Three Weddings

Christmas 1981, India

I felt like an old hand on my second trip to India. I didn’t even bother with a guest house in Delhi. I got off the plane, caught the bus into town, went to a bank and changed some money, and then went straight to the station. The next train all the way to Evansganj wasn’t for another fourteen hours and there were no berths available on it, so I got a fast day train to Kanpur. I knew that in Kanpur I’d have to get the same train I’d have caught anyway, but I hoped there’d be some berths from Kanpur. Add to that, I’d get to spend some time in Kanpur, which I didn’t know at all, rather than Delhi, where I’d spent some time before.

Christmas is a busy time on Indian trains – well, every day is a busy time on Indian trains, but Christmas especially so. The Kanpur quota was all taken, too. So I was going to have to travel in an unreserved carriage (“bogie” in Indian English). Ho hum.

I spent the night in a station rest room. In the morning, I got breakfast in the station restaurant – omelette on toast, with chutney and chai – and then went and waited on the platform for my train.

I managed to find a place on a wooden bench. I took off my sandals, leaving them on the platform underneath the bench, and tucked my feet under me on the bench.

I’d been there a while, when a young fellow with a box of shoe polishing materials – a polish wallah – came along the platform. I saw him polishing several men’s shoes for them, and receiving a small sum from each, although more men declined his services.

Then he spotted me, and my dusty, scuffed sandals under the bench. I saw his face light up. A white lady! Money!

“Sandal polish, lady?” In English.

I resisted the temptation to reply in Hindi. “How much?”

“Five rupees.”

Well, I knew the normal price was more like one rupee, but I also understood that I was a rare opportunity for him to make a little more, and it’s only fair that the poor in a poor country make a little extra from relatively wealthy people from wealthy countries. But equally, I didn’t want to spoil him. This time I replied in Hindi, much to his surprise.

“I’ll give you two-fifty.”

“Okay.”

He did a beautiful job. I handed him a five rupee note. He fumbled in his box for some change, but I told him, “No, keep the change. It’s a present.”

He turned his face away, but not quickly enough to avoid me seeing his wide smile. He knew I knew it was too much, so he wasn’t ripping me off – he knew it really was a present, which I’m certain was more satisfactory for him just as it was for me.

I say “ it’s only fair that the poor in a poor country make a little extra from relatively wealthy people from wealthy countries” but really that’s a gross understatement – it’s a minuscule improvement in a very unfair situation. But it’s a very unfair situation that no-one can correct single-handed. And if that sounds like an excuse for meanness, it’s a hard accusation to rebuff.

But what would the consequences be if one shared one’s good fortune equally with everyone one met? If everyone did it as a matter of routine, it would very rapidly result in the elimination of unfairness – but of course they don’t, and the actual result would be one more person in extreme poverty, and a small increase in the number of moderately wealthy people. And that’s assuming that there weren’t any more complex effects – which would very likely include violence. Ho hum.

That said, it’s not a conundrum I’ve really disentangled to my own satisfaction. I’ve seen other people’s suggested solutions, that some of them seem satisfied with, but none of them satisfy me.

With the help of a coolie, I crammed myself into an unreserved bogie. I don’t know how many people there were in there, but it must have been at least three hundred.

I sat on a long bench seat with my feet on the bench in front of me, and my knees under my chin. I couldn’t put my feet on the floor, because there was an old lady sitting there in much the same posture. The floor was covered with people and boxes and people on boxes. There were more people sitting on the berth above us. I was very glad I was wearing salwar kameej, but other women were quite cheerfully sitting in similar postures in sarees.

The coolie had come into the compartment with me. He made people make room on the seat for me. There was a netting parcel rack above the seats the other side of the corridor, and he shuffled people’s parcels on it to make room for my rucksack. I gave him five rupees, and thanked him in Hindi. After he’d gone, everyone told me I was too generous and should learn the value of money, and they wanted to know how I knew Hindi.

Some people seemed to manage to sleep like that, I don’t know how. I dozed fitfully a few times. Every time we stopped, someone seemed to be getting out, and more people came cramming in. I knew we were due to arrive in Evansganj at about one in the afternoon, and from mid-day onwards I was watching out of the window for Rojasganj (pronounced Rogers Gunge, and probably named after some Angrezi called Rogers), the station before Evansganj, so I could retrieve my rucksack and make my way to the door and be ready to get off. It was getting dark by the time we arrived.

I’ve travelled unreserved a few times since then, but never at quite such a busy time. It’s never been quite so crowded. And I’ve learnt other tricks of Indian travel, but of that more some other time.

That was a fantastic holiday. Having decided not to hang around in Delhi, I arrived in Evansganj a couple of days earlier than I was expected, which was lucky, otherwise I’d have had no time to gather my wits after the journey.

Ravi and Sushila were getting married just four days after I arrived. Sushila worked at the mission hospital with Shanti and Chhoti, but she came from Bartola, a village out in the wilds, forty-five miles south of Dhumshakti. Getting to Bartola was quite a journey, that took all of a long day.

Although I’d spent six months in India three years earlier, I’d never done a journey like that one. The train to Dhumshakti I was familiar with, but the bus out to Bartola was something else. I thought trains could be impossibly crowded, but they’re spacious luxury compared to the country buses. I’ve ridden in those country buses quite a lot over the years, and they’re nearly always fantastically crowded – but I’ve never since been in one quite as crowded as that first one was. That’s what happens when there’s a wedding party of fifty odd people added to the typical load, of course.

For the first ten miles or so, the road was well surfaced, and the ride smooth enough except for a couple of times when we met a truck coming the other way and had to go half off the road to get past it. But at Dhuma our route left the main road, and for the last thirty miles the road was just a rough track, and we averaged less than eight miles an hour.

The bus looked as if it was about to fall to bits, but it must have been as tough as old boots – an English bus really would have fallen to bits if it had tried to do the trip. It would have been a difficult road in a Land Rover. (I know about driving Land Rovers on the rough, I’ve done a lot of it.)

The bouncing and shaking and jolting was incredible. I’d never experienced anything like it. I was treated like royalty, though – well, relatively. I wasn’t sitting on anyone’s knee, and no-one was sitting on mine. I offered to have a little boy on my knee, and his mother was grateful, but the little boy wouldn’t come to me. So he sat on her knee, while she sat half on one old lady’s knee, and half on another’s.

There were six people in that particular seat, designed for three, and the same size as a seat for two in an English bus. Five of the six were adults.

The aisle was full of standing passengers, and I mean full. They were pressed together like sardines. Yet somehow the conductor managed to worm his way through and collect everybody’s fare.

What it was like for the people on the roof, literally dozens of them, I dread to think. Apart from all the people, there were half a dozen bicycles and a huge pile of bundles and boxes.

At one point, the bus stopped while everyone got off the roof, and most of the larger items were offloaded. There was a huge limb of a tree that only cleared the roof of the bus by about nine inches. Then we stopped again while everything and everybody was loaded back on.

In several places, the road crossed watercourses. In each case, this involved a steep descent, an exceptionally rough stretch over rocks and boulders in the stream itself, and then a steep ascent the other side. We had to take these crossings very slowly, so there was no opportunity to get a run up for the climb back up again. The roar of the engine climbing out of the ravines in first gear was something I’ll not forget.

That roar is something you learn to recognize. If you’re waiting for a bus in a village, you can hear it climbing out of ravines from miles away – it echoes around the mountains. You can learn the specific sound of particular buses in particular ravines, and know when the bus will arrive at your particular stop, twenty minutes or more before it does. This is very useful, because it’s impossible for them to keep to their timetable with any accuracy at all, and most of the villagers don’t have watches anyway.

The bus ride finished at Rampur, five miles short of Bartola, and we walked those last five miles, a big crowd of us laughing and joking all the way. The sun set before we arrived, but nobody cared. Quite a few people knew the path well enough to find the way by starlight. It was a magical new experience for me.

We arrived to find a meal ready for all of us outside the church. Several oil lamps hanging from poles illuminated the scene. We sat on rafia mats and were waited on by half-a-dozen smiling girls, who served us a delicious chicken curry and rice, in bowls made of huge leaves stitched together with slivers of bamboo. We ate with our fingers. When we’d finished, the girls brought round a jug of water, and we washed our fingers under a trickle of water from the jug.

A few of our number with local connections disappeared off to various houses in the village. The sarpanch (elected village headman, roughly speaking) invited John, Chhoti and Ravi, the guests of honour, to stay at his house. Shanti wanted them to take me too, but I felt awkward about that, and preferred to stay with Shanti and Kamal in the church, where the rest of us were to spend the night.

There were forty odd of us in the church, huddled together on mats, under rajai (sort of cotton wool filled duvet-like things) borrowed for us by Sushila’s family from people in the village. Except that it’s a single room inside, the church is just like one of the village houses, with mud walls and a roof of half-round tiles on a framework of bamboo and wood that’s still recognizably bits of trees.

In the morning, the same smiling girls served a breakfast of sabji (curried mixed vegetables) and puri (oily chapattis, more or less). I was cheeky enough to visit the impromptu kitchen behind the church, where the food was being prepared by a team of lads who looked to be in their twenties. They were cooking on wood fires between rocks, with gharra (huge spherical pottery vessels) and tawa (chapatti skillets) resting on the rocks.

