting about without being assaulted by fanatics or tram-
pled by the curious. Only occasionally was I bothered by
children who would follow me down the street singing the
local version of "Georgie-porgie, puddin' an' pie," which ap-
parently revolved around the fact that in this land of beards,
I couldn't even cast a five o'clock shadow.
The teahouses were a delight and an enchantment. Gen-
erally these were small houses by the wayside, their interiors
whitewashed and often covered by childlike drawings of
flowers and muskets. A boy would pass among us pouring
water from a Persian pitcher onto the the guests' hands. The
water runs off into a brass bowl covered with an ornamental
grill to prevent splashing. A rag is passed from hand to hand,
and we are ready to begin.
Lunch is pilau, rice cooked with almonds, raisins, and
chunks of mutton. It is served in large bowls, three or four
diners to a bowl. You dig into the delicious mess, press a
wad of it together, and toss it into your mouth without touch-
ing your lips.
Right hands only, please. Left hands are dirty. The Hajji,
who had his right index finger in a splint, had to eat with his
left hand. He did so elegantly, awkwardly, and from a sepa-
rate bowl.
Tea manners are also important. You must never pour a
second cupful into the first one's slops. To avoid this, when
you finish drinking, you swing the cup gently in your hands
and aim at the stove, where the tea leaves fizzle with a jolly
sound.
A woman and two children boarded the bus one day.
Khalifa tipped her off and seated her next to me. Looking at
this typical Afghan woman was like looking at a tree. Be-
hind the latticework of coarse embroidery that concealed a
narrow eye-slit, hunted squirrel's eyes looked back out at me.
I coaxed her off the bus at one stop, and drawing her
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into a corner, plucked at the cotton smock that started from
a circlet around her head and enveloped her all the way to
the ground. She drew it from over her face; I was astonished.
Except for having a complexion like an unripe tomato, she
was beautiful.
Still holding a fold of her chaudri, I clicked my tongue
and hauled out one of my stock phrases: "Khub nai est"-
roughly, "This stinks." She agreed. Then she pointed to the
men nearby, rubbed her fingers together in a sign of shame,
and covered herself over once more.
Abdul Hakim told me afterwards that all Afghan women
are beautiful. I asked how he could know, when he had seen
so few of them for himself. He thought a moment and replied:
"I know that Allah is good, yet I have never seen Him."
Dinner that night in the chai khanna was cozy. There
was shish kebab rolled in powdered grapes, an excellent sub-
stitute for wine sauce in a country where winemaking is pro-
hibited. Outside, the wind was howling, but that only made
the stove warmer, the food more satisfying, and the sound
of the water pipe more comforting. However, I missed our
woman passenger.
When I asked Abdul Hakim about her, he showed me
what I had supposed to be a cupboard door. Opening it, I
stepped through and tumbled down a ramp into a cave dug
out of the hillside. The woman, her chaudri put aside, was
sitting on the floor next to a bed mat. There was no heat, and
only a candle for light. The place was airless and totally with-
out cheer. She was eating her dinner, which had been brought
in by her oldest child.
We tried to talk to one another, but could not. She
offered me her red scarf, and I gave her my pocket mirror.
Then I heard the bolt shoot on the heavy wooden door. I
was caged! Enslaved, trapped, violated, insulted, humiliated,
for thousands of years without end and on forever! Wildly
I banged on the door, the woman sitting and staring at me
without understanding, but I went on shrieking till Abdul
Hakim let me out. I escaped, and left the Afghan woman to
her fate. I never spoke to her again, and clung more tightly
than ever to my male disguise.
No doubt what ensured the survival of the human race
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in Afghanistan all these centuries was the fact that women
needed children for their own survival. Nothing else would
have prevented infanticide. But children are the women's
only line of communication to the outside world, serving as
waiters, messengers, errand boys, telephone, scouts, seeing-
eye dogs, and newspapers. From the time they could talk,
children were taught to report back to mother everything
they saw and heard in the outside world-until the girls in
their turn passed into solitary confinement, and the boys went
out to the men.
On the afternoon of the third day, we arrived at Mazar-i-
Sharif, which I now learned is named for the tomb of Ali,
fourth Caliph and son-in-law of Mohammed the Prophet. We
entered the town through the same bazaars that fester at
every Asian crossroads from Ceylon to the Himalayas and
from Sind to Bengal. But there is a difference here in the pace
of the crowd and the electric clarity of the air. Burly Uzbegs
and Tadjiks, pantalooned and booted, rode on wiry ponies
out of the Central Asia that Marco Polo knew. They were
wearing clothes and using tools that were not so different
from those which the Venetian recorded seven centuries ago.
And then I saw the tomb of the Caliph Ali. Behind a wall
at the end of the town's main street stands a confection of
aquamarine tile glittering in the sun. To a barbarian like me,
who always associated tile with plumbing fixtures, the build-
ing was a revelation.
"Ahhh," there was an audible intake of breath inside the
bus, and men touched their beards. Some of them had lived
all their lives within sight of the mosque, and still they
gasped. Khalifa stopped the bus in the middle of the square.
And suddenly a number of men got hold of me and pushed
me out. I scanned their faces anxiously. But they weren't mad
at me; they wanted me to photograph their mosque.
Arrived at the bus station, another converted caravan-
serai, the passengers quickly dispersed. It occurred to me
that I should have learned the word for hotel before letting
everybody get away. Sauntering through the portal of the
serai with my bedroll on my shoulder, I expected at any mo-
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Riding the Afghan mail
ment to be denounced as an imposter. The trick was to look
as though I belonged, and everything would be all right. But
that way, how could I get any place, since I didn't know
where I was or where I was going?
Abdul Hakim now materialized. "Do you," he asked,
"wish to go to the hotel?"
I felt ambivalent toward this lad. It seemed to me that
consequences were likely to flow from the fact that he spoke
English and consequently always managed to get us two
beds tete-a-tete. But I know when I'm hung up, so again I
allowed him to take over. We got into a horse-drawn carriage.
Abdul Hakim said "hotel" to the driver, which I could have
said myself, and the driver said something to the horse which
I could not have said, and we tore off through dusty streets
until we reached an adobe barracks on the other side of town.
Soon we were installed in a pleasant double room with south-
ern exposure. We had our own bathroom, tiled like the mosque
but not as stately.
I notice that Mr. Justice Douglas, in his book West of
the Indus, does not think much of this hotel. Admitting that
we start from different premises, I think it is one of the best
on the subcontinent. What he said about bedbugs may be
true, but the plumbing is superb, and all the rooms are
equipped with walls, ceiling, and floor.
Abdul Hakim and I had not been long in the room when
we fell to quarrelling. I was certain by now that he was a
government spy. I knew that the Afghan government likes
to keep tabs on foreign travellers. He, on the other hand, said
he was an honorable man and that I needed protection. "Well,
quit sharing my bedroom!" I said, heaving a pillow at him.
"I am engaged to be married," he replied, heaving it back
at me.
At this dramatic moment, the door opened and a man
announced the Governor of Mazar-i-Sharif.
The Governor welcomed me and my "interpreter" to the
province and invited us to stay at the State Guest House. If
there was anything I wanted, I need only ask.
Now it was Abdul Hakim's turn to panic. He was sure
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Krishna Smiled

