GUEST BLOG #2: A lost story scoops today’s war reports (by Geo Beach)

Geo Beach and I have been close friends for nearly a half-century; his literary wisdom and counsel stand behind every line of poetry and prose I have written. No him, no me. This review meant the world to me when it appeared, and still resonates deeply. My father admired his writing enormously.

As an appreciative reader of WriteWeller’s timeless and world-wide “A Regular Irregular Blog”, it’s my privilege to have a worthy 2007 column appended here. It comes from faraway Alaska in the distant Noughties, but the topics have grown closer even, and continue to resonate beyond transitory events. I hope new readers will consider my recommendations and pick up copies of First Into Nagasaki. Our worlds today are still at war, and we need, again, the brave writer who might lead us, laughing and crying, to break the siege of monetized media and predictable publishing and help free our thoughts and hearts.  – Geo Beach

Independent journalist Geo Beach writes for Anchorage Daily News, National Public Radio, History TV, and TomPaine.com.


Right now, the most important war reporting about Iraq is coming from a dead man who sneaked into a Japanese bomb site more than 60 years ago.

To recognize why that is so, you must admit the colossal failure of American journalism in this Iraq War. As with all wars, there has been military fog and political pettifogging.  But in Iraq the willing collaboration of the media was, together with the neocons, coequally responsible for America’s unthinking entry into the war, and for the subsequent uncritical review of its strategy and tactics.  (Until now, when it’s become safe to be a quagmire-raker.)

Here’s the enigma that breaks the code of silently going along to get along – “First Into Nagasaki”, by George Weller (325 pgs, Crown, $25).  New Yorker subscribers have been tantalized by its advance publicity; Harper’s readers have just tasted a salty excerpt.

Not bad for an author who died five years ago at the age of 95. 

But no wonder, either.  “First Into Nagasaki” boasts all the right bona fides.  “The much machine-gunned George Weller” (as Time pronounced him) was a Harvard man and Pulitzer-winner who covered every theatre of the Second World War, “one of the most-captured [foreign correspondents] as he kept crossing front lines in search of the day's front-page news.” (Chicago Sun-Times).

In “First Into Nagasaki”, Walter Cronkite introduces the reportage of George Weller (“one of our best war correspondents”) as a crucial warning for today, “when our nation is again at war and our citizenry can only guess as to how thick are the blindfolds of censorship that distort the truth of our military engagements.”

And George Weller’s dispatches from the smoking ruins are deftly framed with a deeply-researched and lyric essay by his son, novelist and foreign correspondent Anthony Weller.

(Disclosure: I was privileged to know George Weller for thirty years, with still-growing admiration.  And for thirty-five years now Anthony Weller has been a colleague and inspiration.)

As befits the work of father-and-son writers, “First Into Nagasaki” is a thrilling read constructed of stories upon stories.  How George, in the guise of a colonel, contrived to reach Nagasaki.  How Gen. Douglas MacArthur censored George’s atomic reports. How George persevered with stunning scoops of POWs’ stories.  How, at the 60th anniversary of the bombing, Anthony discovered the lost carbons of George’s censored Nagasaki dispatches a scant few feet from his deceased father’s desk.  And how surviving POWs subsequently contacted Anthony with poignant stories of George himself.

But the guts of the book is the simultaneously elegant and straight-shooting reportage of George Weller, a man who defined the difference between being “embedded” and “in bed with”.

So “First Into Nagasaki” may spell the last word on getting out of Baghdad. 

Here’s George Weller on the military holding a free press hostage: “All censored information is fundamentally propaganda.”  (Remember that when you hear a splurge of words like “surge”, instead of “escalation”.)

On bait-n-switch foreign policy: “In war [the American people] are alternately drugged with the promise of bloodless and easy victory, then whipped up with official warnings that peace will be expensive and is far off.”

On compliant media: “The newspaperman’s malady is to accept all the inhibitions of a bad censorship and to discourage himself by precensoring his own work.”

Everywhere George Weller is a genuine correspondent, with letter-like intimacy that conveys respect for readers – a dirt-under-the-fingernails reporter, in striking contrast to today’s repeaters.

And Anthony Weller’s explications retain the old man’s bulldog toughness and beautiful touch: “[T]he Nagasaki reports each contained a dangerous radiation of their own, the unpredictable half-life of truth.”

George Weller wasn’t just first.  Sixty years later, he’s still new, with stories of “The Two Robinson Crusoes of Wake Island” and – in a terrifying obverse of Hampton Sides’ “Ghost Soldiers” – “The Death Cruise”, which discloses vampirism, cannibalism, and murder on the Japanese hellship voyages.

Four years ago the Iraq War began under a false “mushroom cloud” of propaganda.  Today, George Weller and Anthony Weller drop the more devastating bomb.  The real story might be delayed.  But, fiercely reported, the truth will be set free.  Eventually.

Writer Geo Beach can be reached at geobeach@journalist.com.

My First Indian Bureaucrat (by Robin Miniter)

For ongoing reasons, my blog productivity is highly uneven. I’ve invited diverse writer friends to provide Guest Blogs. This, the first, is by Robin Miniter.

