The lumbering express that bisects India, a 1400-mile slash from Delhi south to Madras, gets its name from the route. It might easily have derived it from the kind of luggage the porters were heaving on board. There were grand trunks all over the platform. I had never seen such heaps of belongings in my life, or so many laden people: they were like evacuees who had been given time to pack, lazily fleeing an ambiguous catastrophe. In the best of times there is nothing simple about an Indian boarding a train, but these people climbing into the Grand Trunk Express looked as if they were setting up house – they had the air, and the merchandise, of people moving in. Within minutes the compartments were colonized, the trunks were emptied, the hampers, food baskets, water bottles, bedrolls, and Gladstones put in place; and before the train started up its character changed, for while we were still standing at Delhi Station the men stripped off their baggy trousers and twill jackets and got into traditional South Indian dress: the sleeveless gym-class undershirt and the sarong they call a lungi. These were scored with packing creases. It was as if, at once – in expectation of the train whistle -they all dropped the disguise they had adopted for Delhi, the Madras-bound express allowing them to assume their true identity. The train was Tamil; and they had moved in so completely, I felt like a stranger among residents which was odd, since I had arrived earlier than anyone else.
Tamils are black and bony; they have thick straight hair and their teeth are prominent and glisten from repeated scrubbings with peeled green twigs. Watch a Tamil going over his teeth with an eight-inch twig and you begin to wonder if he isn't trying to yank a branch out of his stomach. One of the attractions of the Grand Trunk Express is that its route takes in the forests of Madhya Pradesh, where the best toothbrush twigs are found; they are sold in bundles, bound like cheroots, at the stations in the province. Tamils are also modest. Before they change their clothes each makes a toga of his bedsheet, and, hopping up and down and working his elbows, he kicks his shoes and trousers off, all the while babbling in that rippling speech that resembles the sputtering of a man singing in the shower. Tamils seem to talk constantly – only toothbrushing silences them. Pleasure for a Tamil is discussing a large matter (life, truth, beauty, 'walues') over a large meal (very wet vegetables studded with chillies and capsicums, and served with damp puris and two mounds of glutinous rice). The Tamils were happy on the Grand Trunk Express: their language was spoken; their food was served; their belongings were dumped helter-skelter, giving the train the customary clutter of a Tamil home.
I started out with three Tamils in my compartment… After they changed, unstrapped their suitcases, unbuckled bedrolls, and had a meal (one gently scoffed at my spoon: 'Food taken with hand tastes different from food taken with spoon – sort of metal taste') they spent an immense amount of time introducing themselves to each other. In bursts of Tamil speech were English words like 'reposting', 'casual leave', 'annual audit'. As soon as I joined the conversation they began, with what I thought was a high degree of tact and courage, to speak to one another in English. They were in agreement on one point: Delhi was barbarous.
'I am staying at Lodi Hotel. I am booked months ahead. Everyone in Trich tells me it is a good hotel. Hah! I cannot use telephone. You have used telephone?'
'I cannot use telephone at all.'
'It is not Lodi Hotel,' said the third Tamil. 'It is Delhi.'
'Yes, my friend, you are right,' said the second.
'I say to receptionist, "Kindly stop speaking to me in Hindi. Does no one speak English around this place? Speak to me in English if you please!"'
'It is really atrocious situation.'
'Hindi, Hindi, Hindi. Tcha!
I said I'd had similar experiences. They shook their heads and added more stories of distress. We sat like four fugitives from savagery, bemoaning the general ignorance of English, and it was one of the Tamils – not I -who pointed out that the Hindi-speaker would be lost in London.
I said, 'Would he be lost in Madras?'
'English is widely spoken in Madras. We also use Tamil, but seldom Hindi. It is not our language.'
'In the south everyone has matric.' They had a knowing ease with abbreviations, 'matric' for matriculation, 'Trich' for the town of Tiruchirappalli.
The conductor put his head into the compartment. He was a harassed man with the badges and equipment of Indian authority, a gunmetal puncher, a vindictive pencil, a clipboard thick with damp passenger lists, a bronze conductor's pin, and a khaki pith helmet. He tapped my shoulder.
'Bring your case.'
Earlier I had asked for the two-berth compartment I had paid for. He had said they were overbooked. I demanded a refund. He said I'd have to file an application at the place of issue. I accused him of inefficiency. He withdrew. Now he had found a coupe in the next carriage.
