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this nor that, we are so often told, is the “real” India. And how well one begins to understand why this word is used! Perhaps India is only a word, a mystical idea that embraces all those vast plains and rivers through which the train moves, all those anonymous figures asleep on railway platforms and the footpaths of Bombay, all those poor fields and stunted animals, all this exhausted plundered land. Perhaps it is this, this vastness which no one can ever get to know: India as an ache, for which one has a great tenderness, but from which at length one always wishes to separate oneself.
    1962

Jamshed into Jimmy
    “Y OU’VE come to Calcutta at the wrong time,” the publisher said. “I very much fear that the dear old city is slipping into bourgeois respectability almost without a fight.”
    “Didn’t they burn a tram the other day?” I asked.
    “True. But that was the first tram for five years.”
    And really I had expected more from Calcutta, the “nightmare experience” of Mr. Nehru, the “pestilential behemoth” of a recent, near-hysterical American writer, a city which, designed for two million people, today accommodates more than six million on its pavements and in its
bastees
, in conditions which unmanned the World Bank Mission of 1960 and sent it away to write what the
Economic Weekly
of Bombay described as a “strikingly human document.”
    Like every newspaper-reader, I knew Calcutta as the city of tram-burners and students who regularly “clashed” with the police. A brief news item in
The Times
in 1954 had hinted memorably at its labour troubles: some disgruntled workers had tossed their manager into the furnace. And during my time in India I had been following the doings of its Congress-controlled Corporation, which, from the progressive nationalist citadel of the twenties, has decayed into what students of Indian affairs consider the most openly corrupt of India’s multitudinous corrupt public bodies: half the Corporation’s five hundred and fifty vehicles disabled, many of them stripped of saleable parts, repair mechanics hampered, accounts four years in arrears, every obstacle put in the way of “interference” by State Government, New Delhi and a despairing Ford Foundation.
    At every level I found that Calcutta enjoyed a fabulous reputation. The Bengali was insufferably arrogant (“The
pan
-seller doesn’t so much as look at you if you don’t talk to him in Bengali”); the Bengali was lazy; the pavements were dyed red with betel-juice and the main park was littered with used sanitary towels (“very untidy people,” had been thecomment of the South Indian novelist). And even in Bombay, the seat of gastro-enteritis, they spoke of Calcutta’s inadequate (thirteen out of twenty-two Corporation tubewells not working) and tainted water supply with terror.
    I had therefore expected much. And Howrah station was promising. The railway officials were more than usually non-committal and lethargic; the cigarette-seller didn’t look at me; and in the station restaurant a smiling waiter drew my attention to a partly depilated rat that was wandering languidly about the tiled floor. But nothing had prepared me for the red-brick city on the other bank of the river which, if one could ignore the crowds, the stalls, the rickshaw-pullers and the squatting pissers, suggested, not a tropical or Eastern city, but central Birmingham. Nothing had prepared me for the Maidan, tree-dotted, now in the early evening blurred with mist and suggesting Hyde Park, with Chowringhee as a brighter Oxford Street. And nothing had prepared me for the sight of General Cariappa in the Maidan, dark-suited, English-erect, addressing a small relaxed crowd on the Chinese invasion in Sandhurst-accented Hindustani, while the trams, battleship-grey, with wedge-shaped snouts, nosed through the traffic at a steady eight miles an hour, the celebrated Calcutta tram, ponderous and vulnerable,
bulging
at entrances and exits with