Better Than Fiction Page 2

  The story I want to tell, though, isn’t about my improved colour sense. I’m digressing before I’ve even begun. As most travellers know, India is, in effect, one long, glorious digression, but what I want to describe is the moment when that country shifted things for me, ever so slightly, a moment over so quickly it wasn’t much more than a flicker in the corner of the eye.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  I’ve never known exactly what is meant by the term culture shock but assume it refers to the intense disorientation you can feel while travelling. Recently, I read Allen Ginsberg’s India Diaries: ‘I slept all afternoon & when I woke I thought it was morning, I didn’t know where I was. I had no name for India.’ As I read Ginsberg, I thought, Yes! That’s it! When you travel you can lose the names for things, and with the names, you lose meaning. You don’t know where you are.

  Certainly I felt some kind of shock when I saw India’s beggars, their limbs tangled into impossible knots, or missing altogether. Or the blind women, eyes rolling in their heads or scars where their eyes once were, handing out printed statements explaining their situation and requesting financial help. Less alarmingly, some beggars wore saffron robes to indicate they were now living a life of a sadhu – that was more like it. That was what I’d expected.

  I was a 20-year-old middle-class girl from Melbourne when I first went to India, and it was long enough ago that it was rare to see beggars on the streets of my own town. But I was diligent. I read books in an attempt to prepare myself for entering a reality very different from my own. On the flight over, to Bombay as it was then called, I read Gita Mehta’s searing description of Americans stumbling around on misguided spiritual trips in India, Karma Cola. In that book she spoke of Americans taking advantage of the relative respect accorded to beggars by begging themselves, to subsidise their travels, or because they had joined some sect. She described Peace Corp workers attempting to save street kids and freaking out when those children attempted to repay that kindness with sex, or stolen goods. I read V. S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization and tried to wrap my head around the world he was describing. One where people’s lives were dictated by caste. Where one’s home might be a square metre of the Bombay footpath near the market you work in – and that small piece of territory may well have been passed down from father to son over several generations.

  But even his vivid descriptions could not prepare me for the fact that lower castes weren’t just physically smaller, they actually seemed to hold their bodies closer to the ground in an attempt to take up less space in the world while other, plumper, more confident souls would use their girth to push you out of a queue. All the while the taller, broader Brahmins carried themselves with pride. My reading certainly didn’t stop me doing what most tourists – and possibly locals – do, which is looking through and around the beggars we came across. Learning to unsee them altogether.

  So: I’d been in India for four months and was about to leave the country, from Calcutta, the city Ginsberg wrote so vividly about in his diaries. India hadn’t been kind to me, but I assumed that my struggles were just another kind of culture shock. If the internet had existed then I would have known that the anti-malarial I was on, Lariam, was the problem, and that it caused ‘neuropsychiatric effects’ in 11 to 17 per cent of users. By 2002 the drug’s labels and literature were clearer about what those effects might be: ‘Mefloquine [Lariam] may cause psychiatric symptoms in a number of patients, ranging from anxiety, paranoia and depression to hallucinations and psychotic behaviour … adverse reactions include … tremor, ataxia, mood changes, panic attacks and rare cases of suicide …’ But there was no such advice back in 1984. I just thought I was going mad.

  None of this boded well for that moment of growth I’ve been promising to describe. Certainly I’d given up expecting it. I’m not sure if the naivety of my hopes for India were why it had so disappointed me, though I felt, to more accurately describe my emotions, that I had disappointed India. I was embarrassed really. Like all those hippies Mehta was so scathing about in Karma Cola, I’d gone to India to find myself and found instead neuropsychiatric effects and giardia. It served me right. It was only once I’d left the country that I began to think of the latticework of dust I’d found laid out on my eiderdown after a dust storm, as a kind of blessing. Or that I realised the week I’d spent in Kashmir, a place of the most extraordinary beauty, was a rare honour. In fact it now seems the ways in which India changed me are too numerous to mention, but at the time I didn’t see it like that at all. Well, until my last hour or so in the country.

