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  ‘Give me my needle,’ said the young man.

  It became obvious that we had on board a drug addict who was quite far gone. He was administered his needle but it did not suffice.

  There were two airhostesses, one Belgian and the other African. The Belgian airhostess walked past us and shrieked. The young man had taken off all his clothes. The African airhostess was called and handed the assistant a napkin which was duly spread across the young man’s loins.

  In a while, this went flying through the air. The young man was nude again. ‘Give me my needle,’ he insisted and once more, he was dosed.

  For a while all was well and he allowed the assistant to drape the napkin so as to protect the modesty of those passing in the aisle. But again, the napkin was airborne and the protests began.

  When we arrived at Kinshasa, we were the last to leave the airplane. I was hobbling and he was nude. He caught my eye. I smiled.

  ‘What a lovely robe this is,’ I said, much as I would to a child. ‘I wish I could wear it.’

  ‘It’s my robe,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I pointed out. ‘You’re not wearing it.’

  ‘I was going to,’ he said.

  The assistant bundled him into it.

  ‘I want my needle,’ he said.

  ‘He will die, Madame,’ said the assistant to me. ‘Explain it to him.’

  On the runway, I could see a group of Africans, the young man’s family, waiting for him.

  ‘Gosh,’ I said, ‘Look, someone’s family has come.’

  The young man looked at the group on the runway. Then he scowled again.

  ‘No, no, smile,’ I said. ‘What a nice smile you have.’

  And so we got him to the door, urging him along like a child. At the door he stopped.

  ‘I don’t want to get off this plane,’ he pouted. ‘I’ve had so much fun on it.’

  Sure, I thought, with those many needles …

  When I managed to limp off the plane, Dom looked at my foot and said, ‘Go and see a doctor.’

  But there was no time. We were in Kinshasa only for a night, and had to fly to Gabon. There, we had an appointment with a minister and I was needed to make notes because he spoke French. And then we had to cross the Sahel Desert where Dom was supposed to be investigating the link between population growth and the march of the desert. We drove to a little settlement, only to find it deserted. No goats. No dogs. Nothing. Only the sand billowing endlessly around the skeletons of dead cattle. I walked around and suddenly through a door, banging in the hot sandy breeze, I saw what looked like a human form. I retraced my steps. It was a man.

  I peered in.

  ‘May I come in?’ I asked, trying French.

  ‘Please,’ said the old man who was lying inside his hut. What I could see of his torso made him look like one of the Starving Buddhas of the Gandharva period. The village had emptied over time, he told me. Years of drought had taken everyone away but he was not going. He was the chief of his tribe and he was going to stay where his ancestors had lived and died. He had grown too weak to move. He could no longer hunt with the beautiful bow and arrow that hung above his head.

  ‘But there is nothing left to hunt,’ he sighed. ‘Where have all the rabbits gone?’

  Outside the hut, the sands stretched like a lunar landscape, barren and bare. It was difficult to think that it once supported human life, that it supported agriculture, that people had lived here.

  ‘Monsieur le chef,’ I said, for that is how one addresses a chief, ‘How do you manage?’

  The UNDP, he told me, sent him a baguette, a loaf of French bread that was more crust than crumb, every alternate day with a can of red beans and a canister of water. The canister of water was very low. He saw me looking at it.

  ‘Are you thirsty?’ He asked. ‘You must drink.’

  This was a man lying all alone in the middle of the desert, but he was still hospitable. It must have cost him much to offer me some of his ration of water but he did.

  When we reached Dakar, Senegal, I did my best to raise hell with the UNDP. Three loaves of bread a week with just one tin of beans and not enough water to last a week? How was anyone to live on that much? Finally, I got them to agree to send something more by way of food and medical assistance.

  At Dakar, I was asked if I would like to see the island of Gorée, which had once played an important role in the slave trade. It was here that the slaves were held before they were ‘exported’.

  The man who took me around was a historian and a scholar. He had spent his life looking into the dark heart of human misery but he was a gentle chap and as he showed me around the miserable quarters where the slaves were kept, where they were examined, where they were weighed, I could tell that he was still moved by the terrible iniquities that had been committed upon the innocent.

  It is difficult to revisit even in my mind the horrors of that island. This was where they kept the men, this was where they kept the women, this was where the children were kept, this was where, sinisterly, it seemed, they kept the young girls. The slaves, who lived in chains, were fed once a day. Each would step up to a cauldron of gruel and each one had five minutes to eat before he was pushed back towards the cell. The walls were damp. Tuberculosis was rampant. Thousands must have died even before they were confined to holds and taken away. The way the human cargo was packed into the holds of the slave ships gave us the phrase ‘packed like Sardines’. The traders’ quarters, though spartan, were paradise in comparison.

  ‘It must be difficult to forgive Europe and America?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh Madame, history does not allow us to make enemies of other nations,’ said the guide. ‘It was the Africans who would sell members of other tribes into the slave trade. After a tribal war, they would take slaves as part of their booty. And when the Europeans came, they simply turned their booty into part of the commodity trade.’

  In the evening, I finally went to a doctor.

