River Town Chronicles

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  MY FAMILY AND I first went to India for a year during 1962–1963. At the time, I was a graduate student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and had received a research grant from The Social Science Research Council to study the merchant castes in a small town in northwest India. The Chairperson of my PhD Committee at Berkeley, Professor Gerald Berreman, suggested that I might want to consider River Town (pseudonym) as a possible place to do my research. I had completed several years of intensive conversational Hindi at Berkeley and later an additional year of Urdu at the University of Chicago, which provided me with a reasonably good foundation in the spoken language of the area of River Town. I was also fortunate that the brother of my Hindi language instructor at Berkeley happened to be from a nearby town and kindly offered me letters of introduction to his family members who assisted me in getting set up in River Town.

  I returned to India for a year in 1967–1968 under a grant from The American Council of Learned Societies and again for six months in 1972, with support from The American Institute of Indian Studies, to continue my work with merchant castes and small towns in the same general area. This book chronicles the pleasures and perils that my family and I experienced during that time, more than forty-five years ago. It is based largely on notes and memories of the people, places and events of the time. In that sense, it is part history, part anthropology and part memoir. All of the people, places and events described in this book are real, but I have taken the liberty of rearranging them in significant ways in order to condense and chronicle as many of our experiences as possible.

  There are no heroes or villains in this story. My work was never intended to be a critique of the way of life of those who live in River Town nor simply an account of our attempts to survive what might be considered the perils of living there. Rather it is a portrait of an encounter between people with differing cultural assumptions and social practices that reveal themselves in the course of the events of everyday life. It reflects the needs, the triumphs, the illusions and tragedies that we all experience when faced with the unfamiliar and unexpected. It is an encounter that has made our life much richer and more meaningful than would have been possible otherwise.

  MAD DOGS

  MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF RIVER TOWNwas from the back of a horse drawn tonga as we inched our way against a crush of humans, animals and bicycles. The rain poured down making forward progress even more difficult. I wondered if this was why the place was called “River Town!” The tonga walla reined in his horse next to a group of men huddled together in front of a sweet shop. I couldn’t see anything, but heard a dull thump and then an angry howl. Suddenly I saw a dog’s head snap back, as a huge man swung a thick, six foot wooden pole against the bony structure of an emaciated looking dog. Thump…Again the man swung the wooden pole, only this time with more force and the dog collapsed in front of the sweet shop, foam drooling from the corners of its mouth. Why was this dog being punished in such a brutal manner? The tonga moved ahead and I could see the lifeless dog sprawled out in front of the sweet shop. The tonga walla turned his head towards me. Pagal. Wo kuta pagal ho gaya. (Crazy. That dog has gone crazy). This was my introduction to River Town. A rabid dog sprawled out in front of the sweet shop, directly across the lane from where my wife, Pat, and I and our three children would live in an unoccupied shop in the bazaar.

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  FINDING A PLACE TO LIVE

  THE TONGA MADE ITS WAY to the chowk (center of town). I paid the tonga walla and walked down a narrow lane to Lallaji’s office. He was dressed in a white cotton dhoti and a loose fitting kamiz and sitting cross-legged and barefoot on a small wooden platform. I handed him a note of introduction from Vinod, his nephew and a friend of mine from graduate school in Berkeley. He seemed pleased to receive the note from Vinod and insisted I join him for a cup of tea. His servant raced out to the bazaar and returned with brass tumblers filled with delicious hot tea mixed with milk and sugar. After inquiries about Vinod and another round of tea, I explained to Lallaji that I wanted to live in River Town and learn about its history and culture. He remained expressionless as if lost in a deep meditative state. I told him that I had a wife and three children who would be living with me. He smiled and softly remarked that it would not be possible. “The women in town would not like it.” He was generalizing about all the women in town, though I was pretty sure he was talking about the women in the merchant neighborhoods, the keepers of purity, who would not like the smell of cooked meat contaminating the strictly vegetarian Hindu neighborhoods of the merchants. But I persisted until Lallaji reluctantly offered to rent me an empty shop in the bazaar (away from the merchant neighborhoods). Still, he insisted it would not be suitable for an American and, furthermore, a small courtyard out back would have to be shared with another family. He was sure I would see the stupidity of such an arrangement but I was happy to hear that someplace, anyplace, was available. Apparently the bazaar was a neutral zone, sealed off from the inner neighborhoods of the merchants, a suitable place for mad dogs and anthropologists. We settled on the rent. Seven dollars a month, including electricity.