he would be arrested for this masquerade. But I signaled him
to form a united front against authority and stick it out. So
we packed up and moved to the State Guest House.
This turned out to be a country manor overhung by wil-
low trees. In the salon, dusty satin curtains covered french
doors of beveled glass, with a dozen panes missing. The wall-
paper curled with mildew.
The steward welcomed us in German (I found that most
foreigners are assumed to be Germans, though this may have
changed by now, what with there being a few hundred Rus-
sian technicians in the country). Abdul Hakim immediately
asked the steward if he could create a hot bath. In half an hour
Ali was back, and with courtly gestures conducted me to a
wooden lean-to. The tub of water which faced me had a
thin skin of ice on it.
However, as I had a thick skin of Afghanistan on me, I
ladled the water over my shivering, dirty body with a tin
cup, scrubbed away, and told myself I was in Finland where
this is healthy. I came down with the ague two days later.
Abdul had a nice hot bath because he knew that the
water is heated in a container that fits into the pipe of the
Franklin stove. One siphons it out through a samovar spigot,
and mixes it with water from the frozen tub.
Everyday while we were in Mazar-i-Sharif, the Gover-
nor's man would appear at the Guest House to ask whether
we wanted anything. Naturally, I asked for a copy of every
book to be found in the bazaar. "That will be easy," he replied,
"for there are none."
If I had had the wit, I would have asked the Governor's
man whether old brass lamps were sold in the bazaar. As it
was, Abdul Hakim, a practical man, asked for a jeep and it
served us as well as the lamp served Aladdin, for it took us
to Balkh.
Marco Polo described this town, which was ancient Bac-
tria, as "a large and magnificent city," a center of learning,
and an entrep6t on the silk route between China and India.
One hundred years later, it was reduced by Tamerlane to a
midden of pottery. We climbed a ruined wall and looked
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Riding the Afghan mail
down over acres of mounded houses studded with shards as
brilliant as the day they came from the potter's oven. What
a bull history let loose in this china shop!
At night, Abdul Hakim and I huddled late over the fire
at the guest house, swapping stories, riddles and songs. We
had three artifacts in common: the Rubaiyat of Omar Khay-
yam, the Wise Men of Gotham, and "MacNamara's Band,"
which his mother owned on a phonograph record-her only
phonograph record. After we had exclaimed over the wealth
of our mutual cultural heritage, we sang each other some
folksongs, and I was not surprised to learn that love is as
hopeless in the Khyber Pass as it is in the Cumberland Gap.
It was after lights out that Abdul Hakim and I always had
our best conversations. He told me about his fianc6e, and re-
cited some poetry he had written to her in Persian. When I
scoffed that he couldn't possibly love a girl he had never
seen, he wept.
"You think I am not human, and that I do not feel the
same passions as you do. But here in Afghanistan we love
and we marry for love, just as in the West."
I was nonplussed, because this meant that some kind of
personality emanates from beneath a chaudri. Here was the
clue to why my question about recognizing your mother in
a bazaar was so funny. But how?
"Anyway," Abdul Hakim continued, "I have seen her."
He had swiped his sister's chaudri and gone to visit his girl-
friend in her home. These men not only love and get married
for love, they have great courage. He might have been shot.
The next morning, I went on the town while Abdul went
about his own business. Mazar-i-Sharif is small and compact,
with a bazaar that sells gorgeous carpets, indifferent pottery,
and, as the man had said, no books. Most of the shops are
meant for camels and horses, not people. The horses are
smaller and more wiry than ours; the camels are understand-
ably Bactrian.
When I had done the bazaar, I strolled into a crowded
chai khanna, and squatting near the doorway, called for green
tea in a loud voice, with a clap of my hands. The cup was
223


Krishna Smiled
brought, together with a wet rag to clean up with, and I
settled down to watch Afghanistan go by.
Anonymous in my brilliant turban and rumpled clothing,
I experienced complete release from the relentless grip of
femininity which immures all women, in all countries, within
an invisible chaudri from the cradle to the grave. I knew I
would return to Delhi, and even to Detroit, and I knew that
I would never be anything but a woman. But for these few
days, I was a free man.
I saw Abdul Hakim pass as I sat there-he never got so
he could recognize me in a turban. After a cup of tea to-
gether, we walked over to the mosque and entered its court-
yard unchallenged. The blue, green, and yellow tiles sparkled
in the sun, lighting up the Arabic script that runs like em-
broidery around the arches of gates and windows. Doves flew
in formation among the minarets, then settled like snow on
the azure domes. Hand in hand, Abdul Hakim and I entered
the mosque.
If I had been a girl, he couldn't have held my hand be-
cause that would have been immoral. If I had been a foreigner,
I couldn't have entered the mosque, because that is illegal.
At dinnertime we shopped among the teahouses, and to
Abdul Hakim's disgust, I chose the loudest honky-tonk in
town. It got louder, as they brought up a three-piece combo:
pottery drum, a large banjo-type instrument, and a horn that
emitted a restricted but agonized range of sounds. An aston-
ishing rhythm developed, accompanied by yodelling that
would have curdled my blood if the singers hadn't maintained
a perfectly docile appearance. As it was, I was glad to have
the camouflage of my costume.
Abdul Hakim had been pouting for some time, and
ruined my dinner by suggesting we leave. I demurred, but he
repeated the suggestion in a way that got me to my feet, into
my shoes, and out on the street in three seconds.
He joined me in the street after paying the bill, and
trudged along at my side silently. At first he refused to say
what had happened, but when he did, I knew that I had not
only arrived, I had come full circle. It was time to go home.
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Riding the Afghan mail
Within the chai khanna I had been studying a large and
portly Hazara who installed himself among a covey of hench-
men, diagonally across the room from us. I was anxious for
any tidbit of history I might pick up from his face and clothes
and bearing. Meanwhile, I forgot that my ignorance of the
language rendered me dumb, not invisible.
It seems that he returned my gaze with interest, and
leaning across his companions had exclaimed audibly: "In
the name of Allah, has he dropped from the skies? I have
never seen such a beautiful boy!"
Abdul Hakim then clammed up, and refused to tell me
whether my admirer would have been disappointed to learn
I was only a girl. So much for studying geography in people's
faces!
I returned to the bus station next morning. Still black
and bruised, and with a fit of ague chilling me to the liver,
I was nevertheless sorry to turn my face southward. I was,
however, cheered by the sight of Khalifa, whom a kindly sta-
tion manager had held over in Mazar-i-Sharif so he could
guide my return.
This is the way it was right through to the end. Where
I had been told to expect barbarism, I met chivalry. Where
I had expected anarchy, I met a sort of primitive democracy.
The country was backward materially, and life was cruel-this
much may be laid to geography and history, which opened
Afghanistan to those vast series of invasions which left their
mark upon the faces of her people.
But kindliness and hospitality are no accident. As a
woman, I was treated with respect. As a man, I was met with
friendship. Would I have met so much warmth, I wonder, on
a bus from New York to Los Angeles?
And, as I say, my transformation had a profound effect
on me. Once I got back to Delhi, I made an irrevocable de-
cision to remain a woman.

225


Holy, Holy, Holy
A morose Dane I knew went hiking alone in the
Himalayas and fell to his death. The news was sent to the
Danish consul in New Delhi by a holy hermit of the moun-
tains by way of a sherpa who was coming down to the plains
on some business of his own.
In order legally to verify his countryman's death, the
consul drove as far as he could up into the mountains, then
hiked the rest of the way to the hermit's cave. Along the way,
he told me later, he speculated on what had brought Halfdan
here, halfway around the world, in order to die. Many of his
acquaintances speculated; he had few friends. I wondered if
I knew.
Halfdan had been tormented by a recurring nightmare
in which he and his best friend, faceless in the dream, were
marooned on a desert island with nothing to eat. The time
comes when nature demands that one kill and eat the other,
in order to enable himself to survive a few days longer. Which
226


Holy, Holy, Holy
will Halfdan become: murderer or victim? On this point the
nightmare teetered, fell, and shattered the dreamer awake.
"I don't think you have to be either," I told him while
we were hiking one day in the tame hills around Mussoorie;
thinking it a foolish conundrum. "I suppose you could die in
one another's embrace, like Aida and what's-his-name."
I caught his green eyes looking inward, into himself, not
seeing me at all. I wondered if we would have to enact his
little psychodrama here and now, and looked around for a
good heavy stone. I liked Halfdan very much, but there was
no doubt in my mind whether I would prefer to be killed or
to kill.
"My brother was in the SS," he said as though that ex-
plained everything, and later I decided it probably did. He
himself had fought in the anti-Nazi underground.
Looking up at him as I picked my way downhill, I saw
his eyes, like the flame on a kerosene stove, lick out again
toward the external world, the one in which he was a totally
rational agronomist employed by the U.N. Food and Agri-
culture Organization, and inheritor of European civilization,
where people don't eat each other any more. He was in many
ways the most civilized man I ever met.
"I think," he said in his light tenor voice that twanged as
though a harp were being played inexpertly on his narrow
rib cage, "I think I would rather be the victim."
When the consul arrived at the hermit's cave, the rishi
received him naked except for a saffron-colored loincloth. His
body was smeared with the ashes of the dead and marked in
yellow swastikas. His hair was unkempt and matted with the
refuse of years. He had trained himself to sit inside his clammy
cave bolt upright, not moving, not speaking, not blinking,
perhaps not breathing, one wondered about thinking, for
hours at a time.
Nevertheless, he conversed quite amiably in English, the
language in which he had talked with Halfdan up until the
day of his accident. The rishi led the consul to a nearby valley,
where he showed him a grave covered with rocks and topped
by a cross.
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Krishna Smiled

"I understand," he said, "that you do not burn your dead.
I wanted to do what was right for his soul."
The place where Halfdan fell is sacred to Hindus as the
source of the Ganges. Legend has it that the goddess Ganga
Maya fell to earth here when Brahma, to fulfill the boon of
a supplicant, caused her to leave her heavenly course. In
pique, she flung herself down upon earth with such force
that had it not been for Shiva catching and entangling her
in his hair, she would have flooded all the world. Instead,
she ran out of the god's coiled locks down either side of
Mount Kailas, to form the rivers of Pmunjab which empty
westward into the Arabian Sea, and the Ganges which de-
bouches 3,000 miles to the east.
The epic is thousands of years old, yet it records ac-
curately the fact that Indus and Ganges, apparently sepa-
rated from one another by the width of the continent, actually
rise within a hair of one another, on either side of Shiva's
part, as it were.
When Ganges reaches Rishikesh, she disgorges icy and
tumultuous from the Himalayas to begin her descent upon
the plains of Uttar Pradesh. The upper reaches of the river
are more sacred, but almost inaccessible, so it is to Rishikesh
that the pilgrims come, by bus, cart, and on foot to keep a
tryst with the river goddess. The terraced hills are striped in
emerald and dotted with little temples studded upon banks
which rise steeply away from the river. Here Ganges comes
roaring like an express train through her narrow gorge, cold
with the cold of mountain snows, and muddy with the mud
of riverbanks she has torn out up the line. Approaching
Rishikesh from the south, as I did, one has the feel of enter-
ing a Chinese landscape painting.
The pilgrims have been coming for centuries to this site,
watched over by a fraternity of holy men in saffron robes. A
caste of scribes has also come into existence whose function
it is to keep track of the pilgrims in all their generations. The
new arrival has only to circulate his name, his father's name
and the village of his birth, and soon a man appears who is
his family's record-keeper. The scribe can show the pilgrim
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Holy, Holy, Holy
where his ancestors were inscribed in his book, which has
been handed down to him from his father, and, for a fee, in-
scribes the newcomer's name in turn, for his son to show to
his son.
For me, the first of my line to visit Rishikesh, the age of
the place was irrevocably fixed in mind by a sign hand-lettered
on cardboard and tacked to a wooden lean-to patched with
flattened jerry cans:
LORD KRISHNA SLEPT HERE.
Right behind my own car, a tourist bus arrived, its oc-
cupants half dead of dust and heat. When its doors opened,
a group of ladies in the sodden-hued saris of Madras dis-
embarked and, as though in a trance, looking neither to the
right nor to the left, walked straight into the river. I followed
them down to the bathing ghat, but they could not have
cared less about me. Along our path, holy contortionists per-
formed, one with his head locked (permanently?) into his
crotch; another scuttling forward and backward like a scor-
pion, on all fours, belly up. Under a banyan tree, a holy ash-
smeared sadhu stared sightless into the sun, then turned to
display his better profile when he saw me aim my camera.
All Rishikesh shimmered in the sun, a painted ship upon a
painted sea; or perhaps a stage set shimmering under klieg
lights waiting for the performance to begin in a language no
one knew, for an audience who will never arrive.
And Halfdan? Had he arrived? Whatever could have at-
tracted him here? Whatever it was, was incomprehensible to
me. I was totally a daughter of the scientific age, and wanted
nothing to do with mystics.
Yet I knew that many practical people come to Rishikesh
to live out their lives. Self-abnegation is a Hindu virtue, and
many a man who has passed his youth in learning the ways
of the world and his middle age in training his children to
the ways of the world, renounces this same world when he
grows old. At fifty he gives away his possessions and puts his
family from him. Taking up a beggar's bowl he retires to a
229


Krishna Smiled
holy place such as Rishikesh, joining the court of some guru
(teacher) or rishi (wise man) who has spent his entire life
in monastic contemplation of the divine. I saw in the prac-
tice only a wastage of India's brain power. Here, masquerad-
ing as beggars, were the men who should be running industry,
sitting in Parliament, investing in growth stocks.
The gurus are held in high esteem by the masses, who
cluster round them for audience. They are often attended
likewise by foreigners, including many freaky ladies (in the
fifties these were mostly German; in the sixties, Americans
made the scene) who wish to learn the secret of eternal youth
or to communicate with their deceased dogs. While western-
ers regard the gurus with respect, many Indians regard them
as charlatans, and their medicinal distillations as quackery.
They often drive the sadhus away from their doors when they
come begging.
Yet these same sceptics may continue to visit one par-
ticular holy man who either comes from the same caste or
has had some contact with the family.
There can be no doubt that some holy men capitalize on
the faith of the people, taking their money and their prayers
to perform feats which are impossible to perform. When
commercialism adds its crushing weight, the phenomenon
becomes even more distressing. In fact, my first encounter
with holy men was through a movie which exploited mysti-
cism, sex and patriotism in approximately equal parts, and
which happenstantially I saw with Halfdan.
He was still under the spell of an experience the week
before, when a travelling magician invited him up on stage
as a hostile witness to his magic. Avoiding Gogia Pasha's eyes,
so as not to be hypnotized by them, Halfdan watched the
magician reach into his assistant's throat and cut his tongue
out. The subject sat tranquilly, a doctor holding his wrist,
where the pulse had ceased to make itself felt. Having given
the audience a chance to view the severed tongue, while
Halfdan looked deep into the assistant's mouth and saw none
there, Gogia Pasha stuffed the organ back into the gaping
aperture and made a pass in abracadabra fashion. Whereupon
the man's pulse resumed and he wagged his tongue in greet-
230


