Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

It seemed I was the only foreign traveler in Tashkent. I was the only guest in my huge hotel. I never saw another tourist in this vast city. And when at last I went to Tashkent Airport for the flight to the Punjab, I was the only person checking in, the only passenger boarding the plane. It was the plane's one stop, the Uzbek Airways flight from Birmingham to Amritsar, every male passenger a turbaned Sikh, every woman in a sari.

I left Tashkent feeling lucky that I had gotten here unscathed from London, that my close encounters had been with good people. The hassles and delays were part of all travel. The revelation was that the old world still existed. The airport had been empty; but the marshaling yards of Shimoly Station were busy with shunting trains, and the station itself was crowded with people going all over the country, and they were taking the train because they were poor.

As for me, here as elsewhere, I felt I was the fortunate traveler.

THE SHAN-E-PUNJAB EXPRESS TO DELHI

BECAUSE IT WAS A SACRED CITY, a howling but deaf and discontinuous mob, mostly pilgrims, kicked along the streets and lanes of Amritsar. These sun-baked streets were thick with stinging dust and smelly traffic, and the traffic included sacred cows, three-legged dogs, old cars, twisted bikes, scooter rickshaws, pedicabs, the usual trotting two-wheeled pony carts—tongas and gharries—and rusted buses. There were heaps of sorted and pawed-through garbage; the sidewalk overspill of fix-it men and their antique tools—spoke-shaves, chisels, cobbling awls, soldering irons, treadle-powered sewing machines; blue exhaust fumes, oily dirt, fresh dung, the fountain in the middle of the miserable road with its sign, Amritsar Improvement Trust,

the temples so attractive to beggars because holy precincts encouraged the giving of alms; and loud noise trumpeting the simple but firmly held Indian delusion that honking horns sped the flow of traffic.

The point about the crowds of excited pilgrims in a sacred place is that they are giddy just from physically being there. Or more than giddy—chattering, skipping, giggling, goggle-eyed with rapture in this, the center of Sikhdom, all of these turbaned men and fluttering women hurrying to the Golden Temple...

Welcome to India and the proof that, as Borges once wrote, "India is larger than the world." On the surface, nothing had changed in Amritsar. From what I could gather, the country was no different from what I had seen three decades before. This prospect delighted me. It was a relief, the mildly orchestrated free-for-all of India—something of a madhouse with a touch of anarchy, yes, but an asylum in which strangers are wel come, even inquisitorial ones like me; where anything is possible, the weather is often pleasant, and the spicy food clears your sinuses. Most of India embodies Blake's dictum that "energy is eternal delight." All you need is a strong stomach, a little money, and a tolerance for crowds. And a way of lifting your gaze upward and moving on, so that you don't see the foreground—in India the foreground is generally horrific. The reality was that Amritsar, like all Indian cities, looked as though it had been made by human hands, skinny ones, and so the result had a look of improvisation, faulty and fragile and somehow incomplete.

The horror is possibly true, or perhaps all illusion, as some Indians believe, smiling and saying, "True and not true, sar. Anekantavada, sar. The many-sidedness of reality, sar."

The austere torpor of the Stans had been wearing me down—the humorlessness and paranoia of a police state, no outward indication of struggle, a kind of beaten-down acceptance. Acceptance is not an Indian trait. In India, no one takes no for an answer: policemen are jeered at, authority exists to be defied, walls are erected to be defaced, and everyone is talking, often in English. Shoeshine boys, rickshaw wallahs, taxi drivers, beggars, businessmen, shopkeepers, and Surinder ("I am agent, sar") Singh with his gimpy leg and his practiced patter, all of them demanding attention. Surinder had assured me of a ticket to Delhi, though the train was full. He had connections, though his ragged clothes did not inspire confidence.

When I remarked that Amritsar hadn't changed, Indians clicked their tongues or sucked their teeth in annoyance. They insisted it had been modernized. I never saw where or how. It is a border city, only a few miles from the Pakistan frontier, and consequently not a place for investment. Besides, being a holy city in India is plenty, since Indians are instinctive pilgrims, liking the ritual, the spiritual boost, and the companionship of a pilgrimage, which always involves a great number of people, a long train ride, loud music, and platters of food.

I was at the main railway station with Surinder.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Guess."

"Please tell me, sar."

"Go ahead, guess. What do you think?"