An Ipswich, Massachusetts native, Robin's work covering women in sport has seen her moonlight with the Amsterdam roller derby team and receive a Fulbright fellowship to photo-document the rise of women's rugby in India. Now in D.C., she slings drinks with an eye on becoming a photo journalist and freelance writer. Soon, she'll be walking Maine to Georgia on the Appalachian Trail, with words to follow. Visit www.robinminiter.com.

My First Indian Bureaucrat (by Robin Miniter)

"An American? Why do you come here?"

"To research, sir, on scholarship from the U.S. government."

The steadfast Mr. Greese was responsible for registering all foreign nationals in Aligarh. It was an Indian city a sensible traveler would pass through: ramshackle, low-lying buildings; dead puppies rotting by the road.

My staunch ally, Nazmohammud, a lanky fellow student with tanned Persian cheeks, had been stuck here for three years. He led our way upstairs.

The oily Mr. Greese sported a toothy grin and an amused curl that tugged at his lips. A hooked brown nose with one-armed glasses askew. A thinning mustache, for propriety.

The air in his dingy office — crowded with nine other bureaucrats (all comfortably asleep, legs crossed atop disheveled desks, fingers laced under potbellies) — was thick with body musk, yellow turmeric from yesterday’s lunch, and the dust of paper decay. Though humidity kept the endless stacks of logbook pages and photocopies wilting, the second-floor summit room (bolted, customarily, on the outside) of the Foreign Registration Office was a reprieve from August heat.

"India is a great country, yes? How do you find it so far?"

"Oh, Mr. Greese, I just arrived. But it’s beautiful so far. I’m hoping to register with you today, then I need to go to Pune for my research."

All foreign nationals living in India for more than six weeks need to be stamped and registered — or else, upon trying to exit the country, no exit will be allowed.

"Research of what?"

"Women’s sports, sir."

"Ha-ha, that is so funny. Women don’t play cricket."

"Well, not cricket specifically. I’m a photographer, looking at the sport of rugby."

"I don’t know about this rugby, but no matter. So you, young man: why do you help her? She is American, you are Iranian. She must be Christian and you are obviously a Muslim. You hate each other always."

"She is a friend. My professor will be her advisor."

"I see. How very strange. My office is very, very busy at this time of year."

"Yes, we can see that. Still, she must get to Pune as quickly as possible. So here are the required papers, as stated by the Indian government."

"Yes…yes, I see…but do you understand, here? These papers? You brought me three colored copies of them all. I need two black-and-white. This will not do."

"It is the same document, yes?"

"Ah, but you see, they are the wrong color. This will not do."

"We can photocopy them again, it’s okay."

"It is not okay. I hope it will be okay. And this letter from Dr. Abdul Matin. Where is his signature?"

"Mr. Greese, the signature is there."

"No, but we need a new signature. He must sign over this signature in ink, because you are handing me a scanned copy of a letter with his signature. This is a very big problem."

"This is not a big problem, we can go retrieve it. Will you be here later?"

"It is not possible."

"It’s only ten a.m. Won’t your office be open later this afternoon?"

"You can come back. Perhaps I will be here."

"Can you promise that you’ll try?"

"Ah, we will see. I am a very, very busy man."

"Mr. Greese, sir, when is the earliest you can give me my stamp?"

"That is a very complicated question."

"What about this evening? Or tomorrow morning? I must get to Pune as soon as possible — please, it’s really important to me."

"You can see that I am very busy. And there is so very much to be done. In three days’ time the procedure can be under way. Perhaps."

"But all the required papers are right here. The checklist is here too, as well as these extra copies. It should be okay for you to give me a stamp for my visa. Please, Mr. Greese."

"But I am telling you once again that the procedure is remaining incomplete. I also require a letterhead from Aligarh Muslim University. And an actual signature of their board. Make sure that it is endorsed by the university president, too. In blue ink only. Come back later. Maybe around five p.m."

We found Mr. Greese at 4:15 that day behind his office building. Alarmingly, he was sauntering away down the roadside, kicking up dust as he went.

"Mr. Greese, here we are," said Naz, intercepting the busy man. "We were able to get those copies. Extra ones, too. And Dr. Matin signed those documents for her. It’s all here. Everything you requested."

"That is nice. How very nice it is. Perhaps I will be free to look at them tomorrow."

"Sir, we have them with us now. It’s not five yet. We arrived even before the time you told us."

"You are confused. I am not here now. You can try again tomorrow."

"What if we look at them for just a moment?"

"You can see that now is not a good time for me."

"When is a good time?"

"Maybe tomorrow."

"Can you promise us a stamp tomorrow?"

"Ah, you see, I can promise nothing. It is not I, Mr. Greese, making the rules. It is our government. The procedure may require more than three days."

"But you just said tomorrow you will look at them. Correct?"

"You may arrive as you wish." Palms clasped behind his back, he whistled as he walked off.

The next morning found us desperately waiting at Mr. Greese’s cluttered desk. After refusing to acknowledge us, then wandering out for two hours, he finally returned, sliding languidly into his wooden chair. Elbows bent, fingers pressed tip-to-tip, he asked obsequiously, "And what can I do for you?"

