Authors: Dervla Murphy
To arrive in Delhi during the early part of July constitutes gross
mismanagement
of an itinerary – especially if one arrives by bicycle. My first week in the capital was spent recovering from heatstroke; then, putting aside all thoughts of cycling during the months ahead, I began to make tentative enquiries about the possibility of doing some voluntary social work until November’s coolness came to the rescue and I could start cycling again.
The enquiries were tentative because my accomplishments were so few. I could not drive a car, teach, nurse, type, keep accounts or speak any language but English; in fact my only discernible skill was
long-distance
cycling, which seemed totally irrelevant. Yet, like Barkis, I was willin’, and chance did the rest.
I had an introduction to Mrs Llewellen, sister of Mr Beck whom I had met at the British Embassy in Kabul, and when I called on her one evening she said that I simply must meet Mrs Bland, who lived near by and came from Ireland. Within half an hour I had met Mrs Bland, who in turn said that I simply must meet Mrs Buxton, an Englishwoman who knew a great deal about India’s social problems.
This suggestion was very welcome as I already felt myself becoming drugged by the oddly soporific atmosphere of New Delhi’s foreign colony. Even a week spent in such a cosmopolitan pocket of luxury tends to blunt one’s perception of the realities of Indian life, and contact with someone like Mrs Buxton seemed an ideal escape route. The difficulty was that a slight aura of mystery surrounded this Mrs Buxton and no one knew her whereabouts. She did not, I gathered, belong to the Western social bloc in Delhi, nor had she any fixed address; but she regularly visited the Cheshire Home at Kalkaji – on the famous Ridge immortalised during the uprising of 1857 – and on 17 July I went there
in search of her, leaving my friend’s house on Janpath at 5.30 in the morning to avoid that heat which by 8 a.m. would be torturing the city. Yet despite this precaution I arrived at Kalkaji saturated with sweat, after an easy eight-mile cycle.
Over breakfast with Mrs Davies, the Anglo-Indian matron, I explained my problem and she promised to do her best to contact the elusive Mrs Buxton. The rest of the morning I spent talking to the patients; it was heartening to see at least a score of India’s destitute being so well cared for – but depressing to think of all the millions who need similar care and can’t have it. For a citizen of a tiny country like Ireland it takes time to get adjusted to the immensity of every Indian problem.
The Home overlooks an undulating landscape, now shrivelled to dull dust. While waiting for lunch I sat on a mud roof in the shade of a peepul tree and looked down on the stagnant, scummy waters of a little lake into which emaciated buffaloes were being driven for their daily splash. Near them an equally emaciated Hindu was vigorously washing himself, standing waist-deep a yard out from the shore and pushing the green scum aside before plunging his head under water. Above, the sky was like a reflection of the landscape, colourless with heat, and kites and vultures wheeled slowly round, ever vigilant for carrion. Below, in the compound, two women were quarrelling shrilly in Hindi and their irritation communicated itself ridiculously to me. Clouds of flies buzzed and tickled; the hot, greasy odours of curry and ghee, rising from the kitchen, killed any flicker of appetite I might have felt. Beside me sat a lugubrious Hindu youth, telling me of his domestic troubles in
singsong
Indian English: his mother had fought so incessantly with his bride of a year ago that the girl had returned to her parents and he had not yet seen his all-important first-born son, now a fortnight old. I listened to the sad, unoriginal story with an odd lack of sympathy. By midday, in such weather, a deadly apathy – physical, mental and emotional – takes possession of me, so that I can register nothing but the unsavoury impact which India makes simultaneously on all the senses.
After a token lunch I fell fast asleep in Mrs Davies’s sitting-room, and when I was awakened at 2 p.m. by a hand on my shoulder I looked up dopily to see someone sitting beside me – it was Mrs Buxton.
Before we had been talking for five minutes I could see that she was one of those people who are born with a flair for living happily outside the framework of tiresome conventions, and neither of us wasted any time. I explained my ambition, listing all the ways in which I could not possibly be of the slightest assistance to anyone – but adding that I did have an infinite capacity for roughing it. As I talked, I was aware of being very thoroughly sized up; Jill Buxton’s vague and amiable manner does not entirely camouflage her shrewdness.
