Butter Chicken in Ludhiana , livre ebook

Pankaj Mishra

BUTTER CHICKEN IN LUDHIANA
Travels in small Town India
Contents
About the Author
Also by Pankaj Mishra
Prologue
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
Acknowledgements
Afterword
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
BUTTER CHICKEN IN LUDHIANA
Pankaj Mishra is the author of An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond, and a novel, The Romantics, which won the LA Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. He writes for several publications, including the New York Review of Books , the New Statesman, Granta, the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian. He lives in London.
Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India was his first book.
Also by Pankaj Mishra
The Romantics: A novel
An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond
Prologue
VERY SENIOR OFFICER and very honest, Mr. Chugh was saying, now for the fourth time, but his wife won t let him be. She wants him to make money. She s mad, I tell you, and she ll drive my brother mad.
A short, stoutish, balding man in his early fifties, he spoke as though he was an acquaintance. In fact, I had met him barely ten minutes ago on platform No. 36, where he was waiting, like me, for the late-night bus to Muzaffarnagar. There, amidst the general wretchedness of Delhi s Inter State Bus Terminal (ISBT) - the thick fog of low-octane diesel smoke, the stench from open, unflushed toilets, the roar of bus engines, the countless cassette players blaring simultaneously, the muddy floor, the swirling mobs of bewildered travellers, the thuggish touts for private buses, the aggressive child-beggars, the bawling babies, the Hindi porn magazines in their yellow polythene covers - amidst such oppressive disorder, the anxiety-ridden face of Mr. Chugh seemed like a mirror image of my own: a fellow-sufferer, I thought, and immediately felt a bond of empathy between us.
Do you know anything about this Muzaffarnagar bus? He had spoken to me first in English, in a thin, quavering, unnaturally high-pitched voice. Subsequently, he spoke only in Hindi. But the initial use of English was important. It was the sole means open to Mr. Chugh of distinguishing himself from the squalor of his surroundings; and it was a coded overture to another presumed English-speaker, an invitation to privileged distress.
I replied that the bus hadn t arrived and that this was all I knew.
Have you asked the Roadways office?
I hadn t. I wasn t even aware of its existence.
Let s go. Let s see what those buggers are up to.
His company gave me the strength to walk up two ramps to the UP Roadways office, and enquire about the delayed bus. Then, on being told about its uncertain status, we wandered around the huge waiting hall on the first floor, trading tales of public-sector ineptitude - no better basis for such impromptu acquaintanceships - before finding a small partitioned-off waiting room in a corner. There, shielded from the rest of ISBT by its cracked and grimy glass wall, through which the dimly lit waiting hall appeared subaqueous and the bales of human bodies asprawl on the floor like so much marine detritus, under a fan which, miraculously, in the midst of such complete breakdown, still worked, we seated ourselves, and Mr. Chugh got started on topics only a severely undermined traveller would take up.
An intense excitement animated his sweat-drenched face; his voice cackled with nervous energy; he was in a hurry to confide in me as much as he could. And, less than fifteen minutes after we had met, I was taken on a whirlwind tour of Mr. Chugh s life.
I learnt, for instance, that he lived in Muzaffarnagar; that he was returning from Jaipur where his brother lived with his mad wife; that he himself had been a doctor in Toronto. But - and here the story turned strange - he was not paid his salary for ten years. So, he came back to India and started working as a consultant to an engineering firm. But he was disappointed by India. His wife was like his mad sister-in-law; she wanted him to make money. He was now thinking of going back to Toronto. They were now willing to pay his salary.
At any other time, Mr. Chugh s story would have seemed slightly garbled, hiding some unpleasant reality (for instance, the bit about his withheld salary: was it because of some wrongdoing on his part?). In its present setting, however, part as though of the disorderly world around us, it appeared plausible. And the mood was infectious. Mr. Chugh asked me no questions about myself; but I had had to stop myself twice from blurting out a few family secrets of my own.
