Amitava Kumar on Working in India
The Chronicle of Higher Education, February, 2008

The Anima of India

I was in graduate school, and a professor of mine said that I might want to apply for a human-rights fellowship. At first I thought of Portugal. I was enrolled in a seminar in which, just that week, I had read an article about peasant struggles in that country. The name Lisbon conjured the beauty of an unbroken beach and mild ocean air. But did I really know anything about Portugal beyond the colorful postage stamps I had collected in my childhood? It would be easier to write that I wanted to work in India.

I hadn't seen my parents for three years. They lived in an old city called Patna, on the banks of the Ganges in eastern India, a place that the late author Shiva Naipaul had called "the subcontinent's heart of darkness." The day I got news of the fellowship I called them, although it must have been the middle of the night there, to tell them I was coming home.

More than 20 years have passed since I came to the United States. I have never applied for a grant to visit any country other than India. At first it was because I didn't have the money to go otherwise, but now it is where I go to work - to write, do research, and conduct interviews.

There is hardly ever time to spend more than a couple of days with my family. And when I look at glossy ads inviting travelers to India, to the Taj Mahal in Agra or Kerala's beautiful backwaters, I realize how many places, and just how much color, I have missed during my visits.

"Welcome to India," the signs at the airport say. But I have a private sign that only I can see. It says, You're here to work.

I land in Delhi and search for sleep, always waking up, alas, around 3 in the morning. Even at that hour, street dogs bark from different directions, working together like runners on a relay team. Just before the sky begins to turn light, the birds fill up the night with their calls. I usually wait another hour, reading, consuming the chocolate I have bought from the duty-free shop, and then busy myself with calls to the taxi rank close by and at least half a dozen airline serv-ices, making travel plans to far-flung towns.

Often I go to Lodi Garden, where I went for walks when I was an undergraduate at the Delhi University, especially during the warm summer evenings with their sunsets that seemed to linger forever. When I was in high school, a program on Lodi Garden was shown on national television. There was only one government-owned channel at that time, and the broadcasts were in black and white. The camera panned over the graffiti on the old monuments, and a grave voice said, "History has already written on these walls, what can you and I now write on them? Please do not deface our heritage."

But the graffiti writers and the lovers will not come till much later in the day. When I take my jet-lagged self there in the early dawn, I see the walkers and joggers in hectic pursuit of health. On the lawns close to the Bara Gumbad, the Big Dome tomb, mostly middle-aged men and women perform yoga. A group of boys might be playing cricket nearby. In another corner of the garden, old men stand in a circle, their heads tilted up, laughing loudly. They are the followers of an Indian doctor who has started a worldwide movement, setting up more than seven thousand laughter clubs that claim to reduce stress.

After that first day, I will never again during that trip have time to walk in Lodi Garden. In all probability, in a matter of hours, I'll be on my way to another town to do research and interviews. The beauty I will see will only be in passing but all the more poignant for that reason.

A bit like the tiny stretch of the sea that I glimpsed on the famous Konkan Coast, a few hours south of Mumbai. This was during my last visit to India; I was doing research for a forthcoming book on the global war on terror. I had gone to a village called Walavati to interview a Muslim family who had been tortured for several days by the police for possessing missiles, except that the objects had actually turned out to be bobbins used in textile machinery. I had been in the car for six hours and was in a hurry to get back to Mumbai. Rain had washed clean the mango trees on the side of the road. We passed a crowded town. And then, suddenly, as if in a watercolor hung on a wall, the sea appeared between two houses. Later that night, or maybe only after a few days had passed, I asked myself why I hadn't stopped.

But there couldn't have been much mystery to that question. After all, it is the same during every visit. In the 12, 15, or even 30 days that I have, I need to travel to scores of places and speak to as many people as I can. Even by the time the jet lag wears off, I know that any pleasure I'll experience during the trip will be unplanned, almost incidental, fleeting.

A couple of years after I began my first teaching job, I went to India to take photographs of migrant workers. Those pictures would later appear in my book about migration, Passport Photos (University of California Press, 2000). The workers I met were mostly young men who had left their villages and traveled west to Punjab to do hard, back-breaking work harvesting wheat and hauling stones out of rock quarries.

The landscape was baking in the June heat. Dust blew all day. The workers wore shorts; the only other item of clothing was a bandana wrapped around their heads. But the men's faces, especially their eyelids, would quickly get coated with gray powder. Under a shed with a corrugated iron roof that radiated heat, the workers sat or reclined on sacks of cement, seemingly indifferent to any discomfort.

Each night I would go back to my hotel in a nearby small town. After sunset, it was hotter indoors. My room was without curtains, and even when I had turned out the light, the glare from the street was so bright that I could count my money. One evening, a Sikh owner of one of the stone quarries invited me to his home for dinner. We sat on wicker chairs that had been put out on the green lawn. I took off my sandals; the grass was cool and damp under my feet. For a long time, my host plied me with whiskey. The alcohol helped, but the ice cubes that he lifted with steel tongs and put in my glass were a true blessing.

While waiting for dinner, we ate a savory dish made from fried egg and spicy minced meat. Many years have passed, but even now, when I am hungry and uncomfortable, I think of that evening with a keenness that can take me by surprise.

The tourist in India is expected to complain of the heat and the dust. I suffer terribly from the infernal conditions in which I sometimes work, but worry that to notice it would immediately mark me as the outsider that I have now become. I am also aware that my taking comfort in small pleasures -- for example, the cool air coming through a straw curtain splashed with water, is a dubious form of nostalgia. And yet I'm not always certain of the correctness of that reading. The truth is that I want to distance myself from the Indian rich, who to my eye appear more greedy and grasping than the rich in the West. This judgment governs my social behavior when I'm home. They speak English, I immerse myself in the vernacular; they stick to the cities, I go to the hinterland; they appear arrogant and uncaring, I sullenly cultivate my guilt.

If I had a moment to spare while in India, I would notice that the difference I was asserting was, for the most part, an academic one.

A year after my visit to the stone quarries, I was back in India, still struggling to finish the photography project. I was in Delhi, and, as it happened, my elder sister was also visiting that city. The night before I was to leave, I took her to a restaurant at Taj Man Singh, a five-star hotel in south Delhi. We were going to celebrate her birthday.

The hotel's design and decor are inspired by Mughal architecture, although its aura owes also to its location in the heart of the most affluent district in the city. I have a memory of cool marble and delicate stone screens, antique wooden sculptures, plush carpets, and stunning oil paintings by some of the best contemporary Indian artists. In choosing that hotel, however, I had made a mistake. I had wanted to surprise my sister, and when we arrived at the Taj she complained that she was not dressed right. But I didn't want to leave this place of refuge. I could feel the sweat drying on my brow. After the noise on the street, the silence alone was a gift.

At the table, my sister would read the name of an item on the menu and then glance at its price. After a while, she said she would let me order. At one point, I think I told her that I was paying with a credit card and that the dinner didn't mean much in U.S. dollars, but of course that would only have made matters worse.

A week passed, and I was back in Florida, where I then worked, when my mother called me from India. She told me that the amount of money I had spent that evening had caused much distress to my sister. Truth be told, although I had relished the prawns that were as big as my fist, a part of me had shared her discomfort. There was something that was just unnecessary about the dinner at the Taj. In the decade since, I have eaten in other wonderful restaurants in Delhi's five-star hotels, establishments like the Imperial's Spice Route or the Oberoi's Taipan, and have always been reminded of my sister's reluctance to order food that evening.

There is innocence in that guilt, but that, too, is perhaps nostalgia. And I have to confess that I have also enjoyed those moments when a trip to India hasn't simply meant a return home - a return to the small-town, middle-class conditions I knew as a young man. The luxury comes as a relief, and it seems to come more easily as the years pass. Even if I rarely do forget that it can be a complicated thing being a tourist in that country called the past.

The first real meal I want to have when I arrive in Delhi is at Karim's. With a spanking new Delhi metro, all one needs to do is take the subway to the market area of Chandni Chowk, and then hire a cycle-rickshaw for a short ride into the alleys past the old mosque known as Jama Masjid. The restaurant's cooks claim a lineage that takes them back to the royal kitchens of the last Mughal emperor, the poet Bahadur Shah Zafar. This goes hand in hand with the other significant claim, only slightly exaggerated, that their cuisine, fit for the emperor, comes at a price that will also satisfy the poor.

The naans and parathas would suffice as complete meals, but I always order the spicy chicken and meat dishes named after various Mughal rulers: Akbari Murgh Masala, Jahangiri Korma, Shahjahani Kabab. I have nowhere else eaten mutton cooked in almond paste. Almost always, I finish the meal with an ice cream called Pista Kulfi, which some say tastes like you're eating flowers. The food flings me into a stupor. A python swallowing a pig must have similar aims as I do. After my long nap, I wake up refreshed.

At such times, I most want to head down to Lodi Garden. Its landscaped lawns are dotted with stone monuments, tombs of Muslim rulers who, about five centuries ago, had intended to lay out a royal cemetery. The monuments don't interest me; I go there to look at the trees. The thin-limbed amaltas in flower, its light yellow blossoms heavy with dew. The scarlet and red of the gulmohar. Hiding among the leaves of the green neem, noisy green parakeets with red rings on their necks. And scattered near the entrance, the heavy, waxy petals of the flowers that have fallen from the giant simul.

A venerable institution, the India International Centre, which everyone calls the IIC, shares a boundary wall with Lodi Garden; I first saw the films of the European New Wave there. Visiting artists and academics stay there during visits to Delhi and offer public lectures. More than two decades ago, I attended readings there by Raja Rao, V.S. Naipaul (the older brother of Shiva Naipaul), Anita Desai, and Salman Rushdie. Even today, it is at the IIC, and at the nearby India Habitat Centre, another cultural organization, that the important intellectual events in the city unfold.

The IIC members are mostly senior bureaucrats, retired officials of the armed forces, and Delhi politicians who want to regard themselves as intellectuals. They are the city's aging elite. In my late teens, I would stand outside the gates and ask the people going to the "members only" film screenings to allow me to accompany them. An old police officer with a clipped white mustache, a dignified man who never once spoke a word to me, always nodded and let me follow him inside. In the IIC's dark auditorium, I discovered the works of Bergman, Antonioni, Bunuel, Resnais, Godard, Truffaut, Forman, Janussi.

Last March, Home Products (Picador India, 2007), my novel about the Hindi film world, was released at the IIC by Shyam Benegal, the director credited with having inaugurated the Indian New Wave back in the 1970s. The event was held outdoors under lights hanging from trees, while the birds in the Lodi Garden kept up their insistent chorus. On that occasion, and every other time I have done a reading at the center, I was still the provincial youth from many years ago, fearful that he is trespassing, standing on a stage where he does not belong.

I am recollecting all this in tranquillity, sitting at a computer in my office in upstate New York, looking out the window at a tree whose leaves are turning orange. The other world that I work in, and that I write about, is so far away from where I live. It is not only about space, it is also about time. I know that during my visits to India, I will always experience everything as if I have to hurry and meet it in the future. Before the present takes hold of it and consigns it to the past that is now forever lost.

I will be collecting material for a book about Hindu-Muslim conflict in the subcontinent, and I will be on a narrow highway in Kashmir, driving behind an army convoy. The highway will branch away to the right, and my taxi will turn left onto a gravel road. No longer will I have to look at soldiers standing upright in their trucks, black bandanas tied on their heads, gun barrels poking out from under the green tarp flapping in the wind around them. Instead, there will be doves bathing in the dirt and beyond them almond and apple trees. In the village where I'll be going, close to the Pakistan border, I'll look for a woman called Saira. She'll be hanging her children's laundry when I'll arrive at her door. She'll guess I'm a journalist and that I'll be writing about her husband. His parents migrated from that village to Pakistan in 1953, and he, too, is a Pakistani citizen. He is Saira's cousin, and they were married in 1987. According to the police, because the man is Pakistani, he is a terrorist, and he will be taken to the border for deportation the next morning.

While I will wait, a family of ducks will emerge from the apple orchard. Behind the drying laundry, I will see sunflowers. Saira will bring me tea. Her 5-year-old son will play with me, shyly. Her older son will bring his notebook to show to me. He has copied down a poem by Longfellow. By the time Saira's husband, Tariq, will return from the police station, she'll have made mutton yakhni, fragrant with cardamom and ginger in a spicy yogurt sauce. The rice will have saffron in it. We'll all sit down on a carpet and have our meal together. Tariq, whom I'll already be thinking of as a condemned man, will eat the food hungrily. I will say to myself that he is eating one of his last meals in his home. This terrible thought will make me appreciate the taste of what I'm eating even more.

Amitava Kumar is a professor of English at Vassar College. His latest book, forthcoming from Duke University Press, is A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb.