Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Beggars I saw as part of life in India. How could you have 1.3 billion people and not have beggars? They went with the temples, they were part of the landscape—they weren't even the worst part. But they got me down. You could live a long time in India if you stayed indoors, bossing the servants, but I was outside most of the time, usually in the role of a pedestrian, and many other people were outside too.

My time was up: I had to move on to Sri Lanka. I admitted to myself that I was spooked and needed relief.

One day I saw a round rotted fruit by the side of the road. It was crawling with insects, alive with big ants, blackened by them. Was it a coconut or a durian? Whatever, it represented a little world of hunger obscured by its eaters.

I finally left Trichy, and India. What sent me away was not the poverty, though it was pathetic and there was plenty of it. It wasn't the dirt, though it sometimes seemed to me that nothing in India was clean. It wasn't the pantheon of grotesque gods, some like monkeys, some like elephants, some wearing skulls as ornaments, some in a posture of repose under the hood of a rearing cobra—terrifying or benign to the believers propitiating them with flowers. It was not the widow-burning or the child marriages or the crowds of the cringing and the limbless, the one-eyed, the stumblers, the silent ones who hardly lifted their eyes. An experience of India could be like entering a painting by Hieronymus Bosch—among the deformed, the fish-faced, the crawling, the flapping, the beaked, the scaly, the screaming, the armless, and the web-footed.

Not the heat, either, though every day in the south it was in the high 90s. Not the boasting and booming Indians and their foreign partners screwing the poor and the underpaid for profit. Not the roads, though the roads were hideous and impassable in places. Not the fear of disease or the horror of the obscenely wealthy, though the sight of the superrich in India could be more disquieting than the sight of the most wretched beggar.

None of these. They can all be rationalized.

What sent me away finally was something simpler, but larger and inescapable. It was the sheer mass of people, the horribly thronged cities, the colossal agglomeration of elbowing and contending Indians, the billion-plus, the sight of them, the sense of their desperation and hunger, having to compete with them for space on sidewalks, on roads, everywhere—what I'd heard on the train from Amritsar: "Too many. Too many." All of them jostling for space, which made for much of life there a monotony of frotteurism, life in India being an unending experience of nonconsensual rubbing.

And not because it was India—Indians were good-humored and polite on the whole—but because it was the way of the world. The population of the United States had doubled in my lifetime, and the old simple world that I had known as a boy was gone. India was a reminder to me of what was in store for us all, a glimpse of the future. Trillions of dollars were spent to keep people breathing, to cure disease, and to extend human life, but nothing was being done to relieve the planet of overpopulation, the contending billions, like those ants on the rotting fruit.

I had not felt that way in India long ago, but I was younger then. I took the short flight over the Palk Strait to Sri Lanka, into a different world.

THE COASTAL LINE TO GALLE AND HAMBANTOTA

I STUMBLED INTO COLOMBO on my birthday. The winsome hotel clerk in the crimson sari knew this somehow. She said, "Happy birthday, sir. Please call us if you want us to come up and sing to you." That "us" made the offer sound either wickeder or more chaste.

To give the day a meaning I went for a walk, marveling at how thinly populated the city was compared to the ones I'd just left in India. The entire population of the Republic of Sri Lanka was the same as the population of the city of Mumbai: twenty million. And the placid and procrastinating Sinhalese were a reminder of how frenzied and loquacious the Indians had been, forever vexed and talkative. I found a barbershop and asked for a baldy and wound up with a crewcut. Then I had my picture taken by a sidewalk photographer. I bought a Sri Lankan notebook. The taxi driver who took me back to the hotel asked me whether I wanted to see anything special, and when I asked him what he meant by special, he gave me a fangy stare and said, "Vimmin" I said primly no. But the word stuck in my head. I remembered that Colombo had a reputation for debauchery. Perhaps I could find another taxi driver later on and indulge myself in birthday depravity among Sinhalese voluptuaries and lotus eaters.