As the train slumped into the station, a black foot thrust itself through my window. It was very bony and fine like something found in a tomb. The footowner maintained his position for a further ten seconds as the train came to a halt, shrieking away those others also trying to secure a foothold. I retrieved my rucksack from amongst boxes of chickens, pigs, etc., while being carried in a crush to the door. Behind me, arguing and banging suggested bodies and luggage being poked in through the windows.

Perhaps fifty shouting men and women were packed around the carriage doorway as if drawn by a huge magnetic force. I punched and shouldered my way out. Nobody seemed to mind.

“Excuse me please, sah’b.”

A tall thin man wearing a red towel around his head cradled my elbow in his hand.

“Come on sir, you vant to see beautiful saris? rickshaw? Hotel maybe? Come on, looking is free.”

“No I’d rather…”

“Alright, no vurries, come on; you vant fortune told? Very cheap, I have Oxforhd degree. You vant money change? Hashish? . . . voman?!”

Throughout this I had managed to loosen his grip with a trick we used at school, and was fleeing towards the first class waiting room. At the entrance, several monkeys were crouched patiently on their luggage, guarding it.

A battered railway attendant wished to inspect my first class ticket. I lent him two rupees and went on in.

At each of the three corners of a relatively calm and bare room, a fat and/or dignified man was dressing, painstakingly, as if for the first time. I eased my rucksack to the floor, and peered through a window at the platform.

One of the three men approached, and began the cross- examination by which a stranger is made to feel dutifully welcome. Had they drawn straws?

‘Esc’huse me sihr, from vere are you coming?”

He was fat, with deep dark eyes like a spaniel’s, as if he had been beaten expertly about the face; and his big sensuous lips slid across each other with an excruciating pleasure. I considered answering, ‘from that train’, or ‘the platform’ but thought better of it.

“Australia.”

“Ah. And how long vill you be here?”

“Five feet eight inches.”

He knitted his eyebrows, and his eyes were momentarily glazed.

“Are you married?”

“No, I’m Church of England.”

“Good gracious.” He glanced thankfully at a print of Krishna pasted on the wall amongst railway notices.

Through the window, I could see several thin people standing along the platform edge cleaning their teeth onto the track.

The man asked cautiously, “Vhyfore is it that you have not married?”

“I hold shares in an economic crisis.”

“By Jove, you are qvite rhight sihr.” He seemed relieved. “To vomen, ve men ahre but ‘a pleasurable means to a measurable ends’, isn’t it? Ha ha ha.”

This occasion of merriment seemed to call for him squeezing my upper arm for several seconds.

Outside I could see many of the poorer tooth-cleaners squatting along a wall with their pants down, looking absently about. This may also have been a queue for a train. The man still held my arm.

“You have eaten vell sihr, but you know, most of my people are very tin.” This was borne out by the ‘squatters’, who looked like they were propped on the ends of bamboo sticks. The man had begun rubbing my arm.

“And vut dhoo you tink of Gud?” His lips slid back into a smile of grey, sharp-pointed teeth, like the mouth of a cave.”

“He seems to have mellowed a lot since coming to your country,” and I walked steadily over to the urinals. I took my station. He was beside me fumbling, breathing deeply through his nose and making occasional small throat-clearing sounds. I attended to the task at hand, trying to ignore the jerking of his head across at me. Finally, my attention was taken by something like a warped saveloy emerging with some help from the underside of his rotund belly. With samurai-like skill I leapt through the doorway, snatching up my rucksack. The man’s bulbous body writhed at tits extremities by which he produced a hurrying motion, but he had first to deal with his own condition.

“A man can’t have a pee in peace,” I shouted to the attendant, who smiled and touched his hat.

I bustled past assorted beggars, coolies and holy-men, and found the oldest rickshaw-runner on the platform. This choice was based on the same principle that one throws pieces of sandwich to the seagull-with-only-one-leg. Before I had fully climbed aboard or given a destination, he had raised the frail wooden vehicle and was running with it, dodging taxis and people flooding the station entrance. I fell back into the seat and decided to relax.

“The Salvation Army Hostel, please.”

“O.K. sah’b,” he said, without changing direction, “Sure ting, rhight-on.”

The sinewy, half-naked old body pumped up and down, weaving us through cobbled streets choked with people and dust. Cows patrolled the streets with expressions of mild distaste. Their hides seemed flung like wet flannels over each skeleton. On the pavements, thin men were curled up on cloths, spread amidst putrid decay and the stench of urine. Around a group of street-seller, people waved and shrieked at one another like children’s marionettes. A massive sign overhead read, “Mustafah Singh’s Hair Oil – Cools The Brain.” Countless birds were being sucked across the sky.

Two days later, whilst our walking, I found myself in the same mud-brick district. I adopted the elbows-in, neck-in posture of someone imitating their own absence. The heat was sweating my back; a dusty, human heat. I marveled at Man’s ability to overpopulate in such a climate.

