Muslim who loves India - long .
Mo
India would be as culturally barren and sterile and unfriendly to
humans as Pakistan..
times.co.uk June 13
Back to the land I love
Thursday, April 6
I have left India many times. The first time was when I was thirteen
and a half and went to boarding school in Rugby, England. My mother
didn't want me to go but I said I did. I flew west excitedly in
January 1961, not really knowing that I was taking a step that would
change my life forever. A few years later, my father, without telling
me, suddenly sold Windsor Villa, our family home in Bombay. The day I
heard this, I felt an abyss open beneath my feet.
I think that I never forgave my father for selling that house, and I'm
sure that if he hadn't I would still be living in it. Since then my
characters have frequently flown west from India, but in novel after
novel their author's imagination has returned to it. This, perhaps, is
what it means to love a country: that its shape is also yours, the
shape of the way you think and feel and dream. That you can never
really leave.
Before the Partition massacres of 1947, my parents left Delhi and
moved south, correctly calculating that there would be less trouble in
secular, cosmopolitan Bombay. As a result I grew up in that tolerant,
broad-minded city whose particular quality - call it freedom - I've
been trying to capture and celebrate ever since. Midnight's Children
(1981) was my first attempt at such literary land reclamation. Living
in London, I wanted to get India back; and the delight with which
Indian readers clasped the book to themselves, the passion with which
they, in turn, claimed me, remains the most precious memory of my
writing life.
In 1988, I was planning to buy myself an Indian base with the advances
I'd received for my new novel. But that novel was The Satanic Verses,
and after it was published the world changed for me, and I was no
longer able to set foot in the country which has been my primary
source of artistic inspiration. Whenever I made inquiries about
getting a visa, the word invariably came back that I would not be
granted one.
Nothing about my plague years, the dark decade that followed the
Khomeini fatwa, has hurt more than this rift. I felt like a jilted
lover left alone with his unrequited, unbearable love. You can measure
love by the size of the hole it leaves behind.
It has been a deep rift, let's admit that. India was the first country
to ban The Satanic Verses - which was proscribed without following
India's own stipulated due process in such matters, banned before it
entered the country by a weak Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi,
in a desperate, unsuccessful bid for Muslim votes. After that, it
sometimes seemed as if the Indian authorities were determined to rub
salt in the wound.
When The Moor's Last Sigh was published in the fall of 1995, the
Indian Government, in an attempt to appease Bal Thackeray's thuggish
Shiv Sena in Bombay (which has done much to damage the city's old
free-spirited openness, and which I therefore satirised in the novel),
blocked the book's import through Customs, but backed down quickly
when challenged in the courts.
BBC Television's efforts to make a prestigious five-hour dramatisation
of Midnight's Children, with a screenplay I myself adapted from the
novel, were thwarted when India refused permission to film. That
Midnight's Children was deemed unfit to be filmed in its own country,
the country which had so recently celebrated its publication with so
much recognition and joy, was a bad and miserable shock.
There were smaller, but still wounding slights. For years I was
declared persona non grata by the Indian High Commission in London's
cultural arm, the Nehru Centre. And at the time of the 50th
anniversary of Indian independence, I was similarly barred from the
Indian consulate's celebrations in New York.
Meanwhile, in some Indian literary quarters, it has become fashionable
to denigrate my work. And the ban on The Satanic Verses is, of course,
still in place.
After the September 24, 1998 agreement between the British and Iranian
governments that effectively set aside the Khomeini fatwa, things
began to change for me in India too. India granted me a five-year visa
just over a year ago. But at once there were threats from Muslim
hardliners like Imam Bukhari of the Delhi Juma Masjid. More
worryingly, some commentators told me not to visit India because if I
did so I might look like a pawn of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party Government. I have never been a BJP man, but that
wouldn't stop them using me for their own sectarian ends.
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'I almost gave up on India - almost believed the love affair was over
for good. But not so'
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"Exile," it says somewhere in The Satanic Verses, "is a dream of
glorious return." But the dream fades, the imagined return stops
feeling glorious. The dreamer awakes. I almost gave up on India,
almost believed the love affair was over for good.
