Finding Lucretius in the Old Delhi Railway Station

Lucretius was a strong, subtle man of gentle temper and fiery imagination. He was born in 99 B.C. and died in his forty-fourth year before completing his great work, On the Nature of Things. It is in Old Delhi Railway Station where I first find Lucretius, and it is in McLeod Ganj where I finally understand him.

Somewhere in the convoluted entrails of the Old Delhi Railway Station lie the answers to human existence. In the gaping jaw of the entrance, on the steps where people gather to trade and display their dazzling array of sores, wounds, and misgivings; in the stomach of the carriages and the warren of stairways, there exists the entire structural base for understanding our universe.

When I ventured into this vast calamity of movement, I hadn’t been warned. Not a single breath of dissent, not one cautionary tale for the single lady traveller, no wise leaning toward prudence. Instead, I was lauded, encouraged with grand claps on my back, and envious I wish I were going too. The journey would prove to be treacherous, finding me at the bottom of a cliff, doomed like poor Sisyphus to trudge up the steep, dark face of a mountain, battling with all my philosophical convictions. Eventually, I would be rescued by a beggar from Saukarpet, but this is rushing unnecessarily ahead. So let me begin at the beginning, or at least something that resembles a beginning, in the hallowed precincts of that first beguiling night of departure.

Diesel fumes first. Traffic policemen on the verge of ticker-attacks. Irate bhai-jis, pa-jis, ma-jis. Horns, bumpers, fistfights on the brink of fruition.

There are no easy ways to actually enter the Old Delhi Railway Station without risking death. All roads that lead here are filled with obstacles, and the traveller, like a true devotee, must prove her worth by carrying her luggage in some combination of hand-head-hip, without so much as a feeble look toward oncoming traffic. Once inside the station gates, it is justifiable to feel a rush of optimism: Yes, I will make the train. Of course, everything will be all right. Inside though, battle still remains to be done with a many-headed hydra, and no signboards to help along the way. Only the coolies, the particular minotaurs of this labyrinth, can pick their way like magical darts through the pulsating chaos of the station, while mystified travellers are left chasing their soles of wind.

It is in this moment of chasing my coolie, that I am reminded of Lucretius, whom I’d been reading the night before. His philosophy on the nature of things becomes instantly clear: atoms (bodies) and voids – the two great factors of the universe in constant play with each other. Blink, and you could miss how the body becomes mercury, water, silver; fill the space of any given container, become the vacuum, turn itself into space.

For a meagre Rs 30, the coolie agrees to deliver me and my bags exactly where we need to be. Off we go then, the sprightly coolie parting the waters of humanity, filling the voids with his agile body, and me, struggling not to lose sight of the tatter of his red shirt, following behind, yelling, ‘There’s no hurry, really!’ And the coolie propelling himself like a hovercraft anyway.

 

Only when I’m safely ensconced on the Jammu Mail which promises to deliver me to Pathankot, and then further promises to deliver me to the beauty of the Dhauladhar in Dharamsala, do I allow myself to subside a little. Even the absence of my name on the list of reserved passengers pasted outside the carriage door, can’t stop the subsiding. Half an hour later, the TC (ticket conductor) storms through, saying that there’s a problem, I should be somewhere else. I tell him in my most petulant voice, that enough is enough. It’s simply too much. I wouldn’t go anywhere even if I could.

‘Okay madam, no problem,’ he says. ‘Only, this is lower class, and you have paid for upper class.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I hiss, scrambling up to the side upper berth preparing to be unconscious for at least seven of the next nine hours despite the snores and belches, which I do, barring a midnight visitation from the TC himself clutching a pink slip of paper which he says I must present on arrival in Pathankot.

 

It is in this death of sleep, with a pink slip of paper tucked in the safety of Lucretius’s folds, that the most brilliant idea comes in the shape of a string of linear clarity joining all the various clatterings of the day, proving that despite the rumbling chaos, everything does indeed connect. It is where Lucretius shows himself – a strong, subtle man of gentle temper and fiery imagination – helping the coolies construct some immense new machine, with no help from above or below, saying that we are all part of this mechanical drama because nothing is produced from nothing, and we are all actors, with colours, sights and sounds to tempt, lure, intoxicate us; that there is a curtain always fluttering, like a red tatter of a shirt between the spectator (that is us), and the sun beyond. Lucretius understood all this, without ever in his life having been to the Old Delhi Railway Station.

 

The Bodhisattvas of McLeod Grunge

At Pathankot, I’m first to jump off the train. Guided by my strong nocturnal visitation, I present my pink slip at the first counter I see. Miraculously, after being made to wait only twenty minutes, I am refunded Rs 270 for my ‘fall’ in class, and sent on my way.

A rickshaw man who’s been eyeing me for the entire period of the transaction, leaning against a pillar, smoking a bidi, agrees to take me to the bus stand where I can catch the bus to Dharamsala. Of course, it is always the sad, decrepit, old men who offer their services, and for various reasons – guilt mainly – you wish the ride to be over soon so you can land on your feet and bring normal breath back into the poor man’s tuberculosis-ridden body.

