35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

272
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
storage tanks, hay mangers for animal feed, yokes for bullocks, cages
packed with squawking chickens, tethered goats, plastic washing
bowls, even desks and chairs and a filing cabinet, and much, much
more, were lashed onto wagons, piled in tarpaulins, or still strapped
to the bowed backs of camels. Anywhere else these people would
have been refugees; here they were merely victims of nature’s
capriciousness, accepting their lot and moving, to start all over again.
Girdhar’s attitude was incomprehensible to me. I could see him
trying to push these ragged and homeless people away from his
camels, and he knew I was not happy with him. Later, when Bentley
had been persuaded to cap his lenses and move on, Girdhar claimed
he’d only been thinking of our safety.
‘Doesn’t the sight of your own people in desperate need bother
you?’
‘These peoples not my peoples,’ he replied hotly. ‘They are big
thieves and cheats, very lazy peoples.’
‘Aren’t they just really very poor people?’
‘Poor because lazy,’ he replied bluntly, adding after some thought,
‘Dirty peoples, too.’
Dirt never means dirt in India. It means caste. To Girdhar, these
people were doomed, destined, cursed, to be what they were, to suffer
what they did. And nothing should or could be done about it. I felt
he thought I was insulting him by even comparing him to such
people. As far as he was concerned, they belonged to a different race.
Even Mahatma Gandhi, revered by all, quoted ad nauseam, had never
really been listened to by those who still revered and quoted him,
had never managed to get the message across. Untouchables might
have become harijans – ‘children of God’ – but they were still
untouchable. And few were touched by their plight.
After another hour’s ride beyond the chaos and desperation of
those dispossessed people, and still out of sorts with each other, we
came to one of the haunting abandoned villages that once belonged
to the Paliwal Brahmins, a now-vanished subsect of the priestly caste
who seem, among many other things, to have been pioneer socialists.
When we stopped to rest and feed our camels, we took the time to
roam through silent, deserted streets that, like Pompeii and very
few other places, had the odd feel of somewhere everyone had