But, as it turns out, not so. As it turns out, I'm about to leave for
Delhi after a gap of twelve and a half years. My son Zafar, 20, is
coming with me. He hasn't been to India since he was three, and is
very excited. Compared with me, however, he's the very picture of
coolness and calm.
Friday, April 7
The telephone rings. The Delhi police are extremely nervous about my
impending arrival. Can I please avoid being spotted on the plane? My
bald head is very recognisable; will I please wear a hat? My eyes are
also easily identified; will I please wear sunglasses? Oh, and my
beard, too, is a real giveaway; will I wear a scarf around that? The
temperature in India is close to 100F, I point out: a scarf might
prove a little warm. Oh, but there are cotton scarves . . .
These requests are relayed to me in a don't-shoot-the-messenger voice
by my usually unflappable Indian attorney, Vijay Shankardass. How
about, I suggest hotly, if I just spend the entire journey with my
head in a paper bag?
"Salman," says Vijay, carefully, "there's a lot of tension out here.
I'm feeling fairly anxious myself."
The organisers of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, at whose invitation
I am travelling to Delhi, are sending mixed messages. Mr Pavan Varma,
a civil servant who is also in charge of media relations for the
event, ignores all requests for discretion and holds a press
conference to say that I'll probably be at the prize banquet.
Contrariwise, Colin Ball, head of the Commonwealth Foundation whose
prize it is, tells Vijay that if police protection is not extended to
all the 20 or so foreign visitors arriving at Claridge's Hotel for the
ceremony he may have to withdraw my invitation, even though I won't be
staying at Claridge's, and nobody has ever threatened the delegates,
who are not deemed by the Indian authorities to be in any danger. The
only threats around right now are Ball's.
I'm going to India because things are better now and I judge that it's
time to go. I'm going because if I don't go I'll never know if it's OK
to go or not. I'm going because in spite of everything that has
happened between India and myself, in spite of the bruises on my
heart, the hook of love is in too deeply to pull out. Most of all, I'm
going because Zafar asked to come with me. High time he was
re-introduced to his other country.
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'The hot day enfolds us like an embrace'
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But the truth is I don't know what to expect. Will I feel welcomed or
spurned? I don't know if I'm going back to say hello or goodbye. Oh,
stop being so melodramatic, Salman. Don't meet trouble halfway. Just
get on the plane and go.
So: I fly to Delhi, and nobody sees me do it. Here's the invisible man
in his business class seat. Here he is, watching the new Pedro
Almodóvar movie on a little pop-up screen, while the plane flies over,
er, Iran. Here's the invisible man sleep-masked and snoring.
And here I am at journey's end, stepping out into the heat of Delhi's
international airport with Zafar at my side, and only Vijay
Shankardass can see us. Abracadabra! Magic realism rules. Don't ask me
how it's done. The shrewd conjurer never explains the trick.
I feel an urge to kiss the ground, or, rather, the blue rug in the
airport "finger", but am embarrassed to do so beneath the watchful
eyes of a small army of security guards. Leaving the rug unkissed, I
move out of the terminal into the blazing, bone-dry Delhi heat, so
different from the wet-towel humidity of my native Bombay. The hot day
enfolds us like an embrace. A road unrolls before us like a carpet. We
climb into a cramped, white Hindustan Ambassador, a car that is itself
a blast from the past, the British Morris Oxford, long defunct in
Britain, but alive and well here in this Indian translation. The
Ambassador's air-conditioning system isn't working.
I'm back.
Saturday, April 8
India doesn't stand on ceremony, and rushes in from every direction,
thrusting me into the middle of its unending argument, clamouring for
my total attention as it always did. Buy Chilly cockroach traps! Drink
Hello mineral water! Speed Thrills But Kills! shout the hoardings.
There are new kinds of message, too. Enrol for Oracle 81. Graduate
with Java as well. And, as proof that the long protectionist years are
over, Coca-Cola is back with a vengeance. When I was last here it was
banned, leaving the field clear for the disgusting local imitation,
Campa-Cola and Thums Up. Now there's a red Coke ad every 100 yards or
so. Coke's slogan of the moment is written in Hindi transliterated
into Roman script: Jo Chaho Ho Jaaye. Which could be translated,
literally, as "whatever you desire, let it come to pass".