  This time I decided that I was going to be X-rayed and if anyone made any comments about strong bones, I would hit him first and thank him later. The doctor took an X-ray and declared that I had a fractured ankle.

  ‘I could break the bone again,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But you have strong bones so we’ll just let it heal.’

  I didn’t hit him but it was a near thing.

  In Japan, there were some intriguing signboards in the Katsura Hotel.

  ‘No Samurai allowed with Sord’, one said.

  ‘No suicide allowed’, another read. Okay, I thought, I will try very hard.

  ‘All windows seeled’, read a third.

  ‘No yam for breakfast’.

  It seemed like a difficult way to live, but I thought I could manage. Then I realised that it was a typo and there would be no jam for breakfast. Or maybe ham. Or maybe there would be neither yam nor ham nor jam. Damn.

  It would be difficult to make a list of all the things Dom hated because there would be so many of them. But museums were anathema. Whenever we were in any city together, I would head off to the museum and Dom would head off to the bar. In a way, it was a relief because I could take my time over the paintings or the sculptures or the implements of everyday lives of people. In a way, it was sad because one wants to turn around and share one’s discoveries; one wants to say what one is feeling to someone who will understand. But between being lonely and being hurried, I’ll take being lonely, thank you.

  In Kyoto, a Japanese photographer who had a passion for whisky and a dislike for culture, accompanied Dom and me. In him, Dom found a soul mate. After all, when Dom was supposed to write about French tapestry and we visited Cluny and the tapestry room at the Louvre, where the greatest tapestries hang, the only thing that excited him was the image of a dog that had produced a turd, in one corner of the huge hunting scene depicting thousands of figures in a forest.

  When I told them that I was off to see the world-famous collection of Kenzo screens at the Imperial Palace neither looked very exci
ted. I knew that I was going alone again. The Imperial Palace was truly lovely and almost empty. There was one guard, bright and young, with a pleasant smile. I smiled back, which might have been a cultural mistake for he began to follow me through the dark rooms around the armoury. I began to walk faster and he speeded up too. The floors were designed so that no one could walk over them without a warning tinkle. And I could hear him tinkling after me. Finally, he called out to me so I stopped to confront him.

  ‘Shake hand,’ he said. I was so relieved that that was all he wanted, I forgot to use the oldest trick in the book: the namasté (folding your hands keeps you out of theirs). As soon as he took my hand, he began to pull me towards him. I broke free and I ran. Ballet, bharatanatyam and horse-riding have given me strong legs and I made good use of them, running until I got to a better-lit space. When I returned, there was Dom and the footling photographer.

  ‘Now what’s the matter?’

  I told him.

  ‘Serves you right,’ said Dom.

  ‘No one gets raped in Kyoto,’ said the photographer, confirming my dim view of his intelligence.

  But Japan had some moments of startling beauty at Kokedera, a Buddhist moss garden around the Saiho-ji Temple. There were a hundred and twenty different varieties of moss with colours that varied from the rich green velvet of Mumbai walls after the rains to a startling maroon and a deep aquamarine. It is one of the earliest gardens to have been designed in accordance with Zen thought and was designed by Muou Soseki, a thirteenth-century genius who designed many other such gardens throughout Japan. It is a karesansui garden, which means it has been designed to be viewed from a single location. You are supposed to sit down and begin looking and continue looking until you no longer see what you are seeing. I read a line of his poetry in translation somewhere:

  When the mind is still

  the floor where I sit

  is endless space.

  I loved Japan, the architectural detailing, the minimalism of art inspired by Zen and the music. Of course, I wanted to see Kabuki and Noh. Of course Dom didn’t want to go, so I went alone and enjoyed the glorious excesses of ancient theatrical forms.

  FIFTEEN

  TRANSLATING IONESCO

  Translation has always seemed to me to be not only an act of necessity but also one of sheer folly. To be cut off from other minds simply because of a difference in language seems unbearably grim and terribly unfair. On the other hand, an attempt to carry the meaning and the connotations of a phrase or an idiom across languages, cultures, time zones and space, seems to be an unbelievably heroic venture, one that is doomed, if not to failure, to always being a poor second, a shadow of the thing itself. I read somewhere that Yahuda Amichai, the great Israeli poet, compared reading a translation of a poem to kissing a woman through a veil. And the Iranians, a friend tells me, have a proverb which says that reading a translation is like looking at the wrong side of a carpet. I must say I have enjoyed these veiled kisses and upside-down carpets quite a lot but I have a small advantage in that I am bilingual. My thoughts sometimes occur to me in French and sometimes in English. I often find myself speaking the ‘wrong’ language, or appropriating a French word in the middle of English. Oddly, the reverse never happens. I don’t need too many English words when I am speaking French but then perhaps that’s the residual française in me. After all, France must be the only country that has tried to ban English words like le jogging, le hamburger and le weekend by law!

  After Dom finished the manuscript for A Matter of People and submitted it to the UNFPA, there was not much they had for a poet and journalist at large. And so they came up with an idea. Dom would ask twenty-five of the world’s most important people in their respective fields of endeavour the question: ‘What do you see as the quality of life, and what do you think it will become in the future?’ The list contained people such as Heinrich Boll, Carlos Fuentes, Indira Gandhi, Eugène Ionesco, Margaret Mead, Yehudi Menuhin, Gloria Steinem and Buckminster Fuller. This was the book that came to be called Voices for Life: Reflections on the Human Condition.

