13 Chapter 13. Into India

Prior to Partition, the village of Wagah was located in the Punjab province of British India, as was the village of Attari, barely 2 kilometres to the east. At the stroke of midnight on August 14–15, 1947, however, residents of the two towns suddenly found themselves in different countries. Sadly, from the moment of their birth, conflict between Pakistan and India was inevitable. In the northwest, the newly drawn boundary cut through the Punjab province and, in the east, through the province of Bengal. In the immediate aftermath of Partition, millions of Muslims fled from India to East and West Pakistan, while millions of Hindus and Sikhs fled in the opposite direction.

It was not a peaceful migration. Millions on both sides were massacred, often with horrifying brutality.¹ Nor was the boundary between West Pakistan and India settled. Within months, the two states were at war over the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, a conflict that was terminated in 1949 by a UN-mediated ceasefire line that left the underlying tensions unresolved. The ongoing dispute devolved briefly into a second war in 1965, which again ended in a ceasefire agreement that both countries soon violated. Thereafter, the de facto border became increasingly militarized—a volatile situation marked by continuing skirmishes and another brief outbreak of war in 1999, with no end to the hostilities yet in sight.

The tensions between the two countries are reflected in an event that takes place daily at what is today the Wagah–Attari border crossing. In 1959, both countries began to observe a long-standing military tradition, in which a nation’s flag is ceremoniously lowered at sunset. But while “retreat,” as the custom is called, is usually a short and solemn occasion, an elaborate nationalistic ritual has developed at the Wagah–Attari crossing, involving drums and bugles and soldiers marching in a highly stylized manner, kicking their legs in the air and generally mimicking a military encounter, before finally ending with a handshake symbolic of peace. The ceremony remained relatively modest at first, but as the performance became more theatrical, it began to draw large crowds on both sides of the border, with onlookers shouting nationalist slogans and cheering their own soldiers on. Despite the handshake, the ceremony is above all a display of national rivalry and pride.

Several of the travellers whom I later contacted shared memories of crossing the border, though none happened to arrive at sunset. Christine Davies recalled a brief wait at the Wagah crossing back in 1961, which she spent drinking chai in “a mud hut with an earthen floor while a friend played chess with a border guard.” In contrast, Don Skelton remembered seeing “lots and lots of military installations” when he entered India twelve years later, in the fall of 1973. The first person he met on the Indian side, “some sort of intelligence officer,” he recalled, asked him, “Did you see any tanks? Did you see any guns? Did you see any emplacements?” This encounter took place little more than a year after India and Pakistan signed the Simla Agreement, which established the so-called Line of Control in Kashmir to serve as an unofficial boundary between the two countries. But neither recognizes the Line of Control as a genuine border.

Rainer, Maude, and I had taken a bus from Lahore to the Wagah border crossing, a distance of only about two dozen kilometres. Because we arrived in the morning, we missed the flag-lowering ceremony. But I did take note of two signs at the border: “Discipline makes a nation great” and “Save the poor. Support prohibition.”

We entered India that day wholly unaware of the precarious state of democracy in the country. In June 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had instructed India’s president, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, to declare a state of emergency. The declaration, which was revoked only in March 1977, allowed the government to carry out mass arrests, to censor the media, to defer elections, and to embark on a series of controversial measures, including forced sterilization. In declaring the Emergency, Gandhi pointed to “internal disturbances” that were allegedly jeopardizing the country’s national security. It was no secret, however, that her central purpose was to strangle dissent and hobble her opponents—and in this she succeeded, at least for a time.²

In retrospect, I sometimes wonder how I could have been unaware of the Emergency, which had been ongoing for some six months when I left Canada early in 1976. At the same time, Canadian media—television news, especially—seldom gave extensive coverage to events in India and other so-called developing countries, and Alberta was, if anything, even more insular. Then, once I arrived in India, my day-to-day experience on the ground gave me nary a hint of the country’s now-suspended democracy, or at least none that I could perceive. As an outsider, I had no insight into the impact of the Emergency on people’s lives, nor was it a topic of conversation among other travellers. I saw no riots, no protests: in this respect, the suspension of civil liberties had accomplished its purpose. Only after my return to Canada did I discover the history that had escaped my notice.

