Now! Here’s an India I can get into! Raucous and noisy and dirty and crumbling and people just waiting to smile at you their survival on every thread and pigs eating garbage on the streets.

A wild and long suffering anarchy of tchai shops and rickshaw wallahs and corner barbers and people crowding around you drinking in your every gesture.

Open sewers like open wounds run through the streets and squares, covered with dust. This city may well have been built in the 12^th Century and boasts fine ramparts and even cobblestone streets for all I know; the description in the Lonely Planet makes it sound like Southern France…but the place is purely Indian budding decadence, the impossible movement of people, teeming of the mob, street munching of cows and bulls, dogs and pigs scrounging for lost tidbits and people everywhere people…

And yet a friendly, non-aggressive curious longing. Today we had a tire explode and had trouble, as usual, jacking up East of Eden. A truck drove by and asked if we needed help with hand gestures which said, "do we stop or fuck?" "yes! stop!", I motioned and within seconds the problem had been solved: the car jacked, the tire replaced and the old one hoisted on the roof rack like a feather. These people are experts in getting non-moving vehicles moving again. Stagnation is time and time is, if not money, then essence: the one thing cars were built to defeat.

And yet what happens when time, essence and the vehicles meet in a tangling of steel, nerve, flesh and destiny? For we saw two accidents today, only minutes after they happened if I could judge by the fresh smell of diesel fuel on the macadam.

Decapitated jeeps and trucks suffering from clumsy frontal lobotomies; lined up beside them the bodies of the driver and his helper, covered by their blankets and waited upon by patient squatting men. They looked as though they were waiting for a ride and one even called out to us to take a photo!

Death doesn’t seem to be mulled over. It’s just there like a tea break or a bidi. A temporary halt to traffic. Any Westerner sitting beside those corpses, even the corpses of total strangers, would be overcome with an assault of emotions which could be read like quick sand on his face. But here there was nothing. "this is our lives", they seemed to say, "there’s nothing else to look for."

India and Islam at their finest, the gentle curves of Gujarati mosques rising like bloated courgettes out of the urban ugliness of Bhuj. It is impossible to resist the friendly calm of the people. On the streets it is impossible also not to react in kind to the violent intrusion of motorcycle horns as one guy, more stupid than the rest, tries to push his way through a teeming mass of people.

Silence here is so rare, and when it falls it does so as a footfall; a gentle dry thud on smoothly laid flag stones. And then a scooter comes crashing by and all is lost to the evil impulses of the age of speed. Strangely enough and according to Gita Mehta in her book Karma Cola, according to Hinduism we are now living in the time before the end, an epoch which is characterised by a destructive and fanatical tendency. This epoch is gifted with more wanton abandon and extermination than any other time, and thousands of years ago the ancients sat down and tried to imagine the one most horrible characteristic which would set this time off from any other. They thought up one: speed!

How did they know, they who lived in the age of the oxen cart and camel walk, how did they know what was to come? How could they possibly have guessed that which we learnt only through grave-digging heart-breaking repetition: speed kills?

Thank God there are still some islands, built of stone out of the ravaged heart of the madding crowd, where speed – and its evil vehicle, noise – are excluded, such is this mosque built by the Pir patriarch, a Bagdadi holy man come to preach in the heathen outreaches of the Islamic world 300 years ago.

That was a time when being a Moslem meant you could put on your hat and pick up your stick and walk the width of a vast empire which was all yours. Every mosque was your home, every Moslem family your family. I know. I am dressed as a Moslem today in a punjabi and with my short hair and beard look like a wondering Caucasian Mullah; and everywhere I go I am greeted with ‘salaam alechums’ and smiles of complicity. "We belong to the same simple and reductive desert faith", the smiles seem to say, "we fly the same green flag."

Bhuj, 24/11/2000

Great and crazy India! Lazy and energetic and caught up in her own lies! The spare tire repaired in Delhi leaks, or course, and now in Bhuj it must be repaired. The tire wallahs send a poor buck-toothed wonder to jack up the car. Out of pride, they refused my offer to move it a little bit away from the filthy wall to make manoeuvring a little easier, and so they work in conditions so cramped as to be intimate.

 

Washing my car free of all the pigeon shit in the middle of the road, now that’s a crazy joy! The hotel boy brings bucket after bucket of clear cold water, and the bucket is in aluminium, so the water shines like thirst. Splashing and wiping and splashing some more with cows and tribesmen walking by and every now and then a sadhu or begging woman, babe in arms, and showing me her mouth with closed fingers in the well known gesture: to eat to eat. To the begging sadhu or woman I’d give the cloth and say, "clean!".



The woman laughed and said, "clean, nay!". She laughed and I laughed and all the rickshaw wallahs laughed because her scam was her scam and everybody knows there’s no point in even pretending she’s all that hungry.