Numb in India, finale: The fire sermon
On the burning in the eye and the burning in the world
Numb at the Lodge has reached the end of its holiday. Paid subscribers have joined us in a brain-melting tourist odyssey across the past and future of Indias real and imagined. The really good stuff is behind the paywall: this time, it’s one last journey in search of the secret that’s been hidden in this country for two and a half thousand years. If you want to come along, all you have to do is click the button below:
Today I’m writing from a small town in the lower Ganges valley. This is what everyone tells you to do: get out of the big cities and experience the calm and tranquility of small-town India. I’m just not sure you’re supposed to do it in Bihar. Even my Indian friends were very concerned to learn I was coming here, because among Indians Bihar has the same bad reputation India has in the rest of the world. According to the stereotype, Bihar is flat, dusty, polluted, chaotic, and poor. It has far too many people, and while they’re all wonderful on an individual level, genuine and hardworking, they’re also generally considered to be ignorant, illiterate, toothless, crippled petty criminals who practice rape as a form of light entertainment. Biharis keep migrating to greener, more prosperous parts of India, where they live in shanties and work for drastically lower wages than the locals, who often quickly and violently turn against them. In Bihar itself the bridges keep collapsing, the politicians keep getting arrested for corruption, and the rural population keep committing gory caste massacres in what’s effectively an undeclared civil war. Unfortunately, this stereotype comes with statistics. Bihar is India’s second-largest state, with nearly 130 million people. 89% of them live in rural areas, more than anywhere outside the Himalayas. It has the lowest average income, lowest GDP per capita, and highest poverty rate in the country. If Bihar were an independent country, it would be the tenth largest in the world, with more people than Japan or Mexico. It would also instantly become one of the poorest countries on the planet, behind such beacons of development as Liberia, Somalia, and Sudan. A population the size of Russia, forgotten under the belly of the world, and living at the extremes of human misery.
My train arrived just before six in the evening, which was a problem. Despite spanning nearly two thousand miles from east to west, India only has one time zone, which means that in the eastern regions it gets dark early, and the one thing everyone had told me about Bihar was that I should not go out at night. There’s no nightlife here. No cocktail bars. People drink, but they drink at home, and mostly just so they can beat their wives. There is no good reason to be on the streets after dark. Stay in your hotel and try not to make too much noise. You should absolutely not attempt to travel overland at night. The countryside teems with throat-slitting bandits, and tourists are routinely robbed. Unfortunately, our hotel was a good long drive from the train station, in a small town upriver surrounded by lots of dark, empty fields. One of my Indian friends told me to watch out for a cop outside the station. If we tried to arrange a lift by ourselves, there was a chance the driver would pull into a dark rural track, threaten me and my girlfriend with a knife, take our money and passports, and then slit our throats and leave our bodies by the side of the road. If we asked the policeman to find us a car, this was essentially guaranteed. Afterwards, the cop would get half the take.
So as our car squeaked and clattered over an unmarked and barely paved road, I kept the optimal route open on my phone, staring at the blue dot as it moved down along the blue line. As long as we’re on the line, everything’s fine. Nothing will hurt me as long as we’re on the line. It took about five minutes before the driver suddenly veered off it. Now we were on a lightless dirt track surrounded by low and lumpy mud huts. My girlfriend and I looked warily at each other. This is it, I thought. This is the day they’re finally going to hack me to death. We trundled deeper into the backlands, as our driver hummed a benign little tune to himself. I should do something, I thought. I could try to reach over and grab the wheel. I could garrotte him with my shoelace. I could refuse to go quietly. But instead, I noticed, I’m doing nothing. Any second now he’s going to pull over, drag me out the car, and cut me into thin slices with a machete, and I’m doing nothing. I’m watching the blue dot on my phone as it moves further and further in the wrong direction. But it was impossible to imagine that this ordinary car journey would really be what made the sun and the stars go out forever. That I could spend the next five minutes getting mildly carsick by scrolling on Instagram, and then be violently murdered at the end. The genres didn’t match. As long as I keep looking at my phone and doing nothing, I thought, this won’t turn into a struggle to the death in a moving vehicle. Pretend everything’s normal, and maybe I won’t even feel the blow that kills me…
The next morning, in the hotel room, I felt a bit silly about the whole thing. Clearly, I’d let myself be influenced by a cruel stereotype about this place. In reality, Bihar might have its struggles, but where doesn’t? It’s still a basically ordinary place, inhabited by basically ordinary people. In fact, we’d met some honeymooning Biharis in the south, and they’d been wonderful. They even gave me their phone number in case I decided to come to Patna. I’ve been in India long enough, I decided; there’s nothing here I haven’t seen before. And then, full of confidence, I went outside.