The highway from the border inland was good. This was the case, actually, with most Indian highways and secondary roads, though the quality of the roads made little difference to the speed of travel. As Gregory notes, “Progress along Indian roads was usually slow, for while few could afford cars there were trucks, taxis, rickshaws, scooters, cycles, buffalo carts, hand carts and the occasional elephant sharing the same tarmac, and cows, of course, had privileged right of way on any road.”³

India is a very large country, and once one is there, a veritable smorgasbord of possibilities beckons.⁴ From Amritsar, one could travel north into Jammu and Kashmir, despite the tensions along the disputed border, hiking in the mountains and perhaps renting an elegant Raj-like houseboat on Srinagar’s Lake Dal. Alternatively, one could head southeast to New Delhi and from there pursue one of several further options: northeast to Kathmandu and the mountains of Nepal; south to Bombay and then down the west coast to the states of Goa and Kerala; southeast to Agra and Benares and then on through Bihar and West Bengal to Calcutta, from where one could then travel down the east coast and then south to the cities of Madras (now Chennai) and Pondicherry. And this is hardly an exhaustive list.

Our immediate destination was, however, Amritsar itself, in India’s half of the Punjab. The city is little more than thirty kilometres from the Wagah–Attari border crossing and only about fifty-five kilometres from Lahore. Our intent was to visit the famous Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in Sikhism, which was constructed over the last two decades of the sixteenth century. As of 2017, the temple was attracting 100,000 visitors per day, and more on religious occasions.⁵

Our plan in 1976 was to rest in Amritsar for a few days before travelling further. That first night, we slept in one of the Golden Temple’s corridors. It was not a particularly restful night:

Guards in their turbans, brandishing spears, a sword dangling at their sides, clatter about the cloistered walls throughout the night. They shout and declaim and march, while lights burn our eyes and lizards scurry across the temple ceilings.

I am sleepless, writing books in my head, and in heat, thinking of sex. I drape a kerchief across my eyes, and fleetingly pass out. But about 5:00 a.m., a chant breaks out that continues for over an hour. I later learn that, at this time, the holy scriptures are opened and at whatever first sentence is revealed, so begins the day’s readings. With more chanted prayers, the book is then carried by the priests into the Golden Temple where it resides until around 10:00 a.m.

Amid this ritual, a group of chai boys arrives, to which I demure and buy an early tea, then drift again into a halting sleep until 8:00 a.m.

The city awakes. I take a victorious crap, then buy an omelette and Coke nearby. I set off for a bank only to discover the theft of $210 in traveller’s cheques. I have to wait until New Delhi to deal with it, as there is no American Express in Amritsar.

I returned to the temple, where I watched the Sikh holy men at their readings. Later that morning, I also encountered a dishevelled youth, German, I guessed, or possibly Dutch. I’d seen him before, in Herat and Kabul, and he was wearing a hat that reminded me of Corporal Agarn, on F Troop:

He drifts through the rooms of the Golden Temple, laughing a crazed and sinister laugh, and making mad gestures. He tells a Pakistani girl asleep in the walkway, “If you want to know about Brain Smuggler Suzy, I’ll be in the room.” But she hears no more than I understand, and he walks, cackling his way, to another place.

I see him again later that day, and this time we talk.

“You are walking down za ‘I shot the sheriff’ road to meet za sheriff who is on horseback with silver spurs, and you look, and you have guns on your sides, too. But zen you’re in prison—I met a friend there, but I wouldn’t want to say who he is—and za only way to get out is you must wait to meet za sheriff.”

“You have met?” I asked.

“No, I’m still in za ‘I shot the sheriff’ jail. You see, I am a brain smuggler. So are Brain Smuggler Suzy and Brain Smuggler Laura. Sometimes, zough, I only want to go to Jimi Hendrix country.”

