Story: A Ghost in India

Rohet warrants just one short paragraph in the current Lonely Plant guide to Rajasthan. It is devoted to a brief description of Rohet Garh, a 350 year-old manor, now a heritage hotel. And in that single paragraph one sentence lit me afire. To wit, “Bruce Chatwin wrote The Songlines here.” Parenthetically, the guide offered the room number: 15.
I got to Rohet Garh late in the afternoon. The sun was low, but still intense. I’d been on the road just a week and was struggling with India. I am no third-world weenie, but this country was something altogether different. I have wandered about in Central and South America, in Asia, the Middle East, places where one can process the challenges facing developing countries. But I could not seem to process this. It was all coming too fast and hard. The smell, the dust, the food, the 1.2 billion people.
Rohet was an oasis. We spilled into the garden courtyard, my wife, daughter and me. It was green and cool and we collapsed into the chaise lounges. A peacock strutted about. That was when I opened the guidebook and read the bit about Chatwin and room fifteen. I looked to the door of our room. Number Eight. I squinted across the courtyard, to read the numbers. They were rising, then, upstairs, with a set of steps leading from the garden, room fifteen.
I should say that I have always found Chatwin a difficult go. I took In Patagonia with me the first time I went to, well, to Patagonia. And although I read it, it did not come easily. I re-read it on a return trip two years later and like many good books it gave up a bit more the next time round. Chatwin is an icon. Known not only for his writing, Chatwin is Chatwin because of the life he carved out and promoted. Like Hemingway, Chatwin was known as much for his peripatetic life as his writing. He summarized his lifestyle thus:

"Those of us who presume to write books would appear to fall into two categories: the ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move. There are writers who can only function ‘at home’, with the right chair, the shelves of dictionaries and encyclopaedias, and now perhaps the word processor. And there are those, like myself, who are paralyzed by ‘home’, for whom home is synonymous with the proverbial writer’s block, and who believe naively all would be well if only they were somewhere else."

Room fifteen was occupied the day we arrived. I kept my eye on it and the next morning it was open for cleaning and empty of guests. It was larger than our room and more elegant and I imagined spending time here, months even. I could do this, I thought, thoroughly kidding myself. I could stay here and forget the world and write and be productive, happy even. “I adore it here,” Chatwin wrote. “Lunch yesterday, for example, consisted of a light little bustard curry, a puree of peas, another of aubergine and coriander, yoghurt and a kind of wholemeal bread the size of a potato and baked in ashes. A sadhu with a knotted beard down to his kneecaps has occupied the shrine a stone’s throw from my balcony; and after a few puffs of his ganja I found myself reciting, in Sanskrit, some stanzas of the Bhagavad Gita. I work away for eight hours at a stretch, go for cycle rides in the cool of the evening, and come back to Proust.” I wonder if he was reading Proust in French? Probably.

“A cool blue study overlooking the garden,” Chatwin wrote to a friend about room fifteen. “A saloon with ancestral portraits. Bedroom giving out onto the terrace. Unbelievably beautiful girls who come with hot water, with real coffee, with papayas, with a mango milkshake. In short, I’m really feeling quite contented. The cold and cough has been hard to shake off. A dry cough always is. But thanks to an ayurvedic cough preparation, it really does seem to be on the wane.”

Chatwin was ill during this stay in India. He would die three years later from complications due to HIV. Songlines was finished north of here, near the Nepal border. I asked the manager if there was anyone around who might remember Chatwin’s stay. “That would be the owner,” he said. The Thakur, I presumed, the Rajasthani gentleman of the Champawat clan, the family upon whom the fiefdom of Rohet had been bestowed in 1622. Regrettably the gentleman never appeared and I was left to my imagination.
In Rohert we visited a Bishnoi village where opium is part and parcel of religion. The elders had already enjoyed one ceremony that morning and were anxious to start again. They ushered us around a wall and begged us to sit. The ringleader, a village elder, had glassy, red-rimmed eyes and sported a Cheshire cat grin. Opium is not smoked here. It is drunk, prepared like coffee. Water is filtered through it, turning brown in the process, then pored into the palm of an elder. A finger is dipped into the liquid and flecked into the air as an offering to Shiva. The palm, brimming with the tea-colored intoxicant, is offered to the pious participants who slurp it up. It is consumed like a sacrament, a holy wine, blood of the ubiquitous gods. Repeat as desired. Chatwin was an enthusiastic cultural participant. He did not shy away from experience. I imagined him here in his charismatic splender, getting high with the locals, returning to his blue room and reading Proust, head spinning. As I said, I was left to my imagination. When it came round to my place in the circle, I put away my hesitation—that would be specifically, not the drink, but the vessel, the palm of my host—and slurped away like the champ I pretended to be. It takes, I was informed, a couple months before the full benefit of the practice can be appreciated. Benefit? “Why yes. Just look at him,” the guide said, pointing to the officiating elder. “He is seventy-two years old.” The man sat cross-legged in his stoned glory looking not a day over sixty. “Opium keeps you young. But of course it is addictive and that is a problem.” He was a master of understatement.
I recall spending a spring day traipsing around Bloomsbury on my first trip to London looking for Virginia Woolf’s house. When I found it, the expected brass plate confirmed the site. The house was not open to the public, in fact, was now an office building. I peered in the window from street level as a woman in a beige sweater pounded away on a computer, a flurry of activity going on behind her in the office, people at a copier and such, a sight very unexpected by this tourist. And then there was the time in Paris, I found Gertrude Stein’s apartment on the Rue de Fleurus, shared with Alice B. Tolkas. Stein called her “Pussy” and Gertrude was “Lovey”. Also not open to the public. In New England you can tour Hawthorn’s house as well as that of the great man, Emerson. If you go looking for Thoreau’s cabin at Walden, you’ll not find it, though some say the foundation exists.
It was the ghost of Chatwin that gave Rajasthan a bit more spice. I like going to a place that helps me connect to something I deem important. Following the path of those before us can give credence to our efforts. We trod Christ’s path, the Villa Dolorosa, in Jerusalem or meditate in Varanasi where the Buddha lived, punctuating our spiritual life. We peer out over the plains and study the snow on Kilimanjaro, or taste a madeleine and we mix with immortals, Hemingway and Proust, for a moment of the imagination. In this way an experience can thicken, making life more savory, like adding a roux to a sauce.
I reflect sometimes that if we understood better the connectedness of existence we might all be gods, omniscient and mindful. I recall reading that with a day of breathing we likely inhale a molecule that had been inhaled by Napoleon—proof that we do not need to go to India to experience ghosts.