In Exile From the Land of Snows (31 page)

Tibetan sweater sellers strike out from their few shared homes, through the town, to the old British-built train station. Passing the dry fountain in its muddy courtyard, they walk beneath the grand pillars of the portico into the main hall leading to the tracks, bounded left and right by ticket windows, now closed. Here they quietly form two facing rows, a broad aisle in between. The women wear ankle-length robes and rainbow-hued aprons, their black pigtails braided with ribbons; the men are in hiking boots, slacks and red or blue parkas. Bundles of incense are ignited. In a corner three nuns, their palms pressed together, recite prayer aloud. A man in a dark suit enters, followed by a troop of bearded Sikhs dressed in olive coats and blue red-finned turbans, bandoliered with cartridges and carrying massive, wooden-butted rifles—the Punjabi police. Mr. Dhawan, New Delhi’s liaison officer to the Dalai Lama, proceeds slowly down the aisle. The crowd stiffens; there is a rustling of newspapers and in a dozen places bright bunches of pink, red and yellow plastic flowers materialize, making the hall suddenly jump to life.

A red light spins across the dark beyond the fountain. A jeep swoops up between two pillars, emitting a squad of police, who, flanking out, screen the station’s entrance. It is followed by a maroon Mercedes-Benz which drives directly onto the marble floor of the hallway. Before the vehicle has stopped, its back doors are flung open, and Ngari Rinpoché, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother, accompanied by a monk and a Tibetan bodyguard, leaps out. Now that he is in his early thirties, Ngari Rinpoché’s great physical resemblance to the Dalai Lama conveys such authority that as he strides into the hall the Tibetans bow as one from the waist, audibly suck in their breath and distend their tongues in the traditional sign of greeting. The front door of the Mercedes opens and out steps the Dalai Lama, clad in burgundy robes and brown oxfords, a maroon monk’s bag slung casually over his right shoulder. Bent slightly from the waist, palms clasped before his chest, he walks slowly down the aisle, his features composed, eyes lit with a warm humor, making contact with scores of expectant faces. Led by Mr. Dhawan, he turns left at the tracks, his retinue sweeping along behind, and heads for the “Retiring Room” to await the train. Ebullient from their brief glimpse of the “Wish-Fulfilling Gem,” the crowd breaks and scatters down the
platform after him, racing past a sign which optimistically reads: “Trains may either gain or lose time.”

In half an hour, a black barrel-nosed steam engine, pulling a long rust-colored train, groans into the station from Jammu, the railhead two hours north of Pathankot. Called 33 Down, for its west-to-east direction down and across the breadth of northern India, the train contains a private saloon. Its exterior is worn and dusty like that of the other cars, the windows tightly shuttered by silver metal blinds; the interior, however, is equipped with a modern sitting-dining room and crisply made-up sleeping cabins, staffed by its own cook and servants who wait for their guests in a white-jacketed line, grinning nervously before pots of steaming water on the kitchen’s iron stove. Crossing the short interval of platform, cleared by police of vendors and beggars, the Dalai Lama enters his car. It is already nine o’clock, and because he normally rises at five to meditate, he goes immediately to his room to say evening prayers and retire for the night. The nine-member entourage—four monks, two bodyguards, two officials of the Indian government and Ngari Rinpoché—choose cabins and sit for a late dinner. Within ten minutes the train pulls slowly out of Pathankot on its way across all of India, taking the party far to the east to Bihar, the first stop on the Dalai Lama’s 1981 pilgrimage to the holiest sites of Buddhism.

For two days and nights, 33 Down traverses India. It is a local. It stops in every town, never running for more than an hour without break. As the cars turn south in a broad arc the first night, white clouds of steam and soot billow back from the locomotive across their flanks, shuttered against the northern cold. Inside, it is—for India—eerily silent. At the start of its trip the train is virtually empty. In second class there is room to spread out in the three-tiered cubicles sectioning the interior like human storage racks. The private compartments of first class are deserted. Jullundur and Ludhiana pass in jolting, chaotic pictures, scored by train whistles, couplings and porters’ shouts. Between, the dark land stands cold and still. By dawn, having crossed the Jumna River on the way down to Delhi, both the Punjab and Haryana have been left behind; Saharanpur and then Moradabad are reached, well within the line of Uttar Pradesh; with 100 million inhabitants, this is India’s most populous state and among the most crowded pieces of land on the planet. The train is no longer empty. Every car save the Dalai Lama’s saloon is jammed. In second class there is no longer room to stand. Passengers hang off the uppermost bunks, clutching caged fans in the ceiling to keep their balance. Below, twenty-five people, packed in an area the size of a meat locker, shout, laugh, peel eggs, belch, play cards and chew betel nut, leering with bright red tongues and wet lips
when they win a hand. Now the metal shutters have been pushed up as far as they will go, the cold of the mountains left behind, any breath of air welcomed to relieve the heat and sweat-filled atmosphere of the car. Even first class has not escaped the crowds. India’s commuters, university students and businessmen, pour on to travel a half hour from one town to the next, up to twenty at a time boisterously filling compartments booked for six. The conductors are gone.