“Where is that?”

“It’s not a real country.”

“A town?”

“Yes—no: a field.”

This strange conversation went on a while longer, during which he told me he had been beaten by a Goan (“a misunderstanding”) and then related, “I have a friend, a French junkie, Pierce. He has been in India seven years. He goes between Goa and Kathmandu. I don’t know if he’s still shooting.”

I have no idea whether this “brain smuggler” was simply strung out on drugs or whether he had an underlying psychiatric condition. But he was one of many lost souls who ended up in India.

Less than eight years after I was there, on June 1, 1984, the Indian Army launched an attack on the Golden Temple, on the order of Indira Gandhi, with the goal of capturing Sikh militants who had taken up residence there as part of an ongoing demand for the creation of an autonomous Sikh state within India. Troops surrounded the temple, and a heavy bombardment began a few days later, severely damaging the temple complex and completely destroying the holy Akal Takht. At least several hundred Indian troops, Sikh militants, and civilians were killed, although many estimates place the death toll in the thousands.⁶

At the time of the assault on the Golden Temple, I was working in a childcare facility in Alberta, where I met a young Sikh who was also employed there. His anger was palpable, and he wished aloud that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi would be assassinated.

His wish came true only five months later, when she was killed by her two Sikh bodyguards.

On November 7, Maude, Rainer, and I took a train from Amritsar to New Delhi, roughly a nine-hour trip. Until then, we had all travelled by bus or some other road vehicle, so trains were something of a novelty. Indeed, few Westerners travelling between Turkey and Afghanistan went by rail, except in parts of northern Turkey. In India and Pakistan, however, rail travel was long established and was simply a more efficient mode of transportation over long distances. Yet trains did have their downside. Travelling by train meant experiencing mainly the cities and missing small villages. Unexpected delays and stoppages were not uncommon, and depending on the destination and the class of ticket, trains could also be very crowded. Describing a train trip from Amritsar to Delhi in the late 1960s, one traveller astutely observed: “Bars on carriage windows and ridiculous overcrowding all provide perfect climate for claustrophobia.”⁷

John Hunter and his wife took a train from Amritsar to Delhi about a decade later, in December 1978. Hunter’s description of third-class train travel paints a memorable picture of “ridiculous overcrowding”:

You can reserve seats in 1st and 2nd class, but they often fill two or three days in advance. So if you just arrive at station, you buy a 3rd class ticket and take your chances. This means waiting for a train to pull in, running for seat space, then floor space, then windowsill space, then door space, then doorstep space.… A seat for four will have six on it. Over each seat is a rack for luggage. But no Indian carries luggage, so three people will be curled up on each rack. They sleep under the seats, then sit on the floor filling the aisleway, then gradually the entranceway between coaches. Finally, when you think no more can get in, as the door is blocked, they come thru windows. I was near the doorway, and as the train pulled out people grabbed onto handles on the outside of the car and begged to be let in.… An argument went on inside as to whether they should be let in. As the train was picking up speed and the man’s face on the outside began to distort and his hair was straight back, they let him in.

In contrast, those who could afford to travel first or second class were guaranteed a reserved seat and sufficient space for luggage. Travelling in the comparative luxury of second class, I began to fall under the spell of the railways—the rhythm, the sense of time passing at its own pace, indifferent to my own needs and wishes. Erik Pontoppidan’s fond recollections resonate with my own: “The yelling sound from the tea vendors, the heavy noise from the rains crossing the iron bridges, the minor keys of the whistles from the locomotives.”⁸ The sounds soon became a lullaby, transporting me into a world of contentment and calm.

Upon arriving in New Delhi, we were met, as usual, by an enthusiastic greeter who escorted us to rooms at Mrs. Colaco’s Guesthouse on Janpath Lane, in the downtown core. My notes described the hotel as “a drag of Westerners, lights on to all hours, mice, graffiti.”