Soon, Mr. Chugh began to repeat himself: not just the themes, but also the exact sentences he had used earlier. It looked as if he was working himself into a state. The thought that he might any moment go completely berserk crossed my mind. It was disturbing: sitting next to him, staring into his thick-jowled, ruddy-cheeked face, and slowly realizing that such delirium could be less aberrant than what a sweltering May night at ISBT might make it seem, that it might have its sources in the peculiar circumstances of Mr. Chugh s life.
But he was, at worst, a harmless bore, and I could, I discovered, easily turn away from him even as he raved on, and let my attention wander around the small enclosure we were in.
There were two other people in the waiting room. They were a plump English couple in their mid-thirties - mentally christened Heather and James by me - whom I had overheard quarreling two hours ago as I walked behind them into ISBT.
Why couldn t you settle with him beforehand ? Heather was demanding to know.
Well, why couldn t you ? James retorted in an equally sibilant voice. No one asked you to just stand around like some decoration while I deal with auto-rickshaw drivers.
Oh, shut up !
And, why get so fucking uptight over a few rups?
They were, I gathered from their enquiries, making the English pilgrimage to Simla. Few English tourists in my knowledge failed to make it there. Whenever asked about this, they would seem embarrassed, as though caught airing some illiberal belief.
I don t know, they would first say, and then add: I suppose it s because it has such English associations.
This was partly true. Simla was usually the last destination in the over-ambitious itineraries of English tourists, the place where, after weeks and weeks of the alienating strangeness of India, they could at last relax, find some comforting familiarity in such weak simulations of England as Simla offered.
For Heather and James at least, Simla was coming at the end of several weeks of arduous travel. Like many other people who have been on the road for too long, they had let themselves go. Their fluorescent backpacks had in places turned black with grime; James had let his beard grow beyond a stubble and into an ugly bristly growth; he wore the kind of printed trousers that should ideally not be seen outside circuses; Heather fared little better with her unwashed shaggy-dog hair and very short shorts from which jutted out a pair of pallid, thickly veined thighs.
Their sullenness, palpable even to the casual observer, was of people who have been travelling together for far too long and whose flagging relationship only some external event or thing could now revive. Already, some of the acrimony I had witnessed looked defused by the awfulness of what they had encountered inside ISBT. A fuller reconciliation would have to wait till Simla where, at an open-air restaurant on the Ridge I knew from the many idle afternoons spent there, they would meet and talk with other similarly jaded English tourists.
Beginning with banal enquiries, the conversation would expand; soon it would have no other subject than the ordeal that travelling in India had been for them. Tales of distress would come pouring out from all sides. At first solemn, the mood would gradually lighten till high comedy was being made out of the peculiar horrors of this or that hotel, anecdotes sharpened for the retelling back home. Then as the afternoon progressed, the estranged couples would start speaking to each other in much the same friendly way they were speaking to others; and by evening past disagreements would have been forgotten, several reconciliations effected, within the new happy community of shared woe.
Thinking of all this, I had almost forgotten Mr. Chugh. He had stopped speaking some time ago and was now fast asleep. His head lolled around on his chest; at times, it drooped alarmingly to my side, as if seeking some resting point there. Hurriedly, I got up and put my backpack on my chair so that Mr. Chugh, when he reached the crucial point in his sideways quest, could find something there to arrest his fall, and walked down to the platform to ask about the bus.
There was still no news about it. I was told to wait another hour.
I came back to find the seats adjacent to mine occupied and the waiting room whirring with a new energy. The three newcomers were in their early twenties. They were carrying large plastic sacks of what looked like children s clothing to me, and had the loud exuberance of people who had pulled off a nice deal for themselves during the day and for whom the night was the wide arena to celebrate it in.
Most likely, they were shopkeepers returning from a day- trip to the wholesale market at Sadar Bazaar and now going home to one of the many small towns around Delhi: Rampur, Bulandshahr, Gajraula. (Fearful places in my imagination, especially Gajraula where, four years ago, several nuns had been raped inside a convent.)
It seemed so, and from not just the plastic bundles; but the uniform hairstyles - no sideburns and oily little curlicues