Night Train to
Varanasi
Sean Doyle
I met him on a train. I was returning
from Delhi to Varanasi. Perhaps, in February, 2011. Still in his sleeping bag,
on the facing lower berth, he was slowly awaking from sleep. His daughter lay
fast asleep on the upper berth. I checked my watch. It was 6.15 am. An hour
more to Varanasi. As he woke up, I greeted him: Good Morning!
We soon struck a conversation, and he
said it was his second or third visit to Varanasi. He also told me, he usually
stays in one of the cheap local hotels near the Ganga ghats. It is convenient
to move around from there. He could stay closer to the life in the narrow
sreets. He was a writer, he told me, and also ran a literary agency in Australia.
Before we detrained, we had become friends. His daughter looked rather aloof
and taciturn.
Sean Doyle met me again , on my
invitation, in a small get together at a friend’s apartment. After he went
back, he kept a regular email correspondence of which I now discover, I have a
large volume. In those days, I was busy researching and writing my biography of
Dr Rajendra Prasad. He, too, revealed later that he was writing a novel – or
rather a narrative of his travels in India in the style of fiction with
descriptions of places, including dialogues with characters he met as he went
round on his travels through various cities in India. Ultimately he polished it
off as a novel - which can best be called ‘un-magical realism’, presenting real-named people in it – one of
them being myself, by our chance meeting in that AC-2 Sleeper. That novel is
now published and available in India
It is rather queer and quaint to find
oneself as a living character in a quasi-fictional travel account which you
hold in your hands as a enticing novel. But that also stops you from being a
reviewer of the book. In fact, all that I’m entitled to do is to act as an
Usher. And I’ll do just that, and start with that very serendipitous moment of
epiphany – when we bumped into each other!
Excerpt:
I’ve barely stirred when I hear a voice.
‘Good morning.’
Where am I? On a train … I raise my eyeshades. A man
of perhaps 60, with glasses, smiling eyes and a kind, round face, is sitting on
the berth opposite mine, swaddled in his bedclothes, sipping a steaming chai. A
picture of contentment.
‘Good morning,’ I manage. I now know where I am.
‘How did you sleep?’
‘After last night, like a log.’
‘Yes.’ He smiles. ‘I noticed you were quite busy.
You did well.’
‘Thank you, and thanks to the kindness of your
compatriots.’
The chai wallah appears. I get one then check on
Anna: sleeping still. And our packs: present and accounted for.
‘Do you know where we are?’ I ask him.
‘About an hour from Varanasi.’
Excellent. We do the introductions. He is Mangal
Murty, a retired Professor of English Literature, living in Varanasi.
‘I studied literature,’ I say.
We chat about the classics for a bit, not my first
such conversation in India. I’ve found myself another ‘English’ gentleman.
Brothers of empire indeed. I love it.
Murty is also a writer, having recently published
the collected works of his father, Shivapujan Sahay, a leading literary figure
in Hindi mid-last century. Murty’s something of a specialist biographer, having
written a biography of Dr Rajendra Prasad, India’s first president, and one of
Jagjivan Ram, an important pre-Independence politician who was of low caste.
Ram’s daughter, Meira Kumar, served a term as Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the
lower House of Parliament (national). And in true classics mode, Murty has also
produced a study of Poe’s fiction.
‘And what is your line of work?’ he asks.
‘Book publishing. I’m an editor.’
‘Oh, lovely.’ He reaches into his bag. ‘Do you mind
if I film you?’
‘What?’
‘Can I film you while I ask you a few questions
about book publishing in Australia?’
‘Ah, okay.’ This is a first: the wake-up interview
in bed during which I … wake up.
He asks, I answer. It’s all over in two minutes.
‘Thanks so much,’ he says. ‘Very interesting.’
A waiter comes by with some sad-looking chola bathura: chick-pea curry and small
puri (deep-fried bread). Think I’ll
wait till we get there.
Murty has an idea. He wants to start walking tours
of the Old City in Varanasi for Indian and foreign tourists.
‘I like it,’ I say. I’m surprised they’re not
already happening.
‘It’s a great oversight that they don’t already
exist,’ he says.
‘That’s just what I was thinking.’
‘I have a few friends who want to be involved,’ he
continues. ‘Would you like to meet us? We’d be very interested to hear your
thoughts on what foreign tourists would want from these tours.’
‘Sure, I’d be happy to.’
‘Delightful. Do you have a phone?’
‘No.’
‘Okay, I’ll give you my number. Today is Sunday. We
could meet on Wednesday or Thursday.’
‘Fine. We’ll be in Varanasi for a week or so. I’ll
call you on Tuesday.’
You know you’re in Varanasi as soon as your train
pulls in. The platforms are populated by bearded, saffron-clad sadhus –
carrying little stainless-steel tiffin tins (for food) and big Shiva tridents –
and lazy, brown cows. And all the signs are in Hindi. It smells like
revivalism.
‘Do you need help with your bags?’ I ask Murty.
‘No, no,’ he replies with confidence, ‘a couple of
my students will help me.’
Sure enough, the train has barely stopped when two
youths, fresh-faced, energetic, eager to please, appear. They greet Murty by
bending down and touching his feet, a sign of respect. He lets them then acts
as if the gesture is entirely unnecessary: a common Indian pantomime. I’m
amazed. He’s not even teaching any more, yet here they are, nine o’clock on a
chilly Sunday morning, picking up his bags. If an academic tried this in the
West, he’d be laughed at and maybe face misconduct charges.
And a couple of days later
It’s 6:15 pm. The meeting Murty mentioned is upon
us. I’m feeling weak, like a hollow version of myself, but I’m here. It’s an
odd choice of venue, a room at the bottom of a regulation apartment block, bare
but for a metal-formica table and half-a-dozen stainless-steel chairs…. I’m sitting
with Murty, three or four other local luminaries, and two of his ex-students.
The latter might be the ones who met him on the train, but I can’t be sure. I
was too zonked. The luminaries include a high-flying architect, a female
English Literature academic, and a lawyer. And there’s a guy with one hand who
asks me several times about Australian ‘folk tales’ and can’t comprehend that
we don’t have such an oeuvre, as
India does. Maybe he’s after an Aussie equivalent to The Song of the Cowherd….
The book keeps wilfully breaking all the
traditional moulds or superimposing them very adroitly – the novel, short
story, theatre, history, philosophy, spiritualism – they are all in a dance!
It’s much like a potpourri, a heady cocktail; though the booze stays always
soft and light-hearted. And once you are caught in the flow – you are carried
forward effortlessly and delicately.
And some random quotes from the novel -
I first visited India in 1984 and have been back
numerous times. It is a thread running through my life, like love, the sea,
literature, music, enhancing the drama of being. Why India? That question’s
been on my mind for 30 years
I
want Anna and India to get along, as you do when introducing loved ones. I want
her to be entranced by the otherness of what she sees, ancient beliefs and
lived traditions the West abandoned long ago.
As we ramble along with the narrative,
the ancient Chinese traveler, Hiuen Tsang often comes to mind. Sean lands in
Delhi and peregrinates through cities and places like Mathura, Fatehpur Sikri,
Jaipur,Ajmer, Pushkar, Varanasi, Bodh Gaya, and so forth, taking you through
his experiences, with Anna, his daughter playing all along as a contrapuntal
tune.The narrative is often embellished
with epigraphs.
‘If there is one place on the face of
earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very
earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India!’
Varanasi
brings out a yearning for oblivion. The river flows, silent, shining. It will
take you away, to eternity.
The
Ganga, and the Aarti, are incarnations of Shakti, the primordial cosmic energy
that moves through the universe. Shakti is female power symbolised as a deity.
She is responsible for creation and is the agent of all change. So the river is
an embodiment of this energy, which initiates change. Death certainly is a
change. The Aarti honours the river and embodies its energy, like prayer. This
is good, a Hindu concept I can understand.
My
attitude towards India is, at base, contradictory. I can’t live within it, I
can’t live without it.
And he ends by saying -
My time will come. I’m not finished with India yet,
and I pray she’s not finished with me.
Sean had sent me a draft copy as he was
still working on the book. It lay in my file. But now that the cat is soon to
be out of the bag, it shows its wagging tail in this pre-view.
