Passing the Buck Way

After Karjat, the plains are well and truly left behind, the sultriness and humidity a bad memory. The breeze coming in through the train window is crisp, the Sahyadris a verdant green, the plunging valleys are a sight to behold. Tearing myself away from the scenery, I dive into the book — and hit the first awkward note. Buck’s protagonist, American missionary David Hardword MacKard, makes the Tower of Silence his first stop in Mumbai. The Tower and tourists? I grimace and turn the page.

MacKard soon boards a train on the same line that I am travelling on. But that’s where the similarity ends. Buck writes: ‘‘He was glad that David, his son, could sleep for there was little enough to see from the dusty windows, plains as barren as winter though it was already so hot that one could scarcely endure the windy heat. Upon the plains, the earthen villages were pitilessly bare under the blazing sun. The villages were scarcely more clear upon the landscape than molehills heaped up, and out of them crawled the most dreary creatures he could imagine upon the earth. Yet they were human, though they seemed scarcely different from the pitiful skeleton shapes of the cattle which roamed restlessly over the barren ground.’’

It’s enough to disgruntle any bona fide Western Maharashtrian, but I plod on. The train reaches Pune with the American missionary and his son and, as I disembark at the Pune railway station, I cringe at the thought of Buck describing Pune again as a barren plain with famine-stricken people, dust and flies. To think that the British had made Pune their summer retreat! But Buck, writing in 1953, says on page 130: ‘‘The monsoon winds came late, but they came at last and for days the thirsty land soaked up the falling rain. In the home of rich and poor alike the people slept night and day to the sound of the soft thunder.’’

Pune is ensconced in a basin with hills on its west; on the east, the plains stretch out. But even geographical realities succumb to poetic liberty; for Buck’s protagonist, the sun rises from beyond the hills and Pune is dotted with minarets and — hold your breath — palm trees! ‘‘The sun was creeping up beyond the grey ghats and over the walls and cupolas of Poona, above minarets, the white colonnades and tall green palms. The streets were already astir, the bullock carts creaked and water carriers splashed the dust with small liquid spheres.’’

Or again: ‘‘Poona was more easily travelled than Bombay, a large city divided into parts like wards, and spotted by the usual monuments and bridges erected by rich Indians. By the fifth day, MacKard was ready to go beyond into the surrounding countryside. He was thinking furiously now about water and how it alone might change the face of India. He saw a country threaded by silver canals, a network of irrigation, independent of rains or even or rivers. Let them use the Mutha and the Mula rivers here in Poona and the Ganges itself in the North-East for electric power, but irrigation canals, the water drawn deep from the earth, alone could provide the steady life-giving stream to the plains.’’

As any Puneite could have told her, the Mula and Mutha were never perennial rivers; they had water only in the monsoons.

Splitting hair? Not really, for as I travel through the book and the landscape, it’s tough to correlate one with the other. Well into the book, the scenario shifts to Wai (or Whai, as Buck spells it), about 70 km south of Pune, at the Sahyadri foothills. This is where the tourist begins the climb to the hill-stations of Panchgani and Mahableshwar. But for Buck, it could well be another world: ‘‘There she found a whole countryside, a lake reflecting the clouds when the sun burst through for an hour or two at a time but Whai itself was on a low hill, a small flattened mountain and the earthen streets were not too muddy…

‘‘Vhai itself was changed, When her father first came here to live as a young man, so bitterly against her grandfather’s will as he knew, the village Vhai as barren as a desert, as all villages were… Her father had even engaged an artisan well-digger to come all the way from Bombay and put in more than twenty wells…

‘‘Other villages had seen the benefit of irrigated fields and they had dug wells, so that the whole region of Vhai had become beautiful and productive. It was a low region (sic) over-sheltered by the distant Himalayas and in the season of monsoons the land became a lake.’’

Now I’m getting confused. Is this Maharashtra? Or Bengal, where the plains get waterlogged in the monsoons and the Himalayas are not too far away?

There’s more. Buck describes Wai thus: ‘‘The whole village was a cluster of earth-walled houses and in this handful of minute homes, every sort of small industry went on, spinning and weaving, pottery-making and carpentry and grinding wheel.’’ The town, actually, boasts of stone-walled houses dating back to a couple of centuries.

Enough, I thought, as I snapped the book shut. Nobel laureate and feted author Buck might have been, but realist she was not. Just goes to show one shouldn’t believe everything one reads!