We travel for exactly half a kilometre, along a mud-filled road before arriving at the bus stand, which I mistake for a junkyard, where a vulgar sight of crows picking bloodied meat on the floor of a meat shop with hanging carcasses greets me. The rickshaw man, after stopping at a singularly beaten up bus, tells me what I already know: there are no luxury buses up to Dharamsala. I wonder how many people will be packed into this bus; how we’ll play our game of space and void, luggage and feet, bodies and bums again – this time, with the marvellous cacophony of horns. A musical journey awaits!

 

My fellow-passengers are an assortment of backpackers, old leathery gents with defiant moustaches under beaky noses, colourful women in synthetic salwar kameezes and a few young ones in impossibly tight fake denim jeans and bright red hair. The conductor is quick to tell me to Mind it, and move my luggage somewhere else because there’s no way I’m going to be allowed to take up two seats instead of one. I comply, positioning myself by the window, hoping to call on my powers of sleep to take me through this journey quickly, and miraculously deposit me in the mountains. Not so. After two hours, when the pain in my bladder has reached excruciating levels, I ask the conductor when we’ll arrive in McLeod Ganj. ‘Definitely by 2 pm,’ he says. Four hours away! Disheartened, I sink back into the flat board comfort of my bus seat, and reach for Lucretius.

When we finally reach McLeod Ganj, I want to weep. Really, I want someone to whisk me away to a warm, cosy room with a spectacular view of the mountains; to say, stay as long as you like, have a hot bath, eat something, you’ll feel better. No such luck. With difficulty I manage to find my guesthouse which has lied about its cosy room and spectacular view. It is a matchbox at the top of a long row of matchboxes, with ratty couches, a ratty bed, a ratty carpet embedded with all sorts of ratty things, and a grilled window through which I can see a few ferns. They have hot water and serve morning coffee. For this, I should be thankful.

 

It rains. Rains and rains. Begins the minute I get off the bus and doesn’t stop for three hours. By evening I’m ready to walk into McLeod Ganj and scavenge for food. My first impressions aren’t good, only because I was expecting more – a calm serenity – a cleanliness. But it is a dirty little place, with narrow streets filled with vegetable peels and piles of garbage, and the only solace to sore eyes are the few snowcapped mountains in the far far distance. The place (and it is still off-season) is packed with tourists, eating joints, pink-bottomed monkeys. Every inch of this hillside is full of them. I eat vegetable momos and miso soup, avoid contact with fellow transcendental travellers and head back to my ratty room. It is a sad, desolate thing – to arrive in a place which has promised something, and delivers quite the opposite.

Back inside the rat nest, I wonder why any one of us has come here? Why anyone goes anywhere? What is it we are looking for: cheap food, breathing lessons, mystical encounters? I pull out a piece of paper with two phone numbers on it. One is from a friend in Delhi whose parents live part of the year in nearby Sidhbari, the other is of a Rinpoche – a friend’s teacher who’s staying at the Gyato monastery.

‘Call my parents,’ my Delhi friend had said, ‘They’re mad.’

So I do.

‘Oh yes. Come visit us tomorrow,’ they say. ‘We’re going for a birthday party. You can come too.’

It’s the nicest thing that’s happened all day.

 

I start early the next morning, walking down the main street, tripping over stones, and into a girl who will become my travel companion – Madhu – who is Hyderabadi-Californian, divorced, liberated, joyful. She walks me around the circumference of the town and later, over hot lemon ginger tea, we exchange bits of pertinent life information. Afterwards, just as a 12 hour session of rain is about to begin, I go off in a suicidal Maruti van to meet the mad parents and the friendly Rinpoche.

The rain makes it difficult to find the exact location of my friend’s parent’s house in Sidhbari. When I finally arrive, a little muddy and soaked despite the heavy anorak, they are drinking black Arabian coffee with sweets. ‘Have some,’ they say, ‘before we go off to this birthday party.’ So I do, after a quick tour of the house which their son, my friend, has designed. ‘It’s his first project,’ his mother says, as if to explain the ambitious scope of it. I imagine what Dhauladhar must look through the big glass windows every morning, when it isn’t hiding behind a cloak of mist.

The party is next door, at 75-year-old Didi Contractor’s house. Didi is famous in this area, and it is to celebrate her birthday that a motley crew has gathered in her living room, leaving the sad, airy shamiana trembling in the rain outside. There are German professional clowns and architects, and professors, and English students on break, and Punjabi matriarchs, and an Australian statue-carving couple with two boys – the youngest of whom bursts into tears on entering the room, protesting that he’s been conned and that this is no birthday party. He is assuaged after the German clowns put on their show and six different birthday cakes make an appearance along with a thali with 75 candles.

‘Next time,’ Didi says, ‘I’ll have a birthday when I’m 80, and then I won’t be expected to blow out any candles… just sit back, smile, and look benign.’

