After twelve hours and many stumbling blind chai stops, the dawn’s vacuum drew us into Aurangabad. We caught a rickshaw to the Maharashtra Government Holiday Camp, dropped into a deep sleep, and awoke only to the gnawing hungers of the late afternoon. 

The rotund Guru Restaurant manager across the lane took care of the second one, with delicious creamy ice-cold lassis, tamarind and coconut mutton biriyani, lighter-than-air parathas, and strong coffee. If we lacked for anything in our cubicle, we only had to buzz. 

Through the City of Gates, we had come from cubicles to caverns. Aurangabad was the jumping-off point for the great art caves of India. The bus for the thirty-kilometre crawl to Ellora next morning was standing room only, but June managed a seat as we approached the site. Hindu caves haf preceded the Buddhist rock-cut temples built here during the 5th to the 7th century. It all went on for two kilometres. 

The most stunning was the megalithic multileveled Kailasanathar temple, modelled after Mount Kailash, Abode of Lord Shiva, and covering an area twice that of the Parthenon in Athens. It had taken a hundred years to excavate, from the top down, exhumed out of the existing basalt cliff. Three types of chisels had carved away the 200,000 tons of rock that didn’t look like a temple. The stone strength of Shiva’s sculpted divine dance would have been more than enough to destroy a weary universe. The Vishvakarma cave, the ‘carpenter’s hut,’ contained a fifteen-foot Buddha underneath along Gothic vaulted ceiling, curved rock ribs carved to look like wood, and a large Bodhi tree sculpted in the back.

The bus back to Aurangzeb’s city was empty. We passed his tomb, the last of the great Mughals, within the exotic decay of what had been Rauza, The Garden of Paradise.

What Ellora was to classical cave sculpture, Ajanta was to Buddhist religious cave painting. In the late afternoon, and a hundred kilometres away, June and I boarded a bus into the mimosa-flecked arid haze. 

The driver dropped us at another government ‘Holiday Camp’ in Fardapur, two kilometres from the caves. Unfortunately, a group from Bombay had booked out nine of the ten rooms. We asked the rest house manager about the tenth.

“Professor.” He said. Head bobble. However, the manager would allow us to sleep in his office ‘free of charge’ and, the next day, we could have a room. He asked if ‘we would be dining’ with them, that evening. It was the only place for miles. We booked a thali in the canteen and went for a wash.

When we returned, he was dancing, like Shiva, on the other side of the door. It sounded like April in Paris, but it was June and January in Fardapur. The acoustic was Sinatra, but the visual was all mid-fifties American, with a goatee, and a lungi. Most of him stopped moving, except for his toes, and an extended hand.

“Walter Spink.” He said. We introduced ourselves, and the game was afoot. June asked him when he arrived.

“Twenty years ago.” He said. Walter was Professor Spink, from the University of Michigan. He was the world’s leading expert on the caves of Ajanta, and the only other guy in the restaurant. Score.

Walter had spent more years studying Ajanta than it took to construct, at least according to his theory. Satavahana dynasty Hindus built the caves in the Waghora River canyons in two phases, beginning around the 2nd century BC, with most of the 29 rock-cut monuments constructed within about fifteen years around 460 AD. Harishena’s Vakataka Empire fell and abandoned them twenty years later. Over the centuries, the jungle reclaimed them, hiding the oldest painted art in India in deep undergrowth. 

In 1819, a British officer, John Smith, hunting a tiger, stumbled on the entrance to Cave 10, and, through the bats and birds and animal lairs, carved his name five feet higher than he was. He had been standing on that much rubble.

It was the pounding on the office door at six the next morning that woke us off the floor. The manager’s mute Moslem assistant was fetching keys for another tour group. 

June and I caught a crowded but to the caves and, on Walter’s advice, began at the far side of the complex, in Cave 16. We found the professor here, already hard at work. We chatted about the similarity of some of the frescoes to the Sri Lankan paintings at Sigiriya, and what lessons there were in general, in caves. I mentioned Plato’s cave, and Walter ran back into it. 

In The Republic, Plato had written about The Allegory of the Cave, an analogy of how men’s lives are an illusion, like the concept in Buddhism. He began with a dark underground cave where a group of people sat, chained to their chairs from an early age and unable to turn their heads, in ‘one long row with their backs to the cave entrance.’ All they could see was a distant wall. This was the only existence they had ever known. Behind them were other people that Plato called ‘puppet handlers,’ holding up various objects, illuminated in flickering shadows on the far wall by a fire at the cave entrance. The captives didn’t realize they were prisoners, and their ‘truth would be nothing but the shadows of the images.’ In more recent times, captives watch television, jog, and demand refunds for what they see. Puppet-handlers are governments and mainstream media.