Rampur, Shahjahanpur, Sitapur, Lucknow, Rae Bareli, Jais, Amethi, Bela … The countryside is one. As the sun shoots up a hundred miles to the north over the distant Himalayas, touches its low winter noon midway in the sky and falls down to the right of the train, its flat light blandly pans through a hazy white sky. A maze of small dusty green rectangles, demarcated by two-foot-high gray mud walls, sit flush on an interminable plain, choking the level land: India’s exhausted heart. Save for sudden wastes of sand or wide, dry riverbeds, every inch of earth is cultivated, the soil overworked and depleted. Few people, though, are visible in the fields. They come into sight at the brick factories bordering every town. Here the earth has been dug three or four feet down, exposing a brittle texture and a flinty, barren hue. In the midst of acres of stacked bricks stand twin funnel-shaped chimneys, the tallest points on the treeless landscape, resembling ruined pillars, their blackened spouts decapitated. Around the kilns at their base trudge the emaciated sari-clad bodies of women workers, flat bare feet and bony ankles wrapped in their greatest possessions: bulky, shackle-like bronze bracelets. The towns come on in choked pools of urine-soaked pea-green slime, their surfaces littered with paper, feces and trash, backed up against low walls scrawled over with political slogans and papered with torn lurid movie posters. Behind each, a chaos of cattle, traffic, compressed buildings and roads, spreading like broken veins, consumes the thin line of rail as it passes the outskirts and comes to a halt in a station. The full spectacle of society then appears, trooped out on the platforms. At one in the afternoon scores are asleep, wrapped in blankets side by side, their heads on their baggage. Before the engine halts, young vendors wash up against the cars bellowing in stentorian voices, “
Moongphali! Moongphali!
” (“Peanuts! Peanuts!”). Others hawk vegetable fritters, fruit, chapatis and milky tea in brown clay cups which, emptied, are thrown on the tracks and smashed. Muscular porters—sporting polished brass badges on red coats over their dhotis—hurl through the crowds, huge trunks balanced on their shoulders, the owners racing behind so as not to lose their luggage. The wealthy cut through the sea of poor making for first-class cars, where their names are posted on cyclostyled pages by the doors. As the reckless exchange between those embarking and those disembarking
subsides, the broken bodies of beggars appear on the ground near the public fountains, where, twenty-four hours a day, a new group of risers are brushing, hacking, splashing and spitting, eager to feel fresh.

The second night
. In the Dalai Lama’s car, the quiet that has characterized the journey so far continues. The rear door locked, a bodyguard sits near the front monitoring the rare comings and goings at stations. Mr. Dhawan and Dawa Bhotia, Delhi’s chief of security for the Dalai Lama, occupy the sitting room with Ngari Rinpoché, talking shop, smoking and reading newspapers. Lobsang Gawa and Paljor, the Dalai Lama’s two personal attendants, who were chosen by him years before as young men from his private monastery, Namgyal Dratsang, occasionally pass some hours in the room joking with Ngari Rinpoché and the guards. The Dalai Lama himself leaves his cabin only to wash, taking his meals alone. He has spread a large orange and yellow cloth-bound scripture across the desk top beside his portable shortwave radio, tuned in the morning and evening for international news. Certain of Tibet’s most sacred images, believed to be receptacles for divine protectors and always kept in the company of each Dalai Lama, are placed about the cabin.

Outside there is actual danger. Murdering “dacoit” bands, equipped with homemade “country” pistols, proliferate in the area. Unseen in the dark, the populous flats have given way to wild hills and gullies out of which the dacoits issue forth to hold up trains, hijack trucks and raid villages. Ironically, due to the great crowds, second-class passengers are safe. First class, with its private compartments and richer take, is the prime target. Here the passengers have locked their doors and refuse to open them without questioning all callers. At 4:00 a.m. Benares, the Holy City, is reached. Half the train exits; some have come to die by the burning ghats on the Ganges’ shores, their long flames fueled for millennia by generations of the Hindu race. Beyond Benares the Ganges is crossed and the very heart of ancient India, Madhyadesa or “the Middle Country,” spanning the Gangetic plain, is entered: the land of two kingdoms and nine republics forming the core of the Buddha’s world. And then, by eight-thirty on the morning of the second day, the train finally reaches Gaya, six miles from Bodh Gaya in the state of Bihar, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, the
axis mundi
of the Buddhist faith.