“Hello, sah’b, please, exc-huse me, vun moment, sah’b,… etc.” I strode unflinchingly on. Something soft and wet hit me on the back of the head. I strode cautiously on.

A few minutes later a gentle, leathery voice caressed my ear.

“How dhoo you dhoo sihr. To vere are you going?”

At first I walked on as one called to a distant mission; but he persisted at my side, not unlike the other dark presence mentioned in the Bible. I stopped and took off my large sunglasses. I had bought them oversized to allow for growing into, which was taking a long time.

“Per-haps ve can bhee of assistance to vun anudder.” He produced these sounds by making his tongue ricochet about the inside of his mouth like a ball. He was a tall, thin man with a large head, standing so upright as to seem more fitted to travelling up and down than horizontally. The extravagant head rocked from side to side as he spoke. The effect was of a question mark hinged at the base of its curve.

“How do you reckon we could help each other?” The suddenness of my Australian accent unnerved him, and for some time after he would glance distrustfully at my mouth as we spoke, as if expecting a small snake to come out of it.

“Vot do you do?”

“I write on people.”

“Ah, you make tattoos?”

“No. What do you do?”

“Vell, to tell you de truce, just betveen you and me, I am a ship’s bosun, speaking for myself, personally.” He smiled proudly, thick flesh ringed his eyes, suggesting indeed a lifetime of resistance to sun, wind and sea.

“My name is Ramadas McFlattery, I am a Burmese Scotsman – you vill understand dis ting – and I have sailed as far nort’ as Lubrushky and sout’ as far as de Banyana Islands.” There was a slight ginger tint in his dark hair, which was cut short and pushed forward like a balding swinger’s. We walked on.

“Is it rhight dat you are now seeking some vay of leaving dis country?” He paused to flick some snot, carefully – as one removes a thread of chewing gum – into the gutter. This precision suggested good breeding.

“Dhoo you feel home-sick?”

“Only when I’m at home.”

I told him my name and explained my disappointment with the country.

“Ah yes; ‘de streets are not paved vid gurus’, as you have discovered. But look. . .” He paused confidingly, leveling two bloodshot eyes at me. I looked away. “Look, if you like, ve need a hand abhoard my ship, vich is sailing tomorrow for Austrhalia. I tink ve could take you abhoard if you decide now.”

“Don’t I need some papers or some-such? I mean. . .”

“I can get dese tings easily. Vot do you say?” he smiled. “You’ll have about fifty dollhars a veek?!”

I pursed my lips and knitted the eyebrows inscrutably, while I thought, “Hurray, home at last!”

“Well . . . Oh excuse me,” I said absently, having bumped into a cow that stood across our path. It seemed to be listening carefully to a brick wall. “Well, sure, o.k., fine, why not?”

“Splendid. Dere are many men from America, Europe and Austrhalia on boarhd to make you feel velcome. Come, ve can talk about de details in a nearby teashop. I hope dat you are good at darts, Ve play a lot on de ship. . .”

We strode, with a strikingly British resolve, to a sort of long, low tin shed filled with wooden tables and stools. Outside, about a dozen very ragged children crowded around us bleating, “Salaam sah’b, baksheesh” (gift), hands outreached as if testing for rain. The chant was defeaning, though the youngest ones gazed about vaguely. The man shoo’d them away like a villain in a Chinese melodrama. We sat.

“Vun small tin,” he pointed at me with his little finger as if making a subtle point. “To obtain your papers from de port ortorities I vill need a hundred rupees. Can you manage it?”

“Sure. Can you return it fairly soon thought?”

“Of course. Dis afternoon on boarhd de ship. Now I vill write you a note for de captain, explaining who you are and vot you intend to do. He likes to meet new crew-members first; a charming man. He is staying ashore at de ‘Guruji Changrila Hotel’. Take a bus dere and he vill tell you your duties. You know dis hotel?”

When a bus finally did stop, I clung to its side steps by holding onto several other people also bulging out over the rapidly accelerating street. Near my destination, the driver swung the bus down a very narrow, effectively scraping us from its side. I hadn’t paid for a ticket, but assumed that the conductor – if he existed – was pinned somewhere in the bowels of the bus.

In the plush lobby of the ‘Guruji Changrila Hotel’, an air of rarified gentility hung over the several dozen black and/or white people mostly seated about. In one corner, two tweedy old matrons sat stonily absorbing tea. Their subdued voices were tight-throated and precise, but their conversation seemed to ramble like a child’s. Above the polite clutter of small crockery, echoed mountainous guffaws. They belonged to a dark, blustering man of about fifty. He was large, with a waist-coat, walking stick and pipe. Perhaps he was the captain. I approached the reception counter.

“Do you have a Captain Worthystoke staying here?”

“I doubt it, thir, do you have the name written down? Ah, thank you. No. I should thay not, but I shall jutht check my regithter.” He soon returned. “No. Thorry.”

The afternoon sun had begun to drain into the greedy earth.

 

***

(Published in Westerly 21; An Anniversary Selection, Fremantle Arts Centre Press)