The Waiting Land Read Free Page A

notice of this grim sight and we were only delayed ten or fifteen minutes longer than usual. The police did not appear (perhaps there are none in these remote villages) and one gathered that the event was unimportant. My Nepalese neighbour told me that it was probably a case of suicide, as people with family or financial troubles frequently throw themselves under trains; and this seemed a likely explanation, since our snail-paced engine could hardly take anyone unawares.
    This morning, on the platform at Muzaffarpur, I met an Irish boy named Niall who was travelling to Kathmandu with a Swiss youth named Jean and an American girl rather disconcertingly known as Loo. Loo had recently arrived in India on a round-the-world air trip, and had been persuaded by the boys, against her own better judgment, to sample life in the raw by going overland to Nepal. She spent most of today pointing out just how much better her own judgment was, and though recriminations seemed futile at that stage one could see her point of view.
    Certainly life cannot be much rawer anywhere than it is in these villages of Bihar. Throughout the Punjab one rarely encounters that extremity of poverty traditionally associated with India – but here one does. And, as the hot, squalid hours passed slowly, I began to take a more lenient view of our affluent society. The people all around usseemed inwardly dead, mere mechanically-moving puppets, their expressions dulled by permanent suffering. To look at their bodies – so malformed, starved and diseased – and to sense the stuntedness of their minds and spirits made me feel quite guilty about helping Tibetans when so many Indians are in such need. Yet one doubts if Indians ever can be helped in the sense that Tibetans can. Apart from the vastness of their current material problem the very nature of the people themselves seems stubbornly to defy most outside attempts at alleviation.
    Rexaul is a smelly, straggling little border-town, overpopulated by both humans and cattle. It has an incongruous air of importance, since all the Kathmandu truck-traffic passes through its streets, yet its cosmopolitanism is limited. When I went to the Post Office – a dark wooden shack – to airmail the first instalment of this diary to Ireland my request caused unprecedented chaos. To begin with, registration was not permissible after 4 p.m. and it was now 5.30; however, when I had flatteringly explained that I wanted to post from India rather than Nepal the senior clerk consented to make an exception to this rule. But then came the knotty problem of deciding where Ireland was – and the even knottier problem of determining the airmail registration fee for such an outlandish destination. In the end no fewer than seven men spent twenty minutes working it all out, consulting thick, flyblown volumes, weighing and re-weighing the package on ancient scales of doubtful accuracy, checking and re-checking interminable sums on filthy scraps of paper and finally laboriously copying the address, in triplicate, on to the receipt docket – with hilarious results, since even intelligent Europeans often find my handwriting illegible. I suppose it is possible that the package will eventually arrive on the Aran Islands, but one can’t help having horrible doubts.
1 MAY – KATHMANDU
    The ninety-mile Tribhuvan Rajpath, named after King Mahendra’s father, was built by Indian engineers during the 1950s. At present it is Nepal’s only completed motor-road – though the Chinese are working hard on an uncomfortably symbolic continuation of it from Kathmandu to Lhasa – and it must be one of the most remarkableengineering feats in the world. Yet the Rajpath’s inexplicable narrowness (or is this defect perhaps explicable in strategic terms?) means that trucks are often rammed against cliffsides by other trucks, or go skidding over precipices in successful but unrewarding attempts to avoid head-on collisions. However, the art of truck-driving is