Video Night in Kathmandu (42 page)

As we passed at a leisurely pace through Ajmer, my drivers decided to try to supplement their business. They made a bid for my jeans. They promised to sell me a girl. They offered to give me a girl in exchange for my jeans. Finally—and not a moment too soon—we arrived at the train station. No taxis were in sight. The taximan was not here, my chauffeurs happily pointed out. But for some more money, they would help me find him. How much more? They mentioned an absurd price, I agreed on something ridiculous, and off we went. At long last we arrived at the taximan. How much to Pushkar? $10. I would pay $5. The man shook his head. I would have to take a bus. No problem, said the boys with the rickshaw: for some more money, they would take me back to the bus station. They suggested a ridiculous price, I
beat them down to something enormous, and off we went. En route, they offered to buy my watch and tried to sell me a girl.

At last we returned to our original starting point, the bus station. Of course there was a bus to Pushkar, I was told. Over there. I stood in line for twenty-five minutes and then was told that it was the wrong line. I stood in another line for thirty minutes, and then observed that it was not moving. I decided to take a taxi. Walking out of the bus station, determined to learn from experience, I hailed a horse cart and asked him to take me to the taximan. Okay, he said. One dollar. Fifty cents, I said. Okay, he said, and drove off without me. At that point, I heard some excited cries behind me and saw the two boys with whom I had already done business. How much to the taximan? They quoted an enormous price, and I beat them down to something outrageous. Off we went.

My clothes, and the ladies of Rajasthan, still unsold, I was taken at last to the same taxi driver as before. $7, he said. $5, I said, provided that we go right away and I don’t have to share. Fine, he said, ushering me into the back seat. His custom assured, he then closed the door and strolled off to enjoy some tea. At last he returned and off we went.

Perhaps five minutes later, the driver stopped again and got out. We were, I noticed, again at the bus station—the home from home that I was now visiting for the third time in the morning. After a considerable delay, my driver returned, trailing a family of unhappy-looking passengers. This quintet was thrown on top of me, and off we went.

Sometime before we arrived at Pushkar, the taxi driver stopped. Cars were allowed no farther, he said: not to worry, though, the tourist tent was only a short walk away. I got out and began walking. Twenty minutes later, I stopped one of the many cars careening down the forbidden road. How far to the tourist tent? A mile and a half. Could he take me there? No: the distance was too short. Still, he said, I could take a shortcut by way of that distant temple over there. I walked and walked to the temple, passing through narrow streets made virtually impassable by 20,000 pilgrims. How far to the tourist tent? I asked a passerby. Two miles. Which way? Away from the temple. I walked a little farther, and stopped another man for directions. The tourist tent was very close, he said, pointing to a street obscured by crowds. I
labored along, guided by some more people, and walked down an endless driveway. At last, the tourist tent! Oh no, I was told when I walked in, this was the tourist bungalow. The tourist tent was on the other side of town. How far? Four, maybe five kilometers.

I spent the next hour moving in ever-widening circles, under a noonday desert sun, all my worldly possessions in my hands, directed this way and that by villagers who spoke no English, villagers who knew the word for “right” but not for “left,” villagers who happily steered me to the tourist bungalow, villagers who shook their heads in abject pity. Pushkar was more crowded than any place I had ever seen. I stopped another taxi. I would pay well, very well indeed, I said, to be taken to the tourist tent. He was not allowed to go, said the driver, but he would be happy to look for another car. He found it. I would pay well, very well, exceptionally well, I told this second fellow, to be taken to the tourist tent. It was too close, he said. And besides, look at the crowds! It was at that point that a young man appeared, saw my plight and, courteously identifying himself as a part-time employee of the tourist tent, offered to show me the way.

That evening, by way of repayment, Arvind invited himself into my tent for a chat. It was one of those strange exchanges, peculiar to the Third World, during which I sensed that it was not just my company that appealed to my newfound friend. For it seemed to me that each of us was a symbol to the other, both to be cherished and to be put to use (a double irony here, since I, completely Indian, served Arvind as an image of the West). And all evening long, an unspoken request seemed to hover in the air. The happiest aspect of traveling in the developing world is that it allows cross-cultural exchanges in which each party can give something to the other. Yet the fact that both parties have something to gain from the giving is surely the saddest thing about traveling in the developing world. On both sides, it pays to be kind.