'Does this cost extra?' I asked, sliding my suitcase in. I didn't like the extortionate overtones of the word baksheesh.
'What you want,' he said.
Then it doesn't.'
'I am not saying it does or doesn't. I am not asking.'
I liked the approach. I said, 'What should I do?'
'To give or not to give.' He frowned at his passenger lists. 'That is entirely your lookout.'
I gave him five rupees.
The compartment was gritty. There was no sink; the drop-leaf table was unhinged; and the rattling at the window, rising to a scream when another train passed, jarred my ears. Sometimes it was an old locomotive that sped by in the night, its kettle boiling, its whistle going, and its pistons leaking a hiss with the warning pitch of a blown valve that precedes an explosion. At about 6 a.m., near Bhopal, there was a rap on the door – not morning tea, but a candidate for the upper berth. He said, 'Excuse me,' and crept in.
The forests of Madhya Pradesh, where all the tooth-brushes grow, looked like the woods of New Hampshire with the last faint blue range of mountains removed. It was green, uncultivated, and full of leafy bluffs and shady brooks, but as the second day wore on it grew dustier, and New Hampshire gave way to Indian heat and Indian air. Dust collected at the window and sifted in, covering my map, my pipe, my glasses and notebook, my new stock of paperbacks (Joyce's Exiles, Browning's poems, The Narrow Comer by Somerset Maugham). I had a fine layer of dust on my face; dust furred the mirror, made the plastic seat abrasive and the floor crunchy. The window had to be kept open a crack because of the heat, but the penalty for this breeze was a stream of choking dust from the Central Indian plains.
At Nagpur in the afternoon, my travelling companion (an engineer with an extraordinary scar on his chest) said, 'There are primitive people here called Gondis. They are quite strange. One woman may have four to five husbands and vicey-versy.'
I bought four oranges at the station, made a note of a sign advertising horoscopes that read marry your daughters for only rupees 12.50, shouted at a little man who was bullying a beggar, and read my handbook's entry for Nagpur (so-called because it is on the River Nag):
Among the inhabitants are many aborigines known as Gonds. Of these the hill-tribes have black skins, flat noses and thick lips. A cloth round the waist is their chief garment. The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship.
To my relief, the whistle blew and we were on our way. The engineer read the Nagpur paper, I ate my Nagpur oranges and then had a siesta. I awoke to an odd sight, the first rain clouds I'd seen since leaving England. At dusk, near the border of the South Indian province of Andhra Pradesh, broad blue grey clouds, dark at the edges, hung on the horizon. We were headed for them in a landscape where it had recently rained: now the little stations were splashed with mud, brown puddles had collected at level crossings, and the earth was reddened by the late monsoon. But we were not under the clouds until we reached Chandrapur, a station so small and sooty it is not on the map. There, the rain fell in torrents, and signalmen skipped along the line waving their sodden flags. The people on the platform stood watching from under large black umbrellas that shone with wetness. Some hawkers rushed into the downpour to sell bananas to the train passengers.
A woman crawled into the rain from the shelter of the platform. She appeared to be injured: she was on all fours, moving slowly towards the train – towards me. Her spine, I saw, was twisted with meningitis; she had rags tied to her knees and woodblocks in her hands. She toiled across the tracks with painful slowness, and when she was near the door she looked up. She had a lovely smile – a girl's beaming face on that broken body. She propped herself up and lifted her free hand at me, and waited, her face streaming with rain, her clothes soaked. While I was fishing in my pockets for money the train started up, and my futile gesture was to throw a handful of rupees on to the flooded line.
At the next station I was accosted by another beggar.
This was a boy of about ten, wearing a clean shirt and shorts. He implored with his eyes and said rapidly, 'Please, sir, give me money. My father and mother have been at station platform for two days. They are stranded. They have no food. My father has no job, my mother's clothes are torn. We must get to Delhi soon and if you give me one or two rupees we will be able.'
'The train's going to leave. You'd better hop off
He said, 'Please, sir, give me money. My father and mother -'
He went on mechanically reciting. I urged him to get off the train, but it was clear that apart from his spiel he did not speak English. I walked away.
