17 May
Emptying out the fridge before China: I want to switch it off while I’m away.
Always this wish for a clean slate, Chairman.
Garden pleasures: Summer
To wander picking (with whole fingers) fresh leaves for the pot.
The stump of the old drumstick tree (the bitter drumstick, right beside the new one) is a gnarled remnant, its annual rings splitting up. A punk crest in the middle (where the trunk broke off before the saw went through) is less sprightly now, an ageing rocker’s Mohican.
“To dig it out would be a Mahabharat,” Habilis said, meaning an epic feat. A Muslim citing Hindu scripture. Where else but here?
Besides, it’s a perennial source of salad greens.
Recipe: Lunch from nothing
Poor Irv’s Shahi Pilaf, for when the fridge is bare.
(Rice and oil you must have, girl, and for that matter continence and salt.)
A handful of drumstick leaf
A handful of curry leaf
These chiefly for colour, though the drumstick will fortify it and the aromatic curry leaf will lift the whole dish. Both leaves have served for centuries in times of famine.
Eight or ten chubby Malabar spinach leaves from washerwoman Sapna’s creeper, not omitting the magenta stalks
Sprig of mint
Sprig of lemon grass
Two bay leaves
Chives from the shade porch pot
Half a withered onion from the basket on the gas cylinder
A few red chillies growing under the tea tree
An early drumstick or two, plucked tender. (If late, pluck them anyway, and steam: in the pulp you have the oyster of the vegetable kingdom.)
A wrinkled egg-plant remnant at the bottom of the fridge drawer
From the spice jar:
onion seed
fenugreek
cumin seed
A handful of cooked chickpeas, last of an elderly batch
Method:
Fry seeds and bay leaf in a tablespoon of oil.
Add a cup of rice, turn once or twice till grains are translucent.
Meanwhile shred the eggplant and put to fry separately, no spices of any sort added. A pinch of salt, certainly, to sweat the flesh; if possible let it be rock salt for its martial thrust (a pinch of gunpowder did in olden times).
Add the chickpeas, all the greens, and two cups of water, and cook twenty minutes till absorbed.
Serve pilaf topped with faux mushroom eggplant. Garnish with young tamarind leaves.
—Confess none of this to the Chinese, Forest Dweller sir.
—Never fear, boy. But you grow thin!
—A balanced diet, sir. The fruit of Home Science.
—Here. Crush this tiny onion seed between the front teeth. It floods the mouth with black urgings? Now, pass it to her on the tongue. She will forget theory.
18 May
Tuesday, a good day to start a journey. Give Dhani an advance, hand over the gate key. Night train to Delhi.
God! I forgot to lop the mulberry.
China
Freeway from the airport: always this first shooting gallery glimpse of the natives—American, Russian, now Chinese—on the road, in the car, the truck cabin, on the bike, the electric rickshaw, the powercycle. Only the model changes across the decades.
Zipping along with small intent faces, little sealed Dead Sea scrolls you want to touch to life.
Beijing: all the women beautiful, all the young men puppies.
The Indian in China is a curiosity. Two thousand years ago on the streets of Chang-an, the ancient capital, London of its day, there would have been a sprinkling of us, men from the Buddha’s land. (Can there have been a woman, a nun with small breasts and shaven head?) Every race and sort and kind from the lands along the Silk Route thronged those streets, pausing to admire a lantern, stopping to buy a steamed bun.
All the flotsam of the world.
Today a foreigner who goes to China, an American say, meets a gaze that is skewed. The eye behind it is either newly condescending, after the Olympic medal tally, the latest Forbes’ ranking of presidents, or else frankly envious: we’ve come this far on your terms, show us where to go from here. Time and again I read this look, angled up or down at Westerners around me in Beijing.
The look I met was altogether different. For a start it was level. It grew narrower the smaller the town, the seedier the street, but it came straight at me. You are—what? it said. One of the trans-Himalayans? I would feel this middle-kingdom gaze brush my skin, linger on the brown in it, then rest on the clothing, take in the round eyes, the glasses, the evident gentility of a man who has not had to live by labour, who has lived off the fat of his head, Mao would say, and then the host of tell-tale but unclassifiable signs, processing the data, numbers spinning on the taskbar, crunching madly, until I felt drawn to return the look and catch the adventuring eye.