Plato then postulated what might have happened if one of the prisoners escaped. He stood up, turned his head, and walked out into the world. There he found grief, and tumbled through the five stages of denial, Rage Against the Machine anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. He saw the sun, and truth, and reality. Buddhist dharma. 

We have mythologized and made iconic heroes of some who have ‘escaped from the cave,’ into however we define reality. The human soul aches for what is missing, without knowing what it is. I, too, had escaped from the cave.

But release from the cave was not the end of the allegory. Plato described the freedman’s tormented need to return to the cave, to free the rest of the prisoners. It wasn’t enough for him to have achieved consciousness. He needed to act on it, to become a Messiah, or a Gautama, or a Che. But there was a problem. 

The freedman returned to the homeland cave of ignorance to bring enlightenment, to bring happiness to the pitiable. But they thought he was crazy. Their language and worldview had been that of shackled shadows in the blackness. And, in the dark, he appeared to have lost his sight, so how could he have brought insight? They viewed him as corrupted and stupid and began to resent and threaten what had been a selfless gesture of attempted rescue. I, too, would return to the cave.

Both Plato and Buddha were like physicians. They had made a diagnosis, identified a root cause, and prescribed a cure for suffering. They both believed that the universe is good and individuals need enlightenment to make a better society. 

Plato could only appreciate the real world intellectually, as an escape from ignorance. Buddha could only appreciate it spiritually in the Eightfold Path on the road to Nirvana, as an escape from self-torture and self-indulgence. Only their definition of wisdom was different. I was trying to travel both paths.

We left Walter in front of the bas-relief Buddha of Cave 19, to flower smells and pool shimmers, along the ridges of the sun-scorched Maharashtran hills. It was hot. We came to the first two caves, carved and frescoed with images of celestial nymphs and scenes from the life of Buddha. The cave shadows were electric narratives of transcendent veneration, a landscape of the soul. If I were to be chained in any cave, either one would have been fine.

*         *        *

Raju knocked on our door again next morning, this time for breakfast. He handed me his address in case we wanted to sponsor his future. I complimented him on his efficiency. He was with a young boiled sweet street vendor. June asked him if they were brothers.

“No.” Replied the little guy. “Him Hindu, me Muslim.” Candy Cain and Able. Raju tried to tell us that there was no bus to Indore that day, but it arrived anyway, jammed to the rivets. June and I commandeered the two seats in the front, with an audible grumbling behind us, all the way to Jalgoan. Even the lone Swiss German sitting next to us was hosyile. A swarm of juvenile peddlers banged on our window. 

The air in our overheated tin can was stifling, and the driver, half asleep, stopped at every garage, pakora stand and chai shop on the way. It became one of the most boring bus rides in India. Even the little girl beside us had lost patience.

“Chalo. Chalo.” She insisted. Let’s go. Let’s go. June, agonized by the arrival of her period, summarized the journey.

“It’s a good day to bleed.” She said.

When we finally pulled into Indore at dusk, an old persistent but lighthearted betel-streaked toothless babu led us to the Crown Hotel. The hole in the wall, where our showerhead should have been, produced a stream of water anyway. On the headboard of our bed was a console of knobs which generated the same Hindi nyahnyah station. 

We went out to the Standard Restaurant for an y excellent repast of onion, radish and pepper salad with some very lonely tomatoes. We had also ordered parathas and a tandoori chicken that, when it arrived, looked more like a miniature emaciated rubber camel, lacquered with mercurochrome, an alien life form I performed an animated can-can with, in a losing attempt to keep June amused, and awake. We beat a hasty retreat to our headboard, indoor in Indore.

We left next morning for a rocky outcrop, and the ancient fortress capital of the Afghan Malwa sultanate, which had ruled large parts of South Asia in the 14th century. The rulers of Mandu were famed for their faithlessness and ferocity. Our bus driver, a likely descendent, drove the hundred kilometres the same way, and it still took five hours of tedious grinding gear changes, to reach the City of Happiness. 

A one-eyed ‘guide,’ met our bus. His compensatory overarching unilateral eyebrow found us a room for eight rupees, in the dharmsala across from the magnificent Jama Masjid Mosque. Cyclops told the innkeeper that he would be our tour guide. June asked how large the ruins were.