He kept
sending emails. Even as the work was about to begin, he emailed on 21 May,
2011:
Ten days
later he wrote again:
Thank you for your perception of me as an Indian. I am very happy to read
that! I have great affection for Indian people, so I take it as a real
compliment. An autorickshaw driver actually said the same thing to me when I
bargained hard with him for a good fare.
He further wrote:
When I got back from
India, I started reading EM Forster's A Passage to India. I have to
say that I didn’t like it, and gave up after 114 pp. There is too
much style, and too little substance in it. Very little
action occurs, and Forster's expression is a bit too
self-consciusly clever for my taste. He seems to love his own cleverness much
more than he loves any of his characters. He satirises all of them (so at least
he is even-handed in a racial sense). A great contrast to this was
Kipling's Kim, which I read while in India. Kipling has clear and
strong affection for most of his characters, especially the Indian
ones. The silliest characters in his book are the English, who
think they run things but actually have no idea what is going on around them.
And there's no shortage of action. I enjoyed it immensely!
The book
will be out in India on 18 February, 2021 on Kindle for Rs. 449. And you can
read this blurb of the book on Amazon.in. Just click on it for a pre-booking!
Writer and editor
Sean Doyle has loved India for decades, so when his first-born, Anna, finishes
high school, they set off on a two-month trip. She wants an adventure; he wants
a holiday. But India is no cakewalk, especially for the faint-hearted, and Anna
has not only recently overcome a personal trauma that’s left her feeling
fragile, she has also never experienced anything like the gargantuan, pulsating
Subcontinent she’s walking into. There’s no doubt about it: Sean is nervous.
Torn between keeping his daughter safe and
giving her the space to embrace India as he has, Sean undergoes one of the most
intense, challenging experiences of his life. He knew Anna would be confronted,
but he didn’t imagine he would, too. Amidst the noise, the sensory overload and
the extremes of life that typify India, they discover more about themselves,
and each other, than they thought possible.
Blending erudition, humour and paternal angst,
this is a beautifully nuanced exploration of a father–daughter relationship set
against the backdrop of one of the world’s most culturally and spiritually rich
countries.
Two endorsements of the book
‘A wonderful illustration of the author’s extensive
knowledge of the history and culture of India, his experience of previous
visits and, above all, his great love for the country. Unlike all other travel
books about India, and uniquely appealing, is the fact that here the author is
accompanied by his just-out-of-school daughter. His fondness for her, his
protectiveness, his eagerness to show her places he has seen is truly charming.
The book draws the reader so much into the feelings and experiences of these
two that Delhi, Ajmer, Varanasi and all the places visited are interesting because of them, as part of their
experience. This is an achievement we associate more with an accomplished
novelist than a travel writer. Travel writing is at its best when, as here, the
interest in the travel is mirrored by our empathy with the traveller.’
Professor
Rajiva Verma,
Former Head,
Department of English, University of Delhi; former President, The Shakespeare
Society of India
‘A
great account … thoroughly enjoyable reading. The narrative flows beautifully,
and the two strands – encountering India, and the pair’s engagement with the
place and each other – hold together nicely. I enjoyed it all. Doyle neatly
sets up all the ambivalences of being on the road again in India: the fun of
it, and everything else. He has a fine knack of evoking place and the circumstances
of travelling: the unaccustomed spaces, the accompanying noise, colour,
activity and people. The story of the author and his daughter is particularly
well handled – their spoken and non-spoken interactions, what they feel as the
trip unfolds.
‘This engaging travel
narrative of India today is also a perceptive chronicle of India in its heyday
as a counterculture hub some half a century or so ago. The book is both a
commentary on the present – of what India is like now - and a record of the
past. It manages both roles with great skill. It becomes effectively a primary
document for the experiences of a generation of visitors, travellers and
sojourners on the subcontinent, a record and explanation of their involvement
and style of life. All in all, a fine achievement.’
Dr Jim Masselos,
Senior
Research Associate in the School of
Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney; Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities, of the
Australia India Institute, and of the Asiatic Society in Mumbai
– one of fewer than 10 foreigners elected since 1947 to a society that traces
its origins to 1804.
I also post here the book’s cover and some photos of Sean when he visited my flat in Lucknow, in 2014. I hope we are soon face to face with a best-seller!
Text & Photos (C) Dr BSM Murty
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