It would slide away, of course. But there in the hurriedly vacated gap between us, behind the apparition of a man coming to terms with a new thing, I would sense the ghost of something I felt approached brotherhood. After Beijing I saw no Westerners. In Xian, where I stayed in a hotel for Chinese beside the Great Mosque, the landlady in her crepe dressing gown nibbling at a crust of hui bread as she played fan-tan with her teenage son would look up at me with a sad longing to speak. I might have been her country cousin, so long lost we’d forgotten each other’s tongue. Only in Pingyao, where I came upon the international backpack brigade, did the skewed gaze return for all the time I was compelled to share those elegant lodgings.
I was happiest out of Beijing, away from Shanghai. I grew up in towns still half village, where streets were disorderly and a fancy shop stood out; the town limits were never clear, the start of the high road indicated simply by a row of upturned tar barrels at the verge and presently, enthralling as a tombstone, the first mile marker. Family outings were often tours of inspection with my father, the journey for me a gleeful delirium of milestones counted from the rear of the jeep as the white-gartered roadside tree trunks leapt back one by one and froze to wall a green tunnel. The holidays over, you saw the same countryside slowly revolving outside the window of a train, always the liberty of fields and more fields. A landscape repeated and still beckoning beyond the water boundaries of our boarding school, a prison house for nine months in the year. (The steppe was the hero of my first Russian novels: that vast plain that began at the edge of the page with solitudes where gigantic clouds paraded in a sky twice as big as ours. The discontents of the characters were beyond me: they had all that—and they wanted Petersburg!) Our big cities held no allure: Delhi a fearful place of politicians, Bombay an unreliable fantasy; only Calcutta, where my father had been on duty once, and ridden that chimerical thing, a tram, twinkled as a city should, just out of reach.
“Town-and-country’s the ideal mix,” Padre Barkworth, retired British army chaplain declares, as we sit sipping our fresh-lime and considering the possibility of rain in a courtyard damped down from a watering can and gently steaming. Lame Ghasita baker has just delivered a roll of warm ginger biscuits, wrapped in an Urdu newspaper.
My almost-adult sister Janet lets the back of her new pointy shoes slip off the heel as she flexes her foot in an unaccustomed way. She frowns at my jiggling knee.
“That’s so irritating!”
A glimpse of some quiet moment like this was what I dreamed of in China. Provincials are the same everywhere. We lurk at street corners, surprise one another in the Beijing metro; we might be freemasons exchanging secret handshakes, the middle finger bent back to point at that thirsty dust bowl, the palm. But the China conference was in the cities and could not be side stepped. China came with it.
At the hotel of the Wo Fo Si, the temple of the reclining Buddha in the Fragrant Hills of northwest Beijing, we sat across a table from the writers of modern China, pushing out notions; our interpreter restacked the freight midstream; then both sides watched the boats tremble on the brimming river. It was a scene out of Xuan Zang’s journal. He had done countless debates with the learned all across India. I sat across from the poet Zhai Yong Ming, the beauty of Szechuan, and sketched her silver spiral necklace. In the botanical gardens next door the gardeners, no Dhanis, wore gumboots and overalls and straw hats. During the week we read before the students of Tsinghua University. Lute master Li played Tang melodies of the eighth century. In Shanghai a green canal, impossibly clean, flowed under our arts-village- windows, crossed by a stone bridge in daily use since 1200 AD. I sat in a billionaire’s jacuzzi and sketched my vast pine bathroom with its fireplace and TOTO the automatic toilet (“Yes, Master,” the rising lid seemed to say) and antique furniture.
Ten days of fellowship will end. The cook runs after our departing car: “Stop!” she cries. “Your plants!”
The billionaire overheard my garden plans and made a mental note.
In her arms not one but two flourishing ginkgos.