  I was sitting outside the hotel I’d stayed in for my last few nights in the country, reflecting on the fact that I found Calcutta – that plump, fetid, monsoonal version of a Victorian city – quite charming. I was, to my surprise, sorry to be leaving. This is one of the things India does to you – it’s like a difficult, demanding lover who you swear you never want to see again, only to find they’ve got under your skin, and insinuated themselves into your dreams.

  I was sitting on the ground, leaning against my backpack, which in turn was leaning against a faded turquoise concrete wall, waiting for that taxi. A few sprays of magenta bougainvillea were waving in the wind, batting me in the face, like sharp little kisses. The heat of the day had not yet descended and I was revelling in the sun. A man – a beggar – rolled up to me. His limbs were twisted up behind his torso and he needed a skateboard to move around. Now I realise he had polio, but at the time I didn’t know what had caused such distortion. He was strong across his shoulder and arms and – it seems impossible that I remember this detail, so perhaps it’s my imagination – his hands were calloused, and sat at sharp right angles to the rest of him, as if they were feet.

  I started feeling around in my pockets but I had no money except rupees for the taxi left. I told the beggar this and he shrugged, saying, ‘No worries,’ in near-perfect English. After an awkward pause he asked, ‘Would you like some chocolate cake?’ That was when I saw, with some surprise, that he had a chocolate cake sitting in front of him on his board. ‘It’s my birthday,’ he elaborated.

  I took the slice of cake I was offered and we started to chat. He had a laid-back casual charm. He wanted to know about Australia. I wanted to know where he got the cake. A Japanese tourist had given it to him, he told me. He also told me that he was married, he had kids, and the business of begging was going pretty well. Over the next ten minutes or so we were joined by several of his friends, all missing bits of their bodies and all getting stuck into the chocolate cake. A fairly animated discussion ensued about how certain territories attracted higher incomes. I was made to feel welcome rather than like the intruder I was, and after that initial approach, no one asked me for money. After a few more minutes the taxi arrived, so I said my farewells. As I drove off I waved out the back window at my new friend, who was resuming his post outside the front of the hotel. He waved back.

  It embarrasses me now to realise how surprised I was to learn that this man, that most beggars, didn’t see themselves as objects of pity. Pity was just the business they were in. They lived complex lives, like all of us. I realised, I suppose, just how ignorant I was. Having seen that, I hoped that I could begin to undo it, though I now see that learning is just a gradual revelation of how deep our ignorance really is. To give up to not knowing, to be uncertain of the name of things: that space is the place where possibility lives and in my mind it shimmers bright as a blue summer sky.

  Huaxi Watermill

  BY ARNOLD ZABLE

  Arnold Zable is an acclaimed Australian writer and novelist, and one of the country’s most-loved storytellers. His award-winning books include Jewels and Ashes, The Fig Tree and three novels, Café Scheherazade, Scraps of Heaven and Sea of Many Returns. His most recent book, Violin Lessons, a collection of stories, was published in 2011. He is the author of numerous columns, stories and essays, and is coauthor of the play Kan Yama Kan, in which asylum seekers tell their stories. Zable has been a visi
ting lecturer at Deakin, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, La Trobe and Victoria universities. He is president of the Melbourne centre of International PEN and has a doctorate from the School of Creative Arts, Melbourne University, where he was recently appointed a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Zable grew up in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Carlton. He has travelled and lived in the USA, India, Papua New Guinea, Europe, Southeast Asia and China, and now lives in Melbourne with his wife and son.

  In September, 1984, I journeyed to Huaxi, a small town in Guizhou Province, in southwest China. For the following nine months I worked at the Guizhou Agricultural College, teaching English to research scientists. The red identity card the authorities issued had me grandly titled: ‘foreign expert’.

  The college was a world unto itself, the campus set apart from and above the township. Each day, I left my apartment to walk from the college out into the countryside. It was autumn when I began the walks. The valley and township were encircled in the near distance by steep limestone mountains. Crops of red chilli peppers and rice were spread out to dry on roadsides and village courtyards. Terraced rice paddies alternated with fields of yellow rape. Vegetable plots were ripe with cabbages, onions, turnips, potatoes and eggplant. All was on the cusp of reaping.

