Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The main road, with its emporiums and bazaars, was just a few minutes away. I reached it and began to negotiate my way, but the crush of jostling pedestrians and broken sidewalks forced me into the gutter. I stumbled along at the curb, bumped by rickshaws and spooked by honking cars. I kept this up for a hundred yards—hating it, growing frustrated, appalled by the huge number of people, their push and pull, shouldering me aside. I was bigger than any of these bandy-legged Dravidians, but it was all I could do to stay upright and moving forward.

I liked to think of myself as unflappable, but the simple walk gave me pause: the hot day, the mob, the car fumes; my making so little progress on what I'd intended as a stroll down Mount Road, which was memory lane. I did not look for pleasure in travel, and I expected nuisance and delay. But this was something else, pointless and unrewarding effort of a sort that no one wants to hear about.

Only the natural courtesy, good nature, and geniality of the Tamils in the mob kept me from being trampled—that was a discovery. Overpopulation was made bearable by politeness. But, trying to walk, I was getting nowhere, seeing nothing, merely protecting myself.

"You see, sir?" the doorman said, summing me up on my sudden return. "Difficult"

Difficult was not the way I thought of the mobbed streets in Chennai. They were something else—unendurable, pure horror, cauchemardesque.

They were freaking me out.

"Walking is not possible. Take taxi."

So I took a taxi to Beach Road and on the way reflected on the life of the expatriate American in India: the multitasking businessman or lawyer with his driver, his air-conditioned office, and his secretaries—India is the land of retainers, gofers, body servants, door openers, waiters, and flunkies. The spouse of such an expatriate is similarly elevated, transformed from a simple soul, possibly unlettered—who would have trouble finding India on a map—to a memsahib, the status of an important lady in society, with a cook, a cleaner, a chowkidar, a dhobi or launderer, and if she has a garden, she will have two gardeners.

Typically, this expat couple has limited interests, knows nothing about Indian history, does not speak Hindi. Their children may attend an exclusive school, catering to the children of wealthy Indians and diplomats, in which case the husband will be involved with the school and his wife busybodying with the other parents. They may talk about their hardship, but India has allowed them to taste power—the power of wealth and, even more beguiling, the power over servants and an ease of living that is almost unmatched in the world. In Bombay in 1860, the visiting Bostonian Richard Henry Dana recorded in his diary his surprise at the number of servants in English households (one modest house he visited had seventeen flunkies) and his shock at their low wages. "Their pay is very small & they find themselves [their own] food, lodging and clothing." Nothing had changed.

Inconvenient and grubby though India sometimes seems to the expatriates, it is preferable to being back home and having to drive their own car, cook their own meals, wash the dishes, and do the laundry. The role of the burra memsahib (the great lady), the corrupt quest for cheap labor, the laziness and complacency of the life, the clubbing and partygoing—all this was described in satirical detail long ago, as the dereliction of the British Raj, by Kipling, Orwell, and other mockers. But in this high-tech-driven Raj, the sahibs were back—in Delhi, in Mumbai, in Bangalore, in Chennai, and many other places. Most were Indians lording it over the cheap labor; many were Europeans, some were Americans.

Their counterparts in the old Raj hadn't walked; neither did these people. And now I was one of them, sitting in a taxi to avoid fighting the crowds. I did not like this at all. I did not approve of what I was doing.

I got to the beach—very hot, very dirty, like the wide flat foreshore of the beach at Santa Monica, but this one piled with wrecked boats, squat ting fishermen near them fussing with nets at the tidemark. It was hard for me to imagine a worse life than being a fisherman on the beach at Madras. Having been displaced by the tsunami, they lived in hovels—there were thousands of them—of crackling wind-blown plastic sheeting supported by stick frames of driftwood, two years after the seismic event. Many had been drowned. The blue plastic tarps wore the stenciling of emergency services. Some men were offshore hauling nets; women were selling fish by the side of the road; small children were playing cricket using appropriately shaped bats and wickets of driftwood.

There was no shade. In the blazing sun the temperature was well over 100 degrees. It would be much hotter next month.

I talked to people with memories of the tsunami. One old man said, "Full water, up to St. Mary's"—and he pointed a quarter of a mile away, inland, across Beach Road.