When I had finished she asked, ‘Would you like to work with Tibetan refugees?’ Then she went on to outline graphically the appalling
conditions
prevailing in most of the refugee camps. It soon became clear that in such surroundings something worthwhile could be achieved by any able-bodied person who was willing to co-operate with the medical staff, and I replied unhesitatingly that I would love to work for Tibetans.
When we left the Home I was introduced to Arabella, the Land-Rover in which Jill had driven to India two years previously. Like myself, she had had no fixed plans on arriving, but Mrs Freda Bedi, the English-born principal of the Young Lama’s School at Dalhousie, had put her in touch with the Tibetan problem – in which she has been deeply involved ever since.
On meeting Arabella I saw why no one knew Jill Buxton’s address: she lives in Arabella, cooking on a primus-stove and sleeping on the front seats, to the horror of all those who consider it both dangerous and unseemly for a Memsahib to behave in this fashion.
In turn I introduced Jill to Rozinante, the long-suffering bicycle which had taken me from Ireland to India; then Roz was loaded into Arabella and we drove back to Delhi, through blistering heat which almost annihilated me but left Jill cheerfully unaffected.
During the following week I spent most of my time getting to know the various international relief agencies which help the Tibetans, meeting members of the Delhi Tibetan colony and learning a lot from Jill about the many awkward angles of the refugee problem.
It was eventually decided that I should go to the transit camp-
cum-school
at Kangra, where 300 children were living in unbelievably
squalid conditions. As Jill was now planning one of her tours of the camps we arranged to leave Delhi together on 22 July, by which date she hoped to have collected a supply of clothing, tinned foods and medicines. But in the East things rarely happen at the appointed time and the 22nd became the 23rd, and then the 24th, before we were ready to start.
The parched Punjab landscape is not very inspiring immediately before the monsoon, yet it was good to be out in the country again, after sixteen days in a city. For 150 miles Jill kept Arabella to the straight, flat Grand Trunk Road along which I had cycled by moonlight on my way from Pakistan to Delhi; and then, a few miles beyond Ambala, we turned north towards the hills.
Twenty miles further on the road began to climb steeply; the landscape became suddenly green and rain-washed, the air was dustfree and the insidious stench of the plains – which permeates even the best-run homes – was replaced by the strong tang of resin. As Arabella swung effortlessly around countless sharp bends my spirits rose perceptibly with the increasing coolness of every mile.
On each side the mountains were dense with trees, shrubs and ferns, and occasionally a clear stream sparkled across the road. This fertility would be taken for granted at home but now I looked at it with something akin to a sense of reverence. We spent the night at Kasauli, a little hill-station perched cheekily on a ridge 6400 feet above sea-level. By day the view from here is splendid enough, but by night it is quite magical, for then the lights of Simla, forty miles away, can be seen twinkling in their thousands on the crest of another mountain.
At Kasauli Service Civil International runs a nursery for about fifty Tibetan refugees under the age of seven. Two British International Voluntary Service workers – David Williams and Robert Bell – had done a great deal to improve the building during the previous six months and I reflected that such projects show the brighter side of our so-often-condemned age. The youth of earlier generations left home and travelled the world usually for gain of some sort, however ingeniously their motives may have been wrapped in pious phrases;
but now a number of highly qualified young people, impatient of the meaningless luxury of their own society, choose to work with the ‘
have-nots
’ on a daily maintenance allowance of one and sixpence.
The other helpers were an elderly Indian ‘housefather’, a
thirty-year
-old Tibetan and a young Japanese nurse. All these people, of widely different backgrounds, were co-operating generously to make this effort a success, and the homely atmosphere more than made up for a frugal standard of living, shared alike by the children and the volunteers.