  BACK TO DELHI

  SOON AFTER NEGOTIATINGa place to stay in River Town, I took the train back to Delhi where Pat, my wife, and our three children, Tim (6 years old), Brian (3 years.) and Lori (2 years old) were staying in a bungalow at Fonseca’s, a residential compound in New Delhi owned by a Portuguese gentleman who had lived all of his life in India. Pat had decided that they would stay there until I found a place to live in River Town.

  The atmosphere at Fonseca’s was an odd mixture of traditional Indian habits and British colonial pretense. The Indian help lived in small huts next to the bungalows. In the main building there was a dining area with a veneer of formality, where servants dressed in white tunics, plumed turbans and immaculate white gloves squatted on their haunches waiting patiently to serve up bad British food and afternoon tea and biscuits.

  There was another American academic staying at Fonseca’s, a frustrated economist on a Ford Foundation grant who shuffled off each morning in good spirits only to return each afternoon disheveled and disillusioned by his encounters with the Indian bureaucracy. “We never get anything done,” he complained. “All I do is sit around and drink tea and try to explain to everyone why I’m not married and have no children.” The economist had learned the hard way that there is no middle ground for a foreigner in India. You either love it or hate it. His futile struggle against the rip current of Indian culture ultimately spelled doom for him. He had had enough and soon returned empty handed to the U.S.

  SHOPPING IN CHANDNI CHOWK

  I SET OUT FOR CHANDNI CHOWK, the magnificent bazaar in Old Delhi, in order to buy supplies for our house in River Town. Walking through the bazaar can easily overwhelm the senses and leave one gasping for air. It reminded me of when I was a boy growing up on the coast in Southern California, where I would plunge into the ocean, let myself go limp and enjoy the pull of the ocean’s rip as it swept me out from shore to the breakers, where another wave would pick me up and fling me back to shore. There was no way to struggle against this. It was an utter sweet feeling of helplessness. It was as if I was being pulled by an unseen force greater than individual will, a tiny sliver of metal being pulled in all directions by a powerful magnet.

  In Chandni Chowk I was accosted by beggars, men with stumps for legs who paddled themselves along the street on small wooden planks with wheels, propelling themselves forward with their hands pressed to the pavement for locomotion. There were pimps, drug pushers, pick pockets, beautiful women walking gracefully in their saris, children with bright eyes dressed up in their best clothes, shopkeepers with their b
alance scales in hand and laborers moving heavy loads strapped to their backs. I passed elegant sari shops, gold merchants, fruit vendors, brass utensil shops, brothels, and paan wallas who sold their paan (beetle nut wrapped in a green leaf that provides a sweet, mild stimulant). The first time I saw large splotches of red on the pavement, I thought it was blood coughed up by someone with a fatal lung disease. I was relieved to find out it was just someone’s paan spit out on the street.

  Underneath the apparent chaos of Chandni Chowk is a unique order defined by Indian sensibilities. Each craft, retail shop and service had its well defined location which transformed the apparent chaos into a well ordered map drawn in a foreign language. Cloth merchants, sari shops, tailors, spice shops, gold merchants, each had its own location along with others of its kind, like schools of fish of the same species swimming together in a vast ocean. If one knows where to look, and how to see, chaos reformulates itself into order.

