“No entry without valid ticket.”
“How can I buy one, when the ticket counter is inside? I have to go
inside.”
“No entry without valid ticket.”
From his face, I can see that he means business, so I turn around,
somewhat panicked.
“Hotel, sir?” A man is actually grabbing my bag already. He pulls on
it. I jerk it back hard, and growl, “No.”
I ask another man where to buy tickets for Indian Airlines. He points
me toward a small office outside the terminal. On the way, four differ-
ent men insist on offering taxis, hotels, and money-changing. When I
reach the office, it is closed. Why is that? It is only three p.m.
“Taxi, sir?” A turbaned Sikh looks hopeful. I shake my head, but he
is not convinced. “Very good, sir, you need hotel, I will take you there,
best quality.” The thought of being pushed into a taxi by a hawker and
being passively taken anywhere in Delhi is not comforting.
“No.”
I walk up to another man. “Where can I buy a ticket for Indian Air-
lines?”
He points at the office from which I just came.
“It is closed,” I say.
“Yes, is closed,” he says, and walks on.
I am puzzled. I don’t know how to proceed. A policeman walks up to
me. “Do you want to change money?”
This is scary. If I say yes, he could arrest me for changing on the black
market. If I say no, he could arrest me for something else, just because
he is upset with me. I decline, but with fear in my eyes.
Passage to India | 81
All the local lowlifes have now figured out that I don’t know what I
am doing, and they all have great ideas about what I could be doing.
“Sir, taxi?”
“You come here.”
“Hotel, sir, very nice, please come.”
My nerves are fraying. Everything is going wrong, and I cannot see a
way to turn it around. I throw in the towel on the ticket and decide to
work only on saving life and sanity. In order to get rid of the masses, I
need to appear resolute, so I walk up to a queue of people standing in
line and join them. I do not know what they are in line for, but it must
be something legitimate and possible, and I hope that it implies to the
masses that I have made up my mind and am doing something that does
not involve them. It buys time. My nerves settle a bit. I can think with-
out being accosted. Best to go to a hotel and see if the desk there can
help me with the flight. But which hotel? I need help from someone who
is not after my money. The man in front of me is well dressed and is fully
ignoring me—a good sign.
“Sir, can you tell me the name of a good hotel nearby?”
He checks me out and smiles, no doubt noticing the stressed look on
my face. “You can go to Ashoka Palace, very good.”
The words sound like music—Ashoka Palace, and “you can go” as
opposed to “please go here.” It allows me initiative and gives me courage.
“Thank you very much. Can you tell me at what time the office of
Indian Airlines will reopen?”
“It will not open.”
“Why not?”
“It will open tomorrow. Today is Republic Day.”
That clears up that issue. Republic Day is a national holiday, similar
asked, it was obvious that the office would be closed today and that my
question was for future reference. They were not trying to mislead me at
all. So actually, there is nothing left to do but go to a hotel and wait for
the morning.
I walk to a taxi man who was not involved in mobbing me earlier.
After a short skirmish over the fare (there are no working meters in
Delhi), he takes me to the “Palace.” I take in stride the driver’s habit of
letting go of the wheel and assuming a praying posture with his hands
whenever we drive by a Hindu temple, and we reach Ashoka Palace
without further complications. I secretly celebrate living through the
forty-five most mentally harrowing minutes of my life, having interacted
82 | Chapter 6
with thirty-six different strangers (indeed, I counted them), nearly all of
it tense and confusing. In the room, I drop my backpack on the floor, lie
down in bed, and immediately fall asleep—to be awoken, a few minutes
later, by the man at the reception desk, who asks if I want to change
money at a good rate. I rudely tell him that I do not and slam down the
phone.
