Touring as Hell, Part 3: The Dysfunction of Life and the Road Through Perdition

It was New Year’s Day, somewhere in Uttaranchal on National Highway 74--progressing between Haridwar and Ramnagar in the desultory, nauseating fashion that is the rhythm of the Indian road--when I felt something that I can only think of as vocational despair descend upon me. How, I thought, how could I look out of the car window on this day, and how could I have looked out of it the day before this, and the day before that too, and imagine a world in which poverty might one day be banished, like polio, to the loneliest margins of human experience, and what’s more believe that such a banishment might be possible in my lifetime? I couldn’t any longer, could I? Because here, here before me, was unassailable, irrefutable, inescapable evidence to the contrary, evidence that I might live one thousand lifetimes and devote each and every second of each and every one of them to improving the lives of only these very people that were this very day clustered on and along this very stretch of NH 74, and yet I would never so much as bring one kernel more of corn to the lips of a single hungry babe! The feeling, as most do, would pass within hours, but I couldn’t soon forget it.

It wasn’t any glimpse of destitution or abjection that provoked this gloominess; in fact, the countryside along the highway between cities, that is, most of what was outside of my window, approached pastoral idyll: fields of delicate yellow mustard blossoms, sugarcane, and green, seedling wheat; a colonnade of eucalyptus trees lining either side of the road; and in the distance, the foothills of the Himalayas rising above the earth like stoic deities. And the cities held no more impoverished masses than I am accustomed to encountering in Udaipur—there were no visible slums, shantytowns, or tent cities to lay low the spirit. My soul foundered on something else, something beyond a shocking image or even the accreting horror of a series of them; I was demoralized by the very process and performance of life around me, the functioning of the world that I had entered. It was dysfunction that flung my spirit to the depths, then: I had seen the dysfunction of Life, Life for the billions, and it unsettled me deeply.

I saw dysfunction in the senseless jostling of traffic, which had no one to oversee it, and in the enormous, omnipresent freight trucks built without taillights. I saw it in the man who smiled smugly as he pushed a laden handcart against traffic, and in the souls clinging to the sides and perched atop speeding buses. I saw it in the young boys awkwardly straddling motorbikes that hurtled heedlessly in the shifting interstices, and in the beggars and hawkers at car windows caught unawares by the sudden resumption of traffic, wavering in the torrent like bulrushes in a swift river. I saw a terribly dysfunctional world outside my window, and though I knew it might possibly be different because I knew a world that functioned well, despair accompanied the feeling that, after all, this particular world would never change.

Predictability is the armature upon which any economy is constructed, and conversely, unpredictability is economic poison (which is why, for example, hyperinflation (a dysfunctional currency) is the gravest ill that can befall any economy—in its throes, one can’t predict what a kilo of rice will cost in the next hour, let alone the next day). Dysfunction and unpredictability are mother and daughter: a dysfunctional world is an unpredictable one. When will the Goods Carrier arrive with produce for market? Will the investment banker make it to a vital appointment with his client? Will the city have power when that time sensitive e-mail attachment arrives? In India, it is best not to depend too deeply upon anything. Mandarins of the international economic system suggest that this country, along with China, will challenge the economic supremacy of the U.S. in the next half century; a nation with a growing middle class of a quarter billion, with an educational system that is producing millions of highly skilled workers annually, and with, by developing world standards, a stable, democratic, and upright government, possesses the necessary ingredients for sustained and prodigious economic growth, the thinking goes. This may very well be true; however, five minutes along NH 74 reveals how truly slight the possibility is that the mass of Indians will be involved in or affected by such growth.

For mired in such dysfunction, dysfunction that runs to the very core of things, how could this world change, how could the world’s billions hope to escape? When the dysfunction was so much bigger than one city, or two cities, or one thousand cities, how would they ever know respite from the onerous toil and hardship of their lives (for dysfunction makes a mockery of hard work without ever delivering one from its clutches)? I didn’t have any answers for such questions, and yet I succeeded in dispelling them with surprising speed—in my defense, I was going on safari the next day, and preoccupation was unimaginable when a tiger might dash into view and out again in a mere split second. I owed myself the forgetting, didn’t I?

Two days later, my family and I were in a car again, en route from Corbett National Park to Delhi, where I would be dropped at Nizamuddin Railway Station and they at Indira Gandhi International Airport. In late afternoon, around four o’clock, after six hours on the road, we drew near to the city—and to the conclusion of what had been, in my case, two weeks of hospital visits, car rides, harassment, and clamoring chaos without cease. There on the Hapur Bypass, between Ghaziabad and Noida, somewhere within the vast conurbation east of the city, a stunningly apt (if rather obvious) metaphor for the tourist experience appeared to me, as if by the conjuring of some supernatural power of macabre poetics. William Blake was frequently visited by ecstatic, hallucinatory vision of angels; in contrast, on January 3, I believe I saw Hell.

The suburbs outside of Delhi were engulfed in a spectral haze of dust and pollution that had settled over everything, rendering buildings in the middle distance vaporous columns of smoke and the city beyond an indeterminate jutting on the horizon. The sun was low in the sky (it sets around 5:30 this time of year) and, as if having gained in heat, glowed flash bulb white; only a faint tinge of yellow at its margins degraded the purity of its fervor. Its rays, so close to the solstice, were foreshortened and struck the earth obliquely. The haze and the sun had conspired to leech away the color of the world; all was white and that which outlined the whiteness, like a badly overexposed photograph. The people, however, were black and small and gathered thickly in places, as a dry canal bed where a cricket game raged (at this point any Indian would interject: “But it couldn’t have been hell if there was cricket!”); the strides of the bowler sent puffs of dust into the lowering haze.

From my car window, the world seemed baked by an intense and blanching heat; its dust was the steam rising from smoldering earth, its haze the sulfurous emanations of a noxious atmosphere; its inhabitants were souls charred to insignificant flecks by an implacable furnace. Then flecks, too, began to appear in the sky. First only a handful dotted its miasmic face, but then the handful of flecks became dozens, and the dozens became hundreds. The black birds wheeled in an enormous, bristling half-circle above the earth, settling over a banquet of eternal carrion. I thought I heard the chorus of their ravening cries mingling with the shrieks of the damned.

What sign was this, what omen, what augury (certainly not one of innocence, as in Blake's poem)? What, precisely, did this vision reveal? Only this: an addled and grasping mind, a strange world more sinister for its strangeness, and a city suffocating in the noisome exhalations of its machines. And one convenient metaphor.