The Peace Correspondent (31 page)

Back ashore, the mercenary holy man and I banter over the few rupees charge, and once more I am in the charge of the single-minded Murkejee. And at last, with late afternoon shadows falling, I pass through the red sandstone gate to see the perfect marble mausoleum reflected in the long shallow pool.

Women with bangled ankles and brilliant saris, clamoring children, holidaying Hindus in Nehru hats and black-veiled Muslims swarm across the marble monument in a crowd scene from Gandhi. Bare feet slap against the cool, smooth as plastic marble floor. Elaborate Arabesque and Arabic inscriptions and inlaid semiprecious stones decorate the great white exterior walls. Inside, the tombs of Shah Jahan and his favorite, Mumtaz, lie side by side in soft light diffused by the translucent dome and pierced marble window screens.

Sha Jahan imported craftsmen from Italy, Turkey and Persia for the fine, delicately-latticed and inlaid stonework. The Moghuls, they said, “designed like giants and built like jewelers.” This marble mausoleum has excited more awe than any other of India's many wonders; “The Ivory Gate through which all dreams come,” a dream in marble, a sigh made stone, a fragile, delicate soap bubble.

A perfect Gibson cocktail onion.

And Mr. Murkejee was right. The Taj is best seen not when the harsh glare of the midday sun burns it bone white, but in the softer flush of the dying day. Outside Agra, we pause at an English Wine and Beer Shop to toast the Taj with a Guru beer
before turning the Ambassador north to the capital. The ancient Indian sun hangs like a saffron disc in the sky to our left as we enter New Delhi.

ON a sweltering weekday rush hour morning, bulging-eyed stone gargoyles high atop the ornate, Indo-Gothic Victoria Terminus Station stare as if in permanent disbelief at the chaotic scene below. Tiffin-wallahs sort out metal lunch buckets for delivery, paan-wallahs roll betel nut and lime mixtures onto leaves. Colorfully garbed migrant women laborers from Andhar Pradesh and Mysore provinces jostle aside scrawny, hairy holy men.

Red London-style double-decker buses, yellow-topped Ambassador taxis and upcountry trucks emblazoned with the most popular Gods of the Hindu pantheon clamor along the crowded road. Bombay's Victoria Terminus, VT to the acronym-loving Indians, is an imposing European structure with a tumultuous crush of Eastern humanity milling before it.

The busy, booming Maharashtra state capital of 8 million people is a rich, cosmopolitan human stew. Urban Bombayers include Parsees, descendants of refugees from Muslim religious persecution in eighth century Persia, dark Tamils, tall, turbaned Sikhs, Gujeratis, Rajasthanis, Sindhis, Goans and all the races of the sub continent bubble along in this pot that does not melt.

The Portuguese, who built a fort in these low-lying, malarial mud flats, bequeathed it to England's King Charles II as a part of a dowry in 1661. After the British government leased Bombay to the British East India Company for £10 gold annually in 1668, its long and prosperous years in the British Empire began. Bombay reached its “Golden Years” in the Victorian reign. Today, India's most modern, prosperous city aspires to be the most Western.

“This is India's Manhattan,” boasts a Bombayite, pointing out the solid row of skyscrapers overlooking the Arabian Sea. This curve of Marine Drive, now Netaji Subash Road, is called the “Queen's Necklace” for the way it twinkles with lights at night. If a map of Bombay resembles satan's profile, Malabar Hill, at one end of Marine Drive, is the hook nose. The hill is India's most expensive residential area, with spacious, Western-style homes.

Behind the skyscrapers and tree-shaded homes, the Banganga area is village India. Tin smiths in ice cream-vendor hats squat before open forges under the eyes of god calendars, insolent children prance noisily around offerings before a gaudy, incense-scented shrine, and in a temple compound, ancient priests prepare vats of spicy food for the poor.

Local fisherwomen in dazzling, day-glo saris and heavy silver jewelry dripping from wrists, ankles, ears and nose, wash clothes in sacred bathing ghats. Bathers claim that the pond, and the surrounding shambles, is as holy as Benares. Looking down on rotting flower blossoms floating on slime-green water, a passing policeman remarks on their beauty. Jabbing his steel-tipped lathi stick at logs as thick as corpse's legs piled in a nearby compound, he adds, with civic pride, “Very nice cremation grounds.” Bright paintings of the Virgin Mother and Child, Ganesh the elephant god, and Saint Sai Bapu discourage men from urinating on the compound wall.

A holy man with trident and begging bowl walks barefoot past the nuclear research center in the heart of chaotic Bombay. Beneath elegant Malabar Hill, one of the world's most expensive residential areas, Hindus wash in the Banganga bathing ghats that are as holy as those at Benares. Goats and ravens pick through the refuse and festering vegetation around the holy pond. Logs like twisted corpses are piled nearby, fuel for the cremation grounds. At the washing ghats, dhobi-wallahs (washermen), part of the fourth, laboring, caste, steam, boil, wash and spread clothes out to dry in spaces they rent by the hour.

