City Of Temples

I wake early after a fitful, nightmare laden half-sleep and go downstairs for breakfast. There are six waiters hovering inside the dark restaurant, a fifteen foot buffet table stretching the length of the back wall, and no other customers. The waiters fall into orbit around my table as I drink my coffee, then form a line behind me as I work my way along the buffet table, replacing lids, rearranging the platters of food, adjusting the bowls of salad by a few millimetres to make them a little more attractive should anyone else turn up for breakfast. There is masses of food: parathas, rotis, chapatis, popads; mango, onion, tomato and chilli salads and chutneys; pokoras, rice cakes, chicken masala and two different vegetable curries. I help myself to a small portion of each dish; the waiters loiter around my table and take it in turns to lean over me and inspect my progress.I walk down to the station in the hot morning sunshine, sweat beading on my forehead from the humidity and chilli chicken masala. I buy a ticket for the following days Sambal-Puri Express then walk over the footbridge to platform 4. No RPF officers challenge me as I walk its length and climb down onto the tracks. On my left a bastee stretches away into the forest of palms and banyan trees; on my right, a beaten earth path crosses the lines and disappears through a gap in the wall behind the Easter Railway's Officers' Rest Rooms. I wait for a Howrah-bound passenger train pulled by an orange and white WAG4-6P electric to pass, and then pick my way across the tangle of points, turn-outs and running lines. I walk trackside for a few hundred metres, sit on a pile of discarded sleepers beneath the shade of a coconut palm and wait for the WDS shunter that moves coaches in and out of the station to pass. The path climbs the embankment behind me into a cluster of rag and plastic sheet shanties; a few feet away, a woman with a naked baby squats by a cooking fire outside the open doorway of her shack, stirring a steaming cauldron of rice. When she looks over at me I smile and wave; she smiles back shyly, satisfied that my sudden appearance in her poor neighborhood represents no threat. Other women emerge from the darkness of their huts, throwing back the thin sheets that cover the entrance, curious to see the unusual visitor sitting beside the railway line. They call out "Hallo!", and I acknowledge them with a smile and wave. They accept my presence and go about the daily business of struggling to survive in this place, glancing in my direction now and again to see if I am still here. People who pass on the path stop for a few minutes to ask "where from?" Otherwise, I am alone. I don't feel in the least bit threatened or unsafe here. I wonder what the locals must think seeing an Englishman sitting on this pile of sleepers; the same surprise I would feel if I saw an Eskimo sitting next to the Great Western mainline outside Swindon station? They are warm, friendly and welcoming nonetheless. The defensive body language and aggressive attitude needed to survive in central Europe isn't necessary here; some humanity and compassion, and a genuine smile is all that is required.There are more than 1,000 temples in and around Bhubaneswar; I could have taken a rickshaw to any one of them this morning. That's what everyone who visits the city does, isn't it?
Not me.
The WDS pushes some stock into one of the station platforms, and then comes forward to the points in front of me to run around its train. The crew takes little notice of me as I take some photographs. It is a fascinating tableau: a hundred tons of hot spinning metal, hissing airbrakes, oil fumes and exhaust a few feet from the woman preparing a meal at the edge of the slum. The ground trembles as the WDS blasts its horns and rumbles past the candlelit hovels with the familiar ALCO chug, hundreds of volts surging through the copper traction motor cables, enough current to light every bastee for miles around.
I walk back down the line to the gap in the wall, and then follow a narrow lane through the middle of the shanty town. Families pose outside their homes for photographs and whoop with delight when I show them their images on the digital screen. They are heartrendingly poor but not bitter or defeated; they show real affection to me and their gratitude for the brief look at their portraits is utterly humbling. I catch a fleeting glimpse of some essential truth that has long since been extinguished by greed and excess in Western Europe, but it is gone before I can catch it, examine it and describe it. I find a Wine Shop that sells nothing but beer at the side of the main road; I order a cold Kingfisher and drink it in a little open-fronted breezeblock hut facing the road. I stand under the ceiling fan and watch two slow-minded Labrador puppies scavenge in the pile of chicken bones and Paan leaf in the corner; they have soft brown eyes which shine with delirious, innocent happiness.
I walk back to Station Square in the pummeling afternoon heat; I stop at a roadside hut and buy a bottle of water, my shirt clinging to me in dark, damp patches.
"May I sit?" I ask the wallah, pointing to four plastic chairs in the shade of the stall.
"Of course," he says with an air of quiet surprise, "They are there for you". It is as if he has been waiting for me to arrive; arranging his chairs each morning - the Englishman might come today, tomorrow, next week.
I go back to the Arya Mahal as the sun sets, shower and then go down for dinner. The same six waiters are on duty, and a handful of people are dotted around the dark, neon light restaurant. A small stage has been set up where the morning buffet was. A fat, sweating Indian man in an ill-fitting white shirt tunes up with random notes on an enormous electronic organ while a small, stout, middle-aged woman in a green sari adjusts her microphone. I order a Kingfisher, an Aloo Ghobi and some rice; each is served by its own waiter. The duo opens up the night's entertainment with an ear-splitting Bollywood film song; the shrieking woman is barely audible above the deafening keyboards. The waiters tap their feet, drum on the tabletops and shuffle in time to the music. There are a few handclaps as the song grinds to a halt. The musicians have a strange, detached look about them; their movements are wooden, mechanical, like a pair of bad actors unenthusiastically going through the motions. The waiters overact their part: they are too enthusiastic, too eager for the next appalling tune to begin; they clap too loudly and dance with jerky, out-of-time movements. The whole scene is surreal; the entire spectacle contrived to serve some unknown purpose, some ritual. I drain my Kingfisher and quickly order another. The duo launch into a Country and Western number and I watch with a kind of detached horror as an elderly Indian couple take to the dance-floor. He is wearing a pair of overly-tight, white flared slacks over platform shoes, the buttons of his bright red polyester shirt straining to contain his overhanging stomach; she struggles to keep her voluminous blue sari form revealing too much of her flabby hips. They appear to be trying to perform something like The Twist to what sounds like the Bhubsville Bluegrass Hillbilly Band. As the badly synthesized guitar-picking solo winds up to full power, the old Indian man in the sprayed-on flares quickly slides his black, combed nylon toupee back into place and then grasps the woman's wobbling hips again. I am back in my room within two minutes.
I turn out the light and listen to the evening traffic on the road outside, in the distance I hear the faint but distinct sound of a waltz being played on something that sounds a little like a sitar.