Similarly greeted by a “street hustler” upon arriving in New Delhi, Brenda Grant and Bruce Short were led a few miles to what Grant described as a “grungy” hotel in the same area where we stayed. “Dirty room, dirty us, dirty sleeping bags—sometimes I can’t stand it,” she wrote. The next day they got up early and went to Janpath Lane where they got dormitory beds at the Jain Guest House.

Maude, Rainer, and I got along well on this trip. But inevitably tensions arise over what people want to do and see or where they want to go. So our trio split up at this point—I left for Benares and Goa, and they went where the road and desire took them. As with so many people I met or travelled with, I never saw them again.

I moved a few days later from Mrs. Colaco’s to the Eagle Hotel in the Paharganj district, which was popular with low-budget travellers at the time. I slept the first night in a room adjoining the hotel desk where the clerk’s “buzzer went off all night and fat rats scurried along the open sewers and up pipes across our floor.”⁹ I then moved to the hotel’s “penthouse,” featuring “two beds, a table, and a window overlooking the evening streets.”

Staying at places such as the Eagle or Mrs. Colaco’s was not particularly by choice. While the big cities of Istanbul, Tehran, or New Delhi always had very expensive, luxurious hotels, most of us were trying to stretch our money for as long as we could. The price and quality of hotels decreased as one moved from Turkey to India, though the price was never high and the quality never stellar. In David Dudeck’s words, accommodations “varied between poor to very poor,” or as Bruce Finch said about most of the hotels, “to call them a one star would be a stretch.” The cheap hotels usually clustered around train stations and bus drops, though in some countries, truck stations.

In 1976, the stock of low-cost hotels and guest houses remained small, and their names passed along from one traveller to the next like the gift of a Kula ring: Istanbul’s Gulhane and Palace Hotels; Ankara’s Konak Hotel; Tehran’s Amir Kabir Hotel and Goodyear Guest House; Kandahar’s Peace and New Tourist Hotels; Kabul’s Khayyam, Green Door, and Mustafa Hotels, and Sigi’s Hotel; Jalalabad’s Spinghar Hotel; Lahore’s Ringo Bell Hotel; Bombay’s Crown Hotel; Calcutta’s Modern Lodge; Benares’s New Quality Hotel and Indian Youth Tourist Hostel; and Kathmandu’s Matchbox and Hotchpotch Hotels.¹⁰ And, of course, in New Delhi, Mrs. Colaco’s Guesthouse, and the Eagle and Crown Hotels.

I stayed in New Delhi for six days, during which time I regularly frequented the nearby financial and commercial district of Connaught Place (today, Rajiv Chowk). I visited the Canadian Embassy twice (to get a new passport), the General Post Office once, a postal branch office twice, and American Express twice (to deal with my stolen travellers’ cheques).

In a letter home on November 9, 1976, I wrote that I was “basically quite fit,” but had developed a “slight touch of diarrhea.” I went to a nearby hospital where I was diagnosed as having amoebic dysentery and was given a two-week regimen of antibiotics.

Regular power cuts in Paharganj meant that the ceiling fans in hotels often stopped, rendering the heat in rooms “oppressive,” as Richard Gregory puts it. He remembers a restaurant in the market area, the Metropolis, that had air conditioning, which made it something of an oasis, its “chilled air icy in comparison to the sweltering conditions elsewhere.” But he also recalls an equally chilling incident:

The noise in Pahar Ganj was incessant, so I paid little attention when, while playing my Swiss roommate at chess one day, I heard a loud bang outside the hotel. Wandering out a while later I saw a man sweeping a bloody mess into a pile—apparently a boiler had exploded and someone had been next to it, these were human remains. The busy market traffic flowed around the scene, unconcerned. They had seen it all before. Life was cheap in India.¹¹

Life did indeed seem cheap, and so did death. There was no escaping the poverty, ill health, and sadness of India’s streets—indeed, of so many streets along the route, where travellers bore witness to a relentless spectacle of pointless suffering. Faces scarred and distorted by burns; limbs broken, twisted, or missing; children hunched and scrawny, blind, with open sores—scenes that became almost mind-numbing as time and place went by. The lines from Mike Ramsden’s poem “Kabul” that describe the crippled beggars on Chicken Street could have been written just about anywhere:

scuttling crabs moving on pads

covering stumps of what were elbows or knees

or sit there holding up for us to see

blunt and shiny objects: their flesh.

Those who made the journey frequently retain images too heart-wrenching to forget. Jean could still recall the sight of a “woman in Delhi with a dead baby, begging.” Similarly, Karl watched as a young woman in Old Delhi drew open the cloth covering her withered breasts to reveal a half-starved baby. He also remembered a man he saw one evening sitting in a dirty gutter, his hands stretched out, who the next morning lay dead and stiff on a cart that would soon take him away to be burned on a woodpile.

Yet side by side with these tragic scenes was an overflow of life, a carnival of the senses that seemed more immediately human than anything we had experienced at home. Fergus B. remembered “Delhi’s smell of mingled dust, sweat, cooking fires, and excrement”—an aroma that comes to evoke the city for many who have spent time there.¹² My time in the city involved walking teeming streets where life seemed to be bursting out on all sides. There, and elsewhere, my senses experienced a cumulative assault: glittering displays of brassware, baskets full of brightly coloured vegetables, women wrapped in exquisitely decorated saris, the enticing aroma of grilled foods, the repellant smell of offal, people shouting, animals braying, vehicles roaring. Of Delhi, I wrote:

Amazing country. Snake charmers, snakes, monkeys, elephants, emaciated beggars, and opulent wealth. Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Hare Krishnas, Children of God, atheists, agnostics, and me. There is nothing in the realm of the imaginary that hasn’t taken form and substance here.

At night, the streets are filled with rickshaws, horse carts, and motor carts; and on the curbs, banana vendors—ten for a rupee—and apples; some restaurants. The rickshaw drivers are phenomenal: lean, muscled, hard-working bastards on gearless wrecks. They peddle on the straight and wisely walk the hills, coasting down the other side, recklessly wheeling and dealing in and out of traffic, fast on the break.

On the street, an elderly Indian man gathers around him his charts on palmistry. Though not believing in it, I pay him two rupees. He tells me something about holy men, Delhi, and money, none of which I understand because he speaks in Hindi.

It is the eve of a holiday commemorating the birth of Guru Nanak.¹³ Bands stream in and out of the ribboned streets; drums and pipes, better than Mardi Gras!

New Delhi’s streets, as in so many cities across Asia, were filled with vendors selling all types of goods, some valuable, some not, but invariably intriguing. Travellers might stop on the street to view the cheaply priced wonders of a vendor’s wares spread out on blankets along the sidewalk: old muskets and knives; leather water bottles; off-the-rack dental plates made from animal bone; ill-fitting wire glasses with Coke-bottle lenses; hair combs, shoulder bags, and wallets; small carvings made of wood or ivory or bone; inexpensive necklaces, silver rings, and bangles; ornate belt buckles. All the while, small children scurried about or, if younger, suckled at their mother’s discreetly covered breast.

Typically, market shops, whether just off the main street or within a bazaar, specialized in certain goods, such as handwoven carpets, Kashmiri woollens, or leather goods, as well as jewellery made with precious or semi-precious stones: diamonds, garnets, lapis lazuli, opals, sapphires, and turquoise set in gold or silver amulets, necklaces, bracelets, or rings—though the traveller needed to be cautious of persuasive fakes.

Also abundant in New Delhi were movie theatres. Rarely did they show films made in the West, though Jean remembered seeing the 1971 high-speed thriller Vanishing Point in a theatre in Lahore. Several times I attended Indian films (only some with English subtitles). India, even then, was a prodigious producer of Bollywood films. The plotlines seemed easily understandable: star-crossed couple, evil antagonist, happy ending, much singing and dancing, great fun.