I choose to think of this as a blessing.
Horn Please, demand the signs on the backs of the one million trucks
blocking the road. All the other trucks, cars, bikes, motor-scooters,
taxis and phut-phut autorickshaws enthusiastically respond, welcoming
Zafar and me to town with an energetic rendition of the traditional
symphony of the Indian street.
Wait for Side! Sorry-Bye-Bye! Fatta Boy!
The news is just as cacophonous. Between India and Pakistan, as usual,
acrimony reigns. Pakistan's ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has just
been sentenced to life imprisonment after what looked very like a show
trial stage-managed by the latest military strongman to seize power,
General Pervez Musharraf. India's army of vociferous commentators,
linking this story to the unveiling by Pakistan of a new missile, the
Shaheen-II, warn darkly of the worsening relations between the two
countries. A politician from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accuses
Imam Bukhari of "seditious utterances" for some allegedly
pro-Pakistani, anti-Indian statements. Plus ça change. Tempers, as
ever, run high.
Inevitably, Bill Clinton, on his recent visit to the subcontinent, was
drawn into these old antagonisms. From an Indian point of view, he
said most of the right things. In particular, his toughness towards
Pakistan, its dictatorship, its nuclear bomb, its illiberalism, won
him many friends, and this after many years during which Indians were
convinced that the basis of American foreign policy in the region was,
in Dr Kissinger's phrase, to "tilt towards Pakistan".
India is, on the whole, basking in the afterglow of the Clinton visit
when I arrive. The roseate old charmer has done it again. Bombay's
movie world is agog. "Hindustani hearts," reports a showbiz magazine
in the city's inimitable prose style, "went bonkers over the Grand
daddy of Uncle Sam." A starlet, Suman Ranganathan, variously described
as a "sexy babe" and "apni sizzling mirchi", that is, "our very own
sizzling hot chilli", is much taken by Big Bill, who is, she declares,
"amazing, approachable, and someone who knows the pulse of the
people".
In India, as my friend the distinguished art critic Geeta Kapur
reminds me, people have very rarely been bothered by politicians'
private lives. One very senior BJP leader is known to have kept a
mistress for years without it affecting his career in the slightest.
Indians, therefore, view the Lewinsky scandal with bemused puzzlement.
If various hot chillis choose to sizzle at the world's most powerful
man, who could be surprised?
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'India rushes in from every direction, clamouring for my total
attention as it always did'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've only been back an instant and already everyone I talk to - Vijay
Shankardass, friends I'm eagerly ringing up to announce my arrival,
even policemen - is regaling me with opinions on the new shape of
Indian politics. If Bombay is India's New York - glamorous, glitzy,
vulgar-chic, a merchant city, a movie city, a slum city, incredibly
rich, hideously poor - then Delhi is like Washington. Politics is the
only game in town. Nobody talks about anything else for long.
Once India's minorities looked for protection to the left-leaning
Congress, then the country's only organised political machine. Now the
disarray of the Congress Party, and its drift to the right, is
everywhere apparent. Under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi, the once
mighty machine languishes and rusts.
People who have known Sonia for years urge me not to swallow the line
that she was never interested in politics and allowed herself to be
drafted into the leadership only because of her concern for the Party.
A portrait is painted of a woman completely seduced by power but
unable to wield it, lacking the skill, charm, vision, indeed
everything except the hunger for power itself. Around her fawn the
sycophantic courtiers of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, working to prevent
the emergence of new leaders - P. Chidambaram, Madhavrao Scindia,
Rajesh Pilot - who just might have the freshness and will to revive
the party's fortunes, but who cannot be permitted to usurp the
leadership role that, in the Sonia clique's view, belongs to her and
her children alone.
I was last in India in August 1987, making a television documentary
about the 40th anniversary of independence. I have never forgotten
being at the Red Fort listening to Rajiv Gandhi delivering a
stunningly tedious oration in broken schoolboy Hindi, while the
audience simply and crushingly walked away. Now, here on television is
his widow, her Hindi even more broken than his, a woman convinced of
her right to rule, but convincing almost nobody except herself.
