Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Eventually the Ice House was bought by the Indian government. It was first used as the Brahmana Widows' Hostel, then a teachers' hostel, and then was left to rot. When I saw it in 1973 it was a semi-ruin. It was now a spiritual center and a museum, a permanent exhibit of the life and work of Swami Vivekananda, an architectural curiosity and part of India's "cultural heritage," so the sign said; but also, in its way, a permanent contribution to the Chennai skyline from a New England entrepreneur.

This little discovery and its history cheered me up, but when I left the Ice House and headed south along Marina Beach towards Mylapore and its churches, I was followed by a troop of ragged children, begging for money, asking for food, for anything; and by the time I had outwalked them, I was back in the crush of people and traffic.

In my Bangalore hotel I had found a discarded copy of Dream Catcher, by Margaret Salinger, a memoir of her experience growing up in the J. D. Salinger household. It was a humane and insightful account of a volatile man whose moods dominated the family. He was not lovable, vulnerable Holden Caulfield, but paranoiac and self-important, with an easily ruffled disposition. Margaret convincingly made the case for the Salinger household having all the traits of a cult and J.D. himself the severe attributes of a cult leader.

In the course of the book, Margaret mentions her father's interest in Raj Yoga and Sri Ramakrishna, who was Vivekananda's guru. She quotes from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna:

A man may live in a mountain cave, smear his body with ashes, observe fasts and practice austere discipline, but if his mind dwells on worldly objects, on "woman and gold," I say, "Shame on him!" Woman and gold are the most fearsome enemies of the enlightened way, and woman rather more than gold, since it is woman that creates the need for gold. For woman one man becomes the slave of another, and so loses his freedom. Then he cannot act as he likes.

"The only thing worth reading" was J. D. Salinger's judgment on this bit of pompous misogyny. Swami Vivekananda was another story. He is praised by Seymour Glass in the Salinger short story "Hapworth 16, 1924." A scripture I found at the Ice House suggested why this might be so. The Swami said, "Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy—by one or more or all of them. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines or dogmas or rituals or books or temples are but secondary details."

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I STILL WONDERED IF I might find a ferry to Sri Lanka. Often, it was not until I was near a point of departure that I got reliable information. It was easy in Chennai to find out about airline flights to New York City; it was impossible to get a straight answer about ferries that departed Rameswaram, just down the line.

Chennai was listed among the cities described as being the engines driving the economy of the new India. Foreign companies relocated here to improve their profits, to manufacture clothes and electronics, to get their phone calls answered, to outsource their piece goods. Yet my being in Chennai only confirmed what I had felt in Bangalore, that the new India was rising on the backs of poorly paid (but well-educated) workers. Yes, it was better than their starving, and I admired their work ethic. But I had seen enough; it was another shocking and unfinished transformation, and I hated having to contend with the continuous struggle and nonconsensual rubbing in this reeking sprawl of eleven million people, no matter how conscientious they were.

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THE BEAUTIFUL THING about boredom or irritation in an Indian city was that it could be relieved by catching a train. I went to Egmore Station and bought a ticket for the morning train to Tiruchirappalli—"Trichy" to most Tamils. It was less than a six-hour ride, with coconut trees and paddy fields the whole way. The man in the next seat introduced himself as Sathymurthy. He was a Tamil. I asked him if he knew anything about the ferry to Sri Lanka.

"Notwithstanding the present crisis," he began, and then, in the mellifluous generalities I had come to associate with Indians who had no idea what they were talking about, he described the situation in the south. I was soon asleep. When I woke, he was gone and the train was pulling into Tiruchirappalli.