Holy, Holy, Holy
ing to the crowd. Halfdan was deeply puzzled by the inci-
dent, and I would have been too, had I believed Halfdan.
To get back to the movie. It was going around to great
critical acclaim, reinvigorating the dormant patriotism of In-
dians like a good dose of salts. As it was in Bengali, of which
neither Halfdan nor I could understand a word, the follow-
ing synopsis may not be totally reliable. I am sure, however,
that I have caught the spirit of the thing.
British soldiers occupying Bengal busy themselves beat-
ing up villagers and raping their wives. A rebellion begins to
take shape. Men take a vow of brahmacharya (celibacy)
until freedom is won. Rajahs run away from their palaces to
join the People. While they are gone, their wives are abducted
by worshippers of Kali (the black-faced, hydra-armed god-
dess of death, whose beak runs with human blood). In case
you think that Kali is the villain of the piece, we then have
a scene showing the guru, who is the leader of the revolt,
taking a stranger on a tour of his temple and pausing to make
obeisance to Kali, who is wearing her customary necklace of
human skulls. He makes a pretty little speech about the god-
dess. The sound of his voice is so sweet that as he talks, the
distressed widow of a revolutionary stops grieving, glazes
over in a blissful smile, and draws herself snakelike on her
belly along the ground to kiss the guru's feet. That old hum-
bug ends his speech with the cry, "Vande Matram!" (Victory
to the Motherland!), and then there is a scene of mass self-
immolation as women kill themselves in throngs because their
husbands have broken their oaths to remain celibate. C'est la
guerre. Cut to a bunch of horses carrying men into battle,
pawing their hooves in time to a syncopated version of the
revolutionary anthem. The sight of so many Bengali actors
on horseback convulsed me, until I remembered the demented
smile on the face of the woman as she glided toward the guru
on her belly. That troubled me: it was the smile on the face
of Krishna, as it might be practiced by the Madwoman of
Chaillot. And that was the glaze I saw on the women as they
decanted from the tourist bus at Rishikesh and walked into
the river.
Below Rishikesh, Ganges begins to spread herself out,
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Krishna Smiled

a woman of middle years, waxing broad and muddy and
powerful as she sweeps across the Northern Province, joined
by Yamuna at Allahabad, Gumti at Banaras, Gogra above Pat-
na, till flooding through Bihar she joins Brahmaputra in the
thousand deltas of Bengal.
By the time the river reaches Allahabad, she is moving
slowly, her veins swollen with the refuse of cities along the
way. Just outside the city, three sacred rivers converge. There
are Ganges, still chockablock with people bathing; Yamuna
which is India's gift to lovers who jump into it when the go-
ing gets rough; and Saraswati, which doesn't flow on earth
at all, but comes pouring down from heaven out of a celestial
pitcher.
Every twelve years, when the sun is in Aries and Jupiter
is in Aquarius, a Kumbh Mela (Festival of the Pitcher) is
held. In 1954 it was to be held at Allahabad, and a bookdealer
brought me to the site, explaining the mystic symbolism of
the once-in-twelve-years ceremony.
Viewing the riverbank in a nonfestive month, I saw noth-
ing but rancid flats filled with desultory bathers. Try as I
might, I could imagine no holy spirit hovering over this singu-
larly dreary salt bund. It was another revelation such as I had
experienced before: one sees just as much of India as one is
willing to see. And I was totally unreceptive to mysticism.
My only concern was that the rickshaw was a tight fit, and I
could scarcely wait to get back to dry land.
As the time for the festival approached, fever ran high.
The government did all it realistically could do to keep con-
trol: for example, proof of inoculation against cholera was
required of anyone purchasing a railroad ticket to Allahabad,
a restriction which was relaxed only on the high holiday itself,
when it is estimated that an additional million souls entered
the city.
During the course of the month, ten million people, in-
cluding the President of India, arrived at the junction of the
rivers to arrange for the release of their souls from the cycle
of perpetual rebirth. The pilgrims camped on the riverbank,
taking frequent ritual baths and eating even less than usual.
From news reports, they seem to have spent much time rescu-
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Holy, Holy, Holy
ing their belongings from huts which set themselves on fire;
suffering bridges to collapse beneath their combined weight;
being trampled by sacred elephants run amok; and listening
to proclamations by the Union of Sadhus supporting the gov-
ernment in any measures it might take to counter United
States military aggression through the arming of Pakistan.
A little discomfort was not deemed too high a price to
pay in order to escape living through another entire lifetime
of India.
On the fateful morning at 10:30, when the planets ap-
proached their celestial cathexis, a parade of Naga Goswains,
known in religious circles as the Unclothed Brigade, were
proceeding to the riverbank for their baths when a group of
pilgrims crept forward on their bellies to take a pinch of sand
from beneath their feet. The holy men laid about them with
their holy spears to prevent the people from touching their
holy feet. Behind the crawlers, ten million people pressed
forward to the river. When the riverbank was cleared, half
a thousand people lay crushed to death in the slippery sand.
Of all the gods, the ugliest is Jagganath. He makes his
home in the delta of the Mahanadi River on the east coast be-
low Calcutta. Wooden, limbless, more mound than man, less
man than lump, he reigns fiercely from his temple at Puri,
whither he commands the faithful come each year to pull his
image in procession. He is regarded by his devotees as one
of the ten manifestations of Vishnu (five of which occurred
in a world preceding ours, four in this world, and one of which
has yet to come) although many a northern Vaishnavite in
good standing has never heard of him.
Jagganath was aborted through the curiosity of the king
who endowed him. Impatient with the slow work of manu-
facture, the king stole a forbidden look at the god in process
of creation, and thus literally stunted his growth. Now, al-
though happily endowed with a soul, Jagganath must be fitted
with golden arms and legs before being wrapped in cere-
monial robes for his annual run.
Perhaps because of this initial unhappy experience, the
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Krishna Smiled

curious are to this day barred from the Temple of Jagganath.
One can get a good idea of what he looks like, however, from
the souvenir portraits of him which are sold in the bazaar
which runs fulsomely round the temple with its bulbous
spires.
From a scarlet lacquered background, a rigid black face
stares out through seashell eyes: blind, yet curiously seeing.
He is flanked by his smaller sister and brother. All their eyes
protrude with primitive force from what well might be the
primeval Id.
When I visited Puri, three hulking gaadies still lurched
in the courtyard of the temple, relics of the week before.
Gaadi is a term which can mean, variously, car, throne, ve-
hicle, or practically anything one sits upon, with overtones
of majesty. In modern Hindi, gaadi came to be used for
"train."
A mouse, for example, is the gaadi of Ganesh, the ele-
phant-headed deity, and he travels everywhere upon it.
Garuda the man-eagle is the gaadi of Vishnu (and incidental-
ly the name of the Indonesian airline).
Jagganath's gaadis were handhewn massive wooden
chariots thirty feet tall, not unlike medieval siege towers in
appearance. Hung with tinsel, flags and portraits of the gods,
and smoking incense, they had borne the idols of the Jag-
ganath family in ceremonial procession to the sea the week
before, while I, several hundred miles away in Calcutta, knew
nothing of the matter because they have their own gods there.
The massive lumbering vehicles, drawn by hundreds of men
who lash themselves to the lead poles, smash blindly forward
on their weighty handhewn wheels, jolt, surge, topple, crush
the laggard underneath the wheels: the very juggernaut.
To worship that which crushes you; to desire to be
crushed by that which you worship. To identify with that
which humiliates you; to seek humiliation as an identity.
Halfdan's sister went underground when the juggernaut
reached Denmark; but his boyhood friend, about whom he
dreamed, collaborated with the Nazis.
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Holy, Holy, Holy
I crossed three rivers to get to Khajuraho: Chambal, by
pontoon bridge; Sindh, by causeway; Betwa, by ferry. After
which the land greens up, becomes fresher and supports some
forests. The people too are more prosperous than elsewhere:
many of the farm women wear a hundred rupees worth of
silver around their ankles as dowry.
The temples, what is left of them, are deserted save for
tourists. Around their outer and inner walls runs a wild and
stony parade of humans, gods and beasts. The complex, which
used to include eighty-five temples but now has only twenty,
is dominated by the sardula: a leogriff (half lion, half griffin,
which is itself half horse, half bird) raping a woman. The
sinuous curves of their locked forms are repeated endlessly
throughout the temple sculptures, now emerging with clarity,
now stylized into a geometric pattern, now dissolved into a
curve which can be recognized only by reference to the origi-
nal statement that stands elevated in front of one of the
temple buildings.
All around, men disport stonily with their women, laying
them horizontally and vertically, up against a wall or floating
on a stream, right side up and upside down, actively and
passively. Above, dancing girls swing their hips provocatively
in the gloom of eaves and columns; over there, a girl with a
delightful rump lifts her foot behind her to extract a thorn
from her sole.
Sex had not been differentiated from religion when these
temples were built, sometime between the ninth and eleventh
centuries A.D. The stony bacchantes memorialize a time, if
that ever existed, when ecstacy was one, whether its source
was earthly or divine, and Lord Krishna sported with the
dairymaids.
Poor Halfdan, I thought, remembering how this man,
educated at Europe's finest universities, had told me his only
happy experience had been with a cowlike farm girl. That had
been Krishna's way, too, but Krishna enjoyed his girls, and
loving them, smiled; while Halfdan's voice was sardonic when
he told a woman he loved her, so that she knew he was only
trying the words to see how they sounded. When he danced,
235