"We have brought you everything you requested. Look, here. As well as extra copies, if you require them. May we please have a stamp?"

Sliding the manila folder toward him, he plucked out the copies. He thumbed through. He studied them. He crossed one leg.

A belabored sigh.

"Does the Pune FRO know that you are coming?"

"I just need this one stamp, from Aligarh, isn’t that correct?"

"You cannot just appear in Pune. It is not possible. You must inform them of your arrival first. You need to write them a letter."

"Sir, I was not told yesterday that a letter’s necessary."

"Oh, but it is. Of course it is. And then you will need my signature." A lovely smile.

"So my letter needs to say, exactly — what?"

"Here, I believe we can use this." He rummaged through the stacks on his desk, at last retrieving a rumpled sheet of paper, frayed on all sides. "Get your pen."

It was the photocopy of a passport, showing the mug of yet another unfortunate visiting student. With approval, he flipped over the weary document.

"Now, follow my instructions perfectly. Write, ‘Dear Pune Foreign Registration Office. It is with the permission of Mr. Greese, supervisor of the Foreign Registration Office in Aligarh, that I, Robin Miniter, request to transfer my registration to Pune'..."

On "First into Nagasaki"

2006 INTERVIEW WITH ANTHONY WELLER about FIRST INTO NAGASAKI: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War by George Weller / edited and with an essay by Anthony Weller / foreword by Walter Cronkite

Q: Your father, George Weller (1907-2002), was a legendary war correspondent, winner of a Pulitzer Prize. The odyssey of what he went through for these atomic bomb dispatches sounds absolutely heroic.

A: Yes, it seems almost unbelievable. Once the bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and concluded World War II, General MacArthur threw a news blackout over both cities. No reporters were even allowed in southern Japan. My father, who’d been bucking censorship for the entire war, felt the world had a right to learn what had happened. So he made his way by boat and train, and sneaked into Nagasaki four weeks after the bomb, ahead of the U.S. Army and Navy. Since correspondents wore military khaki, he told the Japanese general in charge of the pulverized city that he was an American colonel, and expected full cooperation: car, interpreter, lodging. At first the general was skeptical. My father said, “If you don’t believe me, ask MacArthur yourself. But before making that call, you had better consider your position.” The Japanese general bowed to him.

Q: And he wrote this entire book in six weeks? He must never have slept.

A: According to the original manuscripts, he typed all night and wandered around all day looking at the ruins and makeshift hospitals. He wore thick-soled shoes to protect himself against radiation. Each morning, by courier, he sent dispatch after dispatch of what was probably the greatest story of his career—maybe one of the most important of the century—up to Tokyo. He was sure that since the war was over, MacArthur would want to know people were still dying, and send medical assistance. Instead every dispatch was destroyed by MacArthur’s censors, and no doctors arrived for weeks. My father’s articles never reached his editors back at the Chicago Daily News and, until recently, were believed lost.

Q: But he didn’t stay in Nagasaki. He moved on to several nearby POW camps.

A: That’s right. He knew that within a 40-mile radius there were many camps full of American, British, Dutch, and Australian prisoners whom no one had found yet. Most still didn’t know the war was over. They had seen both big mushroom clouds on the horizon but not realized what they were. So he wrote story after story from those camps, taking down each man’s saga, detailing their years of slave labor and unimaginable torture in dangerous coal mines. The POW dispatches were killed by the censors, too. For me the most gratifying part of pulling together this book has been to get letters from brave men in their eighties who still remember my father.

Q: Besides the accounts of how they managed to survive, there were also powerful stories of how some POWs got to the camps.

A: It’s a virtually unknown aspect of World War II, in fact. After speaking to those POWs, he was able to write The Death Cruise, a long narrative about the deadliest Japanese “hellship”, which carried 1,600 prisoners from the Philippines to camps near Nagasaki. After weeks of starvation, dehydration, murder, bombings by our own planes, and even cannibalism in a crammed cargo hold, only 300 survived.

Q: What seems most remarkable is that your father actually lost his carbon of the dispatches—the only copy in existence of a valuable piece of history.

A: For six decades he reported from all over the world—mainly the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Soviet Union, Africa. As with many war correspondents, boxes of paper just trailed him from continent to continent. Even though he retired in 1975 to a villa on the Italian coast, he never got around to organizing the past. Six months after his death I found the moldy typescripts in a wooden crate, thirty feet from where he used to sit bemoaning their loss. It saddened him deeply that they’d been erased from history. The censors had won.

Q: Did he speak to you often about his adventures?

A: Always. What he never mentioned, since he was a writer, not a photographer, was that he had a little camera with him. He took pictures both in Nagasaki and in the POW camps. I found those, too. So the book includes a portfolio of the most dramatic. Like the dispatches, until now they’ve never seen the light of day.

Q: Most of your own books are novels. This book is really your father’s book, yet you’ve written a long historical essay at the end to put it all in perspective.