  In Chandni Chowk I purchased the goods to set up house in River Town; cooking utensils, a small kerosene camp stove, bed sheets, some cups and saucers, thin cotton mattresses and several rough woolen blankets. I left each of the items in the shop where I had purchased them and in the last shop I visited, the shopkeeper had one of his helpers go with me to collect the items and put them into an empty gunny sack until it was full to the brim. Then he tied off the top of the sack and heaved the load onto his back. I flagged down a scooter driver and placed the sack on my lap. We wound our way out of the bazaar and back to Fonseca’s, where I rolled the sack through the front door of our bungalow. I remember Pat standing there with her hands on her hips, looking at me in disbelief. “That’s it?” she said. “That’s all we have to furnish our house? A gunny sack full of what?”

  TRAIN TO RIVER TOWN

  I MADE ARRANGEMENTS for a taxi to pick us up at 4 A.M. to take us to the train station. It was a struggle to fit the five of us into the cab with the gunny sack and our suitcases strapped to the roof. The taxi driver asked me where we were going and I said we were going to the station and then on to River Town. He glanced disapprovingly in the rear view mirror and announced that we wouldn’t like it there “It’s a terrible place, old and backward, bahut ganda jagah (a very dirty place).” His words jogged Pat out of her semi-conscious state so early in the morning. Her head snapped back and she looked at me with a startled expression. I knew what she was thinking. “What in God’s name have you gotten us into now?” If I had known the answer to that, I suppose we might have turned back.

  We arrived at the train station and unloaded the gunny sack and suitcases from the roof of the taxi. Pat stayed with the children and gear while I went to the ticket window and purchased one way, 2nd class tickets to the station nearest to River Town. Several coolies loaded the suitcases on their heads and another rolled our gunny sack onto a hand cart. “Right here, sahab. There are empty seats in this compartment.” They piled our suitcases in the overhead storage racks and, because of its size, had to place the gunny sack on the floor near the door. Soon, the compartment filled with other passengers, the late ones climbing into the overhead luggage racks for a nap or hanging out the doors of the compartment. I guess we were lucky to have seats on the hard wooden benches that lined both sides of the rail car.

  All eyes were fixed on Tim, Brian Lori, Pat and I. It seemed as if people were looking right through us in order to fix their attention on some imaginary objects behind us. Finally, the train pulled away from the station and the sound and slightly swaying motion of the train felt soothing as it barreled through the countryside, spewing smoke and coal soot from the steam engine into the compartment. Finally, a man asked where we were going, and when I said we were going to River Town he replied, “Good. River Town is a bahut acchaa jagah (a very good place).” Pat rolled her eyes. It seemed River Town would be a place of contradictions.

  A young blind boy jumped on the train at the next station and pulled out a small stringed instrument from a cloth sack strung over his shoulder. He had a sweet voice and paused every couple of feet, holding out his hand in hopes of someone dropping a few coins in it. I put some coins in his hand, as did others who gave willingly, even though it looked like they could ill afford it. The blind boy touched his forehead in gratitude and moved on, playing his instrument, along the passengers seated in the hard wooden benches of the compartment we all shared.

  Six hours later, we arrived at the nearest train station, still some 7 miles away from River Town. Our new found friends in the train compartment advised us that the train would stop for only a minute or two, and that we must be ready to jump out as soon as the train slowed down. We stood ready at the door and as soon as the train rolled almost to a stop, Pat jumped out. I handed her Tim first, then Brian and Lori and finally jumped out myself. As the train was pulling out of the station, a man threw out our suitcases and then pushed the gunny sack out the door with his foot. “Jai Ram” (victory to Rama), the man shouted. The gunny sack made a loud clatter, landing at our feet as we stood dazed and disoriented in a soaking rain along side the railroad tracks.

  Several coolies approached us and asked where we were going. They wanted to know if we had gotten off the train at the wrong stop. When I told them we were going to River Town they looked puzzled but scurried around and put our suitcases and gunney sack into a horse drawn tanga. We climbed in on top of the luggage for the seven mile ride from the station to River Town. The monsoon rains poured down on the canopy of the tonga as we huddled together barely speaking a word. The tanga clip-clopped along the road, out of the station area and into the countryside, where the air smelled clean and fresh. The tanga walla urged his horse on, sometimes with soft, pleading words and at other times with a sharp swat to the horse’s behind. In the distance, a cluster of nondescript buildings drew closer until I could make out the outlines of River Town. I was nervous and excited at the same time. “This is it. This is River Town,” I said apprehensively. We entered the lane leading to the bazaar and I asked the tanga walla to stop across from the sweet shop, the same sweet shop where the rabid dog had been bludgeoned to death. We were drenched as we climbed down from the tanga and stood in front of the abandoned shop that would be our home for the next year.

