From My Notebooks In 1977: To Agra and the Taj Mahal

I’ve left the East Coast and started my journey back to Delhi. It’s April and already very hot. At first I found it was only bearable to ride some parts by night, a risky enterprise.

Amjad Alikhan’s student playing scales on his sitar

April, Jabalpur

There was a sprinkling of rain last night. Now, after Seoni, a full scale thunderstorm at dusk. And with the dirt shoulders of road wet more trouble with lorries, and one wild skid which leaves me miraculously vertical, and the curious mixture of relief and indignation. I write this after a good night’s sleep. I feel the fatigue in my arms.

In Jabalpur a beer behind a wine store with some Sikhs, and a late comer who is overcome by emotion. Shows me two addresses in East Ham and pays my 14 rupee bill. I admire this ability to make passionate gestures on the spot, though I don’t suppose he expected me to leave so suddenly. Another fellow on a scooter talks about the farm he has bought as a hobby, and how he plans to train monkeys to shoo off neighbour’s cattle. He talks fondly about Australia.

I feel quite woozy after the beer, but once again I find that as soon as I’m in the saddle my mind and body settle easily to their task.

The book assumes a sort of structure –

Africa: The exorcism of fantasies and fears, and a new basis for equilibrium in the world.

South America; A testing ground for newly discovered strengths, physical and psychic.

North America: A flowering of qualities leading to new indiscretions and tests of a different kind.

Australia: And back into the world of opulence and corpulence and “couples” – both easy and impossible.

S.E. Asia: Nemesis. Collapse of the myth, and beginning from scratch, but more carefully and with a better idea of resources and possibilities.

India: And the beginnings of a conscious spiritual structure.

Leaving Pithora a bit hastily (if it hadn’t been for the argument about money I might well have stayed the night). At Jabalpur I realised I’d better go to a hotel. The Sikhs sent me to Clarkson’s (should have guessed) and the gentleman farmer led me there. I was so besotted by the Sikh’s 14 rupee gesture, and tiredness and folly that I didn’t ask the price of the room.

Even if it’s 25 or 30, I thought the 14 rupees would take care of it. Even when the bearer switched on an air conditioner I didn’t suspect – it made such a ghastly groaning sound that I switched it straight off again. There was a radio and a phone. I was lucky they didn’t charge 145. As it was 45 shocked me. The breakfast scene was a long room, with Indian businessmen throbbing with self-importance, and giving me the glare which to me still means “How can such an animal have got amongst us?” Are they all imagining me, like the Indian singer in Illustrated Weekly (1st week, April) wiping my bottom with paper?

After arguing 5 rupees off the bill, set off into the rain-cooled air. The monkey trainer had promised to visit me before office but failed to appear.

First part of journey to Katni ordinarily pleasant. After Katni road became a minor one which struck off across a deserted, rocky scrub – very empty and hot-looking, though air still cool. Unhappy about the bike, so thoughts of a breakdown here. Have water and rice. For a moment I think, “You can perish in India.” It’s a joke.

[Dating back to Australia: “You can perish in the outback.”]

In fact, it’s a beautiful landscape, rust and dust coloured, rising and falling, savannah really. A nature reserve apparently. Halfway, at Pappai, stop for tea. Nice tea-house scene. One old man holds forth, giving an imaginary account of me and my travels. Others watch me avidly, but with less grasping curiosity than in towns. Some respect is still there. The man next to me, in white shirt and trousers, speaks English but won’t. After a little he gets up and sits somewhere else and ignores me in a rather obvious way.

Khajuraho

A profusion of eroticism clothes the walls of the temples at Khajuraho

Three groups of temples, airport, 3 smart hotels, a village. PWD etc, and Madya Pradesh Hostel. Sleep on grass. Meet Liz McCloud (Dorset and Cambridge) Two visits to main group of temples. B&W at 64ASA. Irritated and stimulated by Texan Simeon – “Jumping Jack” who produces a pure Ayn Rand philosophy. Difficult to argue with logically. Why? The flaw is the same for all ideal systems. They don’t correspond to human nature.

Touched by group of laughing women anointing their idol with pigments, flowers and water, chattering and singing. Very innocent.

Agra, Sunday, April 10th

Arrive just before a rainstorm. Bike rough again. NB: Famous worries about steering head races unfounded. All dealt with by dabs of grease under the steering head lock. When I think of all the jarring, ratting and jerkiness I’ve endured all these hundreds of miles.

To the Taj. Yes, it’s beautiful. Most impressed inside by the sounds that swell and fade in the dome – like a million sad whispers adding up to a cosmic sigh. It rises and falls, it seems, almost independently of the level of noise at ground level, yet any particularly loud voice is heard briefly above the other echoes before sinking into the common pool. People come in determined to make their mark, young men drunk with power, young women drunk with hope, and where they would chisel their names into the marble if they could, they fling their challenge in the air. And immediately everything that was sharp, personal, assertive in the sound is lost and it becomes a mournful ghost joining the legions of ghosts. This phenomenon has very powerful effect on me.

Leaving I pass round the edge of the enclosure, colonnaded galleries in red stone (someone, I see, quarried south of Panna). Quantities of stone slabs are stacked and masons are cutting new panels to reface the galleries.

Walking back to fort. The fort is closed because 120 ministers from foreign countries are visiting. Asked Army official and was surprised to get answers readily. Were they army or police?

Do we also close these places to public for visiting dignitaries’ sake? I suppose we do. Just an annoyance.

In town, walking in bazaar, ox carts, horse carts, hand barrows, cycles and rickshaws, m/cycles and pedestrians thrash about. One horse-drawn cart was moving with more pace and noise than usual. The driver, a young man with patterned red cloth round his head, tunic and lungi, was looking pleased with life. His cart was heavy with men and sacks of grain but his horse was bigger and more temperamental than the others and he was forcing a dashing pace up the hill through the crush. The horse was tossing its head from side to side, twisting between the shafts.

I don’t know how often it happens. Three little girls, hardly two feet off the ground, dressed like old-fashioned dolls, clinging together, fell in a bundle under the cart wheels. I watched the wheel rise up and rise onto the bodies, all three of them, and then roll back. Astonishing and shocking sight. Men came from the shops to pick the girls up. The driver got down and literally raised his arms in supplication to Allah. His passengers hurriedly paid him and faded away. Two of the girls seemed able to walk. The third lay in a boy’s arms, with bright blood rising from her mouth. An adult man was telling the boy to do something. The boy just grinned as though he thought the whole thing was foolish. The man shouted and gave him a push, and the boy went up the road, none too quickly and still grinning with the small body. Later, outside the Dipty X-ray clinic I saw another man take the girls and ride off on the back of a scooter. What chance, I wondered. There are so many of these tiny bundles of humanity living their lives down there on the street surface, far below adult notice. How many are snuffed out like that. Mustn’t exaggerate. Can’t quite grasp the essence of this event. Something extremely familiar, natural or right in that wheel on those small bodies – as though it were potentially present all the time and I just happened to see it then. Something in that phrase “an accident waiting to happen.” There have been cartwheels and little girls in long dresses for so many thousands of years – an automobile accident is science fiction by contrast.

Next week, to Delhi and on the way out of India.

Thanks for your help with the French edition. It is now available to buy on the website here.