Arvind told me that he was twenty-five years old and worked in a hotel not far away. As I could imagine, he went on with pride, his job was wonderful, for it afforded him the greatest luxury in all the world: the chance to talk to foreigners. Once, he said, a Swedish man had fallen ill in his hotel and Arvind had
taken him to a doctor and put him up at his home and nursed him back to health. When the man returned to Stockholm, he had sent him $1,000; when Arvind’s first son had been born, he had sent another $250.

As I could imagine, Arvind continued, he was the envy of even the wealthy. The sons of rich men offered him as much money as they could spare, or anything else he wanted, if only he would do them one small favor: let them shake the hand of a European girl, or even sit by her side for a moment. Arvind looked kindly on such ambitions; he had actually slept with a French girl, and with another tourist from Spain.

Yet still he had never been abroad. And abroad, even the next country in Asia, had acquired for him an ineffable luster. His great dream, he said, was to be hired by a VCR importer, one of those black-money makers who paid men to go to Singapore and Bangkok to bring back video machines they could sell for vast profit. If only he could meet the right man, said Arvind, he might be able to spend at least a night in Bangkok.

Twice he had come close to making it abroad. His grandfather, a professor of linguistics, had promised to take him to a conference in Europe. But then the old man died. A friend of Arvind’s had even got as far as the University of California. But no sooner had he arrived than his father died. Two hours later, his mother died. That was the end of his California studies.

Arvind’s plight was hardly unique, of course; I had met scores of Arvinds in Indonesia and Nepal and China and, most heartrending of all, in every closed country from Burma to Cuba to Nicaragua. The inconsistencies of this longing in a country full of nationalism had been explored by Satyajit Ray in
The Home and the World
in which the hero of the Swadeshi movement, aiming to eliminate all foreign goods, smokes only foreign cigarettes and travels only first-class. That too, however, was hardly unique: the anti-Western dictators of African countries (followers of that great non-Westerner Karl Marx) proverbially drove Mercedeses, while President Sukarno, to name just one, had turned his back on the West in a fit of nationalism and decided to make Jakarta a great modern metropolis—by stocking it with Western hotels and conveniences. In a movie like
Mard
, the cry of patriotism was a great rabble-rouser; but the great audience-pleaser was still the parade of foreign goods. Evil
was foreign, and so too was the good life. That was a contradiction common to just about every developing country.

What did seem unique in the Indian regard of things Western, though, was its divided loyalties toward different kinds of West. For much of the world, India remained the greatest symbol of the British Empire. Yet modern India, especially under Rajiv, was hell-bent on following the way of the future, generally considered to be the American way. More even than Hong Kong, therefore, India, great amalgam of a hundred races and religions, was torn not just between tradition and modernity, but, more specifically, between the British and the American Empires. To paraphrase one of the country’s most-quoted heroes, Matthew Arnold, India was caught between two worlds, one dying, the other struggling to be born.

This strange sense of divided loyalty informed every aspect of middle-class city life. My college-age cousins spent much of their time trying to get hold of records by Bob Dylan, Don McLean and Simon and Garfunkel; yet when it came to reading, they clearly felt most comfortable with P. G. Wodehouse and C. P. Snow. The central monuments of downtown Bombay were still unofficially known by their upstanding imperial names (Crawford Market, Flora Fountain, Victoria Terminus), though increasingly they were being besieged by Waikiki fast-food joints and Pac-Man restaurants. The streets of Bombay were, in fact, a chaos of mixed origins and competing influences—over here Caesars Palace and the Hollywood shop and a sign for mango juice in a “freaked-out box,” over there Lady Diana Tailors, the Jolly Stores (serving “lovely pop-ice”), Textoriums galore and, most dignified of all, the Nota Bene “Cleaners of Distinction.” Some of the pop-cultural artifacts, of course, were British—the Beatles and Wimpy Bars were popular too. But even they were British borrowings, after a fashion, from American models. America might represent riches, glitz and success, but Britain still had the monopoly on sophistication and class. People spoke of getting a few bucks to buy some fags.