A: I realized that all of the questions which naturally occurred to me would also occur to every reader. I needed to understand not just the contexts of the atomic bomb and the POWs; I also wanted to explore what it had meant to be a foreign correspondent before there were satellite phones, when the tendrils of government censorship strangled you by different methods than now. I came to realize that the entire story of how and why he was silenced was more complex than I thought. I ended up even more amazed by what he’d done, yet I saw it was a book not just about the end of the war, but the responsibilities of a writer. It proves that in any era, this kind of courageous rogue reporting is essential to learning the truth.

Kerala

Written in 2000 for National Geographic Traveler. This was my first journey collaborating with the extraordinary photographer Macduff Everton. 

I’d have almost preferred not to go back to India. Over the last twenty years I’d made numerous journeys there, culminating in an exhausting odyssey along one of the most dangerous roads in the world. The book that resulted felt like an entire career; I’d seen most of what I wanted to see; and as much as I loved being among Indians, and the daily pleasures of the culture, I felt done with the place. Despite its perennial problems, India used to be an enchanting country to travel in. Amid the catastrophe of its billion people entering the 21st century, I did not find it so anymore.

The one part I still wanted to see was Kerala, the state at India’s southwestern tip. It is one of the country’s great paradoxes, with a dazed green light that only belongs to Southeast Asia. Its lush “backwaters” are an exalted universe unto themselves: a labyrinth of villages linked by lagoons, lakes, and natural canals whose web extends to a 350-mile coast of sunstruck beaches.

For years I’d heard Indians with all the facts at their fingertips describe Kerala in tones of wonder as a success story—the country’s highest literacy and life expectancy by far, a birth rate even lower than ours, its lowest income yet arguably its highest standard of living—plus a splendor not yet marred by huge, badly ventilated hotels. Skeptical as ever, I wanted to see Kerala for myself. I also hoped it might prove a promising first experience of the country for my wife, Kylée; a yoga teacher, she was already deep in the culture, but had never visited.

At least it would be calm. I knew Kerala held few of India’s usual religious tensions, with Hindus, Muslims, and Christians living amicably together for centuries. Most of the subcontinent had been exposed to the outside world and outside ideas through invaders; along the so-called Spice or Malabar Coast, on the sea route between West and East, the exposure had happened through trade, which tends to be more persuasive.

I put this all together and found myself secretly hoping that Kerala might remind me of the India I first saw decades ago—a quiet, humane countryside full of sustained natural beauty, breathable air, amid a visible architectural past—that I’ve watched rapidly disappear from the rest of the subcontinent. The one guarantee I trusted was the people, who are a constant joy of travel here; for outsiders, the doors to the Indian house are always open.

My first morning in Kerala I awoke to the realization that, unwittingly, I’d saved the best of India for last. I was roused at dawn by devotional music from the Hindu temple just across the lagoon. The day before, we’d drifted to our small hotel—a few bungalows perched by the water—in a carved skiff poled by boatmen, past coconut groves with village houses somewhere among them, following a tropical river. The temple, hidden by palms, lay on a beach which faced both the lagoon and the Arabian Sea. I watched a morning haze lift on a horizon of figures gathering fishing nets as surf unfurled along the outer belt of sand. Nearer, men were doing improbable stretching exercises in time to the music. (“You see?” said my wife. “Their clean diet, amid all this heat, makes for an incredibly flexible body.”)

Those songs, broadcast at all hours, signalled the festival which started that night and lasted several more: ceremonial elephants arrayed on the sands, hot-coal walkers, a cadre of urgent drummers, devotees spinning into a frenzy by torchlight as a golden mask of the god was carried in a palanquin up the beach. When it finally ended, and the lagoon was peaceful once more, I felt stunned and sleep-deprived; but this was the India I’d hoped to see again.

People come to Kerala for different reasons. Some do two monumental weeks in the rest of the country and, exhausted by the guidebook sights, take a few days here to recover, usually on a beach or the backwaters. Others visit Kerala’s prolific spice and rubber plantations, and its wildlife preserves farther inland. Or, like one returning Indian I met who was an electronics executive in Atlanta (“My name’s Hasmukh—just call me Harry!”), you could come here not for the waters, but for an annual ayurvedic tune-up.

“This is like nowhere else in India,” he told me. “You can relax. You can get cured. I’m doing five days of ayurvedic treatment starting tomorrow. Traditional medicine. Herbs, medicated oils, massage, the works. A real Kerala specialty, going back not a few centuries but a few millennia. A friend of mine with a bad back is coming for a whole month of treatment.”

This struck me as a truly strange idea: to leave India healthier than when you arrived. I always expect to fly out with bronchitis. But since the air here seemed clear, what intrigued me more was Kerala’s unmatched, longstanding reputation for several performing arts, especially the epic, gaudy rituals of Kathakali theater. (Unlike most first-rate Indian culture, Kathakali rarely reaches the West.) So I decided on a coastal route south to north, from the area around the state’s capital, Trivandrum, to its most historic trading port, Cochin, with as much time in watery beauty as possible, and plenty of live music and theater along the way.