I remember another widow. In that 1987 documentary we included an
interview with a Sikh woman, Ravel Kaur, who had seen her husband and
sons murdered before her eyes by gangs known to be led and organised
by Congress people. Indira Gandhi had recently been assassinated by
her Sikh bodyguards and the whole Sikh community of Delhi was paying
the price. The Rajiv Gandhi government prosecuted nobody for these
murders, in spite of much hard evidence identifying many of the
killers.
For Vijay Shankardass, who had known Rajiv for years, those were
disillusioning days. He and his wife hid their Sikh neighbours in
their own home to keep them safe. He went to see Rajiv to demand that
something be done to stop the killings, and was deeply shocked by
Rajiv's seeming indifference. "Salman, he was so calm." One of Rajiv's
close aides, Arjun Das, was less placid. "Saalón ko phoonk do," he
snarled. "Blow the bastards away." Later, he too was killed.
Through the Indian High Commission in London (my friend and namesake,
Salman Haidar, then the Deputy High Commissioner, was pressed into
censorious service), the Rajiv Government did its level best to
prevent our film from being shown, because of the interview with the
Sikh widow. Even though she was no Sikh terrorist but a victim of
anti-Sikh terrorism; even though she remained opposed to radical Sikh
demands for a state of their own, and asked no more than justice for
the dead, India sought to stifle her voice. And, I'm pleased to say,
failed.
So many widows. In Midnight's Children, I satirised the first widow to
take power in India, Indira Gandhi, for her abuse of that power during
the quasi-dictatorial Emergency years in the mid-Seventies. I could
not have foreseen how resonant - by turns tragic and bathetic - the
trope of the widow would continue to be.
The Congress has strange bedfellows these days. Its decay can perhaps
best be measured these days by the poor quality of its allies. In the
state of Bihar, the bizarre political double-act of Laloo Prasad Yadav
and his wife Rabri Devi - on whom the wholly fictitious, and wildly
corrupt, Bombay politicians Piloo and Golmatol Doodhwala in The Ground
Beneath Her Feet were very loosely modelled - is once again taking
centre stage.
Some years ago, Laloo, then Bihar's Chief Minister, was implicated in
the Fodder Scam, a swindle in which large amounts of public livestock
subsidies were claimed for the maintenance of cows which didn't
actually exist. (In my novel, Piloo, India's "Scambaba Deluxe", runs a
similar scheme involving non-existent goats.) Laloo was jailed, but
managed to secure the Chief Ministership for Rabri, and blithely went
on running the state, by proxy, from prison.
Since then he has been in and out of clink. At present he's inside,
and Rabri is at least technically in the driving seat, and another
juicy corruption scandal is emerging. The tax authorities want to know
how Laloo and Rabri manage to live in such high style (they have a
particularly grand house) on the relatively humble salaries even
senior ministers in India pull down. Rabri has been "chargesheeted"
but refuses to resign - or rather, Laloo, from jail, announces that
there is no question of his wife the Chief Minister vacating her post.
As a writer with satirical inclinations, I'm delighted by the Yadav
saga, the barefaced skulduggery of it, the shameless wholeheartedness,
the glee with which Laloo and Rabri just go on being their appalling
selves.
But their survival is also a sign of the growing corruption of Indian
political culture. This is a country in which known gangsters have
been elected to the national parliament, and where a man who runs a
state from his prison cell can receive the vocal support of no less a
figure than the Congress Party leader, Sonia Gandhi herself.
Sunday, April 9
Zafar at 20 is a big, gentle young man who, unlike his father, keeps
his emotions concealed. But he is a deeply feeling fellow, and is
engaging with India seriously, attentively, beginning the process of
making his own portrait of it, which may unlock in him an as yet
unknown other self.
At first he notices what first-time visitors notice: the terrible
poverty of the families living by the railway tracks in what look like
trashcans and binliners, the men holding hands in the street, the
"terrible" quality of Indian MTV and the "awful" Bollywood movies. We
pass through the sprawling Army cantonment and he asks if the Armed
Forces are as much of a political factor here as they are in
neighbouring Pakistan, and looks impressed when I tell him that
soldiers in India have never sought political power.