It had grown dark, the rain was letting up, and I sat reading the engineer's newspaper. The news was of conferences, an incredible number of gatherings in the very titles of which I heard the clack of voices, the rattle of mimeographed sheets, the squeak of folding chairs, and the eternal Indian prologue: 'There is one question we all have to ask ourselves – ' One Nagpur conference was spending a week discussing 'Is the Future of Zoroas-trianism in Peril?' On the same page 200 Indians were reported attending a 'Congress of Peace-Loving Countries', 'Hinduism: Are We at a Crossroads?' occupied another group, and on the back page there was an advertisement for Raymond's Suitings (slogan: 'You'll have something to say in Raymond's Suitings…'). The man wearing a Raymond suit was shown addressing a conference audience. He was squinting, making a beckoning gesture; he had something to say. His words were, 'Communication is perception. Communication is expectations. Communication is involvement.'
A beggar's skinny hand appeared at my compartment door, a bruised forearm, a ragged sleeve. Then the doomed cry, 'Sahib!'
At Sirpur, just over the border of Andhra Pradesh, the train ground to a halt. Twenty minutes later we were still there. Sirpur is insignificant: the platform is uncovered, the station has two rooms, and there are cows on the verandah. Grass tufts grow out of the ledge of the booking-office window. It smelled of rain and wood smoke and cow dung; it was little more than a hut, dignified with the usual railway signs, of which the most hopeful was trains running late are likely to make up time. Passengers on the Grand Trunk Express began to get out. They promenaded, belching in little groups, grateful for the exercise.
'The engine has packed up,' one man told me. 'They are sending for new one. Delay of two hours.'
Another man said, 'If there was a cabinet minister on this train they would have an engine in ten minutes' time.'
The Tamils were raving on the platform. A native of Sirpur wandered out of the darkness with a sack of roasted chickpeas. He was set upon by the Tamils, who bought all the chickpeas and demanded more. A mob of Tamils gathered at the station-master's window to howl at a man tapping out Morse code with a little key.
I decided to look for a beer, but just outside the station I was in darkness so complete I had second thoughts. The smell of rain on the vegetation gave a humid richness to the air that was almost sweet. There were cows lying on the road: they were white; I could see them clearly. Using the cows as road markers I walked along until I saw a small orange light about fifty yards away. I headed towards it and came to a little hut, a low poky shack with mud walls and a canvas roof. There was a kerosene lantern on the doorway and another inside lighting the surprised faces of half a dozen tea-drinkers, two of whom recognized me from the train.
'What do you want?' one said. 'I will ask for it.'
'Can I buy a bottle of beer here?'
This was translated. There was laughter. I knew the answer.
'About two kilometres down the road' – the man pointed into the blackness – 'there is a bar. You can get beer there.'
'How will I find it?'
'A car,' he said. He spoke again to the man serving tea. 'But there is no car here. Have some tea.'
We stood in the hut, drinking milky tea out of cracked glasses. A joss stick was lit. No one said a word. The train passengers looked at the villagers; the villagers averted their eyes. The canvas ceiling drooped; the tables were worn shiny; the joss stick filled the room with stinking perfume. The train passengers grew uncomfortable and, in their discomfort, took an exaggerated interest in the calendar, the faded colour prints of Shiva and Ganpati. The lanterns flickered in the dead silence as our shadows leaped on the walls.
The Indian who had translated my question said under his breath, 'This is the real India!'
We did not go far that night. The relief engine was late, there were more delays, the Tamils were cursing: damn, blast, ruddy, bloody. The train broke down throughout the night; it slowed, it stopped, the engine died and then I could hear, among the curses, loud crickets. We arrived at Vijayawada five hours behind time in a dark rainy dawn. I bought an apple at a stall, but before I could take a bite out of it a boy limped over to me, stuck his hand out and began to cry. I gave him that apple and bought another, which I hid until I got into the train.
The south was unexpectedly cool and lush: the greenness of the countryside matched the green on the map, the sea-level colour of this area. Because it was still early, and because Indian villagers seem to think of railway tracks as the margin of their world, there were people crouched all along the line, shitting. At first I thought they were simply squatting comfortably to watch the train go by, then I noticed the bright yellow hanks under them. I saw one man; he portended a hundred more, all facing the train for the diversion it offered, unhurriedly fouling the track. They were shitting when the train pulled in; they were still at it when the train pulled out. One curious group – a man, a boy, and a pig – were in a row, each shitting in his own way. A dignified man with his dhoti drawn up squatted a little distance from the tracks. He watched the train go by and he looked as if he would be there for some time: he held a large black umbrella over his head and a newspaper on his knees. Indeed, he seemed the perfect symbol for what a man in Delhi had called 'The Turd World'.