Much of Kerala lives by fishing. Early one morning I left my bungalow at Lagoona Davina (a resort named for its creator, an adaptable English ex-model) and got poled across the lagoon. I walked beside the Arabian Sea, in gathering sunlight, to a village where boats in yellow, green, white, and blue stripes were pulled up. More were arriving, with weighted nets finer than dental floss, full of glinting fish. It often took twenty men, their heads wound with cloth, to haul a large vessel up the sand. Some boats bore names like St. Thomas, whose purported 1st century visit is spoken of like an eyewitness account. A chaotic wholesale fish market was dominated by women fluttering their hands and bargaining hard, ululating at the male prices. It was seven-thirty, and already very hot. On this beach, at least, despite Kerala’s growing tourism, I was the only foreigner.

This was well outside Trivandrum, a hectic city which most visitors sensibly hurry through to get to its nearby beaches, the alternative to my lagoon. I had a look one day at the most popular of those, Kovallam, which must’ve been gorgeous twenty years ago; it’s now a tourist ghetto of handicraft shops, snack bars, concrete hotels, and saried Indians wading modestly among the daring European bikinis. With luck it will remind the rest of Kerala what should not be allowed to happen.

Trivandrum itself was worth an afternoon. Its art museum was a huge mansion in classic Keralan style: high airy interior, cartoony colors, ornate crossbeams and stained glass. The city had several architectural marvels—a huge temple, a spiralling coffee house like a saffron-stained Guggenheim—and linguistic marvels as well. For years I’ve collected Indian commercial names, and Trivandrum gave me Brilliance College, Hotel Hilten, and Oriental Manures Ltd. This is the India I can never get enough of.

Better yet was a forty-mile side trip to the Padmanabhapuram Palace of Travancore, historically linked to Kerala, now in a neighboring state. This rosewood-and-teak treasure, probably the finest wooden building in the subcontinent, was a royal capital for 400 years. Its sleek white walls, crisscross geometries, and sloping pagoda roofs evoked centuries of happy trading ties with the Chinese; its masterpiece was a dance hall with an insanely polished black floor and sculpted stone pillars crowded with tigers, snakes, lotus blooms, dragons, and barefoot busty maidens cupping oil lamps. I saw in this one site both the Keralan appreciation for foreign ideas, and the natural elegance of its people—both unusual qualities in the subcontinent.


I was trying to learn a few useful phrases of Malayalam, Kerala’s palindrome of a mother tongue, through a typically politicized language book (“Who can live by literacy alone? By reading can anyone fill his mouth and belly? ”). This is the only part of India I know where you can get innocently sandwiched in a teahouse argument about, say, contemporary international fiction, as I was, and find everybody around you passionately taking sides.

“Listen to me. Kundera’s last novel was his best.”

“What do you mean? It was pretentious rubbish. Tell me—yes, you, sir—what is your opinion, please?”

I said, “I’m afraid I haven’t read it yet.”

“Can we be serious for a moment? You are both wrong. The man of the decade is Garcia Marquez. Dispute me if you like.”

“How did you read it? In Malayalam? You cannot get to know a book in translation, my friend, and judge it at all.”

“On the contrary, you avoid the trap of style. As everyone agrees—”

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the principal Malayalam newspaper is the second most widely read in the country, with a circulation of 8 million. Up in Delhi the children beg for rupees; in Kerala they plead for a pen.

And it made perfect sense that this state of avid, argumentative readers was so enthusiastic about other arts. Several evenings at my resort, I’d already been surprised by the high quality of the live music, an experience repeated throughout my journey. Usually it was a violinist, male singer, and mridingam drummer, often accompanying a Mohiniattam dancer of languorous classical gestures, clad in gold and white. This was what Indians themselves loved about Kerala: good art was simply everywhere.

But the eminent magician Professor Muthukad, who started his own Academy of Magical Sciences in order to keep a rich Indian tradition of illusionists alive, surprised me even more.

I saw him perform to a packed house in Trivandrum. With his dark mustache and tough-guy walk he resembled a hero from the melodramatic Bombay cinema, his every move accentuated by glycerine Hindi pop music, but beneath the kitsch he was a fine magician. A Keralite, he performed all over India; he’d soon dazzle New York with his two-hour show of imprisoned maidens galore. He made goddesses appear under a mirrored pyramid; in exotic tableaux he set fire to one slave girl and dismembered another, who talked gaily throughout. He tore India’s biggest film weekly, Screen, into tiny bits and reassembled them—an act of social criticism. My favorite trick was his simplest, when without fuss he made full whiskey bottles multiply like mad from two yellow tubes. He kept vanishing and instantly popping up elsewhere, and he talked more rapidly than anyone on earth.


I was wondering if the backwaters could live up to their promise. Our entry point would be the town of Kottayam. No Indian pleasure is more reliable than its trains, so we made the northward journey there from Trivandrum by rail. For two hours we rattled beside verdant canals, rice fields, and coconut palms—although Kerala is the most densely populated state, it often feels the sparsest, without India’s usual bleak crashing cities.

My wife and I were sharing a compartment with a local railways superintendent who pointed out at every stop that we were “absolutely, rigorously on time, sir.” Though predominantly Hindu, 20% of Kerala’s people are Christian, and when a pastel church flashed past mid-jungle, no village in sight, I mentioned that unusual figure and said, “But from all the churches everywhere you’d guess it was the other way round.”