Unlike the girls, who were smartly dressed in what seemed to be their mission school uniforms, the lads were wearing very plain clothes, lungi (wrap around skirts of simple rectangles of cloth) and ragged shirts.

The wedding was in the early afternoon. It was largely a rather serious affair in the church, presided over by an elderly pastor with a very strong voice. He spoke in a dialect so different from the shudh Hindi (‘pure’ Hindi) of Evansganj that I couldn’t follow him at all. I could only pick out odd words – apart from when he was reading from the bible, when he read what was written there in plain Hindi.

Ravi and Sushila exchanged silver rings, looking very serious as they put them on each other’s fingers.

At the end of the service, three girls appeared with malas (essentially oversize daisy chains but with bigger flowers) and put one on Ravi, and one on Sushila. Then they looked around the church, found me in amongst the ladies on the floor, and came to put one on me. I was sitting next to Chhoti, and tried to get them to put it on her instead, but they weren’t having it. It was for me, a visitor from England – even though I did come from Evansganj originally.

Then there was another meal outside Sushila’s parents’ house, but this time there were about three hundred guests, with all Sushila’s family and friends as well as all those from our side.

After the meal, there was a rather formal giving and receiving of wedding presents, with a middle aged man taking a careful record of who gave what. Gifts ranged from a few rupees to a large, handsome metal trunk – into which most of the rest of the gifts were subsequently placed. There was a lot of beautiful bronze kitchenware.

I’d seen that handsome metal trunk on the top of the bus, but it was the sarpanch, not one of our family, who had brought it.

Then some of the lads, some of them those who’d previously been cooking, appeared with drums, and a party began on the field in front of the house. We danced all night by the light of half-a-dozen feeble oil lamps – long lines of us stepping back and forth with our arms around each other’s shoulders.

I say we danced all night, and I’m sure some people really did. Every time I saw Uncle John he was in the thick of it.

I danced quite a lot, people laughing good naturedly as I learnt the steps. The only other people as wrong-footed as I was were some of the smaller children, none of whom were sent to bed. They collapsed on their mothers’ laps, or any convenient laps, from time to time, but were up again after a little while, and some of them seemed to be dancing as much as any of the adults.

One thing marred the occasion. Grandma was too ill to contemplate the bus ride and the walk, and had had to stay at home. Ayah had stayed in Evansganj to look after her.

The day after the wedding, we all set off for Rampur at first light and caught the early bus back to Dhumshakti. Ravi and Sushila were decked out in their best clothes, and had fresh mala around their necks. Crowded as the bus was, they rode in style, just the two of them on the long sideways-facing seat beside the engine, that would normally be packed with well dressed young men of the kind who have a high opinion of themselves. John, Chhoti and I got special treatment too, with the triple seat just behind the driver all to ourselves.

Nowadays there’s a regular bus service between Dhumshakti and Evansganj, but in those days the train was all there was – three trains a day. We knew we wouldn’t arrive in time for the scheduled departure of the express from Delhi at one o’clock, but hoped to catch it anyway as it very often ran late.

The Delhi train hadn’t yet gone through when we arrived, but the ten o’clock local passenger train turned up at about half past two, and we caught that. Who knew when the Delhi train would actually arrive?

There was no special treatment on the train, but who cares how crowded it is when you’re only going ten miles?

We had one day to prepare for Christmas.

Christmas in Evansganj was nothing like Christmas in England. It had changed a bit since the Christmases of my childhood, but not much. The first couple of Lane Christmases in Whitechapel had been more like the old Evansganj Christmases, but we three kids soon learnt about English Christmases from our peers, and Mum and Dad felt obliged to conform.

But by the age of thirty-three I’d learnt to appreciate a less consumerist style. I’m not really a religious person at all – I’m pretty much an atheist – but I don’t mind church services, even if they’re a bit long-winded. They’re very much preferable to an orgy of presents. And the food was better than English Christmas fare, too – really tasty and plenty of it, without being excessive.

It’s not that I don’t like English Christmas fare; but it would be better to enjoy all the good things over a longer period. It’s nearly impossible to refuse each new treat, but you end up eating far too much if you don’t. It’s not even as though I’ve got a small appetite – quite the opposite.

I really enjoyed the carol singing in church, and there was lots of it. All the carols were English carols translated into Hindi, sung to a somewhat Indianized version of the English (or German, or other European) tune. In my childhood they’d been sung in English, but that was in the days when Evansganj had a substantial white minority.

Sushila had never been in Evansganj for Christmas before, and said that we should spend Christmas in Bartola some time. A Bartola Christmas is something very different again, but that’s another story.