For the last leg of the journey the train veered to the coast and followed the low-lying shore along the Bay of Bengal. The fields were flooded, but men ploughed the water – teams of black buffaloes dragged them through the paddy fields. The rivers were swollen with fast red currents that brimmed to the lip of the banks. This southeastern part of Andhra Pradesh was the most fertile I had seen in India; and it was striking in another way, the people so black, the earth such a deep red brown, the green so green. Still the rain came down, more heavily as we neared Madras.
I asked my travelling companion about his scar. He said he had been stabbed in Assam by some dacoits who took him for a Bengali. He had gone to the door and three men jumped him and began ripping at his heart with daggers. He fell back, and they fled. 'The blood came out – I was on my back, but spouts of it shot up from my heart, high over my face, and splashed over me.' He called to his five-year-old son to get cloths to stanch the flow. The child did as he was told, but his hands were so small and he was so eager that his hand sank into the wound. The father was brought to the hospital at Siliguri, but it took a year for the wound to heal, and by the time he was released he had no money and no job. He described himself as 'a fairly typical Indian engineer'.
We had a conversation about his job. He had something to do with hydraulics. It was not a long conversation. Most Indians I met had jobs that defied analysis or even comment. They were salesmen canvassing for firms that made seamless tubes, plastic washers, or bleaching agents; they marketed bench marks or hasps for manila folders. Once I met a Sikh who made rubber goods, but nothing simple like tyres or contraceptives; he made rubber bushings and casings. I said I didn't understand. He explained: 'Casings – rubber ones – for lugged sprockets.'
It was my inability to understand these occupations that led these Indian railway conversations into anecdotes of the oddest sort. The engineer, seeing that my grasp of hydraulics was slender, told me a story about a yogi who neither ate nor drank a thing in his life. 'What did he live on?' I asked. It seemed a fair question. 'Air only,' he said, 'because he did not want to contaminate the body with food and drink.' The yogi lived to a ripe old age – over seventy. Mr Gopal, the liaison man, had been stumped by my ignorance of liaising. His story concerned a monkey and a tiger who always travelled together. No one could understand why the tiger didn't gobble up the monkey, but a man watched them closely (from behind a tree, unseen) and realized that the tiger was blind: the monkey guided the tiger from place to place. I had heard a story about a man in Bombay who walked on water, and another about a man who taught himself to fly using wings from palm leaves; the canvasser for seamless tubes told me about a bridge of monkeys from Ceylon to Dhanushkodi, across the Palk Strait. I saw these tall stories as a flight from the concrete, the Indian imagination requiring something more than the prosy details of the ledger. So Mr Bhardwaj, the accountant, believed in astrology; Mr Radia, maker of dry-cell batteries, improvised (he said) philosophical songs; and an otherwise completely rational man I met in Bombay claimed that many Indians were addicted to the bite of a cobra: 'You stick out your tongue, cobra bites tongue, and venom makes you wonderful.'
A few miles out of Madras, an English missionary found me clutching the window, gasping in the heat that had just descended on the train. He ignored my condition. He said he was absolutely livid. He was glad to hear that I was (as I told him) a journalist: he had a story for me.
'Some Americans,' he said, 'who call themselves Christians are paying four rupees a head – and that's a lot of money in Madras – to people they baptize. Why? I'll tell you. To put up their conversion figures, so they can get more money from their parishes back home. They do more harm than good. When you go back to the States I hope you mention it.'
'Gladly,' I said. Will whoever is responsible for these corrupt missionaries who offer baptismal bribes please persuade them that they are doing more harm than good?
Then we were at Madras Central and rickshaw-wallahs were flying at me like bats, repeating, 'Where you going? Where you going?'
They laughed when I told them Ceylon.
This was what I imagined: somewhere past the brick and plaster mansions of Madras, arrayed along Mount Road like so many yellowing wedding cakes, was the Bay of Bengal, on which I would find a breezy sea-front restaurant, palm trees, flapping tablecloths. I would sit facing the water, have a fish dinner and five beers and watch the dancing lights of the little Tamil fishing smacks. Then I would go to bed and be up early for the train to Rameswaram, that village on the tip of India's nose.
'Take me to the beach,' I said to the taxi driver. He was an unshaven, wild-haired Tamil with his shirt torn open. He had the look of the feral child in the psychology textbook: feral children, mangled demented Mowglis, abound in South India. It is said they are suckled by wolves.
'Beach Road?'