He smiled proudly. “Back when there were no Christians in ancient Rome, twenty centuries ago, there were already Christians in Kerala.” Like many here, he traced his family faith all the way to Saint Thomas.

Kottayam is a town that thrives on the written word. Its many publishers are inundated by manuscripts from Malayalam novelists, and one house claims to put out a book every day. I was heartily in search of gentle countryside, but first I wanted to visit St. Mary’s, a 16th century church with a rare treasure on its arched ceiling: 99 recessed squares of flowers, birds, and angels’ heads—early, naive Portuguese paintings in vegetable hues, from the era when that country was a power on the subcontinent.

Once inside, I found myself the unexpected guest at a wedding. As fans whirred patiently, the fluorescent lights burned and the dark-frocked priests and video cameramen and the entire congregation chanted along. Two more Indian strangers (in this case, Christians) got hitched, sweaty in their finery, having met only once. Today they wore the shell-shock of a customary arranged marriage, but having seen Indian weddings before and come back to visit later, I knew that next year would probably find them a cozy, expectant pair. “Will they be happy?” the bridegroom’s cousin said to me. “Of course they will be happy. When they get to know each other.”

We were staying a few miles from Kottayam at Coconut Lagoon, a resort entirely of 19th century houses of white stucco and dark teak, “imported” from elsewhere in the state, set in palm groves beside the Vembanad Lake by a long-established local family. (This architecturally faithful and ecologically sound tourism is, in India, the norm only in Kerala, unfortunately.) From here we could make daily expeditions into the backwaters, which are Kerala’s glory.

Soon after dawn the next day we set out on a chugging boat, an updated African Queen, through the misty backwaters. The waterways, 100 feet across, were supported by meticulous stone walls and bordered with trees—hanging creepers, banyan, mango, jackfruit, banana, but mostly palms leaning out to seek sunlight. Men and women were busy in their soapy first ablutions. Butterflies, herons, eagles, ducks, mynahs, cormorants, and snake birds—darters with serpentine necks—patrolled everywhere. Paths led along both sides: a fish vendor on a bicycle, a paper boy striding swiftly to keep up with us, grinning, waving.

The boat chugged beneath plank bridges. At times the backwater became choked with the hyacinth pads that proliferate like beautiful weeds, clogging traffic—a fisherman, paddling home after a night’s work, followed gratefully in the larger boat’s cleared wake. I liked getting around Kerala this way rather than by car; for one thing, other boats are never plowing straight at you. These so-called backwaters may follow a main road and divide a village or town with its bakery, primary school, fabric and jewelry shops, market, temples, churches, pharmacy, YMCA, “typewriting institute” (five cents per page, no mistakes, no waiting), occasionally even a satellite dish. The house architecture was often grand: curved arches, starry lattice-work, and always sloping tile roofs.

Here, too, were bars with hammer-and-sickle posters on the faded walls—Kerala had the world’s first elected Communist government, in 1957—and the elaborate remains of stone gates guarded by sculpted lions or a silver statue of Jesus shaded by a sun-umbrella. The canal kept opening to lesser canals, with locks for controlling the water level, sacred cows asleep like bookends, children paddling a tiny skiff to school, men immersing themselves then surfacing with armfuls of dark silt to use as fertilizer. Vast ricefields stretched away in Mondrian blocks. It was all in reverse, a puzzle-world of water irrigated by orderly fingers of land.

The ultimate way to enjoy the backwaters, I found, was to stay a night or two on a converted kettuvallam, a gliding Kerala cargo boat traditionally used for transporting, say, thirty tons of rice. It looks awkward—a giant eggshell of coir-rope (made from local coconuts) knotted on a web of bamboo and covered with closely-woven thatch. Flaps lift like wings on each side, letting in light but not heat. In recent years the dormant trade of constructing them has bounced back, due to visitors. My wife and I boarded right at Coconut Lagoon, and were surprised how comfortable and spacious the kettuvallam was: two suites with enormous beds, modern bathrooms, and a salon near the bow open to breezes.

The point is not to get anywhere, but to drift languidly through ethereal beauty. It was astonishingly romantic to watch sunset from one kettuvallam among several, while the three boatmen set out hanging lanterns and a pearly glow faded behind the scrim of palms. Dinner was an abundant eleven platters of Keralan cuisine, built around subtly spiced fresh fish. As the coconut islands darkened, the shimmering water doubled the infinite heaventree of stars. Waking at dawn we found ourselves surrounded by hundreds of fishermen’s skiffs on immense Lake Vembanad. It was like time travel, into a quiet morning of another century which I was reluctant to leave.


An oil lamp is lit, and two vocalists begin chanting a verse above the hammer-and-tongs of percussionists. The arrival of actors is unearthly: when a god appears, the audience may prostrate themselves. There are bursts of argument, brandished swords, leaping, to-and-froing with the hands in dispute, harsh imprecations and threats of disembowelling. The actors’ faces, hands, and bodies are elastic, alive to every gesture in the chanted text as the warlike percussion batters on.