  I found alternative routes, and extended my explorations along new ones. I became a familiar figure in the hamlets of the Miao and Buyi people, and was invited into their homes for toasts of maotai, the fiery liquor native to Guizhou Province. Gam bei! Drink up, they gestured. So I did. I was a novelty, one of the first foreigners to work in the province for decades.

  No matter what route I took, I eventually made my way to a bridge over the Huaxi River. Eighty metres or so in length, the bridge was supported on concrete pylons. In the middle stood a brick shelter housing a watermill. The room was stacked to the rafters with sacks of grain waiting their turn at the grinding stone.

  The miller knew no English, and I knew little Chinese. He filled his kettle and placed it on the coal stove. The whine of the kettle demanded attention like the insistent cry of an infant. The miller poured the tea, relit his long-stemmed pipe, and settled back on a stool opposite me. We sat in silence, broken occasionally by the chatter of passersby, and the laughter of children playing on the riverbanks.

  From time to time a horse-drawn cart cluttered by, now and then a truck laboured past. Farmers came down from their hamlets with sacks of recently harvested grain. The miller added them to the stacks, returned to his seat, and resumed his silence. And all the while, beneath our feet, the steady beat of the watermill: Thoom. Thoom. Thoom. Round and round, an endless churning.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  At the time, China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution. As I got to know them, my students would come to my apartment and tell me tales of what they had experienced during that period.

  I came to see that much of the country had descended into mass psychosis led by an aging pied piper – a self-serving potentate clinging, despite his waning years, to his power. That human capacity for slander and recrimination, betrayal and bullying, the settling of old scores and vendettas, was amplified many times over, as faction fought faction, and Red Guards roamed the countryside quoting the sacred homilies of their self-titled Great Helmsman.

  The students had been assigned to years of hard labour in the countryside, or had seen their parents humiliated, imprisoned, or exiled to remote villages. Loudspeakers resounded with slogans and denunciations. Bad elements, rich farmers, landlords, counter-revolutionaries, rightwingers made up the five ‘black categories’ – with capitalist roaders, traitors and spies additional felonies, and intellectuals completing the roll call as the ‘stinking ninth’.

  The denounced were paraded in the streets or forced to kneel for hours. Placards hung from their necks, dunce’s hats perched on their heads. Mobs jeered and beat them, and performed the loyalty dance. ‘Mao is the red sun that shines in our heart,’ they chanted, as they tore apart the lives of former comrades.

  The fate of one student in particular encapsulated the madness. I shall call him Y. An earnest man in his mid-twenties, he was forever lost in thought, questioning, contemplating. He chose his words carefully, pausing to weigh up their meaning before releasing them.

  ‘We were all caught up in it,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later, we stepped into the quicksand.’ His father worshipped Mao. A Red Army soldier in the 1940s, he studied law after liberation, and rose to a prominent position in the bureau of public security. ‘He was a kind and decent man,’ Y assured me, ‘and he had faith. Even now he has faith, though it has been so shaken.’

  At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, Y’s father followed Mao’s injunction and criticised old cadres whom he believed had become corrupt. Inevitably, the wheel turned, the accuser became the accused, the interrogator the victim. Y’s father was denounced and imprisoned. His son had followed his own trajectory, as a teenage member of the Red Guard and the son of a cadre, to his fall from grace as the son of a prisoner. Cut off from his father, he was reared by his grandmother, a kindly woman, fiercely protective of her grandchild.

  As a child Y had dreamt of becoming a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. ‘At that time I was shy, a person of few words,’ he said. ‘Their heroic image impressed me. I saw many films about them. I imagined I would give up my life on the battlefield, and my heroic deeds would be known far and wide by the people.’

