Travels with Herodotus (3 page)

I thought that the crowds, awakened by the roar of the horn resounding directly over their heads, would fall upon us in a rage, beat us, perhaps lynch us even. Far from it! As we inched forward, they rose one by one and moved aside, taking with them children and pushing along old women barely able to walk. In their ardent compliance, in their submissive humility, there was something
apologetic, as if sleeping here on the road were some crime whose traces they were quickly trying to erase. And thus we inched our way toward the city, the horn blaring, people stirring and giving way—on and on and on. Once we reached town, its streets turned out to be equally difficult to navigate: it too seemed just one enormous camp of white-clad, somnambular phantoms of the night.

In this fashion we arrived at a place illuminated by a red light-bulb: HOTEL. The driver left me at reception and disappeared without a word. The man at the desk, this one sporting a blue turban, led me upstairs to a little room furnished with only a bed, a table, and a washstand. Without a word he pulled off the bedsheet, on which scurried panicked bugs, which he shook off onto the floor, muttered something by way of good night, and departed.

Left alone, I sat down on the bed and started to consider my situation. On the negative side, I didn’t know where I was. On the positive, I had a roof over my head; an institution (a hotel) had given me shelter. Did I feel safe? Yes. Uncomfortable? No. Strange? Yes. I could not define precisely wherein lay this strangeness, but the sensation grew stronger in the morning, when a barefoot man entered the room bearing a pot of tea and several biscuits. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. He placed the tray on the table, bowed, and, having uttered not a word, softly withdrew. There was such a natural politeness in his manner, such profound tactfulness, something so astonishingly delicate and dignified, that I felt instant admiration and respect for him.

Something more disconcerting occurred an hour later, when I stepped out of the hotel. On the opposite side of the street, on a cramped little square, rickshaw drivers had been gathering since dawn—skinny, stooped men with bony, sinewy legs. They must have learned that a sahib had arrived in the hotel. A sahib, by definition, must have money, so they waited patiently, ready to
serve. But the very idea of sprawling comfortably in a rickshaw pulled by a hungry, weak waif of a man with one foot already in the grave filled me with the utmost revulsion, outrage, horror. To be an exploiter? A bloodsucker? To oppress another human being in this way? Never! I had been brought up in a precisely opposite spirit, taught that even living skeletons such as these were my brothers, kindred souls, near ones, flesh of my flesh. So when the rickshaw drivers threw themselves upon me with pleading encouragement, clamoring and fighting amongst themselves for my business, I began to firmly push them away, rebuke them, protest. They were astounded—what was I saying, what was I doing? They had been counting on me, after all. I was their only chance, their only hope—if only for a bowl of rice. I walked on without turning my head, impassive, resolute, a little smugly proud of not having allowed myself to be manipulated into assuming the role of a leech.

Old Delhi! Its narrow, dusty, fiendishly hot streets, with their stifling odor of tropical fermentation. And this crowd of silently moving people, appearing and disappearing, their faces dark, humid, anonymous, closed. Quiet children, making no sound. A man stares dully at the remains of his bicycle, which has fallen apart in the middle of the street. A woman sells something wrapped in green leaves—what is it? What do those leaves enfold? A beggar demonstrates how the skin of his stomach is plastered to his spinal cord—but is this even possible? One has to walk carefully, to pay attention, because many vendors spread their wares directly on the ground, on the sidewalks, right on the edge of the road. Here is a man who has laid out two rows of human teeth and some old pliers on a piece of newspaper, thereby advertising his dental services. His neighbor—a wizened, shrunken fellow—is
hawking books. I rummage through the carelessly arranged, dusty piles and settle on two: Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(useful for learning English) and the priest J. A. Dubois’s
Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies
. Father Dubois arrived in India as a missionary in 1792 and stayed for thirty-one years, and the fruit of his studies of Hindu ways of life was the book I had just purchased, which was published in England in 1816 with the assistance of the British East India Company.

I returned to the hotel, opened the Hemingway to the first sentence: “He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.” I understood nothing. I had a small English-Polish pocket dictionary, the only one that had been available in Warsaw. I managed to find the word “brown,” but none of the others. I proceeded to the next sentence: “The mountainside sloped gently…” Again—not a word. “There was a stream alongside …” The more I tried to understand this text, the more discouraged and despairing I became. I felt trapped. Besieged by language. Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and preventing my going further, closing off the world, making it unattainable. It was an unpleasant and humiliating sensation. It might explain why, in a first encounter with someone or something foreign, there are those who will feel fear and uncertainty, bristle with mistrust. What will this meeting bring? How will it end? Better not to risk it and to remain in the cocoon of the familiar! Better not to stick one’s neck out of one’s own backyard!

On first impulse, I might have fled India and returned home, if not for my having bought a return ticket on the passenger ship
Batory
, which in those days sailed between Gdańsk and Bombay.
The Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had just nationalized the Suez Canal, prompting England and France to respond with armed intervention; as war broke out, the canal was blocked, and the
Batory
was stuck somewhere on the Mediterranean Sea. Cut off from home, I was condemned to India.

Cast into deep water, I didn’t want to drown. I realized that only language could save me. I started to think about how Herodotus, wandering the world, had dealt with foreign languages. Hammer writes that Herodotus knew only Greek, but because Greeks at the time were scattered over the entire planet, had their colonies, ports, and factories everywhere, the author of
The Histories
could avail himself of help offered by the countrymen he encountered, who served as his translators and guides. Moreover, Greek was the lingua franca of those days, and many people in Europe, Asia, and Africa spoke the language, which was later replaced by Latin, and then French and English.

I began cramming words, night and day. I placed a cold towel on my temples, feeling my head was bursting. I was never without the Hemingway, but now I skipped the descriptive passages I couldn’t understand and read the dialogues, which were easier:

I understood all of that! And this, too:

I walked around the city, copying down signboards, the names of goods in stores, words overheard at bus stops. In movie theaters I scribbled blindly, in darkness, the words on the screen, and noted the slogans on banners carried by demonstrators in the streets. I approached India not through images, sounds, and smells, but through words; furthermore, words not of the indigenous Hindi, but of a foreign, imposed tongue, which by then had so fully taken root here that it was for me an indispensable key to this country, almost identical with it. I understood that every distinct geographic universe has its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. Without it, this universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it. I noticed, too, the relationship between naming and being, because I realized upon my return to the hotel that in town I had seen only that which I was able to name: for example, I remembered the acacia tree, but not the tree standing next to it, whose name I did not know. I understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture.

During all those days after my arrival in Delhi I was tormented by the thought that I was not working as a reporter, that I was not gathering material for the stories that I would later have to write. I hadn’t come as a tourist, after all. I was an envoy, engaged to render an account, to transmit, relate. But I found myself empty-handed, and feeling incapable of doing anything, at a loss even to know where to begin. I knew nothing about India, after all, and hadn’t asked for it.
Crossing the border
—that was it. Nothing more. But now, since the Suez war made returning impossible, I could only move forward. I decided to travel.

•   •   •

The receptionists in my hotel advised me to go to Benares: “Sacred town!” they explained. (I had noticed already how many things in India are sacred: the sacred town, the sacred river, millions of sacred cows. It is striking, the degree to which mysticism permeates life, how many temples there are, chapels and various little altars at every step, how many fires and how much incense is burning, how many people have ritual markings on their foreheads, how many are sitting motionless, staring at some transcendent point.)

I heeded the receptionists and took a bus to Benares. One drives there through the valley of the Jamuna and the Ganges, through flat, green countryside dotted with the white silhouettes of peasants wading in rice paddies, digging in the ground with hoes, or carrying bundles, baskets, or sacks on their heads. But this view outside the window was mutable, and frequently an immense expanse of water filled the landscape. It was the season of the autumn floods, and rivers metamorphosed into broad lakes, veritable seas. On their shores camped barefoot flood victims. They fled before the rising water but maintained their contact with it, escaping only as far as was necessary and returning immediately when the floodwaters started to recede. In the ghastly heat of the dying day, the water vaporized and a milky, still fog hovered over everything.

We reached Benares in late evening, at night really. The city seemed to have no suburbs, which normally prepare one gradually for the encounter with downtown; here one emerges all of a sudden out of the dark, silent, and empty night into the brightly lit, crowded, and noisy city center. Why do these people flock and swarm together so, clamber all over one another while all around,
just beyond, there is so much free space, so much room for everyone? After getting off the bus I went for a walk. I reached the outskirts of Benares. To one side, in the darkness, lay the still, uninhabited fields, and to the other rose the buildings of the city, densely peopled, bustling, brilliantly illuminated, throbbing with loud music. I cannot fathom this need for a life of congestion, of rubbing against one another, of endlessly pushing and shoving—all the more so when right over there is so much free space.

The locals advised me not to go to sleep at night, so that I would get to the banks of the Ganges while it was still dark and there, on the stone steps that stretch along the river, await the dawn. “The sunrise is very important!” they said, their voices resounding with the promise of something truly magnificent.

It was indeed still dark when people began converging on the river. Singly and in groups. Entire clans. Columns of pilgrims. The lame on crutches. Aged virtual skeletons, some carried on the backs of the young, others—twisted, exhausted—crawling with great difficulty on their own along the asphalt. Cows and goats trailed alongside the people, as did packs of bony, malarial dogs. I too joined this strange mystery play.

Reaching the riverside steps is not easy, because they are preceded by a thicket of narrow, airless, and dirty little streets tightly packed with beggars, who nudge the pilgrims importunately all the while raising a lament unbearably terrible and piercing. Finally, passing various passages and arcades, one emerges at the top of the stairs that descend straight down to the river. Although dawn has barely touched the sky, thousands of the faithful are already there. Some are animated, pushing their way who knows where and why. Others sit in the lotus position, stretching their arms up toward the heavens. The bottom rungs of the stairs are occupied by those performing the purification ritual—they wade
in the river and now and then submerge themselves completely in the water. I see a family subjecting a stout grandmother to the purification rite. The grandmother doesn’t know how to swim and sinks at once to the bottom. The family rush in and bring her back up to the surface. The grandmother gulps as much air as she can, but the instant they let her go, she goes under again. I can see her bulging eyes, her terrified face. She sinks once more, they search for her again in the murky waters and again pull her out, barely alive. The whole ritual looks like torture, but she endures it without protest, perhaps even in ecstasy.

Beside the Ganges, which at this point is wide, expansive, and lazy, stretch rows of wooden pyres, on which are burning dozens, hundreds of corpses. The curious can for several rupees take a boat over to this gigantic open-air crematorium. Half-naked, soot-covered men bustle about here, as do many young boys. With long poles they adjust the pyres to direct a better draft so the cremation can proceed faster; the line of corpses has no end, the wait is long. The gravediggers rake the still-glowing ashes and push them into the river. The gray dust floats atop the waves for a while but very soon, saturated with water, it sinks and vanishes.

I
f in Benares one finds cause for hope—a cleansing in the holy river, and with it the improvement of one’s spiritual condition, the promise of drawing closer to the infinite—Sealdah Station in Calcutta has the opposite effect. I arrived in Calcutta from Benares by train, a progress, as I was to discover, from a relative heaven to an absolute hell. The conductor at the Benares station looked me over and asked: “Where is your bed?”