In the midst of a seemingly endless succession of stops, arrival comes as a surprise. There is a quiet around the Dalai Lama’s saloon. The windows and doors remain locked. On the platform, the abbot of the Tibetan monastery at Bodh Gaya waits in a small group of monks. Their neat claret robes and bright yellow jerkins form a clean, tranquil pool of color in the stream of stained and torn figures swirling around. The front door of the
saloon gingerly opens, and Ngari Rinpoché looks out. He pulls the door back and the monks are ushered in, bearing white silk scarves, to welcome the Dalai Lama. After a brief greeting in the dining room, the Dalai Lama briskly leads the party back out, not wishing to lose time.

There is something different in Gaya. It is apparent on the platform, in front of the station house, even before the town itself is reached. There are crowds, but their movement appears frail and somber. The frenetic pace has not slowed, yet its interior force has dissolved. The people abut one another more lightly, their appearance shrunken and strained. There is, as well, a less subtle sign of the change. As the Dalai Lama steps out of the saloon and walks toward a covered bridge spanning the tracks to the station house, he passes a small girl, no older than eight, alone on the platform. Unlike other beggars in other stations, she says nothing at all. She stands immobile in a torn gossamer rag, a glassy look in her dark eyes. The girl is severely starved. Her black matted hair is light red from protein deficiency. Her nose, jaw, shoulders, bare legs and arms are flat bone. The slight bulge of her lips forms the only fullness on her body. The quick movement of the large party passing by pulls her little head up, mouth drawn tight, forehead pinched at its center. Automatically her hands, holding a tin bowl, extend. Already past her, the Dalai Lama calls for Ngari Rinpoché and instructs him to return and give the child money. He drops behind, finds her and, bending down, speaks. The girl grabs the twenty-rupee note he has offered; twenty rupees—$1.66—eighty times the bunch of coins—twenty or thirty paise—normally given. Later Ngari Rinpoché himself is surprised—even appalled—over his recondite breach of the conduct governing the normal business done between beggars and donors.

The reason for such strictly regulated, small contributions is evident just outside the station. In the muddy plot before its entrance lie scores of crippled, dying people. Bihar, India’s poorest state, is an area of unallayed suffering. It is dead winter now and the heat is still immense. At night the temperature drops down fast, killing hundreds who have only straw to cover themselves. In summer, thermometers regularly exceed 100 degrees, sunstroke killing hundreds again. Today it is overcast, stultifying. Earlier it has rained, and the station yard is soaked with puddles, the mud between them littered with red-stained leaves from the
paan
of betel-nut chewers, banana peels, orange rinds,
bidi
wrappers and the short green-tipped sticks used by the poor for brushing their teeth. Horse, dog and, in the corners by the walls, human feces sit amidst pools of urine, emitting a foul stench. Everything, fruit, paper and excrement, is coated with flies. Skeletal dogs, devoured by mange, their skin bearing only a patch or two of remaining
fur, bolt about, rummaging through the grime. At the far end of the yard stand a row of horses harnessed to dusty black canvas-covered carriages, their thin spines and bloated bellies covered with sores. Between them and the station entrance an army of homeless beggars has come to camp. But they are not beggars in contrast to a markedly franchised population. They are the population itself, or so much of it that those who own homes—who have somewhere to go—look only slightly more purposeful as they move through the crowd. The worst have been literally broken in pieces. An old gray-bearded man, legless and crazed, pulls his cropped torso in circles near the building’s walls, ranging from one piece of refuse to another, talking to each. About him wander those slightly better off: the blind, empty sockets exposed in their heads; young men, legs permanently wrapped around each other, swinging their wriggled bodies like buckets between the support of double crutches; middle-aged lepers, ears, noses and cheeks deeply pocked, filthy rags twisted around the stumps of missing fingers and toes; others with elephantiasis, dragging alien pillows of flesh, grown from their arms and legs, across the ground. These luckier ones, still ambulatory, move to the files of travelers going in and out and bet their morning meal, eyes frozen with ingrained anxiety. Among the travelers, not even those who carry bags and have the price of a train ticket wear shoes. They slip from the station trying to avoid the beggars while dodging the larger puddles of urine and trash.