When Jill and I arrived at the entrance to the nursery playground our appearance caused a demonstration that astonished me. From every direction the children came running towards us, with
outstretched
arms, greeting us as though we were long-lost friends. All they wanted was to be picked up and cuddled, and their
unselfconscious
revelation of this basic need completely disarmed me. In his book
Tibetan Marches
, Dr André Migot writes:
*
‘As for Tibetan children, they can only be described as adorable …’ Remembering this, while these toddlers hugged my legs and climbed all over me, I saw exactly what he meant. Many of them were in pretty poor shape, suffering from scabies and general malnutrition, yet they glowed with good humour; and later, at the evening dispensary session, I observed that Tibetan gaiety was equalled by Tibetan docility. Diminutive
four-year
-olds stoically swallowed gigantic sulpha tablets without a murmur and one five-year-old boy stood unflinchingly, his head laid on the nurse’s lap, while she dressed an agonising ear-abscess.
After the children had chanted their night prayers and been put to bed by the four Tibetan ayahs, Jill and I dined with the volunteers. During the meal we discussed the Indian Army’s recent threat to requisition the Nursery building; obviously someone had blundered badly by not ensuring, before investing precious time and money, that no such threat could be made. I heard later that, through the kindness of the Area Commanding Officer, SCI were allowed to retain the house; but this was my first experience of the inefficiency too often
connected with aid to the Tibetans. Many individuals and organisations are helping the refugees, yet the lack of co-ordination – either through insufficient knowledge of the overall picture or because of petty jealousies between rival organisations – sadly diminishes the sum total of good achieved.
Looking back on my initiation into the refugee world such a short time ago it is strange to remember my innocent assumption that everyone involved in this type of work puts refugees first; the disillusionment was extreme when it became obvious to me that a large minority put themselves or their organisations first and remain coolly detached from refugees as human beings. This does not, of course, apply to the full-time field-workers, almost all of whom are genuinely concerned and who have little interest in the machinations of the powers-that-be in London, Delhi or New York. These machinations are by no means confined to Tibetan relief work, but recently several experienced people have remarked to me that the Tibetans do seem to bring out the worst in relief agencies – possibly because this race has ‘something special’ and stimulates extra possessiveness. Admittedly such criticisms leave one open to charges of ‘crankiness’; people argue that ‘human nature being what it is one can’t expect anything else’, and no doubt this is partly true. Yet in Big Business human nature is not allowed to impede efficiency so drastically and it seems only reasonable to aim at a similar discipline in the administration of refugee aid.
Another of the basic problems of this situation arises from the cultural gulf between Western helpers and an Eastern people; what looks like an excellent scheme to an American or European may well have a disastrous effect on a group of Tibetans. However, this difficulty should diminish in time if each side makes the necessary effort to understand the other’s point of view.
On the following afternoon Jill and I arrived in Simla. Like the Red Fort in Old Delhi, Simla is one of India’s ghost-haunts – though instead of the formidable elegance of the Fort one sees here a monument to the Victorian penchant for ugliness on a grand scale. The skill with which a large town was built on such vertical slopes gives the place a certain
interest and charm, but from a visitor’s point of view Simla’s fall from glory is as yet too recent for it to seem anything more than an embarrassing example of the fragility of empires.
One hundred and thirty years ago this 7300-foot mountain was as inaccessible and deserted as its neighbouring peaks. Then an enterprising army lieutenant built himself a bungalow near the summit and within a few years the mountain-top had been transformed by the magic wand of wealth and power into a centre of imperial opulence. Here, until 1947, the British lived during the hot season in their own little world, comfortably cushioned on the knowledge that they were indispensable to India, yet remaining as remote from the fundamental realities of Indian life as Simla is from the sweat and dust of the plains. Then, less than a century after Simla’s creation, there was no more Empire. Overnight, the town became an ill-at-ease holiday resort for Indians, who now stroll along those streets which not long ago were forbidden to their race. Yet the spirit of Simla remains obstinately British, just as the spirit of the Red Fort remains Moghul, and this must indeed be flattering to the Indians who, looking at these reminders of past conquests, can see that however omnipotent the invaders may once have been, they all finally succumbed to the implacable vastness of India.