Religion intrudes everywhere in India. Paintings of gods --
Virgin Mother and Child, Ganesh, the elephant god, and great scholar-worker Sai Bapu -- stop men from urinating on walls. Hindu and Jain temples, Muslim mosques and Fire Temples of the fair-skinned Parsees, or Zarathustrans, are scattered throughout the city. Religious pictures decorate walls of the smallest curry stall or dry goods shop.

Chaotic Bombay is home to a nuclear research center, and Zoroastrian Towers of Silence, where Parsis dispose of their dead. Evenings, well-fed vultures circle the sky over the towers, near the city reservoir. Local legend has it that vultures dropped human tid-bits into the reservoir before it was covered.

One evening, scores of religious processions block traffic for hours as devotees bear statues of the pink, pot-bellied elephant god to Chowpatty Beach for his annual bath. Celebrating this Chaturthi festival, worshippers smeared with red paint play flutes, bang drums and dance through the streets. All of Bombay stops when Ganesh takes a bath.

In Falklands Road, the infamous Bombay Cages red light district, harsh fluorescent lights pierce the darkness. From behind iron bars, dwarfish girls of many different Asian races -- dark Tamils, Chinese-looking Nepalis -- clutch beseechingly at passersby. A block away, Ganesh followers prance and chant around their dancing god.

Things are never as they seem in India. Even Bombay Duck is a dried, fried, salted jelly fish (also known as stinkfish). India has as great a variety of cuisines as all of Europe, and Bombay is India's gastronomic capital. There is Kutchi food from the frontier with Pakistan, pungent Maharasthra fish, Goan prawn curries, spicy northern Mogul cuisine, more subtle Persian, or Parsee dishes, tandooris, vindaloos and even chow mein. (Bombay has India's best Chinese food). The curious, but cautious, diner may dip a tentative taste bud into the mulligatawny at any of the good hotel restaurants, especially at the Sunday tiffin buffets, or in regional restaurants such as the Khyber, Delhi Durbar or Copper Chimney.

Foreigners unfamiliar with India find doing business difficult. “We suffer diarrhea of words and constipation of action,” goes an ancient Indian saw.

Dominating Bombay's vast harbor is Elephanta Island, with its a monolithic Hindu temple devoted to Lord Shiva. Launches for the island and the holy Sixth century Elephanta Caves leave from the downtown Gateway of India, a Gujarat-style Triumph Arch. Here, a chaotic collection of snake charmers with baskets of cobras, monkey men with playful simians and “filthy-postcard” wallahs selling bad reproductions of the erotic carvings of Khajuraho attempt to squeeze a few rupees from the mainly-Indian tourists.

At the island, fat ladies, chapati-swelled bellies bursting from saris, ride crude palanquins, wooden chairs roped onto poles, up the steep steps. Monkey beggars demand banana baksheesh (tips), from photographers.

Grandmotherly guides squabble over long pointing sticks, a mark of office, then go on to give their own interpretations of Hindu sacred art. All art in India is basically religious in nature, a guide explains, as her flock studies Vishnu's consort, Parvati. This hourglass female body, with perfect full breasts, narrow waist and swinging hip, suggest that the ancient Hindu and modern Playboy magazine physical ideals of womanhood are identical.

Yoga, too, is religious, a guide says. “Not just head down, legs up.” Statues depicting normal solitary figures doing yoga have only two arms. The windmill effect of multi-limbed gods is meant to illustrate motion. “Like you make Mickey Mouse film,” the guide explains.

Film? Bombay is South Asia's Hollywood, the world's largest film-making center, its dozen studios churning out half of India's 800 pictures a year. Every film, in Hindi and regional languages, is a mixture of romance, adventure, music, action, drama and dancing. The genre is known locally as marsala, a mixture of spices for curry. Most action consists of chubby girls running
around trees singing and batting kohl-darkened eyes at porky heroes.

Plump is sexy, and successful, on the subcontinent. Western stars balloon up on Indian billboards; poster artists make even Jane Fonda pleasantly plump.

A tattered hoarding breathlessly promises “RAPE-MURDAR AND ROMANCE FILM” with “Sex Bomb Silk Smita.” This in a country that barely tolerates on-screen kisses.

Glossy Indian film magazines, the Bombay weekly city magazine, Business India, and Debonair, a down-scale, modest Playboy, keep the Bombay sophisticate posted as to what is happening in his swinging city.

The bar guide in a local weekly says, “the Hi-Time has a balcony reminding you of bars in the Wild West.” Not that western, though. A wine-glass-shaped menu card on the bar proclaims: “Dear Guest. The State Prohibition & Excise Notification No. FLR 1079/105-A PRO dated 20-9-79, prohibits the sale of alcoholic beverages to Indian Nationals on ‘dry days'.”

In the evenings, much of Bombay gathers at Chowpatty Beach for a sunset circus. Couples who have escaped from the watchful eye of parents, snuggle on the rocks. Pan salesmen roll betel nut and spice mixtures on betel leaves to sell. Children line up before crude, hand-powered miniature merry-go-rounds. Yogis bury themselves in the sand like human crabs, waving their arms for alms.

Bombay is like a Maharashtra curry, mysterious and overpowering at first, rich and wondrous to those with the taste.