In the foreground a migration of ragged people carried bundles on their heads, following a bullock cart mounded with bruised furniture. The white hairless patches on the children's heads spoke of overcrowding, malnutrition, and disease, and they were all grinning in the glare of the sun.
'That, I believe is the new petrochemical plant. It's already in operation,' said Mr Radia.
We were passing a shantytown made entirely of flattened cardboard boxes and bits of hammered tin. Women squatted, slapping cow turds into pies, and inside the terrifying huts I could see people lying with their arms crossed over their faces. A man screamed at a running child; another howled at the train.
'Everything's coming up. Patel's factory. It's completely industrial here. Jyoti Industries. Worth crores, I tell you. Crores!'
Mr Radia was looking past the muddy ditch, over the heads of the skinny cows, the children with streaming noses, the crones in tattered headdresses, the many squatters who were making puzzled faces and shitting, the leathery old men leaning on broken umbrellas.
'Another new factory, already famous – Baroda furniture. I know the director. We've had him around for drinks.'
Then, heartily, Mr Radia the Anglophobe said, 'Well, cheerio!'
At Broach, fifty miles south of Baroda, we crossed the wide Narmada River. I was standing by the door. A man tapped me on the shoulder.
'Excuse me.' He was a dark bespectacled Indian in a flowered shirt, holding two coconuts and a garland of flowers. He moved to the door and, bracing himself on the handrail, pitched the garland, then the coconuts, in the river.
'Offerings,' he explained. 'I live in Singapore. I am so happy to be home.'
Late in the afternoon we were in the lowland of Maharashtra, gleaming swamps, the green inlets of the Gulf of Cambray, and just at the horizon the Arabian Sea. It had been cool in the morning, and pleasant at Baroda, but the afternoon ride to Bombay from Broach was stifling: the air was dense with humidity, and the feathery fronds on the tall palms drooped in the heat. At every siding I saw the feet of napping Indians sticking out from under packing cases and makeshift shelters. And then Bombay began. We were still quite far from the city centre – twenty miles or more – but the sight of a single sway-backed hut swelled to a hamlet of shacks, and then to an unbroken parade of low dwellings, their roofs littered with plastic sheets, bits of wood and paper, a rubber tyre, shingles held down with stones, and thatch tied with vines, as if this accumulated rubbish would keep the shacks from blowing away. The hovels became bungalows the colour of rotten cheese, then three-storey houses bandaged with laundry, and eight-storey apartment blocks with rusty fire escapes, getting larger and larger as we neared Bombay.
On the outskirts of the city the Rajdhani Express came to several alarming stops – so sudden, one of them toppled my water pitcher on to the floor and the next smashed a glass. We did not appear to be at stations for these stops, although there were people leaving the train. I saw them throwing their suitcases on to the tracks and leaping out themselves with the speed of deserters, picking up their baggage and racing across the line. I discovered they had pulled the emergency alarm cord (penalty for improper use rupees 250) because they were passing their houses. This was an express train, but by pulling the alarm the Indian could turn it into a local.
There was a fat boy, a recent graduate from the Dehra Dun School of Engineering. He was on his way to Poona for a job interview. He told me why the train was stopping with such force, and he described how the alarm worked.
He said, 'Person who wishes to leave train pulls cord and dewice inside releases wacuum causing brakes to seize in that particular bogie. Conductor is sure which bogie alarm is pulled, but there are so many people he does not know who has pulled chain. Conductor must reconnect dewice and create wacuum in order for train to move.'
He spoke so slowly and methodically that by the time he finished this explanation we were in Bombay.
It was at a railway station in Bombay that V. S. Naipaul panicked and fled, fearing that he 'might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd'. The story is told in An Area of Darkness. But I did not find Bombay Central especially scarifying; a closer acquaintance with it made me think of it as a place of refugees and fortune hunters, smelling of dirt and money, in a neighbourhood that had the look of the neglected half of Chicago. The hurrying daytime crowds might have frightened me more if they had been idly prowling, but in their mass there was no sense of aimlessness. The direction of those speeding white shirts gave to these thousands of marchers the aspect of a dignified parade of clerks and their wives and cattle, preparing to riot according to some long-held custom, among the most distinguished architecture the British Empire produced (cover your good eye, squint at Victoria Station in Bombay, and you see the grey majesty of St Paul's Cathedral). Bombay fulfils the big-city requirements of age, depth, and frenzy, inspiring a chauvinism in its inhabitants, a threadbare metropolitan hauteur rivalled only by Calcutta. My one disappointment came at the Towers of Silence, where the Parsis place their dead to be eaten by vultures. This may strike a casual visitor as solemn barbarity, but it is based on an ecologically sound proposition. The Zoroastrian at the gate would not let me in to verify it. I had been brought there by Mushtaq, my driver, and, leaving, I said perhaps the stories were not true – I couldn't see any vultures. Mushtaq said they were all down at the towers feeding on a corpse. He looked at his watch: 'Lunchtime.' But he meant mine.
After my lecture that evening I met several writers. One was Mr V. G. Deshmukh, a jolly novelist who said that he could not make a living by his pen. He had written thirty novels. Writing is the single activity in India that doesn't pay, and anyway this man wrote about the poor: no one was interested in reading about poor people. He knew, because the poor were his business.
'Famine relief, resettlement, drought prevention, under-privileged, anything you can name. It is a headache sometimes. But my books don't sell, so I have no choice. You could call me an organizer.'
'How do you prevent droughts?'
'We have programmes.'
I saw committees, position papers, conferences – and dusty fields.
'Have you prevented any lately?'
'We are making steady progress,' he said. 'But I would rather write novels.'
'If you've written thirty, surely it's time to stop.'
'No, no! I must write one hundred and eight!'
'How did you arrive at that figure?'
'It is a magic number in Hindu philosophy. Vishnu has one hundred and eight names. I must write one hundred and eight novels! It is not easy – especially now, with this damned paper shortage.'
The paper shortage was also affecting Kushwant Singh's Illustrated Weekly of India. His circulation was 300,000 but he was about to cut it down to save paper. It was an Indian story: Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure. India, the largest rice-grower in the world, imports rice. 'Hunger is the handmaid of genius,' says the Pudd'nhead Wilson epigraph above one of the Bombay chapters in Mark Twain's Following the Equator, and truly India's hunger-inspired genius threatens to sink her. Every success I heard of convinced me that India, swamped by invention, was hopeless and must fail unless what I saw later that night ceases to exist. It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.
Unable to sleep, I went for a walk. I turned left out of my hotel and walked a hundred yards past the brothels to the sea wall, counting the sleeping figures as I went along. They were stretched out on the sidewalk, lying side by side; some were on pieces of cardboard but most slept flat on the cement, with no bedding and few clothes, their arms crooked under their heads. The children slept on their sides, the others on their backs. There was no sign anywhere of their possessions. I reached seventy-three and turned the corner, where down the road that ran next to the sea wall there were hundreds more -just bodies, no bundles or carts, nothing to distinguish one from another, no evidence of life. It is sometimes thought that these sleepers in the Bombay streets are a recent phenomenon; but Mark Twain saw them. He was on his way to a midnight betrothal ceremony: