The Naked Tourist Page 6

  I went up to my room and my four-poster bed, exactly like a prince of the Grand Tour. The Raj antiques and prints in the room, the wainscoted bathrooms, are corporate reconstructions of a British officer’s milieu, but they provided a Western insulation against the frenzy of the street. In the heart of a great hotel there is utter silence, an unreality that stills the most frayed nerves. The sweat gradually dries on your skin and your isolation returns. The hushed boys padding along the carpeted corridors with their prints of Old Calcutta, the swish of laundered saris and the polite talk around the pool, where the gin and tonics are served to a sound of parrots.

  Tristes Tropiques is a loose collection of travels ranging from the West Indies to the Amazon to Asia, between which the restless Frenchman zigzags erratically by means of what he calls “a mental tracking shot.” He jumps from Brazil to India and back because he feels like it. He is given to a certain oratory (“Alas, poor Orient!”). Otherwise, Tropiques is written in a tone of detached indignation, of scrupulous objectivity and calm skepticism—which, in the end, are merely the qualities of the pitiless eye and a roving ear. Mercifully, it defies the humdrum demand of contemporary American editors to have a “coherent thesis,” whatever that is. The world, Lévi-Strauss seems to recognize, is not itself a coherent thesis, so why should it be interpreted through one?

  But in the middle of this majestic work there erupts an unhinged and delirious chapter on Calcutta under the title of “Crowds.” In it, we see the rage, disgust, and hysteria to which even the anthropologist is prone, albeit displayed with a rare candor. But perhaps that “even” is a little naïve. No man is a mechanical camera.

  What we are ashamed of as if it were a disgrace, and regard as a kind of leprosy, is, in India, the urban phenomenon, reduced to its ultimate expression: the herding together of individuals whose only reason for living is to herd together in millions, whatever the conditions of life may be. Filth, chaos, promiscuity, congestion; ruins, huts, mud, dirt; dung, urine, pus, humours, secretions and running sores: all the things against which we expect urban life to give us organized protection, all the things we hate and guard against at so much cost …

  The key word here is “humours,” as if Calcutta is medieval even in the medical sense. Lévi-Strauss then compares the human multitudes of India with the comparable emptiness of the Brazilian jungle. In the Americas, he says, one feels landscape acutely because people are small within it; in India, however, it is the reverse. The human crowds and a long history have obliterated nature, turning everything into human waste and exhaustion. The Indian city and the remote jungle are the two extremes of human experience that give the anthropologist his moral bearings. It’s clear he prefers the jungle. Would I?

  I do not, for the most part, agree with him about Calcutta. Lévi-Strauss spends an inordinate amount of time dwelling on Calcuttan hustlers, as if they were unlike anything he had ever experienced before. They seem to have gotten to him in an acute sort of way.

  Every time I emerged from my hotel in Calcutta, which was besieged by cows and vultures perched on its windowsills, I became the central figure in a ballet which would have seemed funny to me, had it not been so pathetic. The various accomplished performers made their entries in turn: a shoeblack flung himself at my feet; a small boy rushed up to me, whining “One anna, papa, one anna!” A cripple displayed his stumps, having bared himself to give a better view … a New Market porter begged me to buy everything … He listed the items covetously, as if all the goods were presents intended for himself. “Suitcases? Shirts? Hose?”

  After reading this diatribe in my four-poster bed, I was curious to know which hotel Lévi-Strauss had stayed in. He mentions that it was a luxury establishment and that it was around the corner from the venerable New Market, for that was where he had suffered his ordeals. But the Oberoi Grand was around the corner from the New Market and it was, as far as I knew, the only old luxury hotel that was. Had Lévi-Strauss stayed here?

  Throwing down the book, I got dressed and went back down to Chowringhee. The New Market lay on the block behind the hotel, reached by a street of chemists and cloth stores. It was thick with human bodies, and I had to swim through them. The Market is also a British monument, but soukified inside, so that as I wandered up the steps into the first segment of the labyrinth I was lost at once and the “ballet” of which Lévi-Strauss had so bitterly complained began. A hustler latched onto me, with a whole procession of facial expressions that seemed to have been borrowed from a Peter Brooks performance of the Bhagavad-Gita: woe, dismay, surprise, anxiety, injured pride, incredulity, aggression, concern for his parents, concern for my parents, concern for my children, concern for his children, etc. Street theater of the purest kind, and of the kind that had driven the fastidious European anthropologist insane. But it is after all only the ballet of the tourist and his Other. A ritual that cannot be avoided. My guide did what is customary in the New Market and bought us two beers while we sat at a gold merchant’s from whom he obviously got a commission. But thereafter things got decidedly strange. Did I want to buy gold? A firm no had him shaking his head, tutting with the owner, a few swigs of beer, and then an offer to get us two tickets from his cousin for the Elephant Festival at which, I could rest assured, the Indians went mad and made for a lot of good photographs. “Not wanting to go?” For I was shaking my head and laughing. It was Lévi-Strauss all over again.

  But he suddenly got up and disappeared—to get the tickets for the Elephant Festival.

  He came back twenty minutes later, cursing and shaking his head. Couldn’t find his cousin, couldn’t get tickets. Would I like some “girlfriend panty hose” instead? Underpants? Tablecloth? Our bottles clacked and I refused. We started to chat about our respective lives, and he was keenly curious. What kind of house did I live in, two floors or one? Wife and kids? Why not? I learned a fair amount about him, depressing as it was—he was a university student in “mechanical engineering”—and in return I described the insides of the Oberoi Grand hotel. It occurred to me then that, apart from desperately wanting to sell me things, he simply wanted to have a banter over a beer with a foreigner.

  By now I wanted to leave but could not figure out where the exit to this incredible maze lay. He looked me over slyly. Then he said he could get me some Ayurvedic medicine. I didn’t want any. “No, no, you will needing it!” His cousin had some freshly made powders. As I finished my beer, he disappeared again, this time for ten minutes, and I was already on my way out when he caught up with me, holding two dingy paper bags of yellow powder. “Sir, sir,” he cried, almost kneeling, “take it, take the Ayurvedic medicine!” I had to repeat that I had no intention whatsoever of accepting his dismal powders.

  “I understand!” he cried now. “You can pay me tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow if you like! Here—”

  And he thrust the paper bags into my hands. Now I was stuck with them and a look of complete, almost savage triumph came over his face.

  “All right,” I said wearily, “I’ll pay you tomorrow.”

  “Yes, pay tomorrow, tomorrow!”

  He bowed, I bowed, we began to move in opposite directions, and other hustlers closed in on me as I darted back into the dark arcades on Chowringhee. I was sweating violently, drenched from head to foot. The boys saw some look of weakness in me that had something to do with the two paper bags dangling from my fingers, with the traces of yellow powder that had begun to leak from them. Aha, they were thinking, so here is a jackass sahib who has had some Ayurvedic crap fobbed off on him. Very interesting! I wandered back into the Oberoi, quite confused as to what had just transpired. In the lobby, the bellboys stared at the packages as if they were miniature bombs, knowing of course exactly what they were, and I finally had to ask one to relieve me of them. They had a good laugh among themselves. “Certainly, sir!” The condescension was so slight that it passed under my nose and evaporated. The packets were gingerly carried to a wastebasket and dropped into it with a smart brush of the hand
s. I was trembling, for some reason. As an Englishman I always feel that something is expected of me—but what? A show of rectitude, of stoic command? Or something out of Trainspotting?

  What had happened in Calcutta was that the Englishness inside me had been evoked in a way it never had before. It is occasionally evoked in New York, but not as viscerally as in India. You are asked to play a part, a part that is fixed in the racial memory of others. For the tourist, it begins to get complicated. Which part of you is real and which is the part? In your own culture, you never think about it, but as a traveler you are forced to think about it all the time. Because in reality no one is ever taken purely as an individual—look at the way Western anthropologists look at Indians or, more extremely, Papuans. We are individuals, and they are “a culture.” In the same way, for Indians I am an “Englishman,” just as an American staying at the Oberoi Grand is always an “American.” Push him a little and he will play the part, as will I. I just had.

  For the next few days I wandered around Calcutta without Levi-Strauss’s disgust. Fewer cows than expected, no vultures, no pus. But the longer I stayed, the more it felt like a composite city assembled inside a single feverish brain, one of those fantastical Londonesque utopian scenes dreamed up by the Victorian painter John Martin. The Botanic Gardens with the “world’s largest baobab tree,” the ghats with their Armenian baths, the strange industrial riverscapes of the Ganges with its chocolate-colored waters and hazy chimneys. I walked down Chowringhee and Park every night, shopping in bargain pharmacies, eating at Grain of Salt and Shish with the infotech hipsters, and dipping into the new American-style malls but never knowing where I was going or even where I was. For at least the author of Tristes Tropiques was right about the oppressive confusion of crowds. “Daily life appears to be a repudiation of the concept of human relations.” But was he also right about the primitive forest being an antidote to the hideous “amoebic” cities of the modern world? Life is inherently easier and more dignified, he says, in places where people began to pillage only four hundred years ago, instead of four thousand.

  I love cities. Or rather, I am inclined to be an urban tourist. When I walked across the Maidan in the morning to watch the cricketers set up their wickets, I felt that I was inside a nightmare to which I had taken a liking. No relatives, no friends, no phones ringing, no connection to anything: just the city teeming with birds and goats, with millions of strangers sleeping outdoors. At home and estranged in equal measure, the traveler picks his way through garbage and rubble to find a little peace, stopping to drink a milky chai at the street corners where the mango trees grow with mad abandon, their leaves shooting up among sooty architraves and rotted pilasters. But he is never really happy, for he is always thinking of his next move: like a billiard ball, he is motionless only temporarily. Always alone, it is his only comforting thought: “Tomorrow, I’ll be somewhere else!”

  DESERT ISLANDS

  At Dum Dum airport, a small and mangy crowd had assembled for the two-hour flight to Port Blair. An hour before dawn, it was postponed and I went to look at the rain that was rolling in, for Calcutta is surrounded by estuaries, swamps, and lagoons, and its rain seems to draw energy from so much nearby water. There was now plenty of time for relaxed Indian conversations, for there seemed to be an unspoken complicity among all the people herded together for so obscure a destination. Almost no foreigners ever fly to Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman Islands, and a white fellow in a summer suit with a bit of jungle equipment rolled in ugly bags is bound to attract those grandfatherly queries from old men that cannot be turned away.

  Five or six times I had to explain that I was on my way to a place called Papua New Guinea—no, it was not in India—and that I was flying to Bangkok first. Then, I explained, I had found out that halfway between Calcutta and Bangkok there lay these Andaman Islands and that I could stop off there on my way to Thailand. They nodded and their eyes shone. Did I know their history? How the British had built a terrible penal colony there? But, sir, all is peace and tranquility now. Except, of course, for the niggers. My chai nearly fell out of my hand. The what? Oh, yes, sir, the niggers. The Andamans are full of niggers. It was an old gent with a kind of origami piece on his head made out of a Bengali newspaper: rain gear.

  “You will probably see them,” he added darkly, “begging by the roads.”

  I was being disingenuous. It was precisely because of these remote tribal peoples that I was going to the Andamans. I had seen them first in an Indian newspaper article a few weeks before, where it was reported that in the wake of the 2004 tsunamis, the secretive hunter-gatherer tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar islands off the coast of Burma had fired arrows at relief workers in helicopters.