  After his father was imprisoned, books became Y’s solace. He read voraciously, furtively, so as not to arouse suspicion: intellectuals were the ‘stinking ninth’ and their pursuits deemed counter-revolutionary. He developed a passion for ideas, sought out thinkers, read Rousseau, Voltaire, Hegel and Goethe in Chinese translation. He read Gorky and Hugo and became addicted to novels.

  ‘I would lose myself in the characters. They remained imprinted in my mind a long time after I finished reading. They taught me how to live, how to observe the world around me. I revered the authors who created them, and wished I would one day become a writer.’

  His life-experiences, and reflections upon them, led Y to believe that the most difficult challenge in life was how to be kind, yet strong. ‘To be kind is not enough,’ he would say. ‘You have to be strong to give to others, and strong to withstand life’s fluctuating fortunes.’

  The wheel turned. The Cultural Revolution was over. Mao was dead, the Gang of Four imprisoned. At Party gatherings cadres pronounced the new slogans. The Cultural Revolution gave way to the ‘Four Modernisations’. ‘Extreme Leftists’ were out and ‘The Three Bad Types of People’ were the new enemy. After years of self-imposed isolation, the doors were opening. Y seized his opportunities, studied agriculture, and became a research scientist and teacher of biology and horticulture; and he continued his reading and contemplation.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Every evening I continued my walks. The farmers were bringing in the harvest as they had for millennia; and every evening I made my way to the watermill to sit with the miller. I left towards nightfall and made my way back along the riverbank, past darkening fields to the township.

  The narrow streets were crowded. Teams of bullocks and horse-drawn carts trundled by. Jeeps and trucks whipped up dust, as they wove their way through competing traffic. I ate at roadside food stalls, the Huaxi teahouse and in basic restaurants. My favourite snack was a slice of fried bean curd with a filling of chilli and hot spices. Nian-ai-dofu it was called, ‘love bean curd’. It was invariably dark when I arrived back at my campus apartment.

  For two months the harvest continued, dawn to dusk, seven days a week. Bent over in rain, wind and sun, farmers shielded in conical hats drained the fields of rice and corn, sunflowers and rape, and leached the valley of its colour.

  Then it was over, the fields reduced to fallow strips of dirt strewn with hayricks. The rice had been threshed, husked, bagged and carted, the trees denuded of their fruit and foliage. A collective sigh descended on
the valley. The relief could be sensed in the temporary stillness. The seasons were turning, and still I continued to make my way to the watermill.

  I walked as the countryside sank into the damp, walked as smoke curled day and night from village chimneys in below-zero temperatures. Walked until the entire valley was lost under thick layers of cloud and incessant drizzle, lost in its own thoughts in the depths of winter.

  In the township, boys dragged wooden carts weighed down with winter fuel, their faces blackened, fingers charred, their clothes covered in coal dust. At the street stalls vapours rose from huge woks. The noodles and rice dishes were spiced with extra doses of oil and chilli. Vendors in fat padded jackets hung on till after dark selling pumpkin and sunflower seeds, while I retreated to the teahouses and surveyed the night scene through windows and doorways.

  Through it all, the mill continued churning. The massive wheels could be seen beneath a trap door, turning incessantly, grinding the yields of the harvest into flour, taming my mind into stillness, and subduing the noise of the day into silence.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  The students continued to recount their stories. Y was a regular visitor. He loved nothing more than to allow full rein to his contemplations. His talk often turned to his grandmother. He had spent his earliest years in a remote mountain village.

  As a child he was a dreamer, and very curious. The countryside spoke to him. In his eyes, the stalks of grain in the breeze were nodding their heads, extending their greetings to the labouring farmers. He roamed the fields, stole into orchards, ate his fill of fruit, and returned home with his stomach bloated. His grandmother admonished him for overeating.

  Y’s mother could not handle his relentless questions, but his grandmother listened to them with great patience. She called him ‘my little treasure’ and told him stories, fables, and epic tales of the rise and fall of successive dynasties. She recounted her stories by the open doorway on summer nights, and by the stove in winter. She sidestepped the terrors, protected herself from the storms brewing about her, and did her best to answer her grandson’s queries.