My driver for the week had winkled me out of a crowded platform at Gangapur City railway station in Rajasthan and manhandled my heavy suitcase out to his spotless Toyota. I’d liked him immediately. He was stick-thin under his uniform, not very tall, and he had a spivvy little moustache and sideburns and neatly barbered jet-black hair. But it was the smile that first arrested me. It had a shriven, fatalistic quality that made him seem vulnerable yet supremely at peace with himself and the world.
‘I am simple man, sir,’ he told me when I’d tried to fathom his smile with personal questions. ‘I pray and I like my vegetables. And every day, chapati. I love my wife and childrens. I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t smoke. I don’t take meat. Sometimes I take opium in the evening. Is very good for sex, sir, and for sleeping.’
His name was Babu, which is an affectionate Hindi word, he said, meaning ‘small boy’. ‘A bit like our English “sonny”, then,’ I observed from my stately position on the back seat. ‘Oh, yes, sir, thank you, sir!’ he said, keeping his eyes steadfastly fixed on what remained of the road after the recent flash floods. Every day for a week, Babu drove me across Rajasthan, from one remote hill fort hotel to another. After the drab conformity of Britain, it felt like being driven across Narnia after Aslan’s triumph. The roads were terrible in places, however, and at times our daily journey was a bit of an ordeal. But Babu was the best possible driver and permanently anxious about my mental and physical wellbeing. ‘In Rajasthan, sir, our guest is our god,’ he said, and his concern for my comfort indeed appeared to border on adulation.
But if I was his god for the week, I turned out to be a god with an earthy and eccentric nature, which greatly amused him. It didn’t take me very long, for example, to realise that the women in the rural areas of Rajasthan must be among the most beautiful in the world. (If you think this a ridiculously sweeping statement, go and see for yourself; it’s actually shocking.) Babu, I think, had rarely had anyone in the back of his car who was such an immediate and vocal devotee of the local women, but he rose to the occasion and did his best to pander to my enthusiasm. ‘That one is very nice, sir! Very graceful. Shall I slow down, sir, so you can have good look, maybe take picture? Oh, sir, she is covering her face — I think she is very shy, sir.’
Everywhere you looked you saw them, gorgeously dressed, festooned in solid silver, and labouring in the fields or in road-mending gangs or walking by the side of the road with huge bundles of firewood balanced on their heads.
‘Woman’s life very hard here, sir,’ said Babu, sensibly introducing a note of cold realism to the incoherent ravings and whistlings emanating from the god on the back seat. ‘She get up, five o’clock. Make fire. Make food for family. Send children to school. Then she go in field and work until the evening. Then she pick firewood and take to house. Then she make dinner for family. After that she clean house, mend clothes. And at night when she go to bed, she do sex with husband. Is 24-hour job, sir. That is why womens in Rajasthan thin and graceful like this. They always working, sir.’
One day I bought a small amount of opium at a village sweetshop, and under Babu’s reverential guidance took a small dose to ameliorate the misery of a particularly bad road between Ramathra and Ranthambore. ‘How much should I take? This much, Babu?’ I said, carefully separating a small lump from the black stickiness in the plastic bag and showing him. ‘Oh, no, sir!’ he said. Then he laughed. Then he laughed again, in spite of himself. ‘Oh, no, sir, that would be too much, sir! Half, sir! Half!’
After I’d eaten it and was sitting back and contemplating the passing scene once more, he ventured, ‘Sir, are you famous in your country, sir?’ It was a question he had been harbouring for some time, clearly, and his initiating a conversation like this, and with a personal question, marked a new and more intimate stage of our relations. ‘Only in my house and maybe in my village,’ I said. ‘Why, Babu?’ ‘I think you are joking me, sir,’ he said. ‘When VIP come to Rajasthan, my boss always ask for Babu for driving. Sir, I think you are not normal person. You like womens, you like opium. No, sir, you not normal person at all.’
And then the road got really bad and he had to concentrate fully for a while.
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