'That sounds like the place.' I explained that I wanted to eat a fish.
'Twenty rupees.'
'I'll give you five.'
'Okay, fifteen. Get in.'
We drove about two hundred yards and I realized that I was very hungry: turning vegetarian had confused my stomach with what seemed an imperfect substitute for real food. Vegetables subdued my appetite, but a craving – a carnivorous emotion – remained.
'You like English girls?' The taxi driver was turning the steering wheel with his wrists, as a wolf might, given the opportunity to drive a taxi.
'Very much,' I said.
'I find you English girl.'
'Really?' It seemed an unlikely place to find an English whore – Madras, a city without any apparent prosperity. In Bombay I might have believed it: the sleek Indian businessmen, running in and out of the Taj Mahal Hotel, oozing wealth, and driving at top speed past the sleepers on the sidewalk – they were certainly whore fodder. And in Delhi, city of conferees and delegates, I was told there were lots of European hookers cruising through the lobbies of the plush hotels, promising pleasure with a cheery swing of their hips. But in Madras?
The driver spun in his seat and crossed his heart, two slashes with his long nails. 'English girl.'
'Keep your eyes on the road!'
'Twenty-five rupees.'
Three dollars and twenty-five cents.
'Pretty girl?'
'English girl,' he said. 'You want?'
I thought this over. It wasn't the girl but the situation that attracted me. An English girl in Madras, whoring for peanuts. I wondered where she lived, and how, and for how long; what had brought her to the godforsaken place? I saw her as a castaway, a fugitive, like Lena in Conrad's Victory fleeing a tuneless travelling orchestra in Surabaya. I had once met an English whore in Singapore. She said she was making a fortune. But it wasn't just the money: she preferred Chinese and Indian men to the English, who were not so quick and, worse, usually wanted to spank her.
The driver noticed my silence and slowed down. In the heavy traffic he turned around once again. His cracked teeth, stained with betel juice, were red and gleaming in the lights from the car behind us. He said, 'Beach or girl?'
'Beach,' I said.
He drove for a few minutes more. Surely she was Anglo-Indian – 'English' was a euphemism.
'Girl,'I said.
'Beach or girl?'
'Girl, girl, for Heaven's sake.' It was as if he were trying to make me confess to an especially vicious impulse.
He swung his car around dangerously and sped in the opposite direction, babbling, 'Good – nice girls – you like – little house – about two miles – five girls – '
'English girls?'
'English girls.'
The luminous certitude had gone out of his voice, but still he nodded, perhaps trying to calm me.
We drove for twenty minutes. We went through streets where kerosene lamps burned at stalls, and past brightly lit textile shops in which clerks in striped pyjamas shook out bolts of yellow cloth and sequined saris. I sat back and watched Madras go by, teeth and eyes in dark alleys, night-time shoppers with full baskets, and endless doorways distinguished by memorable signboards, SANGADA LUNCH HOME, VISHNU SHOE CLINIC, and the dark funereal THOUSANDS LIGHTS RESTAURANT.
He turned corners, choosing the narrowest unlighted lanes, and then we stayed on dirt roads. I suspected he was going to rob me, and when we came to the darkest part of a bumpy track – we were in the country now -and he pulled over and switched off the lights, I was certain he was a con man: his next move would be to stick a knife in my ribs. How stupid I'd been to believe his fatuous story about the twenty-five-rupee English girl! We were far from Madras, on a deserted road, beside a faintly gleaming swamp where frogs whistled and gulped. The taxi driver jerked his head. I jumped. He blew his nose into his fingers and flung the result out the window.
I started to get out of the car.
'You sit down.'
I sat down.
He thumped his chest with his hand. 'I'm coming.' He slid out and banged the door, and I saw him disappear down a path to the left.
I waited until he was gone, until the shush of his legs in the tall grass had died out, and then I carefully worked the door open. In the open air it was cool, and there was a mingled smell of swamp water and jasmine. I heard voices on the road, men chattering; like me they were in darkness. I could see the road around me, but a few feet away it vanished. I estimated that I was about a mile from the main road. I would head for that and find a bus.
There were puddles in the road. I blundered into one, and, trying to get out, plopped through the deepest part. I had been running; the puddle slowed me to a ponderous shamble.
'Mister! Sahib!'
I kept going, but he saw me and came closer. I was caught. 'Sit down, mister!' he said. I saw he was alone. 'Where you going?'
'Where you going?'
'Checking up.'