Krishna Smiled

his lithe body stiffened within the ridiculous tuxedo which
Delhi nightclubs required men to wear, and showed none of
the suppleness he really had, and which he revealed only to
mountains. Ultimately, all to mountains.
Well, Halfdan was a monotheist, son of a Lutheran min-
ister. And when that god died, there was no other to take his
place. Hinduism provides the believer with a veritable super-
market of gods, and there is something to satisfy every con-
ceivable taste. Would you care for Vishnu in the shape of a
boar? Or the black bull Nandi, Shiva's gaadi, brooding over
the city of Mysore? Hanuman the monkey god or Ganesh the
elephant god or Thing the anything god? The Hindu con-
sumer is not tantalized by a multiplicity of canned soups or
motor cars; but he certainly has his pick of gods.
He may be small as the tiny lingam I came across at a
village crossroads: so formless and indistinct as to suggest the
clitoris of the town rather than its penis; and I would have
missed it altogether were it not for the flood of orange paint
and marigolds which had been heaped upon it. Or he may be
fifty-seven feet tall and naked as a jaybird, like old Gomates-
vara posted atop his hill. Grey granite vines climb his legs,
grey granite curls adorn his head; the Buddha's contempla-
tive smile transfigures his great granite face. Every twelve
years, whether he needs it or not, they bathe him down with
coconut milk, plantains, ghee, jaggery, gold, silver, and flow-
ers mixed with nine varieties of gems, "etc." Whatever is left
to be included in that "etc?"
Everything seems so hodgepodge, so undiscriminating,
at times so vile and dirty, so seldom sublime, that a visitor is
baffled. How can anyone worship such things? Could you
pray in a public bath house? A zoo? Disneyland? Where is
the ideal, the belief that takes a man by the heart and renders
him more than he was? Must Hindus remain mired forever
in the verdant excretory fantasies of the childhood of their
race? One ought to be able to believe that all life is sacred
without having to worship it in its lowest forms. Even a scor-
pion which invades a village hut may not be killed, but only
thrown gently out into the path, presumably to sting the
neighbors. Where everything is sacred, human life is less so.
236


Holy, Holy, Holy
But after a time, the same visitor may feel he has missed
the point. Is not life itself hodgepodge, undiscriminating, at
times vile and dirty, seldom sublime? Is man necessarily the
center of the universe? Does believing that he is, make west-
ern history any more humane than eastern? Are there more
gentle souls among us, or more brave, or more wise? In my
observation, the answer must be no.
Perhaps Hindus are not saying: these horrible things are
worthy of being held sacred. Maybe they are saying: the en-
tire universe is sacred, and that must necessarily include what
is horrible as well as what is beautiful.
On my return to America, I met Kali. She had dyed her
hair blonde and was having more fun. Smiling for the pho-
tographer, she steps down from her bloody dais to mount her
new high-performance sports-model gaadi. With a screech
like that of a predatory animal, she tears down the freeways
of America, laying down rubber all the way, slaughtering in-
nocent and guilty alike in such number that she cannot even
drink all the blood.
The high priests of her cult vaunt Kali in her latest mani-
festation, broadcast the virtues of her gaadi, and keep count
of her victims, comparing this year's Memorial Day toll with
last year's. The announcer's voice is neutral, we do not expect
him to break down and cry. We know that some will die, it is
Kali's will, and we have no time to dedicate all those corpses.
While we scorn the tale of 60,000 princes turned to ash
by an ascetic's glance, our widescreen Indians and cowboys
send one another to blazes. Only bizarre forms of death divert
us: a man killed by a car at his own breakfast table, a con-
struction worker fallen into wet concrete, mother murders
babe, a busload of Mexican migrants ... the door groans open,
and the monster enters to read us the six o'clock news. Murder
by car, murder by war, murder by peace, murder by the little
boy next door who always seemed so nice-we are bathing in
blood. But unlike Hindus, we deny death any significance.
We labor toward our ideal of objectivity in cold blood.
While Moslem and Hindu hack each other to bits, we pay
237


Krishna Smiled

journalists to record the slaughter dispassionately. Having
made the transition to a market economy, we pay the mur-
derer cash to tell his story to the pulps. Pulps: now there's a
word! Give me Kali any day, for her blood is hot, and her vic-
tims know why they must die.
Jagganath immigrated to the United States too. He has
left Puri with its clean sea breeze and the horrifying undertow
of its sea beach, and adopted television for his gaadi. En-
sconced therein, he turns his eye upon us and bids us serve
him. I, for one, cannot refuse. The hammer pounds my head
to sell the pain-killer that will ease the headache brought on
by the hammer's blows. The insistent drip of gastric acids eats
through my entrails, which obligingly turn to plastic. The
foaming beer mug drives me mad with thirst. All the complex
technology of the space age is put to use in order to replicate
the compulsion which Jagganath exercised for centuries with
his vacant seashell eyes and ineffectual stick hands.
"At least," I tell myself, "at least we of the West are in-
dividuals. What were ten million people doing on the beach
at Allahabad all at the same time?"
Worshipping the sun, the moon and the stars, of course,
like the millions who crowd Jones Beach or the sewer's edge
at Santa Monica. One cannot walk the summer shores without
stepping on the naked and/or the dead, as well as on their
sandwiches, umbrella poles, and trash. Is it really more meri-
torious to flock to the beach in search of a suntan, rather than
in search of nirvana?
Imagine that the suffering crowds at August beaches
should be uplifted by the Word that their immersion was go-
ing to wreak a spiritual change in them. "And ye shall be re-
ceived into heaven as the result of a day at the beach." Well
worth a sunburn and chiggers in the coke! How patient and
docile we would be in homebound traffic, how oblivious to
accident, knowing that our souls had been placed in perpetual
trust. There would be no hurry to get home. Our home would
be the ultimate universe. We need ask no longer, "Are you
running with me, Jesus?" because the rat race would be
ended.
Silently, gaunt grisly men stalk past us in bikinis, scuffing
238