Dinner at Shanghai University
Frogs’ legs, deep fried
Chickens’ feet with red pepper
Spring rolls, scalding sauce inside
Fish-head soup
Prawns in a yellow bean sauce
Chicken with chestnuts
Broad beans
Runner beans
Bok choy
Sea lettuce
Marinated radish
Roast beef, cold
Squid with green pepper
Yangtze River fish, steamed whole
Hunan fish tails with red chillies (Mao’s favourite)
Beef and tomato hot pot, simmering
Steamed rice
Congee with apple and pineapple
Dates in syrup
Watermelon
As a child Filo would insist on detailed accounts of grand meals she missed. (This one, Tochter, was one of the simplest; Beijing was where the banquets happened.) I chaffed our philosopher Ashis Nandy, the last free mind in India, for shaking chilli powder over everything. Afterwards we reconstructed this menu from the ruins as we sat around the table, picking idly, calling out favourites, wonders already half-forgotten.
28 May
An end to feasting. My countrymen go home, the journey begins.
I leave the ginkgos at Shuang’s apartment and take the subway to the Beijing West railway station. “Soft sleeper” this first night: wake to the yellow loess plateau. Hillsides dotted with cave dwellings. Here on the morning of 23 January occurred the greatest recorded earthquake of all time, the Shaanxi earthquake of 1556. A million perished. Akbar was 14, Elizabeth 23. Their thrones just months away.
29 May
Xian
At the Xian railway station I strike my first Indian-crappy public toilet, then catch my first city bus. It takes me to the Great Mosque precinct where I’m told the hotels are cheap. When I learn how cheap I’m plunged in gloom: I could have pushed back my return date, had a whole month in China.
Clean sheets, bright casement window. I open the window and the room is filled with the aroma from the bakery across the lane. I do a wild jig.
Hui miniature
The Hui people number some forty thousand. Muslims, they have lived clustered around the Great Mosque of Xian for a thousand years. They are descended from Silk Route travellers who stayed on in the Middle Kingdom. Their name means simply “foreigner”. They speak Chinese but their women headscarf and the men skullcap, and all revile pork. Their grilled mutton is not to be passed by, but the trans-Himalayan must beware the third stall on the left where a certain hard-faced woman skewers the unwary. The boy waiter, who has surely stepped out of an Oxiana painting, is by no means to blame. His foot is on the ladder to heaven, hers is not. Let the foreigner mark the old Hui proverb: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Let him pass by on the other side the next day. His landlady on the other hand takes a note off her son to complete the refund of his room deposit to the last jiao. Six fabrics clothe her ethereal beauty, but here too the trans- Himalayan must pass by on the other side. Ah, the Hui are a handsome race! Hui soup is eaten with hard cakes of Hui flatbread broken into it. Notice the bakery below the window with the dervish. Eaten plain, the pasty cud approaches the universality of Esperanto. Herein is the brotherhood of man. Buy one, fresh from the griddle, and it will do service as a coaster; buy six and they will haunt you for the rest of your travels. True, in Mongolia, they will keep the wolf from the door. The border is of irises. The artist was disputed but his signature is woven into the gourd vine tendril.
Things I leave behind
At the Sunday market I cannot buy the sweet-tempered golden Labrador on a leash as opposed to in a cage. Forgiveness flows from under its unicorn-pure eyelashes. But I buy, in their Chinese homeland, lichis, the fruit hanging this minute on our own tree on the 433. Other things I fail to buy:
Loquats, pale orange, missed in Beijing, missed again in Xian
Ripe jackfruit segments parted with exquisite polythene-gloved fingers
Walnut butter, fresh ground in a jar
Great fat wrinkled Bactrian dates
Blue-glaze pottery jardinières
A bushy paintbrush for washes
An inkstone
Green tea
A silver necklace with a gyre down to heaven
A caged cricket
A hundred harassed songbirds
A child’s lemon yellow suit, size 3, greatly reduced
A blown-glass ammonite
Imitation flat noodles in a china crock
A hollow wooden frog with serrated back and stylus croaker
Biscuits to munch on with hotel Nescafe
Imitation leather moccasins soft as sin
Disco crispy chicken drumsticks
Mao poster (reproduction)
Red Guard headband (perchance)
Tiger Balm
City maps from old women
Bonsai junipers, canaries, pickled horse mushrooms, silk shawls, cow livers: where is a thirteen hundred-year-old pilgrim in Chang-an to pack these? Easier to overstay.