“Fifty square kilometres.” He said. “The battlements go for sixty kilometres.” Cyclops sagged.

June and I flew off northwards to the palace area on rented bicycles. We entered one of the twelve gateways and another world. Mandu was called the city of joy because Ghiyasuddin, its hedonistic ruler, devoted himself to hunting, fine arts, and visceral pursuits, mostly the thousands of women in his harem, although he had also written a cookbook. His father, whose militaristic priorities Ghiyasuddin had rejected, had established the Khilji dynasty, by poisoning the previous sultan. Ghiyasuddin’s son would poison him in the same way. In between lay a prosperous plateau of resorts and pleasure palaces. His Jahaz Mehal harem, built in the shape of a ship, floated between two luxurious contoured lakes. Whispers of what had transpired, inside these compartments and corridors and open-air baths, reflected out of the scalloped diamond windows of the thick stone walls. Young ragamuffins danced Dhar dances on the terraces. One of them gave me two thick square silver coins, six hundred years older than he was. 

June put on my khaki bucket hat and followed my slipstream, whistling south to the tombs and royal enclaves at the other pole. Despite the weakening of the mid-afternoon sun, it was still a long hot ride, punctuated by cartographic correlations and canteen consumptions. 

We chanced on a tranquil sanctuary, under a shady parapet of the lower fortress. I showed June how to quench her thirst with the white powder cream of tartar, from the pods of the Baobab trees above us.

“It’s called monkey bread.” I said. And on cue, tribes of black-faced gray langurs flew overhead, and above them, flocks of emerald parrots. I sang Semitic psalms that echoed through the dome of an ancient vaulted Muslim tomb. We traded sweaty kisses in the cavernous cool shadows. Serenity.

In the mosques and mausoleums and caravanserai, I recognized undisguised Hindu architectural elements, pried from the temples that preceded them.

Cyclops, the mosque watchman, and their elderly friends were waiting for us, behind the last rays in the Dharamsala courtyard. We all slept outside that night, because of the heat. Cyclops told us of a place called ‘Own.’ He said the temples were better than anything at Khajuraho, but as nowhere as nowhere can be in India. June and I withdrew to discuss the pros and cons. 

As the death rattle snoring of the sleeping natives reverberated out into the ceiling stars of the night sky, the cons won out. We were already as nowhere as we could be, far too many miles into the mirages of Madhya Pradesh.  

* * *

During our slow breakfast next morning, the news broke, that not only was there no direct bus to Bhopal, but there also wasn’t one back to Indore either. 

The old beater parked next to the mosque all night was going to Dhar. It would have been full if it hadn’t been chockablock first. Like a snail through gelatin, our conveyance stopped in every village along the way, and some between. 

A newspaper full of chili pakoras killed some of the monotony, and the stationmaster in Dhar killed all remaining possibility of a direct bus to the state capital. We were heading to the City of Lakes to see the Taj-ul-Masajid,’ the Crown of Mosques, a massive pink shrine topped by two 18-storey high octagonal minarets with marble domes. In the shortsighted world of traveler’s tick boxes, it was a collectible. 

But our destination would become famous for more than water and worship, and fall off the bucket list, ten months after we pulled into town. Bhopal was about to become the worst industrial catastrophe in the world.

Union Carbide had been manufacturing pesticides here since 1969. But, as the rest of the planet moved away from its use, the factory in Bhopal was running headlong into its own accumulated poison. There had been omens. 

Three years before we arrived, a worker pulled off his mask in panic, after splashed with phosgene. He died three days later. Phosgene leaked over 24 workers a year later. No one had told them to wear masks. Gas leaks of methyl isocyanate, chlorine, monomethylamine, phosgene, carbon tetrachloride, and combinations, began to occur. American experts and local Indian authorities warned the company of the potential of a ‘runaway reaction.’ 

By the time June and I reached Bhopal, most of the safety systems were not functioning. No one had replaced the leaking pipes. The steam boiler, used to clean the pipes, was broken. The owners had reduced training and halted promotions. Employee morale vaporized, taking the most skilled workers with it. Only English manuals were available, even though few had a grasp of the language. There was no maintenance supervisor on the night shift. Instrument readings were infrequent. Workers’ complaints went nowhere. Management fined seventy percent of the plant’s employees for refusing to deviate from the proper safety regulations and fired one employee after going on a fifteen-day hunger strike. 