Holy, Holy, Holy
sand into our sandwiches. Or are those loincloths they are
wearing, and are they Naga Goswains?
Americans are so often accused of being obsessed by sex
that it was a relief to find the Indians are too. But Hindus
accept sex as divine recompense for the miseries of life, while
we persist in counting sex among our miseries. Hence they
can display their lovers in temples, while we hide ours in
darkened theaters. Their gods are participants; ours a voyeur.
Presumably, as western civilization makes further in-
roads into the Hindu psyche, neurosis will invade their ero-
genous zones too. Great lovers will be consigned to legend,
the statuary will be banished from the temples and arrested
for indecent exposure, the Kamasutra will be censored, and
Hindus will begin to sublimate. India will build a growth
economy, and forever look back in anguish at the erotic chaos
of the past.
The guide who showed me Gomatesvara took me up to
a balcony where giant granite genitalia confronted me. He
thought I might want to take a picture. Accordingly, Go-
matesvara flexed his grey granite muscles and advanced upon
the west, where he was photographed for the cover of Physi-
cal Culture. The dancing girl of Khajuraho finally removed
the stony thorn from out her upturned foot, and became Play-
mate of the Month. The sporting lovers came down from off
the temple walls to be photographed in living color, and the
resultant TV special became the subject of a decision by the
Supreme Court which found the sculpture had redeeming
social and artistic merit. But neither attackers nor defenders
of Khajuraho cared to attribute divinity to those darling lov-
ers, though, nevertheless, approval was given to viewers to
have sex when the commercials came on.
I liked Khajuraho better than Banaras, possibly because
there were no people there. And celebrating sex seemed like
a marvellous idea. Remembering the parking-lot-marker-
Shiva-lingam having his makeup applied in the courtyard of
that Banarsi temple, I had to wonder: was Adonai wrong to
take godhead away from that miserable stone, and leave him
-a miserable stone?
The stone continues to exist whether or not you call him
239


Krishna Smiled
Shiva and paint him orange with two blue eyes. So also do
sex, violence, thrills, fairy tales, art, commercialism, patrio-
tism, fun, terror, and-incidentally-religion. In America, we
recognize and endure all these, but for us these experiences
are fragmented and meaningless. In India, these elements are
integrated and sanctified, rolled into a single ball of wax ready
for the Hindu to pick up and throw at the unanswered ques-
tion.
And what of our poor fragmented selves? Children of
men whose faith was as a rock, we have seen that rock shat-
tered by war, by fraternal treachery, by cannibalism, until our
very souls fragment and we become, like Halfdan, both mur-
derer and victim.
For us, traditional answers no longer suffice, and we no
longer know what questions to ask or of whom.
Smiling, Krishna rose like Venus on the half-shell from
the azure depths of the President's swimming pool, breaking
the calmly reflected pillars with his sleek form as he boosted
himself up to stand before me the figure of a Greek god, only
I supposed he must be a Hindu one, though he had no more
arms than necessary, and he was laughing at me.
"You mustn't jump into the water as if you were a frog,
you know;" and Krishna taught me to dive, a feat which half
a dozen gym teachers had pronounced impossible. "It is only
a question of confidence;" and unexpectedly, I was confident.
Krishna himself had learned to swim in distant dawns in
sacred pools atop a hill crowned by one of those temples so
detested by Jehovah. He qualified for the Olympic team there.
"In a sacred pool? For God's sake!"
"Oh, yes, I snuck over there before the religion business
opened for the day, and when the priests and pilgrims arrived,
I would run home," he said. The water rippled smoothly off
his muscles; he swam without a sound. "I could do a mile in
4:02, if traffic wasn't heavy."
Idol-of-Krishna was his full name, he had no other and
didn't need more: just Krishnamurti.
240


Holy, Holy, Holy
Krishna was the eighth avatar of Vishnu, Protector and
Sustainer of Life who rides a man-eagle for his gaadi and lies
down to rest among the coils of a giant cobra. In babyhood
he was the pet of dairymaids, whom he later mounted, be-
coming a combination Pan and Tyl Eulenspiegel, not above
lifting up mountains to shelter his beloved cow girls from the
rain. The two of us used to go picnicking alongside Okhla
Canal where otters carry their sleek heads above the tops of
the browning grass and oxcarts creak past loaded with hay.
There under the mango trees, Krishna taught me his smile.
I imagine it was the same smile that adorned the face of
Apollo when he played his flute and the birds stopped singing
to listen. Krishna plays a flute too, but he paints his face all-
over blue and until you get used to that sort of thing it can
stop you cold.
"I never thought that I would love an American girl,"
said Krishna, who had 1,363 wives and loved each one of
them each night. They were all Indian, of course. It is well
known that western women are too demanding. They have
not been taught to regard their husbands as incarnations of
God.
Krishna was surprised at how he grew in stature when
he saw himself reflected in my eyes, the eyes of an autono-
mous human like himself, rather than in the god-crazed eyes
of some supine cowherd. It woke him from the habit of cen-
turies. He took a new interest in the world around him, and
walked to the office instead of taking his gaadi. Leaving be-
hind the security of temples, he strode out into the contempo-
rary world. He'd had one foot in it when I met him; all he'd
needed was a shove.
He turned out to be an excellent manager, a hangover
from the days when he advised King Arjuna and drove his
chariot in the great battle which provides the setting for the
Bhagavad-gitd. Later, he was an officer in the British Army.
Now, he took an interest in computers, and conducted some
highly efficient military operations. As he began to pay atten-
tion to business and leave the dairymaids alone, gross nation-
al productivity rose, schools were built in rural areas, some
241


Krishna Smiled

villagers agreed to separate their sewage from their drinking
water, some college graduates forsook the fleshpot cities for
the benighted villages, the flamboyant eccentricities of out-
lying provinces were reduced in importance until they became
no more than colorful elements in the Republic Day parade,
Indian civil servants took over the United Nations Secretariat,
some intercaste marriages took place: in short, an ancient
civilization cracked and, animated by the dybbuk of Henry
Ford, India staggered out to greet the twentieth century.
But we who were so concerned about our impact on
Asia never anticipated Asia's impact upon us. We brought
efficiency; she touched us with mysticism. We preached util-
ity; she taught us elaboration. We planted industry; she
reaped population. We taught her how to manipulate the ex-
ternal world, abjuring prayer; she taught us that the internal
world is not beyond manipulation. We brought our vision in
black and white, for or against, with or without; she opened
our eyes to subtle gradations of life's spectrum, things which
are at one and the same time right and wrong, yes and no, and
smiles that are, of all things, blue.
For me, that smile dissolved the harsh dichotomies of
life in the northern hemisphere. Western categories fade in
the light of Krishna's smile, dissolve into the shimmering col-
ors of secret gardens that lie enclosed by palaces where Kitu
used to wait for me beside the swimming pool.
Nor was mine the only mind expanded by that radiance.
Gasping beds of pink and orange and purple flowers, plucked
by the hands of itinerant flower children from the gardens of
Rashtrapathi Bhavan rose into the air and, blown across
oceans of time, reassembled themselves with psychedelic
gaiety on posters and movie screens upon the walls of Amer-
ica, their amplified voices breaking down the walled cities of
our minds. Soon Krishna himself, in his avatar as a hippie,
arrived in America, riding the Garuda label at 33 1/3 rpm.
I recognized his gear: it all came from a cunning Jain temple
in Ajmer, bedizened in mirrored hippogryphs and purple ele-
phants. All he lacked were strobe lights, and the Americans
supplied those.
242


Holy, Holy, Holy
Behind Krishna came Yehudi Menuhin holding Ravi
Shankar by the hand, and they were followed by hordes of
beatles, mothers, and freaked-out dionysian creatures half
divine, half mad, couldn't care less. The exuberance of the
Hindu pantheon burst through the worn facade of the Prot-
estant ethic.
Temple bells were rung, not by saffron-robed monks, but
by long-haired lads in cast-off clothes of foreign cultures who
had fallen under the spell of Khajuraho and would make love
indefinitely but not war. Astrology storms the bastion of rea-
son and drama enters the House of Aquarius, the very sign
which presided over the stampede at the Kumbh Mela.
I felt warmly superior over the Kumbh Mela until the
advent of rock festivals. It is true we do not mob our holy
men, nor stampede in and out of churches like they do in
Delhi. We treat religion with respect, wearing our nicest
clothes. But that is because we have lowered our sights.
Celestial stars don't determine our lives so much as hu-
man ones do. It is the singing stars who set the tone for our
society, decree what we shall wear and be, the shapes our
fantasies and our shirts will take. So it is they whom we stam-
pede to adore. They are the gurus of our culture, and the chief
difference between the riverbank at Allahabad and the pas-
tures of Woodstock is that people came to Allahabad to re-
deem their immortal souls, while we went to Woodstock to
pleasure ourselves.