The hotel is on a squiggle of paved road running through the centre of town, loud with the beeping of motorcyclists as they fail to thread their way through the crowds. Away from there, the whole place crumbles into filth. My phone took us on a walk along a street that turned out to have been repurposed as an open sewer, fringed with green slime. Since no one drives down here any more, people have built shanties in the middle of it. They live directly on top of the slurry. Behind the Punjab National Bank there’s an enormous pit of sodden garbage. Black squealing piglets darting around between heaps of plastic and human waste. A corrugated-iron shack is luxury. People live in low hovels made of cow dung. They cook their food over burning cow-dung cakes. It’s a grey land: this is the breadbasket of India, but there’s something unwholesome about the earth here. This country imagines itself in lush green meadows, happy cows chomping on the grass, wooden pails full of pure white milk, vegetarianism, kindness towards all living creatures—and meanwhile, here in its agricultural heartland, the soil is all dust and famished, full of heavy metals, and the vegetables in the market stalls come scraggly and misshapen, shrivelled onions, anaemic tomatoes, limp scrags of cauliflowers, aubergines already rotting inside before they’re ripe. Nothing is fruitful. Nothing is plump.
The people come out the same way. This land mangles its inhabitants. In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss sketches out a brief, non-structuralist account of the caste system: India simply has too many people, scratching out a living from a soil exhausted by six thousand years of intensive agriculture. ‘When a community becomes too numerous, however great the genius of its thinkers, it can only endure by secreting enslavement. Once men begin to feel cramped in their geographical, social and mental habitat, they are in danger of being tempted by the simple solution of denying one section of the species the right to be considered as human. This allows the rest a little elbow-room for a few more decades. Then it becomes necessary to extend the process of expulsion.’ In the end, you come to twenty-first century Bihar, where outright slavery has swallowed millions. The crowds that push and shove in front of each other are composed of the stunted and the afflicted. People with limbs bent in the wrong direction, joints locked, huge fibrous swellings, graceless zombie-walking, or some with parts of their bodies eaten away, skin asteroid-studded by parasites, withered legs all bone and nothing else, useless flappers for hands, red obliterated feet, some deformed from birth and some bashed or crushed until all the useful tendons and ligaments dissolve into swollen jelly, and some scattered people with their tongues loose, drooling, or looking up in boredom as small flies sucked the moisture from the corners of their lips.
But the worst were the children. As soon as we stepped outside, the children started converging on us. Some of the children are barely five years old, but they wander the streets in pink pyjamas grey with dust, and their hair and faces are dust-grey too. Some of the children carry even younger children around with them, along with empty milk bottles. They walk up to you and start tapping you on the hand, or the thigh, or however high up they can reach, and ask for money. I didn’t want to give the children any money. Some of the local schools here have banners over the door that say ‘DON’T MAKE THEM BEG—LET YOUR CHILDREN LEARN,’ but a lot of parents seem to think that making them beg is the more lucrative option, and I didn’t want to prove them right. Instead, I decided to make a big donation to a charity working with Bihari street children. (I went with one called Rescue Junction; you can support their work here.) But I wasn’t sure that telling the children I’d supported a charity that might maybe help someone like them at an unspecified point in the future would really be enough. My girlfriend had the idea of buying some fruit, so we’d have something to give other than money. I was doubtful: as soon as she offered them a nice apple, I said, they’d start tapping her wrist even more insistently. No, no fruit, money, money. But we bought some bananas from a street vendor anyway.
A few children hung around us, watching curiously. The moment she offered the first banana, they surged. Suddenly, my girlfriend was at the centre of a scrum of hungry pleas and snatching hands. She soon stopped even trying to dole out the fruit; she just stood helplessly, holding the bag as dozens of tiny fingers scrabbled through the plastic to grab a fistful of mushy bananas. The whole thing lasted less than thirty seconds, and afterwards the children all loped away without a word. There was only one left, a little boy who hadn’t managed to get a banana in time. He stood alone in the dust and bawled.
In the end, I think it would have been much less upsetting if the children had insisted on money instead.
A month ago and half a world away, I was lucky enough to spend some of my time in Mumbai with Prithvi Pudhiarkar, the poet laureate of Kandivali. (You should start reading him now; that way you can say you were on board before he went global.) Prithvi showed us the austere sacred caves overlooking the skyscrapers of the northern suburbs. The difference between India and the West, he said, is how we deal with suffering. India recognises that suffering is an inextricable part of life. The whole of Indian philosophy and mysticism is an attempt to overcome that suffering through deep mental discipline. You distance yourself from your own senses. Withdraw from the noisy world. The West, meanwhile, has tried to eliminate suffering by crude mechanical means. And in a way, that project has been incredibly successful. Once, the cities of Europe also had open cesspits, marching cripples, five-year-old beggars, and feral pigs eating human shit. Not any more. Back home, the kind of screaming poverty that’s grinding a hundred million Biharis into the dirt is gone. We’ve decided that the point of life is to be happy all the time, and so we banished human suffering from the visible realm. No one sees it; everyone publicly pretends that it doesn’t exist. But it does exist. Suffering really is an inextricable part of human existence; sooner or later, it will come for you, and the West simply has no good way of dealing with it. One of the most visible signs of the social decay in Western countries is opiate addiction. We experience physical or mental suffering and can’t cope, so we take painkillers, and in the end we get addicted to the act of blotting out our own pain. Prithvi imagined himself visiting me in London, and looking compassionately at all the lost and battered Westerners on the street. Businessmen in raincoats. Freelance programmers. Poor things: their lives are so hard, it really makes you count your blessings; just think, it’s a pure cosmic fluke that you were born in India and not somewhere miserable like here…
I think Prithvi’s insight is basically true, precisely because it’s such a big, sweeping generalisation. Yes, the West has a long stoic tradition; yes, the Indian approach to suffering has been part of our philosophy since Schopenhauer, and maybe since Pythagoras; yes, there are plenty of Indians who seem to think they can buy their way out of suffering, from the crorepatis in gilded penthouses to the beggars in the street. It doesn’t matter. The most boring thing about our age is its urge to nitpick, to needle for counterexamples. But there’s one counterexample to his thesis that’s been preying on me here in Bihar, which is the story of King Suddhodana.
