Because it was a sacred city, a howling but deaf and discontinuous mob, mostly pilgrims, kicked along the streets and lanes of Amritsar.
These sun-baked streets were thick with stinging dust and smelly traffic, and the traffic included sacred cows, three-legged dogs, old cars, twisted bikes, scooter rickshaws, pedicabs, the usual trotting two-wheeled pony carts – tongas and gharries – and rusted buses. There were heaps of sorted and pawed-through garbage; the sidewalk overspill of fix-it men and their antique tools; blue exhaust fumes, oily dirt, fresh dung, the fountain in the middle of the miserable road with its sign, Amritsar Improvement Trust, the temples so attractive to beggars because holy precincts encouraged the giving of alms; and loud noise trumpeting the simple but firmly held Indian delusion that honking horns sped the flow of traffic.
On the surface, nothing had changed in Amritsar. From what I could gather, the country was no different from what I had seen three decades before.
This prospect delighted me. It was a relief, the mildly orchestrated free-for-all of India – something of a madhouse with a touch of anarchy, yes, but an asylum in which strangers are welcome, even inquisitorial ones like me. All you need is a strong stomach, a little money and a tolerance for crowds. And a way of lifting your gaze upward and moving on, so that you don't see the foreground – in India, the foreground is generally horrific.
The horror is possibly true, or perhaps all illusion, as some Indians believe, smiling and saying, “True and not true, sar. Anekantavada, sar. The many-sidedness of reality, sar.”
Whichever, acceptance is not an Indian trait. In India, no one takes no for an answer: Policemen are jeered at, authority exists to be defied, walls are erected to be defaced and everyone is talking, often in English. Shoeshine boys, rickshaw wallahs, shopkeepers and Surinder (“I am agent, sar”) Singh with his gimpy leg and his practised patter, all of them demanding attention.
I was at the main railway station with Surinder. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Guess.”
“No, this is very serious, sar,” he said, snapping at me for my facetiousness. “You must tell me now.”
I told him.
“You are lucky,” he said, sounding resentful. “Very lucky today.”
“Why would that be?”
“You qualify for Old Age Exception.”
This meant 100 rupees off the 400-rupee fare to Delhi – $7.50 instead of $10 because I was over 60 – which required a large form to be filled out in triplicate.
In the age of computers, which Indians excelled at, so I was told, many government forms were still filled out by hand in triplicate, on thick sewn-together pads, with flimsy sheets separated by carbon paper, using blunt pencils, following the printed direction Press Hard.
In a world of change, India is exceptional. Everyone talks about India's great leap, Indian modernity, Indian millionaires, and “You must see the transformation of Bangalore.” “The Indian miracle” was a boasting rant in every Western newspaper and magazine.
But on the evidence of Amritsar this assertion was a crock, not just a joke in bad taste but the cruellest satire. It seemed to me that little had changed except the size of the population, an unfeedable, unhousable, uncontainable 1.3 billion people, not many of them saying, “We are modern now,” because more than a third of them were working for a dollar a day.
Yet the country still ran, in its clunky fashion, all its mends and patches showing, and what looked like chaos in India was actually a kind of order, like furious atoms spinning. Surinder Singh merely appeared to be a tout and an opportunist. In fact, he was part of the complex system of Indian ticket buying. As I was congratulating myself on having secured a $10 seat on the express to Delhi, he showed up again, demanding the equivalent of an additional $10.