243


It's a long way to Khajuraho,
we'd better get started
I, Marco Polo, launched into fabulous adventure
strapped into an upholstered chair, waterproof paper bag in
hand. I had saddled no camels, climbed no mountains, en-
dured no sandstorms, but I reached India anyhow. Someone
else attended to the details, leaving me no role to play. No
role? There was no drama-one hoped for no drama, it could
end only in oblivion. Captive in the aircraft's cocktail lounge,
the adventurer could not advent. Anxiety, the disease of pas-
sivity, replaced courage, the disease of action.
Aloft. The vistas of this hugely revolving world con-
stricted themselves into an 8 mm reel. The endlessly varied
faces of mankind were replaced by the xeroxed countenances
of airline employees. And those egg crates, those wastelands,
those airports, resounded with the noise of my own language.
Someone had forbidden airline personnel to speak their
mother tongues, on pain of life. English pursued me like a
surface-to-air missile, sucked in by the very accent I emitted.
244


It's a long way to Khajuraho
And that stewardess! I had gone to high school with her, but
they had tied a sari round her as she went about her business
of eliminating wonder. Wander?
Imagine fabled lands which Tamerlane and Genghis
Khan labored to achieve, dragged forward for my delectation,
without any exertion whatever on my part. A cosmic conveyor
belt took me to India, of which I saw only the cogs: Orly
(grey), Bonn (brown), Beirut (blue), Iran (apparently,
since the Shah's picture was on the wall). Now, because I had
drunk black tea in the middle of the night at a bare trestle
table under a picture of the shah, had I been to Iran? Perhaps
it was Montana. It was too dark out to tell.
I saw Kilroy on a bathroom wall in Bonn, his peculiarly
American phiz peering out to see what those foreigners were
going to do next. A familiar face at last. I may never have been
east of New York before, but he had been. So had all the mass
media. With lens, cartoon, and poster, they have uncovered
the subtle mysteries of the world to millions who associate
"mystery" with murder, and "world" with problems. Proxy
travel has wafted us in carefree, permapress documentaries
from Hong Kong to Kathmandu and back via Paris ("Vous
est Americaine?" inquired the waitress. "Ham and eggs!" she
shouted to the cook). Why travel?
In short, the passage to India was boring. The irksome
interior of the plane raised for me a philosophical question:
Was I in fact travelling? What did it mean to travel? Was it
only the passive consumption of miracles? Delhi's pellucid
air may be as intoxicating today as when Shah Jahan sat his
peacock throne; but could I enjoy it as fully, who had not
labored through choking sands to breathe it? The winking
campfire below spelled life or death to the earthling; but it
was meaningless to me at 30,000 feet. History was below, I
was among the mindless clouds. Where was Marco Polo now?
Somewhere between Abadan and Karachi, I decided
that if I could not actively relate to the world I was passing
through, then I would just go back home and frequent the
movies, where I could see the same marvels from a more com-
fortable seat. I knew very well that the homebound traveller,
245


Krishna Smiled

his feet not quite damped by the Cinerama tide, is soon sur-
feited with the appearance of reality: the rest of the world
is apparently very much like us, but the natives wear these
funny costumes. With such comforting thoughts, we leave the
travelog yawning, we already know more about India than
we care to know, actually to go there would be redundant.
Most of us feel alienated when we travel, which is why
we buy souvenirs. We think that through them we can annex
reality. The truth is, acquisitiveness is a cop-out. It prevents
one from noticing that he hasn't been there. Brass urns, star
sapphires, embroidered handbags, fake antiquities, and all
the other bric-a-brac of the tourist trade merely symbolize
one's failure to make contact with the outside world.
Airlines and steamship companies were just then un-
covering the Far East for hordes of Far Westerners who had
already done Europe and were looking for something new.
It made quite an impression on Indians to have a boat dock
in Bombay with seven hundred of the elderly infirm, some
actually confined to wheelchairs, but festooned with their
all-seeing cameras and armed with American Express checks,
descending upon the chawls and chowks of the city in pursuit
of ivory elephants and embroidered teacozies. No one could
believe they had come so far, expending so much effort and
money, in order to purchase these worthless objects.
But shopping is a substitute for experiencing reality,
much of which is too repellant to enjoy anyhow. So a sequined
cap becomes a stand-in for incomprehensible Bhopal; a fur
jacket substitutes for ruined Ghazni; and a star sapphire is
some recompense for Srinagar, which stinks, you know, really
stinks.
What meaning do these objects have once they have
been severed from their origins and become an item of barter
among the In people? Anyone who actually buys a brass bell
while in India might as well be in Times Square, and deserves
to be. Travel must be more than a spectator sport, or it is an
affront to the world one travels through.
Souvenirs seemed to me an insult to my life in Asia. What
souvenir of blind tap-tap-tapping in the dark, what souvenir
246


It's a long way to Khajuraho
of exhausted children, what souvenir of hunger in a loom-
festooned cottage? Besides, I had no money. Star sapphires
were beyond me, wooden bookends beneath me. And I took
my job seriously: I didn't need to collect brass bowls and
Nepalese battle horns, my job was obsession enough.
Photography is another way to cope with the alienation
of travel. Trying to capture reality, we photograph the alien
swoop of a sari as a woman bends to the well; an old man sing-
ing by a fountain; temples marching with determination into
the sea. Each moment is an apocalypse, each picture worth
a thousand words. Then, viewing the pictures which have
made words unnecessary, we find their sense has gone. De-
vout Moslems fear we shall capture their souls when we take
their pictures. They can relax. Photography is barely skin-
deep; souls elude us. The camera has made us observers
rather than participants.
Landing in India, I got rid of my movie camera. It
seemed to me to proclaim my otherness, my outsideness, the
fact that I would be there for the moment only. Then I would
take my film back to the United States and exhibit Asia as a
curiosity to my friends-my real friends, the American ones.
After coffee, they would show me their slides of Acapulco.
In such pictures, the world becomes a set piece against
which we arrange our preconceptions. We think we are pho-
tographing the Taj Mahal, but we project reels of ourselves
grinning foolishly in front of what might as well be a painted
backdrop in a photographer's studio.
I wanted to record my impressions in greater depth, us-
ing a longer time exposure. I therefore chose the most sensi-
tive and durable instrument I possessed: myself. And if my
travel into inner space has not always been commensurate
with my travel into outer, that is to be expected: it is a long
way to Khajuraho, but even farther to my Self.



