Free To the Ends of the Earth by Paul Theroux Page B

corners. Families sought refuge beside pillars, under counters and luggage carts: the hugeness of the station intimidated them with space and drove them to the walls. Their children prowled in the open spaces, combining their scavenging with play. They are the tiny children of tiny parents, and it’s amazing how, in India, it is possible to see two kinds of people in the process of evolution, side by side, one fairly tall, quick, and responsive, the other, whose evolution is reduction, small, stricken, and cringing. They are two races whose common ground is the railway station, and though they come quite close (an urchin lies on his back near the ticket window watching the legs of the people in line) they do not meet.
    I walked outside, into the midday chaos at the western end of the Howrah Bridge. In Simla, rickshaws were retained for their quaintness: people posed in them. In Calcutta, rickshaws, pulled by skinny running men in tattered clothes, are a necessary form of transport, cheap, and easy to steer in narrow back lanes. They are a crude symbol of Indian society, but in India all symbols are crude: the homeless people sleeping in the doorway of the mansion, the commuter running to his train accidentally trampling a station sleeper, the thin rickshaw-wallah hauling his plump passengers. Ponies harnessed to stagecoaches labored over cobblestones; men pushed bicycles loaded with hay bales and firewood. I had never seen so many different forms of transport: wagons, scooters, old cars, carts and sledges and odd, old-fashioned horse-drawn vehicles that might have been barouches. In one cart, their white flippers limp, dead sea turtles were stacked; on another cart was a dead buffalo,and in a third an entire family with their belongings—children, parrot cage, pots and pans. All these vehicles, and people surging among them. Then there was panic, and the people scattered as a tottering tramcar marked TOLLYGUNGE swayed down the bridge. Mr. Chatterjee said, “Too much of people!”
    Mr. Chatterjee walked across the bridge with me. He was a Bengali, and Bengalis were the most alert people I had met in India. But they were also irritable, talkative, dogmatic, arrogant, and humorless, holding forth with malicious skill on virtually every subject except the future of Calcutta. Any mention of that brought them up short. But Mr. Chatterjee had views. He had been reading an article about Calcutta’s prospects. Calcutta had been very unlucky: Chicago had had a great fire, San Francisco an earthquake, and London a plague as well as a fire. But nothing had happened to Calcutta to give planners a chance to redesign it. You had to admit, he said, it had vitality. The problem of pavement dwellers (he put the figure at a quarter of a million) had been “somewhat overdramatized,” and when you considered that these pavement dwellers were almost exclusively engaged in ragpicking you could see how Calcutta’s garbage was “most intensively recycled.” It seemed an unusual choice of words, and it strayed close to claptrap; vitality in a place where people lay dead in the gutter (“But everyone dies eventually,” said Mr. C.), the overdramatized quarter of a million, the recycling ragpickers. We passed a man who leaned at us and put his hand out. He was a monster. Half his face was missing; it looked as if it had been clumsily guillotined—he had no nose, no lips, no chin, and clamped in his teeth, which were perpetually exposed, was the bruised plug of his tongue. Mr. Chatterjee saw my shock. “Oh,
him!
He is always here!”
    Before he left me at the Barabazar, Mr. Chatterjee said, “I
love
this city.” We exchanged addresses and we parted, I to a hotel, Mr. Chatterjee to Strand Road, where the Hooghly was silting up so badly, soon all that would float on it would be the ashes of cremated Bengalis.

The Hopping Man
    I WAS ON MY WAY WHEN I SAW THE HOPPING MAN IN THE crowd on Chowringhee. He was very strange: in a city of mutilated