  NEW NEIGHBORS

  I THINK WE WERE ALL RELIEVED to reach River Town without incident. It had been a long trip and all of us were tired. The tanga walla helped me unload the suitcases and gunny sack from the tanga, as two boys rushed out suddenly from our new home and grabbed our belongings. A third boy wrestled with the gunny sack and we followed them inside. Next to the doorway, a small man in a dirty shirt, loose fitting pants and a cap sat mending a pair of shoes. The mochi ( belonging to the leather worker caste) looked up at us cautiously and touched his right hand to his forehead and then resumed his work. Inside, a gaggle of small children peeked out from behind the back door that led to a small courtyard filled with rubble. “Angreez (English),” one of them said. “Nahiin, nahiin, Amrikan (No, no, American)” one of the others speculated. The boys put our gear down and called out for their father, who emerged wearing pajamas (loose fitting pants), a short cotton vest over a white shirt that hung below the vest, and a pair of scuffed leather shoes, the backs broken down, with no laces. He had a stubble of grayish beard and short cropped hair. I guessed he was about forty-five years old, but it was hard for me to tell for certain. He said Lallajii told him we were coming but that he didn’t believe him. He told us to sit down. “This is a bad time to travel. You should have waited until the monsoon rains stopped.” I looked around for a place to sit. There were two straight back chairs with their wicker seats busted out and a couple of charpois (rope-strung cots) propped up against one wall. On the opposite wall were several small wooden pegs sticking out from the plaster, apparently to hang clothes or other items on. “Tell your mother to make some tea.” A small boy scampered out of the room and disappeared into the courtyard. “Where do you all live?” I asked. “We live here,” the man replied. “We are your neigh
bors.” The man introduced himself as Ram Swarup (the image of the god Rama), and his sons as Mohan (“enchanting,” and an empithet of the god Krishna), Mohendra (an epithet of the god Vishnu), Bhushan (an ornament, a jewel) and the youngest, Paphu (an affectionate nickname). “All sons? No daughters?” I asked. He told me the girls were in the other room with their mother but were afraid to come out. “A jao betii (come here, daughter).” A little girl with huge, dark eyes emerged from behind the door. Her name was Meena ranii (queen Meena). “Go get your sisters.” Meena scampered off and returned with her three older sisters, Shakti (strong, powerful, like the goddess Durga), Saroj (lotus flower) and Madhu (honey, sweet), a young girl with a cheerful smile and generous eyes.

  A few minutes later, Mohan returned with a tray filled with cups of tea. Following behind him was a lithe, angular faced woman with high cheekbones whose small size was accompanied by quick, agile movements that hinted at some hidden strength and self confidence. I guessed that she was in her early thirties. She was wearing a thin, white cotton sari, the end of which covered her hair and was drawn across her face so that only her eyes and cheekbones were visible. She was barefoot and had several rings on her toes and a small ornament pierced the side of her nose. Ram Swarup introduced her as “the children’s mother” and offered no other name. The children all called her bhabhi. I introduced myself, Pat, Tim, Brian and Lori. Ram Swarup wrestled with the sounds of each of our names and motioned to Pat and me to sit down on the chairs. Our butts poked through the broken cane bottoms of both chairs. We were each given a cup of hot tea and the worn pot was placed on the floor in front of us. I asked Ram Swarup to join us, but he refused. The tea tasted delicious. It was sweet and warmed our insides after the drenching we faced in the tonga ride from the train station. Mohan filled our cups again and looked pleased that we accepted the tea. The rest of Ram Swarup’s family stood there watching us intently, perhaps wondering if we might not drink tea, or perhaps drink it in some strange, unfamiliar manner.