—This Almanack, Young Householder, contains all things material to a good life.
—Indeed, Almirah Rentier, sir.
—Note, then. There is in men an impulse to record, and an impulse to enjoy heedlessly.
—Which do you advise, sir?
—The botched life is the life that succumbs to the one or the other.
On the second day I visit the Small Wild Goose pagoda.
Then the museum with Tang figurines in clay, ladies on horseback with cats and mandolins, as if lifted yesterday from the kiln.
Then, sadly, the Great Wild Goose Pagoda.
—A rule, boy. Take dictation.
—She has borrowed the pen, sir.
—Then commit to memory the following.
MAXIM
The Almanack considers: In countries as in men the ambition should be in the work, not in the plan.
1 June
On the third day I ride a bicycle on the Xian city wall, the whole circuit, thirteen kilometres. There is a lap when you are alone in China, as far as the eye can see. It is still possible. It’s years since I rode a bicycle, and my calves ache on the home stretch. A boy plays the piha standing in an arch below. He is one of ten million migrants from the countryside.
On the last day I watch a thousand terracotta warriors face down a throng of ten thousand from foreign parts. On the last night the upstairs concourse at the Xian railway station has standing room only. No one shoves, no one pushes, and yet the hair is black like ours.
3 June
Pingyao
I ride the electric rickshaw through early morning streets, past the first trickle of workers, and shuttered shop fronts of what could be the set of a western. The hotel is a courtyard hotel and I strike a bargain with the suave owner. Pingyao is tourist country, even for Chinese, a perfectly preserved brick city from Ming times, with hutong courtyards hidden from the street by elaborately decorated screens. There is little overt restoration yet a miraculous state of preservation that must have to do with low rainfall. I walk past yards and doorways, peeping as far in as I dare, catching tranquil moments of domesticity. By mid-morning I’m sketching the intricate brick patterns over gateways and doorways on the alley just inside the city wall.
Four teenage girls stop their bicycles to see how the sketch is going. In a public square they might have hesitated; here there’s nobody. One of them, Eileen, speaks good English and wants to know what I think of China. It’s a marvel, I assure her with a sweep of the hand, a perfect marvel. Their smiles grow wider. I expect them to remount and go on their way. But they close in, simply and unaffectedly interested in the stranger. No, but really, what have I seen? Almost nothing, I say, except for Beijing and Shanghai. “Shang...hai!” they chorus. But Shanghai is briskly set aside. Now I see how young they are, school-leavers from Wuhan on a tour: the rented bicycles, these funny brick lanes, the foreigner sketching, everything is oxygen, burning with an invisible flame and they are fire-eaters. Now I’m the one who’s afraid they’ll leave. I invent questions to detain them but I needn’t have feared: they’re in no hurry. Their enthusiasm is an undentable spacecraft, shining. I get them to write out their names. They leaf through my book. They ask me which of them is the prettiest. Both sides have found a private lane where they can be as nosy as they please. Only one of them, Shi Jiao, the shyest, appears to go by her Chinese name; the rest sign Western. I find this time and again among young people of their age, the ones most apt to seek me out when I’m sketching. When they were gone, waving madly, a woman of seventy came by, and with the warmth of the girls still upon me I nodded brightly at her. She looked at me without the trace of a smile and turned her head away. But there was a still older man, of almost reproachable (and surely at one time dangerous) gentility who sneaked a look at my drawing and smiling approval bowed courteously as he edged away.
Reprinted with permission of the author and Aleph Book Company. The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: An Almanack will be published on 7 May 2014.
Irwin Allan Sealy is the author of The Trotter-nama, The Brainfever Bird, and other novels, and a travel book, Yukon to Yucatan. He lives in the foothills of the Himalayas and is apprenticed to a bricklayer.