 

After the party, I’m dropped off at the nearby Gyato monastery to meet the Rinpoche, the teacher of my mother’s Buddhist friend in Madras. I found him swathed in maroon under the sanctuary of a large maroon umbrella, ready to whisk me away into the warmth of his own little room in the monastery. All around there are monks with hologrammic faces – serene from one way, mischievous from the other. For two hours we talk about wisdom and method, movies and meat. We drink sweet chai from a hot flask. He shares his dinner of flat noodles in broth (which he says is not very good so don’t feel obliged to eat it). His mobile rings periodically, which I find very amusing. We talk and laugh, he is wonderfully bright-faced and open, and when I tell him I’m writing about a boy monk in my novel, he whips out a book of sayings and tells me I may find them useful. Fifteen minutes before he’s due to go off for his debating session, he makes sure that I’m in a taxi back to McLeod Ganj with his umbrella and tells me that he will come meet me in three days after his strict boundary impositions are lifted.

 

I return, with all the kindness of strangers misting up my eyes, and rain misting up the car. I go back to Madhu, lovely Madhu, who braves it in the rain to meet me at the only landmark I know – Hot Spot – from where she guides me to a tiny Tibetan café where we exchange our stories. I tell her the most important thing I’ve learned all day: that Dharamsala receives the highest amount of rain in India after Cherrapunji. We laugh, because we’re in the middle of it.

 

Camus takes the high road, I take the low road

For the next few days it continues to rain, and I continue to fail at writing. I look out at the drenched ferns from my window, order cups of milky coffee, soak my feet in a plastic bucket of hot water. During brief spells of sunshine, Madhu and I make excursions around Dharamsala. We visit the Tibetan Children’s Village – an integrated educational community for destitute Tibetan children in exile – and are enchanted by the swarm of chubby, red-faced toddlers who come running to cling to our legs. We visit the classrooms and the residential halls; see how they’re being schooled with a heavy emphasis on Tibetan culture and language. Sonam, who takes us around, informs us that His Holiness (H.H) has placed a great importance on the cultural and social upbringing of these children, so that when they return to their homeland, they will find it easy to adapt. ‘From the day we became refugees,’ he has said, ‘our basic objective was to rise to the very place from where we have fallen down.’

H.H has his detractors, respectful though they may be. In the market place, among the Tibetan Youth Congress, there is a sense of hopelessness when it comes to the idea of return. Fifty years after communist troops entered Tibet, the Tibetans are no closer to returning to that evasive home. And with diplomatic relations between India and China getting stronger, the dream seems even more distant.

What will happen once H.H is no more? Will the Middle Path find its Way? How do you call a country you have never seen home?

 

The day Madhu left, I felt bereft. We ate our last dinner under Goan stars – masala dosas and banana lassis. After seeing her to the bus, I walked back to my ratty room wishing I could have made the long, terrible journey back to Delhi with her.

My smiling Rinpoche came to see me on my last day in Dharamsala. We visited the museum, watched the monks debating, ate more noodles. I returned his umbrella and thanked him many times for his kindness, and for Shantideva’s teachings which I’d been studying.

‘How has your stay been?’ he asked.

I tried to explain how I’d come to Dharamsala with a Virginia Woolfesque idea of obtaining a room of my own to write, submerging myself in the peacefulness of the mountains. The trip had its ups and downs, but I had failed to write anything of significance.

The Rinpoche listened carefully. Then he quoted H.H, ‘Expectation will lead to disappointment, disappointment to anger, anger to violence.’

I thought about this as I took my last meal alone in Hot Spot where a local man with a fake accent was trying to round up foreign women as extras for a film in Dalhousie.

Later, I took the dark road towards my bus. I walked along the cliff side, wheeling my suitcase behind me. I saw lights approaching. They came at me fast. This is the end, I thought. How disappointing. What a foolish, unsatisfying way to go. I thought of Camus who proclaimed that dying in a car crash was the silliest way to go; who died in a Facel Vega in Yonne, on a rainy day with someone else driving. I decided to take a chance and sidestep fate; to let myself fall. It was the longest fall in my life. I did it inelegantly, screaming, clutching to my sterile laptop. I remember stopping. It was sudden, abrupt, in the brambles of a prickly shrub. I reached for my handbag, my laptop, my suitcase that had fallen further. I felt nothing. No pain, no fear. Only shock.

After a long silence, I heard a voice calling at the top of the hill, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ I managed to say, beginning my Sisyphean scramble up the cliff.

Men came scampering down, hands outstretched. The beggar from Saukarpet was the one who finally dragged me up.

‘I saw you from the tea stand,’ he said. ‘One minute you were there, next minute there was nothing.’

Is that how it is, I wondered. One minute there, the next minute gone. Is that how the world really ends – not with a bang, but a whimper?

 

I climbed on to the bus, bruised and humiliated. I was the lone passenger on the bus for half an hour. I concentrated on the dim lights gleaming at me from the hillside while the bus driver and his companion kept repeating how my fall was the most spectacular thing they’d seen in some time.

I reached for Lucretius, who was whispering through the ancient pages, ‘…thus you, in cases like this will be able by yourself alone to see one thing after another and find your way into all dark corners and draw forth truth.’