[sacw] Salman Rushdie on his recent trip to India

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web - Dispatch #1
14 June 2000
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

__________________________

The Times, UK
13 June 2000

Back to the land I love [By Salman Rushdie]

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.
'I almost gave up on India - almost believed the love affair was over for
good. But not so'
"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.
'The hot day enfolds us like an embrace'
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 Almod=F3var movi=
e
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
=E7a 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?
'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. "Saal=F3n 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
=46odder Scam, a swindle in which large amounts of public livestock subsidie=
s
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.
'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 lumi=E8re
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.
'The Writers' Prize is only a pretext. To have made this trip with Zafar
is the real victory'
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
=46oreign 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.
'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.
Salman Rushdie =A9 2000
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