The next day I go back to the airport and buy my ticket without fur-
ther incident. I fly to Chandigarh, the capital of the state of Panjab, once
united with the differently spelled Pakistani state of Punjab, before the
countries were divided.1 Sahni picks me up at the airport, and we drive
to Panjab University. He laughs at my experiences in Delhi and says that
traveling by train is much to be preferred over Indian Airlines. The drive
delights me. If you ignore the living beings, Chandigarh is a modern city,
with straight boulevards, whitewashed houses built in straight rows, and
many traffic circles. However, this attempt at organization is altogether
insufficient to subdue India’s ruling Muse of Chaos, and like all other
Indian towns, cows, dogs, boys with kites, and girls guarding littler sib-
lings dominate the street; tea vendors set up shops in wooden crates,
fruit salesmen stack their wares high on rickety pushcarts, fully blocking
one traffic lane, and grown men just hang out as if they were teenagers
at the mall, smoking and chatting, watching the world with the uncom-
prehending disengagement that one has watching an anthill.
Chandigarh is the capital of Panjab, the homeland of the Sikhs, some
of the more striking inhabitants of this subcontinent. The men sport
fully bearded faces and colorful, tightly rolled turbans that hold the
long hair which, following the rules of their religion, should not be cut,
ever. There is a minor Sikh rebellion going on. Some Sikhs are trying to
gain independence from India. The Indian government is cracking down
hard on them, with mixed success. There are sandbagged holdouts on
campus, filled with men
in army fatigues brandishing machine guns. A
Red Cross sign near campus proclaims: “Don’t shed blood, donate it.”
Walking onto campus, I run into a demonstration, people with signs I
cannot read and angry slogans, but my worries dissipate when Sahni
explains that they are just employees demanding higher pay. Rebellion
or not, raises are important too.
Sahni introduces his students, among them Sunil Bajpai, a quiet fel-
low of my age, mustached and already balding. The whale fossils are
about five to ten million years younger than the Pakistani ones, and they
are the subject of Sunil’s thesis. Fossils were first discovered here during
geological survey work2 by the Geological Survey of India, when India
Passage to India | 83
was still a British colony, but Sahni’s lab was the first to start looking for
fossil whales seriously.3 The most important publication is Sahni and
Mishra’s 1975 monograph, of which there are only few copies in the
United States.4 I now see it for the first time in the original and it feels
rather like a pirate’s treasure map as I open it in the dimly lit, cavernous
lab—pages nearly two feet high, printed on musty yellow-brown paper
that is frayed at the edges and covered with dirty thumb prints and mil-
dew stains. There are photos of fossils, but they are all out of focus and
printed with too much contrast. The fossils are like white islands in a
black ocean, the dashed lines indicating anatomical features like secret
trails that lead to buried treasure. I am glad I came here. The fossils
might as well be pirate’s gold.
Sahni and Mishra were remarkable. Mishra, with not even a car,
collected many fossils and described the geology, and together they rec-
ognized that these fossils represented early whales, well before the Paki-
stani fossils were recognized as such. Truly, these whales do not look like
modern whales, and the fossils were mere fragments. It was an accom-
plishment to identify them as whales, more so since the famous Smithso-
nian paleontologist Remington Kellogg had written that the early whales
“evidently did not reach the Indian Ocean during Eocene time.”5
Sahni also shows me the fossils, most of them wrapped in yellowed
newsprint and hidden behind fossil elephant tusks and antelope skulls.
The Indian whales now come to life for me. There is a blackened skull,
with a long snout and eyes the size of marbles. Its ears are large and far
apart, different from Ambulocetus and Pakicetus. Sahni and Mishra
named this whale Remingtonocetus, after their Smithsonian colleague.
Sunil and I make tentative plans to work together in the place where
these whales come from, an area called Kutch near the Indian Ocean in
the state of Gujarat. Combining the Indian whales with Pakicetus and
Ambulocetus will allow me to study three snapshots of the rapidly
evolving whales just a few million years apart—a unique opportunity.
Kutch is about six hundred miles from Chandigarh, too far for a
quick look around on this there-and-back trip to India. However, there
are some localities with Eocene whales within driving distance in the
Indian high Himalayas, and another whale, the ambulocetid Himalay-
acetus, was found there. So, the next day, Sahni takes me and his three
students into the mountains, a three-hour drive in Sahni’s tiny van.
The fossil sites in the Himalayas are different from those in Pakistan.