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'I feel a greater volatility in people - a crackle of anger'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I can't tempt him into Indian national dress. I myself put on a cool,
loose kurta-pajama outfit the moment I arrive, but Zafar is mutinous.
"It's just not my style," he insists, preferring to stay in his young
Londoner's uniform of T-shirt, cargo pants and sneakers. (By the end
of the trip he is wearing the white pajamas, but not the kurtas;
still, progress of a kind has been made.)
Zafar has never read more than the first three chapters of Midnight's
Children in spite of its dedication ("For Zafar Rushdie who, contrary
to all expectations, was born in the afternoon"). In fact, apart from
Haroun and the Sea of Stories and East, West, he hasn't finished any
of my books. The children of writers are often this way. They need
their parents to be parents, not novelists. Zafar has always had a
complete set of my books proudly on display in his room, but he reads
Alex Garland and Bill Bryson and I pretend not to care.
Now, poor fellow, he's getting a crash course in my work as well as my
life. In the Red Fort after Partition, my aunt and uncle, like many
Muslims, had to be protected by the Army from the violence raging
outside; a version of this appears in my novel Shame. And here, off
Chandni Chowk, the bustling main street of Old Delhi, are the lanes
winding into the old Muslim mohallas or neighbourhoods in one of
which, Ballimaran, my parents lived before they moved to Bombay; and
it's also where Ahmed and Amina Sinai, the parents of the narrator of
Midnight's Children, faced the gathering pre-Independence storm.
Zafar takes all this literary tourism in good part. Look, here at
Purana Qila, the Old Fort supposedly built on the site of the
legendary city of Indraprastha, is where Ahmed Sinai left a sack of
money to appease a gang of arsonist blackmailers. Look, there are the
monkeys who ripped up the sack and threw the money away. Look, here at
the National Gallery of Modern Artare the paintings of Amrita
Sher-Gil, the half-Indian, half-Hungarian artist who inspired the
character of Aurora Zogoiby in The Moor's Last Sigh . . .
OK, enough, Dad, he plainly thinks but is too nice to say. OK, I'll
read them, this time I really will. (He probably won't.)
There are signs at the Red Fort advertising an evening son et lumière
show. "If Mum was here," he says suddenly, "she'd insist on coming to
that."
Zafar's bright, beautiful mother, my first wife Clarissa Luard, the
British Arts Council's highly esteemed literature officer, guardian
angel of young writers and little magazines, died of a recurrence of
breast cancer last November, aged just 50. Zafar and I had spent most
of her final hours by her bedside. He is her only child.
"Well," I say, "she was here, you know." In 1974, Clarissa and I spent
more than four months travelling around India, roughing it in cheap
hotels and long-distance buses, using the advance I'd received for my
first novel Grimus to finance the trip, and trying to stretch the
money as far as it would go. Now, I begin to make a point of telling
Zafar what his mother thought of this or that - how much she liked the
serenity of this spot, or the hubbub over there. What began as a
little father-and-son expedition acquires an extra dimension.
I've always known that, after everything that has happened, this first
visit would be the trickiest. Don't overreach yourself, I thought. If
it goes well, things should ease. The second visit? "Rushdie returns
again" isn't much of a news story. And the third - "Oh, here he is
once more" - barely sounds like news at all. In the long slog back to
"normality", habituation, even boredom, has been a useful weapon. "I
intend," I start telling people in India, "to bore India into
submission."
I should have worked out that if I myself was a little uncertain of
how things would go, everyone around me would be in a blue funk.
Things have improved in England and America, and normal service has
very largely been resumed. I have grown unaccustomed to the problems
of a maximum-security protection operation. What's happening in India
feels, in this regard, like entering a time-warp and being taken back
to the bad old early days of the Iranian attack.
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'The Writers' Prize is only a pretext. To have made this trip with
Zafar is the real victory'
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My protection team couldn't be nicer or more efficient, but gosh,
there are a lot of them, and they are jumpy. In Old Delhi, where many
Muslims live, they are especially on edge, particularly whenever, in
spite of my cloak of invisibility, a member of the public commits the
faux pas of recognising me.
"Sir, there has been exposure! Exposure has occurred!" my protectors
mourn.
"Sir, they have said the name, sir! The name has been spoken!" "Sir,
please, the hat!"