Index

Acheson, Dean, 11
Afghanistan: Kabul to Kandahar,
108-22; Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif,
206-25
Anti-Americanism. See Culture, In-
dian
Banaras, 21-29
Bangladesh, 79-81. See also Lin-
guistic nationalism
Bathing: in Ganges, 23; at Delhi
Gymkhana   Club, 136-37; in
Arabian Sea, 137; at Rashtra-
pathi Bhavan, 142; at Brazilian
Embassy, 145; at Malabar, 172-
73; at Mazar-i-Sharif, 222; at
Rishikesh, 231; at the Kumbh
Mela, 232-33; in America, 238
Beggars, 24-25, 139-40
Bhilsa, 41-42
Bowles, Chester, 163
British Raj: origins of, 51; British
provinces, 51-52; princely states,
52-53; hill stations, 104-5; cast-
aways of, 171-73
Capitalism. See Culture, Indian
Caste: and conversion to Islam, 25;
untouchables, 98-99; lack of lit-
erature on, 99; description of,
99-100; and representative gov-
ernment, 100; and race, 101; and
the foreigner, 103-7; contrast
with Afghanistan, 214
Cattle, 41
249

Censorship. See Publications pro-
curement
Ceylon, 174-76
Children: as workers, 27, 99, 161;
clothing, 162, 171; servant's,
177-79, 185, 188-89; as social
security, 188; as a means of sur-
vival, 221
China: propaganda in India, 159,
202; comparison of U.S. and In-
dian attitudes toward, 202-3
Communism:    propaganda,  157;
publications, 158-59; and sex,
159, 169; bookstores, 169; and
youth, 161-62; in Kerala, 164-
70, 173; vs. free enterprise, 166-
67; and U.S. Department of
State, 197. See also McCarthyism
Coorg, 82-88
Culture, Indian: attitude toward
West, 19, 134-35; laborers, 59,
120-21; capitalism, 165-67; anti-
Americanism, 169; touching, 172;
faith, 237-40; impact on Amer-
ica, 241-43
Delhi, 41, 45-50, 62-69, 131-46,
177-89
Diplomatic corps: initiation, 11-12;
life style, 132-39; and being a
woman, 146
Festivals: Dussehra in Uttar Pra-
desh, 17; Holi in Bhilsa, 41-42;
Janamasthami in Delhi, 36; Ga-


nesha Chaturthi in Coorg, 83-84,
87; Kumbh Mela, 232-33; of
Jagganath, 233-34; of Gomates-
wara, 236
Hyderabad: 52-53, 55, 74, 153
Intelligence procurement. See Pub-
lications procurement
Jews and Judaism, 83-84, 114, 128-
29
Kashmir, 147-56
Kerala, 161-73. See also Commu-
nism, Linguistic nationalism
Krishna: as idol, 36-38; as student,
43; as revelation, 44; as army
captain, 46; as hunter, 60; as pil-
grim, 229; as lover, 235; as
Olympic swimmer, 240; as faith-
ful married man, 241; as mod-
ernizer, 241; the hippie inver-
sion, 242-43
Labor. See Culture, Indian
Lahore, 123-29
Languages: multiplicity  of, 14;
English, 52, 77-78, 96, 158; Lin-
guistic Survey of India, 72; as
basis of political organization,
72; Sanskritic and Dravidian, 73,
78; Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani, 75-
76; changing speech patterns, 76;
civil service standard, 79. See
also Linguistic nationalism
Linguistic nationalism; Pukhtoonis-
tan, 68; Andhra, 73-74; Reor-
ganization of Indian States, 74;
Bombay, 74; Kerala, 74, 164; not
in Coorg, 82; and dictionaries,
88-89; and national unity, 89.
See also Languages
McCarthyism, 194-97, 201. See
also Communism
Marriage: changing concepts of,
30-31, 241; raising age of, 47;
celebration, 60; and color, 102;
wedding procession, 126-27; and
foreign service, 144-46; Emman-
uel's, 179-80; an Afghan in-
stance, 223. See also Men and
women

Index
Men and women: travel arrange-
ments, 18, 19, 213-14, 221; in
crowds, 36; Radhakrishna, 43;
Akbar's view, 61-62; in ancient
sculpture, 92-93, 235; machismo,
110-11; in Afghanistan, 116-17,
219; nautch, 125-26; la chasse,
130-33; Dr. Radhakrishnan on,
143; across ceasefire line, 156;
evils of coeducation, 157; a Chi-
nese view, 159; two Americans,
175-76; a temporary   merger,
206; chaudri use, 207, 216, 224,
218-19; woman as appendage,
211; chivalry, 215, 225
Mosques: Jamma Masjid, 62; Niza-
muddin, 65; Mazar-i-sharif, 220.
See also Temples
Music: of Tan Sen, 35, 186; in a
tomb, 65; of the courtesans of
Lahore, 125; of the nautch girls
of Karachi, 125-26; at Maidens,
130; among the Quilon planters,
172; abroad the Almirante Sal-
danha, 176; Methodist hymns,
181; folk, 181-82; Bengali nautch
boy, 182-85; in an Afghan tea
house, 224
Nehru, Jawarhalal: deposes Lion
of Kashmir, 155; acquiesces in
Chinese takeover of Tibet, 192;
mentioned, 13, 142-43, 193
Pakistan: and Urdu, 75-76; and
Bengali nationalism, 79-81, 88-
89. See also Bangladesh
Partition, 54, 55, 59, 64; aftermath
at Lahore, 124; of Kashmir, 152-
54
Pathans: way   of life, 111-21;
status of women, 116-17, 207,
219; Pukhtoonistan, 68, 113-14.
See also Afghanistan
Pepsu, 56-59
Photography, 62, 247
Publications procurement: assign-
ment, 11-14; in the bazaars, 20-
21; railway publications, 28; tele-
phone directories, 32-33; ratio-
nale, 32-33; dam specifications,
59; ephemera, 68; dictionaries,
70-71; palm  leaf manuscripts,
91;  Pukhto   dictionary,  123;
250


Index
gazetteers, 124; forestry reports,
149;  communist   propaganda,
158-59, 161 f; government re-
ports, 187; folk songs, 187;
newspapers, 190-91; and intelli-
gence, 194-96, 198; censorship,
198; in Afghanistan, 217
Punjab, 45, 56-57
Raj. See British Raj
Sherpas, 91, 103-4
Shiva: as a souvenir, 22; glimpsed
in temple, 23; decapitates his
son, 83; recollected, 239-40
Sikhs, 45-50, 57-58. See also Pun-
jab
Sikkim, 203-5
Slocum, Harvey, 59
Souvenirs, 22, 40, 119, 215-16, 170,
193, 246
Temples: of Banaras, 23; difficulty
in ascribing, 36; in Old Delhi,
36-38; in countryside, 38; Jain,

39-40; of Love at Banaras, 92-
93; of Madurai, 174; Lakshmin-
arayin, 178; of Kali, 231; of
Jagganath, 234; of Khajuraho,
235, 239; in Ajmer, 242. See also
Mosques
Tensing, 105-7
Tibet, 192-94
United States Congress, 197-201
United States Departmen of State:
impact of McCarthyism, 197;
and Congress, 197-201; competi-
tion with Department of De-
fense, 200
Untouchables. See Caste
Uttar Pradesh, 16-19
Vindhya Pradesh, 33-36
Weavers: of Banaras, 26-28; of Sik-
kim, 204
Women. See Men and women;
Diplomatic corps

251



AUTHOR NOTE FOR REPRINT OF KRISHNA SMILED

The author, one of the few women to be commissioned as a
United States Foreign Service Officer in the 1950's, was assigned
to publications procurement in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Krishna Smiled: Assignment in Southeast
Asia is a memoir of her experiences as a 21-year-old footloose in
Asia.
After two years in London as US vice consul, the author returned
to the United States, married Sol Elkin, a labor arbitrator, and en-
tered academia. Judith Laikin Elkin (Ph.D., 1976, the University
of Michigan) is an associate of the UM Frankel Center for Judaic
Studies and founding president of the Latin American Jewish
Studies Association (LAJSA). She is the author of TheJews ofLatin
America, co-editor of The Jewish Presence in Latin America, and has
served as consultant to exhibits and films on this subject. The
mother of two daughters and four granddaughters, Dr. Elkin lives
in Ann Arbor.