Mark and I
will be spending about three weeks in India while on our long voyage this
December/January. We’ll fly to Delhi after a week in Istanbul, spend a few days
there, then fly to Calcutta (now Kolkata) where we will join a GAP tour for two
weeks, travelling by train up the Ganges, stopping along the way at several
cities, and ending back at Delhi. From there we will visit Bangkok, Vietnam,
and Hong Kong. We travelled in South East Asia in 2000, the first of our
every-five-year long trips, visiting Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos,
Vietnam, and Cambodia. Mark has travelled in India. When he was just a lad of
24 to 26, he lived in a small city in Thailand, constructing an air base and
other pieces of infrastructure as the US built up its presence in that area,
readying for the big push on Vietnam. He and his first wife Bobi had access to
the American services flights throughout the area when he was on leave. They
took advantage of that largesse, dropping about five times into India and
seeing Delhi, Mumbai, Agra, Chandigarh, and[Kashmir.
I have never
been to India though for decades I have been interested in its long history and
diversity. Much of my early knowledge and sense of it came through reading the
novels of people like Paul Scott and EM Forster – in other words I imbibed a
distinctly British Raj sensibility with respect to the sub-continent. Over the years though, through
films, documentaries, more recent novels, and reporting by writers like
Stephanie Nolen of the Globe, I have developed a more realistic perspective on
the present day conditions of this enormously populated country. On our visit
to Egypt in 2010 I had an experience of these perspectives intersecting. The
tour along the Nile that we took included a three day cruise. Our group was
slightly too large to be seated together at one of the circular dining tables.
Most of our fellow travellers were about the ages of my daughters. They secured
a table together; we sat nearby with another couple about
our age and a family of five from Bangalore, India: parents about our ages,
their son and only child, his wife and five year old daughter.
I was pleased
by this arrangement as the Indian family held great interest for me. I had an
opportunity on several occasions to talk with them, especially with the mother.
She was quite forthcoming about her background, caste, and family customs. She
and her husband were Brahmin. Their marriage had been arranged in
the ways of their people (which she detailed for me), as had that of their son.
This lady had grown up under the Raj. Her father had held some important
position in the British government there and they had lived during her youth in
a beautiful mansion in Bangalore. She seemed to me the quintessential upper
class British Empire/Indian woman of whom Paul Scott wrote in The Jewel in the
Crown. Though she was about seven years younger than me, she appeared to be
some years older. Her demeanour was entirely gentle and kindly. We took to one
another quickly and had a series of talks about her life and her family.
Her husband,
by contrast, seemed inserted into the life of the modern, burgeoning India. He
was an engineer who owned a company that made doors for airplanes. Their son,
also an engineer, worked for the firm and clearly was positioned to take over
from his father when he retired. The son’s wife, though well-educated and also
of the Brahmin caste, did not work outside the home (the home, I hasten to add,
shared by all five of the family members). At dinner this lady was quiet to the
point of being mute. Her sole duty seemed to be the care and (literally) the
feeding of her young daughter. She cut and gave each morsel to the little girl,
who seemed to take no initiative whatsoever in her own nutrition. The child and
her father also were quite silent during the meals, though the young man would
talk with us if his parents had left the table. The entire situation seemed
claustrophobic in particular for the younger generation, though it undoubtedly
replicated that experienced by the older lady in her own early marriage.
All of the
above detail is by introduction to the day I spent on Friday “seeking India.”
Our visit there requires visas. I had tried to apply on line but had run into
snags that were frustrating. I tried to call their consulate but there was only
a series of messages to listen to. I phoned the organization to which the
Government of India has given the on-line business of arranging passports and
visa, again with no satisfaction. So I determined to go to them. I started from
home about 9:45 AM, going by subway and then bus to an office in Don Mills on
Lawrence Ave E. I arrived about 10:55 and spent the next half hour standing in
line to speak to the receptionist. There were about 30-40 people either in my
line or waiting in chairs to my left to be seen by case workers facilitating
their requests. Other than one other lady I was the only non-South East Asian
person present. I minded none of the above circumstances. I was on a mission to
get into India and this was all part of the process. My turn: I produced
passports and tiny (ugly photos) and requested visas for our trip. Where was my
application form? I hadn’t one—wouldn’t that be provided there? No, one could
only get one on-line. Ouch! All that way, all that time, to simply be sent home
again.
My mood was
considerably less up-beat on the journey back into the center of the city. But
no matter, I would get Mark to work on the application process with me this
weekend as his grasp of up-loading tiny pictures is superior to mine. In the
meantime I headed downtown to the Carlton theatre to see an Indian film called
“Court” that I had read about. This was no Bollywood movie. Its story was of a
somewhat rabble-rousing poet/singer who was arrested and accused of abetting
the suicide of a sewer worker who, it was alleged, had been moved by the lyrics
of one of his songs heard two days before his death. The singer, an older man
known to the police for his incendiary, anti-establishment musical rants,
rarely appears in the film, other than on two occasions when he was performing
with his troupe of singers and musicians. The real focus of the movie is the
Indian court system, its inefficiency and interminable delays.
Most of the
(in)action was portrayed in the courts themselves. The judge, prosecuting
attorney and the counsel for the defence are shown again and again for brief appearances
with witnesses. Some missing information or unexamined issue always provoked a
delay sufficient to have the case put over to a later date. In the meantime the
poet, having been denied bail, was incarcerated. Various points became clear as
the “trial” continued though they seemed to have little effect on the judge or
the disposition of the case. The police accepted the word of a man who was
known to have acted as a witness for the prosecution in several unrelated cases,
always those investigated by the same police officer. The “proof” that the
sewer worker had committed suicide lay in the fact that he had worked there for
three years without injury, yet had been found dead in the sewer tunnel with no
protective gear, something alleged to only have been possible if he had
deliberately entered the tunnel to take his life by inhaling the poisonous fumes
therein. Testimony by his wife, however, made it clear that the man had never
been issued protective gear. He had always gauged the levels of noxious gases
by looking to see if there were live cockroaches close to the entrance! The
city agency responsible for sewer workers, undoubtedly Dalits, formerly called
“untouchables,” did not provide adequate working conditions for its employees.
No piece of testimony appeared to make any impact upon either the judge or the
prosecutor. The trial simply continued at its glacial pace to the on-going
frustration of the defence attorney, the poet’s supporters, and I must say, the
theatre audience.
There were
side scenes showing something of the lives of the three main players:
prosecutor, defence, and judge. The prosecuting attorney, seemingly secure in
her adamant defence of the laws of the land – even of statutes enacted over a
century earlier – went home to her family in the evenings, cooking supper while supervising
her son’s homework, and giving some legal advice to a friend by telephone. The
defence counsel, a bachelor with his own place and friends with whom he enjoyed
evenings out, contended with his nagging and demanding parents. The judge, seen
at a day-long party with family and friends, gives advice to a young man who is
concerned about the behaviour of one of his children: have a ring made for him
with a particular gem-stone.
The film ends
with no resolution to the case, in fact, with a fairly clear idea that it will
continue for years. In all likelihood the poet, whose health is not strong,
will die in prison. When the screen darkened and the credits began to roll, the
small audience for the film united in a half-groan, half-laugh. The point about
the ineffectiveness of the court system was clearly made. Still, it was an
interesting movie, not showcasing the exotic beauties of India, but rather, in
muted shades giving a slice of post-colonial day-to-day life within one sector.
I continue to
seek India, clear that my roughly three weeks in the country will only give me,
as did this film, windows into small slices of the vastness of this ancient
land and people.
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