This was the way he spoke, in long lisped passages, interrupting himself, repeating that he was sick in a voice that was monotonously apologetic. He was German and had been a sailor, a deck hand on a German ship, then a steward on a Finnish one. He had sailed for seven years and had been to the States – 'Yes, to every country,' he said, 'but only for a few hours.' He loved ships, but he couldn't sail any more. I asked why. 'Hepatitis,' he said, giving it a German pronunciation. He caught it in Indonesia and was in the hospital for weeks. He had never managed to shake it off: he still needed tests. He'd had one in Amritsar. 'People say to me, "Your face is sick." I know my face is sick, but I cannot eat.'
His face was ghastly, and he was trembling. 'Are you taking any medicine?'
'No.' He shook his head. 'I take this.' He opened the leather purse he had been smoothing with his scrawny fingers and took out a cellophane envelope. He peeled the cellophane away and showed me a wad of brown sticky stuff, like a flattened plug of English toffee.
'What is it?'
'Opium,' he said. 'I take it in little balls.'
His lisp made 'balls' moistly vicious.
'I am a yunk.' He broke off a piece of opium and rolled it between his fingers, slowly making it a pellet.
'A junkie?'
'Yes, I take needle. See my arms.'
He locked the compartment door and pulled the curtain across the window. He rolled up his left sleeve. His arm appalled me: each vein was clearly defined by dark bruised scars of needle marks, thick welts that made the veins into black cords. He touched his arm shyly, as if it didn't belong to him and said, 'I cannot get heroin. In Lahore I am not feeling so well. I stay in hospital but still I am weak and nervous. The people are making noise and it is so hot. I don't know what I can do. So I escape and I walk down the street. A Pakistani says to me he has some morphine. I go with him and he shows me. It is good – German morphine. He asks me for one hundred and fifty rupees. I give him and take an injection. That is how I get to Amritsar. But in Amritsar I get very sick and I cannot get any more of morphine. So I take this – ' He patted his right pocket and took out a cake of hashish, roughly the size of the opium blob, but dry and cracked. 'Or I smoke this – ' He withdrew a little sack of marijuana.
I told him that with his budget of drugs he was lucky to have got into India. At the border post I had seen an Indian customs official ask a boy to drop his jeans.
'Yes,' said Hermann. 'I am so nervous! The man asks me do I have pot and I say no. Do I smoke it? I say, yes, sometimes, but he doesn't look at my luggages. If I am nervous I can hide it in secret places.'
'Then I suppose you don't have anything to worry about.'
'No, I am hot and nervous always.'
'But you can hide your drugs.'
'I can even throw them away and buy more,' he said. 'But my arms! If they see my arms they know. I have to hide my arms always.' He pushed his sleeves up and looked again at the long dark scars.
He told me how it was that he had come to India. In Hanover, he decided to cure himself of his heroin habit. He registered as an addict and entered a rehabilitation centre – he called it 'The Release' – where he was given 700 Deutsche Marks a month and a daily glass of methadone. In return for this he helped clean the centre. He never went out; he was afraid that if he did he would meet someone who'd sell him heroin. But an odd thing happened: by staying in he rarely spent his monthly allowance, and he found that at the end of a year he had saved quite a lot of money – enough to live on in India for six months or more. So he picked up and left, just like that, on a charter flight to Teheran, where his withdrawal symptoms began.
He had carried his dereliction to a derelict land. He was doomed, he stank of death, and his condition was not so different from that of the unfortunates who appeared at the railway stations we passed, gathering for the light and water. There are foreigners who, knowing they are wrecked, go to India to be anonymous in herb decrepitude, to age and sicken in the bustees of the East. They are people, V. S. Naipaul wrote recently, 'who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own – who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security.'
'I take this now.' He popped the pellet of opium into his mouth and closed his eyes. 'Then I take some water.' He drank a glass of water. He had already drunk two, and I realized that the Indian water would kill him if the drugs didn't. 'Now I sleep. If I don't sleep I take another opium.'
Twice during the night a match flared in the upper berth, lighting the fan on the ceiling. I heard the crackle of cellophane, the snap of the gummy opium in his fingers, and Hermann gulping water.
The signs in Amritsar Station (third-class exit, second-class ladies' waiting room, first-class toilet, sweepers only) had given me a formal idea of Indian society. The less formal reality I saw at seven in the morning in the Northern Railways Terminal in Old Delhi. To understand the real India, the Indians say, you must go to the villages. But that is not strictly true, because the Indians have carried their villages to the railway stations. In the daytime it is not apparent – you might mistake any of these people for beggars, ticketless travellers (sign: ticketless travel is a social evil), or unlicensed hawkers. At night and in the early morning the station village is complete, a community so preoccupied that the thousands of passengers arriving and departing leave it undisturbed: they detour around it. The railway dwellers possess the station, but only the new arrival notices this. He feels something is wrong because he has not learned the Indian habit of ignoring the obvious, making a detour to preserve his calm. The newcomer cannot believe he has been plunged into such intimacy so soon. In another country this would all be hidden from him, and not even a trip to a village would reveal with this clarity the pattern of life. The village in rural India tells the visitor very little except that he is required to keep his distance and limit his experience of the place to tea or a meal in a stuffy parlour. The life of the village, its interior, is denied to him.
But the station village is all interior, and the shock of this exposure made me hurry away. I didn't feel I had any right to watch people bathing under a low faucet -naked among the incoming tide of office workers; men sleeping late on their charpoys or tucking up their turbans; women with nose rings and cracked yellow feet cooking stews of begged vegetables over smoky fires, suckling infants, folding bedrolls; children pissing on their toes; little girls, in oversized frocks falling from their shoulders, fetching water in tin cans from the third-class toilet; and, near a newspaper vendor, a man lying on his back, holding a baby up to admire and tickling it. Hard work, poor pleasures, and the scrimmage of appetite. This village has no walls. I distracted myself with the Signs, GWALIOR SUITINGS, RASHMI SUPERB COATINGS, and the film poster of plump faces that was never out of view, BOBBY ('A Story of Modern Love'). I was moving so quickly I lost Hermann. He had drugged himself for the arrivaclass="underline" crowds made him nervous. He floated down the platform and then sank from view.
I wondered whether I would find any of this Indian candour familiar enough to ignore. I was told that I should not draw any conclusions from Delhi: Delhi wasn't India – not the real India. Well, I said, I had no intention of staying in Delhi. I wanted to go to Simla, Nagpur, Ceylon – to wherever there was a train.
'There is no train to Ceylon.'
'There's one on the map.' I unrolled my map and traced the black line from Madras to Colombo.
'Acha,' said the man. He wore a colourful hand-loomed shirt and he waggled his head from side to side, the Indian gesture – like a man trying to shake water out of his ears – that means he is listening with approval. But the man, of course, was an American. Americans in India practise these affectations to endear themselves to Indians, who seem so embarrassed by these easily parodied mannerisms that (at the American embassy at least) the liaison men say 'We're locking you into that programme, ' while the American looking on says 'Acha' and giggles mirthlessly.