Suddhodana lived around two and a half thousand years ago. The state he ruled was on the hilly, half-civilised fringes of the Gangetic plain, and it wasn’t really a kingdom. What government existed was carried out by a kind of tribal council of aristocratic warlords; Suddhodana happened to be the most powerful warlord in one particular clan. What matters is that for whatever reason, when his first son was born Suddhodana decided that this boy should get to live a life without any kind of suffering. He shouldn’t even experience a single negative thought. The prince grew up without ever leaving his father’s palace, which had been built as a kind of fortress against reality. Inside, everyone was young and beautiful. Any servants who fell ill were instantly dismissed. In the vast, lush gardens, the flowers were constantly uprooted and replaced so they appeared to be blooming all year round. The boy grew up happy, pampered, and stupid. He had never met a human being who wasn’t there to serve him, and all of them were constantly grinning. He knew the world existed only for his entertainment. He had never encountered sickness, age, or death. Two and a half thousand years ago, on the edge of India, Suddhodana invented the first world.
It didn’t work out the way he’d planned, though. The boy stayed in the walls of his palace until he was a man, twenty-nine years of chocolate for dinner, but eventually he got frustrated with the place. Since frustration is a form of suffering, Suddhodana had to let him go. But he prepared: before the prince left, he had the city cleaned, hung with banners, strewn with petals, and all the ugly people exiled to the hills. When his son emerged from the gate, it was to crowds of beautiful youths maniacally grinning at him. Still, you can’t sanitise the entire world. Not long into his tour, the price spotted, swaying on the edge of the adoring crowd, a feverish man with his face covered in pustules. In his dumb kindness he tried to rush over and help him, but his servants held him back. They explained that this man was sick, and if the prince came too close he’d get sick too. Later on there was the shadow of a bent-over crone, toothless and demented, and the prince tried to help her too. His servants were forced to tell him that there was nothing he could do; she was just old. Once, she was young. If you’re lucky, it’ll happen to you. When the prince saw a dead body being carried to the cremation pyre, he didn’t rush over to help this motionless man with his mouth open and his glazed-over eyes. He already knew. Finally, he saw an ascetic sitting emaciated and motionless on the ground, and his servants explained that this was a holy man, who performed gruelling austerities to escape the suffering of the world. Suddenly, the world seemed incredibly full of suffering. The prince decided to leave his father’s kingdom, renounce the world, and become a wandering ascetic. So he wandered the flat Gangetic plain, and saw suffering. He visited the holy city of Varanasi, where corpses are burned all day and all night by the banks of the Ganges, and saw death. He only ate a single jujube every day; he even tried to stop himself breathing. ‘My backside became like a camel's hoof; the projections on my spine stood forth like corded beads; my ribs jutted out as gaunt as the crazy rafters of an old roofless barn.’ Somehow, none of this put an end to the suffering of the world, so after a few years of terrible austerities he started eating again. Eventually he came to a secluded place by the side of a river, and sat under a tree for seven weeks, deep in meditation. After seven weeks, he woke out the sleep he’d been in his entire life. You know the son of Suddhodana as the Awakened One. The Sanskrit word is Buddha.
I’m in this dusty, poisoned town in Bihar because this particular dusty, poisoned town is Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha attained enlightenment. According to tradition, this ground is sacred: if the prince had his realisation on any other patch of soil, the psychic shockwave unleashed by his ascent to Buddhahood would have torn a hole right through the earth itself. This is why this town is populated by cripples and beggars, who crowd here from every corner of Bihar to coax a few rupees out of the foreign pilgrims. This sacred slum is my last stop: from here, I start the journey back home to London. But without realising it, I’ve followed the Buddha’s path, winding along the north Indian plain through Varanasi until I arrived at this particular spot in Bihar. Like the Buddha, I have grown up in a pleasure-palace fortified against reality; like the Buddha, I have seen a lot of things that upset me. Maybe this is the place where I’ll finally wake up.