  The Andamans are a long archipelago of some 572 islands that are mostly invisible on a map. They stretch northsouth at about the latitude of Sri Lanka, lying closer to Burma than India. They were administered once from Calcutta before being turned into a separate Indian department and had belonged to the Indian Navy for decades. Only recently opened for tourism, they were devastated by the tsunami; their native peoples were Negritos, black Africans who had migrated across Asia seventy thousand years ago, and thus were related to Papuans, who were also Negritos. So, I had thought at once—astonished—it would be a taste of Papua before getting to Papua! They bore mysterious names, Jarawa, Onge, Sentinalese. Violently hostile to outsiders, they killed intruders into their forests. The British had built a penal colony there in 1858 because it was so easy to control the convicts: the Jarawa obviated any need for walls. Today, there were 238 Jarawa left amid 300,000 Indian settlers.

  On the Air India plane, I was tense. There are times when the world seems nastily small; on other occasions it appears vast, cold, and very blue. I met the same old man at the back of the plane outside the toilets and, out of nowhere, he informed me that the famous “dumdum” bullet had been invented in 1889 in a small British munitions factory that had stood next to Dum Dum airport.

  “You are, sir, a quite amazing people!”

  There was no irony behind the spectacles, however—I wondered whether dumdum bullets had ever been used on the Andaman niggers. Two hours’ flying time south from Calcutta, the islands suddenly appear out of a dark sea, sleeping like large beasts under mist and rain.

  Descending into Port Blair, you could be flying into any logging town in the Amazon or, for that matter, Papua New Guinea. At least Papua as I imagined it to be, which was to say as I had seen it represented in the pages of the odious National Geographic. Sprawling hillsides of shacks and piled logs, networks of mud paths, corrugated tin roofs: an air of failure, of nowhereness, which is not the same as whereverness. It is a real place, you think, but a failed one, a half-place asleep in its tremendous obscurity and remoteness. Its charm has gone. It reminds you not only of Papua but also of Haiti’s Port-au-Prince. Beaten-down trees, blue walls, the sea at the end of every alley. A skeleton of municipal respectability remains, a few lawns here and there, a ceremonial cannon peeping out to sea. But the living heart of it seems unsure in some way.

  The airport was a bare warehouse. A deserted tourist booth offered a single leaflet listing three hotels, all in the capital. I took a leaflet to the exit and got a cab into town. It was raining with indescribable intensity. “Fortune Resort,” I told the driver, and pointed to the little picture. We spun up hills at angles of sixty degrees, then rolled down them again—a fairground ride. At a roundabout I saw a black man wrapped in a blanket, his head covered with threads of red wool. The driver smirked.

  The Fortune Resort Bay Island was designed by famed Indian “ecological architect” Charles Correa. It is in so-called Native Style, which is to say it offers airy pavilions with palm thatch roofs open to the sea, which bear no resemblance whatsoever to any Jarawa structures you will ever see. It is the top hotel in the Andaman Islands, which is to say that it is not owned by the government. The lobby is filled with Jarawa kitsch, paintings of happy black matrons and dancing
children in red flower garlands, and on the verandah open to the sea stands a statue of a Jarawa warrior spearing his prey—a pig, or a passing tourist? The walls are covered with ecological propaganda, like a high school’s: most noticeably, a picture of the “pollution system” of a Typical American City. Brahms’s Third boomed on the sound system. I collapsed into a cane chair, and after about an hour a waiter appeared with a gloomy grin. He had a white napkin draped over his arm as if he had seen this in a training video. I ordered a gin and tonic.

  “I am sorry, sir, bar is closed.”

  “Well, what time does it open?”

  He looked at his watch. “In five minutes, sir.”

  He stood there smiling. I ordered the drink and said I would come back in five minutes. Then, neither of us left. He continued smiling. There was not a single guest in the hotel except me and another Britisher, who was sitting in the restaurant below, talking secretively into a cell phone. After five minutes, the waiter went off to get the gin and tonic.

  I felt like the hero of Dark Passage, a man who has perhaps faked his own death. I peered over the railing to look at the man babbling into his phone downstairs. He wore a cheap “businessman” jacket and the voice was unpleasant. “We could go up to seventy-five,” he was whispering urgently, hunched over a beer, “but I told him seventy-three, okay?” A jasmine-scented heat steamed the flesh, and lonely fishing boats crossed the darkening bay without lights. The end of the world, with Brahms.