It's useless to point out that I do tend to get recognised a fair bit
because, well, I look like this and other people don't; or that, on
every single "exposure", the reaction of the persons concerned has
been friendly, even delighted. My protectors have a nightmare scenario
in their heads - rioting mobs, etc - and mere real life isn't enough
to wipe it away.
This has been one of the most frustrating aspects of the past few
years. People - journalists, policemen, friends, strangers - all write
scripts for me, and I get trapped inside those fantasies. What none of
the scenarists ever seems to come up with is the possibility of a
happy ending - one in which the problems I've faced are gradually
overcome, and I resume the ordinary literary life which is all I've
ever wanted. Yet this, the wholly unanticipated story-line, is what
has actually transpired.
My biggest problem these days is waiting for everyone to let go of
their nightmares and catch up with the facts.
Monday, April 10
A somewhat paranoid start to my day. I learn that the head of the
British Council in India, Colin Perchard, will not let me use the
Council's auditorium for a press conference at the end of the week. In
addition, the British High Commissioner, Sir Rob Young, has been
instructed by the Foreign Office to stay away from me - he is "not to
come out of the stables," he tells Vijay.
Robin Cook, the British Foreign Secretary, is arriving in India the
day I am due to leave and, it would appear, is anxious not to be too
closely associated with me. He is scheduled to travel to Iran soon,
and naturally that trip must not be compromised. (Later: Cook's trip
is cancelled anyway, because of the closed-court "spy trials" of Jews
in Iran. So it goes.)
Better news comes from the Commonwealth Foundation's Colin Ball, who
has moderated his stance, and is no longer threatening to withdraw my
invitation to his awards dinner. Like Cinderella, it would appear, I
shall go to the ball. But in my paranoid mood I think that if the
foundation is so nervous about my mere presence, they are unlikely to
want the closer association with me that giving me the prize would
inevitably create.
I remind myself why I'm really here. The Commonwealth Writers' Prize
is only a pretext. To have made this trip with Zafar is the real
victory. For both of us, India is the prize.
We're off on a road trip to show the boy the sights: Jaipur, Fatehpur
Sikri, Agra. For me, the road itself has always been the main
attraction.
There are more trucks than I remembered, many more, blaring and
lethal, often driving straight at us down the wrong side of the
carriageway. There are wrecks from head-on smashes every few miles.
Look, Zafar, that is the shrine of a prominent Muslim saint; all the
truckers stop there and pray for luck, even the Hindus. Then they get
back into their cabs and take hideous risks with their lives and ours
as well.
Look, Zafar, that is a tractor-trolley loaded with men. At election
time the sarpanch or headman of every village is ordered to provide
such trolleyloads for politicians' rallies. For Sonia Gandhi, ten
tractor-trolleys per village is the requirement. People are so
disillusioned with politicians these days that nobody would actually
go to the rallies of their own free will.
Look, those are the polluting chimneys of brick kilns smoking in the
fields. Outside the city the air is less filthy, but it still isn't
clean. But in Bombay between December and February, think of this,
aircraft can't land or take off before 11am because of the smog.
The new age is here all right. Zafar, if you could read Hindi you'd
see the new age's new words being phonetically transliterated into
that language's Devanagiri script: Millennium tyres. Oasis Cellular.
Modern's Chinese "Fastfood".
He wants to learn Hindi. He is good at languages and wants to learn
Hindi and Urdu and come back without all the paraphernalia that
presently surrounds us: without, to be blunt, me. Good. He's got the
bug. Once India bites you, Zafar, you'll never be cured.
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'At first Zafar notices what first-time visitors notice: the terrible
poverty of the families living by the railway tracks'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Behold, Zafar, the incomprehensible acronyms of India. What is a WAKF
Board? What is an HSIDC? But one acronym reveals a genuine shift in
reality. You see it everywhere now, every 100 yards or so:
STD-ISD-PCO. PCO is Personal Call Office, and now anyone can pop into
one of these little booths, make calls to anywhere in India or,
indeed, the world, and pay on the way out. This is the genuine
communications revolution of India. Nobody need be isolated any more.
Bill Clinton visited the hilltop fortress-palace of Amber, outside
Jaipur, but his security people wouldn't allow him to indulge in the
famous local tourist treat. At the bottom of Amber's hill is a
taxi-rank of elephants. You buy a ticket at the Office of Elephant
Booking and then lurch uphill on the back of your rented pachyderm.
Where the President failed, Zafar and I succeed. I feel glad to know -
in a moment of schadenfreude - that somebody else's security was
tighter and more restrictive than mine.
Clinton did, however, watch dancing girls twirling and cavorting for
him in Amber's Saffron Garden. He'd have liked that. Rajasthan is
colourful. People wear colourful clothes and perform colourful dances
and ride on colourful elephants to colourful ancient palaces, and
these are things a President should know.
He should also know that at a test site near Pokhran in Rajasthan's
Thar desert Indian know-how brought India into the nuclear age.
Rajasthan is, therefore, the cradle of the new India that must be
thought of as America's partner and equal. (Clinton did raise the
subject of the Test Ban Treaty, but failed to persuade India to sign.
After all, the US hasn't ratified it, either.)
What should not be drawn to Clinton's attention - because it has no
place in either the colourful, touristic, elephant-taxi India, or the
new, thrusting, Internet-billionaire, entrepreneurial India that is
presently being sold to the world - is that Rajasthan, along with its
neighbouring state of Gujarat, is currently dying of thirst, in the
grip of the worst drought for over a century.
What the President must not be permitted even to think is that the
money spent on India's ridiculous bomb could have helped to care for
and feed the sick and hungry. Or that it's absurd for Prime Minister
Vajpayee to appeal to the people of India to help to fight the massive
destruction wrought by the drought by making charitable contributions,
"no matter how small", while the Indian Government is still spending a
fortune on Rajasthan's other weapon of mass destruction.
It's hot: almost 110F, above 40C. The rains have failed for the past
two years, and it's still two months to the next monsoon. Wells are
running dry, and villagers are being forced to drink dirty water,
which gives them diarrhoea, which causes dehydration, and so the
vicious circle tightens its grip.
When I was last here, a dozen years ago, the region was in the grip of
the previous worst-ever drought. I travelled in Gujarat then and saw
much the same sort of devastation as is apparent everywhere in rural
Rajasthan today. This is something I wrote then; now things are even
worse: "The rains have failed so often that now they say instead, the
drought succeeded. They are plainsmen, livestock farmers, but their
cattle are deserting them. The cattle, staggering, migrate south and
east in search of water, and rattle as they walk. Their skulls, horned
mile-posts, line the route of their vain exodus. There is water to the
west, but it is salt. Soon even these marshes will have given up the
ghost. Tumbleweed blows across the leached grey flats. There are
cracks big enough to swallow a man. An apt enough way for a farmer to
die: to be eaten by his land."
As the gulf between the feast of the haves and the famine of the
have-nots widens, the stability of the country must be more and more
at risk. I have been smelling a difference in the air, and reluctant
as I am to put into words what isn't much more than an instinct, I do
feel a greater volatility in people, a crackle of anger just below the
surface, a shorter fuse.
At dinner, Zafar eats a bad shrimp. I blame myself. I should have
known to remind him of the basic rules for travellers in India: always
drink bottled water, make sure you see the seal on the bottle being
broken in front of you, never eat salad (it won't have been washed in
bottled water), never put ice in your drinks (it won't have been made
with bottled water) . . . and never, never eat seafood unless you're
by the sea.
Zafar's desert shrimp knocks him flat. He has a sleepless night:
vomiting, diarrhoetic. In the morning he looks terrible, and we have a
long, hard journey ahead of us, on bumpy, difficult roads. Now he,
too, needs to guard against dehydration. Unlike the villagers we're
leaving behind, however, we have plenty of bottled water to drink, and
proper medication. And, of course, we're leaving.
Tuesday, April 11
A day to grind through. Long, gruelling journey to Agra, then back to
Delhi. Zafar suffers, but remains stoical. He's too weak to walk
around the magnificent Fatehpur Sikri site, and only just manages to
drag himself around the Taj, which he declares to be smaller than
expected. I am very relieved when I can finally get him into a
comfortable hotel bed.