Paul Scott, the author of
The Raj Quartet, deserves the credit for that powerful phrase “staying on”. This is the story of a man and a woman who stayed on.
But first, the journey. We arrived in Delhi late at night and were met by the agents without whom no trip to India can go at all smoothly. These are the people who constitute the bureaucratic layer which everything in India seems to require. They are the travel bureaucrats who intercede on your behalf with the hotel bureaucrats, the train bureaucrats and any other bureaucrats whose path you might cross.
These travel bureaucrats are well worth paying for. They smooth paths. They deter confidence tricksters. They lead you out of the airport into their waiting cars where, quite charmingly, they bedeck you with garlands of flowers and offer you chilled bottles of water. They are immensely reassuring, even if you have visited India before and think you know all about it. Because something that any visitor to India will learn sooner or later, no matter how many trips he has made, is that he certainly does not know all about it.
Off we went into the night, onto a bumpy road that led from Delhi airport, past construction site after construction site. Large, half-built stilted highways loomed over us in the dark; high, glittering buildings rose on either side of the road. This was the new India, the India of the knowledge industries, the India of biochemistry and electronics. But just beyond the new, a road’s breadth away, is the old, the decrepit, the tumbling down, the simply grubby.
And that India, an India of grinding, hopeless poverty, of dust and desperation, exists cheek by jowl with the affluent and the modern.
Our car turns off the main road and within seconds we are in a different age, as surely as if we had wandered out of the 21st century. Here there are shacks, mud-walled or constructed of tarpaulins and bits of tattered plastic sheeting. Here there are beds made of poles, dragged out onto the edge of the street from doors one cannot see, and on these beds people lie in the postures of sleep, a hand across a chest, an arm dropped down beside the bed, caught in the beam of the headlights, sleeping through everything.
There is something shocking about the sight of those who have nowhere to sleep — or shocking to us, at least, the products of well-set societies. You can see such people, of course, on the streets of London or any other British city, lying in doorways under a muddle of dirty blankets, but here in India there are whole families on the side of the road, under primitive shelters or under none, children laid out beside adults — people who have nothing, one assumes, but the rags that clothe them. I have often seen such sights in Africa and South America — I remember my shock on seeing children, tiny children, living in cardboard boxes on traffic islands in Bogota — but the scale of this in India, the sheer enormous scale of the poverty, seems so much greater than anything one will witness elsewhere.
Of course, if you cannot stomach contrasts, then it is best to turn back straightaway, or not come to India in the first place. Because there you are in your cocooned comfort and there they are, your fellow human beings, separated from you by an impossible, yawning gulf of differing fortunes. But if you do not come here because you feel too guilty, then you do not bring the however-many-thousands of pounds that your trip is going to inject into the Indian economy, some of which, at least, will trickle down to the people on the lower slopes of Indian society. If you are at all sensitive to poverty, though, prepare to lie awake at night; prepare for the moral pea to make your luxury mattress uncomfortable.
Our trip through the night lasted a little over an hour. The roads became narrower — tracks now — and the villages through which we drove seemed smaller and shabbier. And then, after driving along a track that made its way through fields of reeds — with the words of the proprietor of the house to which we were going ringing in my ears: “We are difficult to find” — we drew up through a set of impressive gates. There, in the middle of nowhere, was what appeared to be a rambling Lutyens bungalow. And this place at which we had arrived was called Tikli Bottom — a place that advertised itself as an upmarket guesthouse where those arriving at Delhi airport might retreat before starting their Indian visit in earnest.
It was very late, but our hostess, Annie Howard, might have been greeting us as if we had arrived in perfect time for a country weekend in Norfolk. Our room, looking out onto the courtyard around which the house is built, was the perfect room for just such a weekend. Furnished in just such taste as one might find in a comfortable English country house, all that it seemed to lack were copies of Country Life or Horse and Hound.
In the place of these offerings were books of Indian interest: memoirs of the Raj; books on the flora and fauna of the Himalayas; the latest works of William Dalrymple. One that caught my eye and which provided that night’s reading, late though it was, was a fascinating account of British women who had married Indian princes. There had been many of these, it transpired, and they had braved vituperation and ostracism for the men they loved. Some of them, alas, discovered that these men were used to having more than one wife, and this took the shine off their exotic liaisons. But many of them made good marriages with men who indulged them splendidly. In their palaces, though, one suspects that there were rooms just like this: little bits of English country life transported to the plains and mountains of Rajasthan.
At breakfast time we met our host, and that was when the whole notion of Tikli Bottom became clear. Martin Howard is an Englishman with a naval sense of humour. He is a tall, distinguished-looking man who came to India in 1984 as naval attaché at the British Embassy. His period of office was somewhat longer than usual, as he spent a year at the Indian National Defence College, and during the four years of his posting he became attached to the country.
After the end of his naval service, Howard worked in India for British Aerospace and Rolls-Royce. Then, when it came to retirement in 1994, it occurred to him that there was no real reason to return to Britain. He stayed on. He acquired a piece of land — a farm near the village of Tikli — and, being an Englishman, he knew that the old English word for a piece of low land is bottom.