On another night in New Delhi, I attended a circus show. It was held in a small arena with a low tent ceiling. Perhaps five thousand people were in attendance. A couple of elephants ambled around the ring, disinterested. Two lions posed lazily on stools, moved only by the whip of a silk-gowned ringmaster. All the animals seemed thin and old, wanting more than anything to be left alone for a nap. A trapeze artist and a baton-bearing gymnast seemed equally ill-disposed to performing, though the ringmaster refrained from using his whip on them.

On November 9, I wrote a letter home, the same day that American Express provided me with replacement cheques for the ones that had been stolen. Two days later, the Canadian embassy handed me my new passport. On November 13, a Saturday, I went to the nearby railway station to board a train to Agra and from there to Benares.

1. For examples, see Vidhi Doshi and Nisar Mehdi, ”70 Years Later, Survivors Recall the Horrors of India–Pakistan Partition,” Washington Post, August 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/70-years-later-survivors-recall-the-horrors-of-india-pakistan-partition/2017/08/14/3b8c58e4-7de9-11e7-9026-4a0a64977c92_story.html. An enormous amount has been written about Partition, of course, but one of the most visceral introductions remains Kushwant Singh’s riveting novel Train to Pakistan, first published in 1956—less than a decade after the events it describes.

2. The Emergency has generated no shortage of commentary. One useful analysis, written from the standpoint of democracy in India, is Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, “The Indian Emergency (1975–1977) in Historical Perspective.” See also Adrija Roychowdhury, “48 Years of Emergency: Here Is What Happened over the Two Years That Changed India’s History,” Indian Express, June 25, 2023, https://indianexpress.com/article/research/emergency-48-years-timeline-history-8685088/ (with subscription).

3. Richard Gregory, “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Kashmir and India” section.

4. Time, money, fatigue, sickness, or simply homesickness often precluded supping at the entire plate of India’s possibilities, but a few tried. Frank Sullivan travelled all the way south to Sri Lanka before heading north again to Nepal where he trekked. Margot Miller similarly travelled as far south as Goa before going to Nepal.

5. Harpreet Bajwa, “Golden Temple Wins Laurels as World’s Most Visited Religious Place,” New Indian Express, November 25, 2017, https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2017/Nov/26/golden-temple-wins-laurels-as-worlds-most-visited-religious-place-1711154.html.

6. For a summary, see Arjun Sengupta, “39 Years Since Operation Bluestar: What Led Up to It, What Happened,” Indian Express, updated June 6, 2023, https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-history/operation-bluestar-history-explained-8648026/ (with subscription).

7. Quoted in David Tomory, A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu, 81.

8. Erik Pontoppidan, “A Tribute to the Indian Railways!” n.p.

9. Terry Ledressay recalled staying at a hotel in India where one night a rat tried to drag a large duffel bag, containing the collective passports of passengers on a bus tour, into its hole. The bus driver blocked the hole with a wardrobe, but the rat got out and tried again to drag its quarry away, until finally it was driven off.

10. See Tomory, A Season in Heaven, 44 and 65; Christina Lamb, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World, 19; Richard Gregory, A Pukka History of the Hippie Trail: Overland to Asia in Search of Hashish,” 64–67. Acclaimed journalist Robert Fisk described Jalalabad’s Spinghar Hotel—where he interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1997—as “a relic of the Afghanistan hippy trail, a high-ceilinged hotel of the 1950s with large rose gardens and tall palm trees which, even in winter, bask in the warmth of the winds coming up from the valley of the Indus.” The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East, 15.

11. Gregory, “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Kashmir and India” section.

12. David Pearson remarked of getting off a plane in Delhi in 1987, “As soon as the air hit me, I knew I was in India. You can smell India. And I love the smell. I don’t want to think about the smell’s ingredients, but it’s just a fabulous smell.”

13. The birthdate of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, is disputed, although the most widely accepted date is April 15, 1469. Sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the anniversary of his birth began to be celebrated in November, on the day of the full moon in the month of Kattak (roughly mid-October to mid-November), and according to some traditions he was born on the fifteenth day in that month.