It rains a lot here. Beautiful and peaceful pine forests cover the slopes,
dampening sound and light, but bad for collecting fossils. Rocks are
84 | Chapter 6
covered with pine needles or undergrowth. The only outcrops, places
where bare rocks and fossils are visible, occur in the small streams. But
the exposures are steep and slippery, and weeds compete with my feet
for a foothold. The fossils here are found in shale—compacted mud,
really. Shale is friable and unstable; the surface is slippery and full of
loose rock. I spend at least as much time seeing where to put my feet as
I do looking for fossils. To make matters worse, it is starting to rain, and
the people in this village use this valley as the community bathroom.
Sahni and I have raincoats, but the three students are miserable in their
wool sweaters. Sahni shows no mercy and tells them they should have
brought coats. One of the students is from this area, and he’s used to
scrambling on these slopes. He finds part of a tooth. It is a whale tooth,
and I notice that it has a clear break on one side. The remainder of the
tooth is still in the rock. I did not bring tools to extract it, or glue to join
the pieces, not thinking fossils would be found. With my pocket knife, I
flick away the shale that surrounds the tooth. It comes out in one piece,
and I wrap both pieces in my handkerchief and put them in my shirt
pocket. Amazing—a whale tooth collected from a very difficult place
under very poor conditions.
The student asks us to visit his village and his house. Sahni agrees
reluctantly. It would be somewhat of an insult to say no, and an honor
for the family to receive a professor from Chandigarh. The houses are
built along a steep hill, and, just as in the Pakistani mountains, the roofs
of one family are the floor of their neighbors above them. The houses
are mostly wood, weathered gray and unpainted; glass windows are
small, and wood lattice covers them, very picturesque. We scramble up
the steep path and drop in, unannounced, on his family. His mother and
sister are home, and offer some food. Again Sahni hesitates. This is a
poor village. He does not want to impose. She brings out a dish, which
is devoured quickly by the three young men, their professor, and his
foreign guest. Another dish comes out, also eaten; another; and another.
Dishes keep coming. A large meal had been prepared for someone, and
now it is all gone. Sahni is supremely embarrassed. His group wolfed
down a feast obviously not intended for them. But there was no way
out. Refusing to eat would have been very rude, in this culture that hon-
ors guests to an extreme.
On the way back to the car, walking to the lower parts of the village,
I notice a stray dog eating something. I tak
e a professional interest in
road kills, and often collect them, since the bones are useful to compare
to fossils. I chase the dog away and walk over to the morsel he dropped.
Passage to India | 85
My heart stops as I see what it is. The dog was eating a cut-off hand.
The shock only lasts a second, as I realize that the hand is hairy and
much narrower than a human hand. It is a hand of a monkey. My heart
still pounds, and I quickly walk away. Later, back on the road, we see
macaque monkeys sitting on the side of the road. The rain worsens as
we descend from the Himalayas through numerous hairpin turns. The
windshield is opaque with rain, and Sahni has the inexplicable habit of
turning on the wipers only for one or two beats, only after all visibility
is lost, and then turning them off again. I bite my lip and sit in the pas-
senger’s seat, but all ends well. Traffic is the most dangerous thing when
visiting India.
Back in Chandigarh, I use a sewing needle to clean the tooth. Sahni
offers some Quickfix, an Indian version of model-aircraft glue. The slo-
gan on the box says it “joins everything except broken hearts.” The
glue’s wispy threads fly uncontrollably; it does not adhere very well at
all. I resolve to bring my own glue next time. To make matters worse,
the only little brush available for gluing has metallic silver paint on it.
The tooth I put together has a silvery sheen, a permanent reminder of
this memorable trip.6
whales in the desert
Following up on that first visit to India, Sunil and I make plans to collect
in Kutch in 1996. Having learned from experience, I now fly directly
from the Unites States to India and meet him in Gujarat. In the past,
Sunil has come here often, working on a shoestring. In the morning, he
would take the bus to a village in the desert, talking the driver into
dropping him off at localities on the bus line. Busses are the main mode
of transportation for villagers. People are too poor to have personal
cars; besides busses and trucks, there is rarely a car on these roads. The
bus reaches villages only twice a day, and the schedule does not take the