I spent only a week in India in 1984, but more than once in that time, I was asked whether it was true that Gary Coleman was dead
(Different Strokes
and
Here’s Lucy
were the only foreign shows on Indian television at the time). That same week, however, a lady in Ahmedabad shyly approached me for information
on a different kind of West. “Do they say still in England Old chap’ and ‘old man’?” she asked. The question was not for her, she quickly added, but for a fifteen-year-old boy of her acquaintance who was determined to get his British manners exactly right.

In time, of course, this mix was beginning to change, and India seemed, in its slow and elephantine fashion, to be sloughing off some of its musty Edwardian past and taking on more of the bright new futurism of America. Thirty years ago, a British accent might be the main selling point in a negotiated marriage; now the best draw of all was an American green card. In my parents’ day, every bright student went to Oxbridge; now, as my cousin prepared for his GRE exam, he told me how one classmate had gone to Kansas, and one to Columbia, one to UCLA and one to Indiana. Rajiv himself, the country’s great Everyman, had been educated at Doon School, India’s grandest version of the English public school, and had followed his mother and his grandfather to Oxbridge; now, however, he stood as an apostle of the new, computerized, yuppie way of knowledge—the American way. One fairly typical Indian patriarch I heard about memorized a classical English poem every day (he had all the wartime speches of Churchill down by heart), and made his family read
The Times
of London over breakfast, retire after dinner to read biographies of Asquith and reassemble at nine o’clock each night to listen to the news on BBC World Service (a treat he had missed, he boasted, only four times in his sixty-one years). When his son finally got to Cambridge, however, he had been so shocked at the absence of cummerbunds, Apostles and Conan Doyle streetlamps that he had suffered a nervous breakdown.

The sad story served, among other things, to highlight what was perhaps the strangest of all the features of India’s relations with abroad: that many of India’s dreams of the outside world, whether British or American or even Soviet, were curiously dated. Neither Don McLean nor P. G. Wodehouse, after all, was notably popular on the streets of London or New York. But in this land of dusty stairwells, Humphrey Bogart-style black telephones and Ambassador cars unchanged for twenty years, they fit right in. And even as “jolly good”s still echoed around the gentlemen’s clubs, the movie mags trafficked in a fast talk full of “groovy gals and guys.” The respectable daily newspapers still
followed the sober and august example of
The Times
of London, hardly recognizing that their model had itself become zappily popularized, and to that extent Americanized; the glossy new magazines took their models from America, but here too they seemed somewhat behind the times,
India Today
appropriating the red border and structure of
Time
but investing it with some old-fashioned fast-and-Luce rhetoric, while newborn
Debonair
billed itself as the Indian
Playboy
but still adhered to a fifties sensibility of black-and-white modesty. “No, I’m sorry, Miss Brasenose,” said the caption under the cartoon in
The Statesman
, one of India’s most respected papers, “but ‘coitus interruptus’ was not the first Roman governor of Ireland.” The slightly jejune nature of the joke, its Latin atmosphere, its provision of its heroine with the name of an Oxford college—all this gave even a semi-daring crack the somewhat musty and cobwebbed air of a Victorian schoolroom.

That skewed and displaced quality seemed peculiar to India. For where Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal and Bali all excelled, in their different ways, at re-creating every rage from the West, India simply naturalized them. The most obvious example of this was the half-erudite, half-errant English still spoken in many educated quarters of India. But more recent examples were everywhere. India had not imported McDonald’s, as most countries had done, but had created instead its own fast-food emporia, Pizza King and Big Bite, which offered hamburgers without the beef. India did not have Coca-Cola (it had been outlawed in 1978 after the company refused to disclose its formula), but instead offered Campa-Cola, which took its name, its logo and its concept from Coke, though sadly not its taste. Just so, the commercial movies borrowed their props, their symbols, even their plots from abroad, yet finally produced something that was strangely old-fashioned and thoroughly Indian.