Kamal and Jyoti were married in Jyoti’s village, Navadih, on the 27th. I know both Bartola and Navadih quite well now, and know how different they and their people really are, but at the time the two experiences seemed very similar to me – very different from England or Evansganj, in a somewhat similar way. A lot of what I wrote about Ravi and Sushila’s wedding could be repeated almost word for word, and to do that seems silly. On the other hand, it seems terrible just to say this wedding was a repeat of the last one!

Even though Grandma still wasn’t very well, the easier journey to Navadih meant she felt able to come, and Ayah came too.

One difference was that the Christians in Navadih were a minority, and in particular the sarpanch was a Hindu. He was on perfectly good terms with Jyoti’s family, and attended the wedding, but didn’t offer his hospitality to anyone. Here again most of us slept in the church, but Grandma, John, Chhoti and Kamal spent the night with one of Jyoti’s uncles.

I now know that the dancing in Navadih isn’t quite the same as the dancing in Bartola, but at the time I didn’t even realize. I just thought I was even more useless at learning the steps than I thought I ought to have been, and put it down to tiredness.

Navadih is actually not very far, as the crow flies, from Bartola; but it’s the other side of some very rough jungle country. There are paths, but you need a guide or you could get hopelessly lost. There are deep ravines, steep thickly wooded slopes, rocky ridges and vertical cliffs up or down that you come across unexpectedly in the forest. The paths twist and turn in a most confusing way, even for someone with a good sense of direction. Oh, and there are wild animals: bears, snakes, huge monitor lizards and occasionally tigers or elephants. And bandits. But it’s one of the most beautiful and interesting places I’ve ever been. The view from the top of the rocks at the highest peak is just amazing. But again, that’s another story. I didn’t go up there that trip.

Shanti and Peter’s wedding was in Evansganj, of course. It was on the 30th, and was very different from either of the others. This was a town wedding, not a village wedding; and it owed a lot more to British influence, not so much because of John and Chhoti and Shanti, but because of the whole Evansganj Indian Christian community. The villages have largely retained their Adivasi (tribal – literally, Aboriginal, and proud to be so) culture, with a veneer of Christianity overlaid on it. Evansganj is still to a considerable extent a remnant of British India, even though it’s almost entirely inhabited by people of Indian origin.

A newly arrived Brit might not see Evansganj that way, not until they’d experienced the villages. But the culture in a large part of Evansganj, different as it is from Europe, resembles Europe much more than it resembles the villages.

Not all Indian towns have areas like this, but nor is Evansganj the only one that does, by any means.

On New Year’s day almost the whole Evansganj Christian community went for a picnic down by the river. The Christian community? That’s an odd way to define the group, but it’s hard to know how else one could define it. The outing was organized by the Evansganj Young Christians, but it was open to anyone who wanted to come, and lots of Hindus and Sikhs came along as well.

There were some very Christian Christians in Evansganj, but the majority of the Christian community were about as Christian as the average Brit, and there was no clear dividing line between them and the Hindus or Sikhs, most of whom took their religion about equally casually.

There were a few Christians who, while perfectly friendly with the Hindus, wouldn’t attend a Hindu festival, and vice versa; but the majority of people of whichever religion would attend anything that looked like fun.

Sadly, things have changed somewhat – there’s a lot more tension between the communities nowadays. Older people used to say intercommunal tension came and went like the tide, but in my admittedly limited experience it’s just got worse over the years.

At that time, the Muslim community didn’t mix much with the rest, but there was no trouble. In more recent years, some Hindu extremists have caused trouble for both the Muslims and Christians, and while these two groups still don’t really mix, there’s been a certain amount of co-operation in self defence. It’s important to stress that the trouble is caused by a tiny minority – the majority of Hindus are very peaceable people.

Getting back to that picnic! At that time of the year, the river is not much more than a stream in the middle of a wide expanse of sand. A little further downstream, it’s mud rather than sand, and the farmers on each side of the river take advantage of the opportunity to grow winter crops in the fertile riverbed; but at Evansganj it’s just sand and rocks. Great for a New Year’s picnic!

There were plenty of dry sticks in the bushes on the sandbars, where the floods had left them last monsoon. They were just light, hollow sticks of besharam or jamti, not good enough firewood to be worth collecting to take home for cooking, but plenty good enough to make a cheerful blaze on the riverbed. I remembered doing exactly the same thing on New Year’s day when I was a little girl.

I’m not really sure how many of us were there, but it can’t have been less than a couple of hundred. People had brought all kinds of lovely food, and it was all shared about. Some things were heated up over the bonfire, but mostly it was cold stuff.

Back to the top

On to Activism