Tank alarms had not worked for four years. There was only one manual backup system, compared to the four-stage systems used elsewhere. The flare tower, out of service for five months, could handle only a quarter of any gas leak. All but one vent gas scrubber was inoperative. Maintenance had ceased, and safety systems, inadequate to begin with, switched off to save money, including the tank refrigerators. Tank 610 was overfull with forty-two tons of methyl isocyanate that, at 20 degrees Celsius, was 15 degrees more than safe. The tank pressure gauge had been malfunctioning for a week. Carbon steel valves had used at the factory, even though they corrode when exposed to acid. No one had installed slip-blind plates that would have prevented cleaning water from pipes from leaking into the tanks through the faulty valves. The water pressure was too weak to spray the gases escaping from the stack. Temperature and pressure began to rise inside the tanks.  

Union Carbide had sited the plant close to a densely populated area. Slums had mushroomed nearby. Local authorities had no idea of the quantities or dangers of chemicals used. On the eve of destruction, there was no plan.

Then, over two nights in December, water entered tank 610, starting a runaway reaction, pushing the temperature inside the tank to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and the pressure to the moon. The tank vented 30 metric tons of methyl isocyanate into the atmosphere in less than an hour. The cloud was heavier than air, and the northwest winds blew it through the surrounding shantytowns. 

The gas blanket smothered the life out of eleven thousand people and injured a half million more. Those who ran inhaled more than those with a vehicle. Short people, like children, took in more and were trampled. All the leaves fell off the trees. Animal carcasses bloated. 

Early the next morning, a manager asked the instrument engineer to replace the tank gauge. The city is still contaminated with thousands of tons of toxic chemicals. 

The puppet handlers at Union Carbide, for their part, denied that there were any long-term adverse effects. Indian authorities arrested CEO Warren Anderson for manslaughter at Bhopal airport, but released him on two thousand dollars bail, six hours later. He was flown out on a government plane so that he would ‘meet no harm by the Bhopal community.’ The Indian court summoned him four years later. When he didn’t show, they declared him a fugitive from justice. American courts not only refused to extradite him, but they also ruled that his victims could not seek damages under US federal law. In 1987, they decreed that the plant was a ‘separate entity, owned, managed, and operated exclusively by Indian citizens in India.’ 

Union Carbide ended up paying fifteen percent of the damages awarded. Claimants had to prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that death or injury was due to the chemical cloud. By 1992, even with the wave of medical practitioners that had moved into the area, seventy percent of whom were unqualified, less than fifty per cent remained unexamined. By the same year, the compant had closed all but one of the original fifty ‘work sheds,’ built for occupational rehabilitation of the gas victims. The government levelled a two-million-dollar vocational center. In the two thousand flats constructed in the nearly ‘Widow’s colony,’ water didn’t reach the upper floors, and there were no buses or schools for a decade.

Two thousand was Bhopal’s magic number, in dollars as well as flats. It was Warren Anderson’s bail, the fine of the seven culpable plant employees, the average death claim payout for the victims, a quarter of Anderson’s yearly golf club membership, and the number of years after the Romans had nailed his messiah to a tree for his suggesting how great it would be to be nice to people.

Our journey to Bhopal was better than Anderson’s, and better than the destination. The lighthearted toothless betel babu, who had led us to the Crown Hotel two nights before, was waiting for us, at the bus station in Indore. After red gum-chattering to Mr. Khan, the driver of the bus we had boarded, he left us with a rotating gesture of pressed palms. Mr. Khan took us to Bhopal in record time, even with the roadblocks, and chai and diesel stops. 

Bhopal was Cairo without the chic—already polluted and sleazy, but still boring. We found the Rajneet, I drilled the mineralized precipitate out of the showerhead, and we had biriyani and lassis in the empty subarctic air-conditioned dining room, downstairs. Two high-turbaned Sikhs at the next table amused us, with skilled feats of belching, staring and flatulence.

A four-rupee rickshaw peddled us up to the ‘Crown of Mosques’ next morning. It was right across the street from the ‘Mosque of Two and a Half Steps,’ one of the smallest mosques in Asia. Between the two, was a toxic silence. There was no one there, like there would be no one there, months later.

The prehistoric Bhimbetka caves outside Bhopal contain the earliest traces of human life in India. The allegorical paintings of burials, and magical sky chariots, predate the Bhopal burials and Anderson’s flight, by thirty thousand years. Between the two, like Plato said, ‘their truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.’ 

                         ‘There is light at the end of the tunnel for India, but it’s that of an 

                           oncoming train which will run them over.’

                                                                                       Navjot Singh Sidhu