PREVIOUS CONVICTIONS by A.A. GILL

Author:A.A. GILL
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

India

The ghat, the landing place on a river, boasts a dumpy, municipally grand classical entrance, the sort of thing you might see on a Victorian northern railway station. It’s sweat-stained and weedy, chipped at the edges, polished black by a million wet bodies. A grimy inscription in English is now barely legible. Through its arches jostle hundreds of pilgrims, shimmering gaggles of girls in bright saris with painted faces and hennaed fingers; hawkers selling deep-fried parcels; men in dhotis and turbans with corded whip-thin arms beating drums into a frantic rhythm. Trumpets howl, bus horns bellow like lost cattle, a murder of furious crows creaks from a banyan tree, a slow tin train clanks past; commuters hang from open doors to catch the sticky, fetid breeze. The air eddies with charcoal smoke and incense. The ground is claggy with trodden blossom, boiled rice and chili. Children wail, holy men chant, socially invisible widows and lepers implore.

Steps lead down to the river, the Hugli, the final leg of the sacred Ganges that frays into the Bay of Bengal. These people are all Biharis: poor migrant agricultural workers of low caste. They come to the river to celebrate a religious festival, they worship the sun and in thanks they dunk great bunches of bananas like digestive biscuits into the muddy water that carries rafts of wild lilies, scattered foaming ashes, bloated, spinning corpses and the world’s largest, longest continuous cache of prayers and incantations, all drifting in a slick of liquid toffee. The sun likes bananas—maybe it’s their color.

Men and women ritually wash, some lather up till they are bubbly ghosts, and rinse themselves like speedy otters. Youngsters pose and splash, a fat man floats past, spouting water like a small whale with a head cold. Women anoint their shaven babies from tin cups, swaying and suggestive in clinging saris, and in the throng, surrounded by taunting boys who are fascinated but fearful, there is a gaudy, grand, dramatic transvestite eunuch. These strange creatures are allowed special license at festivals. They have the power to bless and curse from beyond the pale. Kohl-rimmed eyes flash, carmine lips pout and he/she lifts his/her sari to flash them a hirsute, confused and darkly fascinating pudendum.

It’s 10:30 in the morning, 90 degrees Fahrenheit, 97 percent humidity. Eleven dull hours ago I was in London; my underpants still think they’re in Fulham. This is India; it could only be India. Nowhere offers you more awe for your air miles, more rapture for your rupee, than the subcontinent. Nowhere fascinates in such depths and variety, with such horror and beauty, enchantment and frustration. Nowhere is so approachable and so utterly other.

I’ve come to compare two cities—Calcutta and Bombay, or Kolkata and Mumbai, east coast and west, ancient and modern. They epitomize the preconception of India. Bombay moves and shakes, has a mobile phone permanently clasped to its middle-class ear. Calcutta is communist, argumentative and still a universal parable for ultimate poverty. The there-but-for-the-grace-of-God place all uneaten greens have to think about before they are allowed to leave the table.

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