'English girl?'
'No English girl.'
'What do you mean, no English girl?' I was frightened, and now it all seemed a transparent preparation for ambush.
He thought I was angry. He said, 'English girl – forty, fifty. Like this.' He stepped close to me so that in the darkness I could see he was blowing out his cheeks; he clenched his fists and hunched his shoulders. I got the message: a fat English girl. 'Indian girl – small, nice. Sit down, we go.'
I had no other choice. A mad dash down the road would have taken me nowhere – and he would have chased me. We walked back to the taxi. He started the engine angrily and we bumped along the grassy path he had taken earlier on foot. The taxi rolled from side to side in the potholes and strained up a grade. This was indeed the country. In all that darkness there was one lighted hut. A little boy crouched in the doorway with a sparkler, an anticipation of Diwali, the festival of lights: it illuminated his face, his skinny arm, and made his eyes shine. Ahead of us there was another hut, slightly larger, with a flat roof and two square windows. It was on its own, like a shop in a jungle clearing. Dark heads moved at the windows.
'You come,' said the taxi driver, parking in front of the door. I heard giggling and saw at the windows round black faces and gleaming hair. A man in a white turban leaned against the wall, just out of the light.
We went inside the dirty room. I found a chair and sat down. A dim electric bulb burned on a cord in the centre of the low ceiling. I was sitting in the good chair – the others were broken or had burst cushions. Some girls were sitting on a long wooden bench. They watched me, while the rest gathered around me, pinching my arm and laughing. They were very small, and they looked awkward and a bit comic, too young to be wearing lipstick, nose jewels, earrings, and slipping bracelets. Sprigs of white jasmine plaited into their hair made them look appropriately girlish, but the smudged lipstick and large jewellery also exaggerated their youth. One stout sulky girl held a buzzing transistor radio to the side of her head and looked me over. They gave the impression of schoolgirls in their mothers' clothes. None could have been older than fifteen.
'Which one you like?' This was the man in the turban. He was stocky and looked tough in a rather grizzled way. His turban was a bath towel knotted on his head.
'Sorry,' I said.
A thin man walked in through the door. He had a sly, bony face and his hands were stuck into the top of his lungi. He nodded at one. 'Take her – she good.'
'One hundred rupees all night,' said the man with the turban. 'Fifty for one jig.'
'He said it costs twenty-five.'
The taxi driver wrung his hands.
'Fifty,' said the grizzled man, standing firm.
'Anyway, forget it,' I said. 'I just came for a drink.'
'No drink,' said the thin man.
'He said he had an English girl.'
'What English girl?' said the thin man, now twisting the knot on his lungi. 'These Kerala girls – young, small, from Malabar Coast.'
The man in the turban caught one by the arm and shoved her against me. She shrieked delightedly and hopped away.
'You look at room,' said the man in the turban.
The room was right through the door. He switched on the light. This was the bedroom; it was the same size as the outside one, but dirtier and more cluttered. And it smelled horrible. In the centre of the room was a wooden bed with a stained bamboo mat on it, and on the wall six shelves, each holding a small tin padlocked suitcase. In a corner of the room a battered table held some medicine bottles, big and small, and a basin of water. There were scorch marks on the beaverboard ceiling, newspapers on the floor, and on the wall over the bed charcoal sketches of dismembered bodies, breasts, and genitals.
'Look!'
The man grinned wildly, rushed to the far wall and threw a switch.
'Fan!'
It began to groan slowly over the filthy bed, stirring the air with its cracked paddles and making the room even smellier.
Two girls came into the room and sat on the bed. Laughing, they began to unwind their saris. I hurried out, into the parlour, through the front door, and found the taxi driver. 'Come on, let's go.'
'You not liking Indian girl? Nice Indian girl?' Skinny was starting to shout. He shouted something in Tamil to the taxi driver, who was in as great a hurry as I to leave the place: he had produced a dud customer. The fault was his, not mine. The girls were still giggling and calling out, and Skinny was still shouting as we swung away from the hut and through the tall grass on to the bumpy back road.
I had a late dinner, served on a banana leaf in a dingy restaurant near my hotel. The windows of my hotel room were open; I could smell sweet flowers. The odour sang as I read Exiles: 'I am sure that no law made by man is sacred before the impulse of passion… There is no law before impulse.' The perfume was familiar; it was jasmine. I thought of the girls, laughing there in that hut, wearing the white flowers with such narrow petals.