  It was a great idea but in the making of it, he ran into a couple of snags. One of the people that had been agreed upon was Eugène Ionesco, one of the greatest playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd genre. I thought this was completely apposite even if the Theatre of the absurd was about the insignificance of human existence. Most people believe that the Absurdists felt that communication had reached the level of Babel, that meaninglessness was all that lay behind the façade of human interaction but I have always thought otherwise. To begin with, if they allowed that belief to reach its logical conclusion, they would not have written at all—simply because to write needs an act of faith and to publish or to perform needs an act of trust in some community of communication. The Absurdists were not nihilists; by pointing out our failure to connect with each other, I believe that they were urging us to connect. By emphasising the non-linear, they sought to remind us that we still have the choice to allow for another way of living. By producing near meaningless conversations, they sought to challenge us into refining meaning.

  And so ionesco fit perfectly, according to me. Dom duly rang him up and after a few seconds, hung up disgruntled.

  ‘He wanted to talk Froggy,’ he said.

  I did not think that a polite way to refer to the language of Racine and Valéry, but I held my peace and offered to call him.

  Ionesco was charming and when I explained the project to him, he declared that he would willingly write for such a book. Ha, I thought, to myself. Take that, you nihilists. Here is the Big Daddy of the Absurdists agreeing to write about the value of human life.

  ‘My theme is that life is like a circus, and that most of us are clowns,’ he said. I told him that he could say what he wanted.

  ‘I shall need two weeks,’ he declared.

  That was better than I had hoped.

  ‘And I will write in French,’ he said.

  I told him that we would be delighted and that he should let us know if he had a translator of choice to whom we could send the piece when it was done.

  ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you translate it.’

  I was rather overwhelmed by this, but two weeks later when the piece arrived and I read it, I found that it was easy because Ionesco had written it without flourishes, a j’accuse that indicted us all. It took me a week and when I finished, Dom read the piece with a look of growing dismay. He began to read out lines at random:

  ‘“People lived yesterday and today exactly as they deserve to”? “To murder children has been a habit in mankind’s history”? “Man is a social animal who cannot stand society”? “What is better? To be afraid of robbers and murderers or to be afraid of the police?” Polly, you were saying that his work was about the value of human life?’

  ‘Suppose we read it another way,’ I suggested. ‘Suppose we read it as rhetoric. Suppose we read it as a challenge.’

  Dom applied himself to the piece again.

  ‘I suppose one could read it that way,’ he said, although he looked doubtful. ‘But what about the end of the piece?’

  I took my translation from him and read it again: ‘For us to reduce what is wrong with us to a minimum, we need competent administrators who have no ambition, resentment, or doctrines. As for a fair sharing of economic goods, we could suggest that it be left to programmers. But there again, it would not do much to our situation as creatures who will die or to our tragic existence.’

  ‘It is pretty bleak but it is all true. As mortal beings, we are fated to die. And if that is the end, then all of us are tragedies and small changes are not likely to make much difference to that essential tragedy.’

  ‘If all life ends in death, then all life is a tragedy. That’s what he’s saying.’

  ‘Let’s say he is saying all of this in complete good faith. Even so, I believe he fits into the book because we should have one voice that speaks for the meaninglessness of any attempt to escape our eventual fate.’


  ‘Now that we’ve asked him, I don’t suppose we can throw it out,’ said Dom, morose.

  One of the other authors we asked was the great French novelist and Poe biographer, Georges Walter. He too insisted that he would write in French and that I should translate his piece. Recently, I stumbled on a copy of Voices for Life given to me by a friend and re-read the piece. I remembered translating it, sitting up in bed in the Gramercy Park Hotel, wondering at the strange new world that Walter was conjuring up. Now, sitting in my bed in Colaba, more than three decades later, some of it is almost prophetic.

  ‘If we find ourselves with too much power too soon, maybe it is time for us to learn how to use the toys we manipulate, to know that what contains the worst can also contain the best. The Information media is sometimes like that huge machine a humorist conceived of, as big as a locomotive but, though full of cogs, pistons and bolts, only able to crack a hazelnut. If all too often communication conveys insignificant matters, it does happen that the publicity that goes with information brings out what was kept hidden and acts brutally as the voice of justice. When a paper has no other power than a fact whose truth it proclaims with obstinacy, with substantiating evidence, then it shows real strength. Television can inflict the face and words of a nitwit upon us; but it can also reveal the sincerity that goes with the face and words of a valuable man, and it can show up the impostors.’

  I looked up from the book at the news channel that I had been watching and a parade of nitwits passed before my eyes.

  I did not get paid for the translations. Since I was a woman working with my husband, the United Nations did not feel the need to pay me. Rafael salas, the Secretary of the UNFPA, once said that my notebooks were all part of the archives at the United Nations.

  ‘And it is most fortunate that you are wedded to M Moraes,’ he said, with a hint of mischief. ‘Or we would have had to pay you.’