Kathakali (“story/movement”) is a unique Keralan performance art that developed in recent centuries out of ancient Sanskrit theater, though it has as much dance as acting in it. Performances are often free and may last all night, usually presented in the open air by Hindu temples that hire a Kathakali troupe. The plays’ texts come from the two Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

The effect is hypnotic, powerful, and even terrifying, because the performers loom overhead and at times leave the stage to cut a swathe through the rapt, swaying crowd, who part for the swordplay—the figures now storming at each other, now elegantly dancing, now brooding, now bathing in an enemy’s blood. The actors themselves do not speak any lines. It’s like watching performers act out The Iliad while Homer’s verse is proclaimed in ancient Greek; naturally, a great deal of the experience gets missed if you have no grasp of the language.

I saw the greatest Kathakali troupe perform at the impressive open-sided theater of the state Kalamandalam School in Cheruthuruthy, north of Cochin, having spent an afternoon watching master classes in theater, dance, and music. Students (from age thirteen) live at the school; the rigorous classes begin before dawn. Because Kathakali is hard on the body, and can take ten years to master—every actor learns all the roles—it’s traditionally been an all-male art, though there’s now a female troupe performing throughout Kerala.

All that practice, all those exercises, are designed to transmit the nuances of character through the extraordinary costumes and makeup which announce the broader outlines. The elaborate masklike makeup is applied by specialists, and involves geometric paper cutouts, fringed and folded and pasted-on. The costumes are gigantic encasements. These preparations take about five hours, as the performers gradually become mythical characters.

Tourists usually see a highly abbreviated performance, which makes sense, as so much is inevitably lost on a foreign audience. It can still be a powerful, primal experience, and because Kathakali is done in an intimate space, the kings and gods are only a few feet away. To see one victoriously pulling out cotton strips of an enemy’s entrails, and laughing in triumph while covering a maiden (played by a man) with them, is to realize that the scope of theater is far wider than you ever thought. At the end, there was a delightful moment of healing calm when Krishna renounced the savage blood-frenzy—the god bringing humanity back to man after the madness of war—and it was as eloquently expressed in Kathakali, with all the forgiveness, the amused, rueful benevolence of the god, as I have ever seen it.


Long this coast’s busiest port, Cochin—Kerala’s northern hub and most important city—has three parts, linked by bridges and frequent ferryboats: mainland Ernakulam, British-era Willingdon Island, and the earlier, evocative Fort Cochin, where we stayed. There a pink and yellow architectural past of hopeful colonizers survives in grand Dutch and Portuguese townhouses and stately churches (Vasco da Gama was buried in one), and in the airy British layout of private club, solemn residences, and cricket pitch.

The loveliest part of Fort Cochin was Jew Town, a traditional quarter of shuttered houses in ghost-shades of once-audacious blues, greens, and ochres, often with a Star of David worked into the grillwork of a window. Jew Town’s 16th century synagogue was the earliest in the British Commonwealth, but Jews were already long settled in Cochin. Many old houses are now antique shops aimed cannily at foreign tourists, and the quarter remains the nerve center of Kerala’s spice commerce.

The Jewish Synagogue was, oddly, both simple and lavish, with a white plank ceiling and plain walls, ornate hanging lamps, and 1100 Chinese blue and white floor tiles. Services are still held on Fridays and Saturdays for a dwindling community, but I was there early in the week, so on the advice of the Indian synagogue-guide I waited around one afternoon with a few other visitors to meet an elderly, small-boned man of pale complexion who sometimes stopped by. At first he was hesitant to talk (“We are not animals in a zoo!”) and when I asked his name he said only, “Nameless,” with a faint smile.

“The Nameless Jew,” I said. “My relatives, too. In the war.”

At this he thawed. “There are fifteen of us left here. Only three are young, like you. What will be the future? I don’t know. Whoever is left will decide. There are five thousand Jews in India—lots up in Bombay. This is the oldest location, but eventually it will be over here. And the truth is, we have never been persecuted. Not in two thousand years. This is the only country in the world where that is so. Not once—only by the Portuguese. But never by Indians.”

With the few other visitors standing around, he opened ornate doors to reveal a silver-clad Torah, containing the five books of Moses, and a gold crown, a gift of the local maharajah back in 1805. “You see?” he said. “We were always welcome here.”

That tolerance made Kerala special in India—the worldly tolerance of traders who’d seen the value of their spices rise and fall across many generations. Around the corner, in an old house filled with mountains of fragrant ginger, a dapper man told me with a shrug, “The classical importance of Cochin in spices has gone. You don’t need to actually come here to trade now, because of telephones and roads. The best cardamom in the world comes from Kerala, but the South American price is half ours, so we can’t compete—we sell it only locally.”

“Does spice run in your family?”

“So far, yes. My great-grandfather started this business fifty years ago. I’ve been at it twenty-seven years. Some Jews sold this building to a coir-merchant, then I bought it from him.” Behind him a painting of Christ hung on the lustrous blue walls. “Years ago there were sixty spice merchants like me in Jew Town. Now, about ten. We sell ginger, betel nuts, turmeric, and black pepper especially, mostly to Europe and the Arabian Gulf.”

I saw his speculating colleagues in action upstairs in the venerable Indian Pepper & Spice Trade Association Building. In an air-conditioned room with a polished floor, two dozen booths—each with a fan and several phones—were manned by forty brokers in pepper futures. They cursed, they napped, they gesticulated theatrically and shouted like wrestlers at close range. (All were barefoot, a rule I shall suggest to the New York Stock Exchange the next time I get invited.) Volcanic eruptions of energy linking buyer to seller via these amiable middlemen would subside just as quickly, while a woman in a red sari came and went, talking of Kerala’s condiment.

Here, I thought, were past and present reconciled, in a room of spice traders bickering on cell phones while those lush backwaters were a mere hour and a century away. I’d been right to come back. I hoped Kerala’s genius for subsistence, which in India looks almost like prosperity, would survive—and that its coconut palms would multiply faster than its hotels.

Dream of Kashmir

Written in 1999 for National Geographic Traveler magazine

As our century draws to a close there seem fewer and fewer places that, mythologized by the past, have survived intact through our era of over-tourism. At the same time, other remote places that a resourceful traveller could happily rummage around in twenty years ago have, due to political upheavals, become areas to avoid—and may remain off-limits for our lifetimes. Iran, Afghanistan, parts of Central America and of Africa come quickly to mind. But none of those were ever among the world’s popular tourist spots. They were 19th century myths associated with derring-do and explorers, not with a vision of pure, eternal beauty accessible to anyone—like Kashmir.

In 1984, at the end of an Indian journalism assignment and just before the summer monsoon, I left an overheated Delhi and flew north to Srinagar, in the Vale of Kashmir, to relax for a week among the ethereal lakes and mountains. Who then could’ve predicted that one of the most beautiful places on earth, the Kashmir of transcendental serenity and the enchanted name, would soon close down even to Indian tourists and become utterly off-limits for foreigners, with a reputation for kidnappings and unleashed political violence?

When I recall that time—having since written a travel memoir about the subcontinent—I see how much of the best of India, and how many of its difficulties, were made eloquent to me in that week in Kashmir. The technicolor natural beauty; the daily humor and annoyances; the constant theater of the people; even the legacy of British imperial rule, in the paradox of comfortable houseboats where you could escape the torpor of the Ganges plain and be pampered by proud Muslim tribesmen, living here since ancient times, now (with colonial irony) trained to be hoteliers.

Most of all, there was a particular mystical charm unique to Kashmir, which anyone who visited it then remembers with a flood of nostalgia and disbelief. To be in the Vale is to be becalmed, and to leave the world, and the concerns of the world, really far behind. This is partly geographical, for until airplanes came to India, the valley—a hundred miles by twenty—was reachable only by camel, elephant, horseback, and sore feet.

Remoteness is partly why people visit tropical islands, of course, but much of Kashmir’s profound allure is philosophical, too. There is something unfathomably unreal about the place, in which the laws of time and motion do not apply and are quickly forgotten. A day there can feel like a week, and a week feels like a month; every element haunts the memory as in a vaporous dream. To speak of Kashmir in such extreme terms is traditional, since it has always had this effect on everyone.

Kashmir had flourished most under Mogul rule, especially in the 17th century, when the emperor Jahangir built the Shalimar Gardens for his wife. The Vale then contained seven hundred such gardens, though only a few of those Mogul masterpieces remain. Jahangir’s dying wish was that Paradise resemble Kashmir.

When the new countries of India and Pakistan were carved out of British India in 1947, the princely state of Kashmir was the odd man out. Largely Muslim, yet owned by a Hindu maharajah, it became part of India and has been a flashpoint with Pakistan ever since. Three wars have erupted over its potential independence; separatist violence closed its hotels from 1989 until recently. Last year the situation was quieter, but there is no telling if Kashmir may settle down enough to reenter the guidebooks.


When I visited there were few such fears, and despite the fact it was midsummer, when most foreigners avoid India’s heat, there were plenty of tourists. Srinagar, ringed by the rough, slate-gray mountains of the lower Himalayas, is the Venice of India; all life occurs around water. The capital looks medieval, built from stone or wood and peopled by canny-faced tribesmen from all over the East, with smoky alleys, trundling horse-carts, cluttered bazaars, sooty utensil-shops and creaking bridges. I wandered among exiled Tibetans lugging huge, hairy carpets past merchants’ rickety houseboats and fabric shops of blazing color. After the parched heat of Delhi I found the hypnotic relief of magnificent blossoming trees and a cool, watery breeze. Except for the tourists, none of that has changed.

Shikharas—narrow, flat-bottom skiffs that ply the Vale’s lakes and their complex tributary systems—are Kashmir’s taxis, gondolas, trucks, buses, stores, and bicycles. Some shikharas are utilitarian and worn; others, with mildly racy names, have sofas in yellows, reds, and purples, and matching canopies.

There is only one way to fully enter Kashmir’s state of mind. I crossed Dal Lake in Lolita to the houseboat I’d reserved. It was about 120 feet by 20, intricately carved, with a roof deck and a shaded stern veranda facing the lake. Her bow was moored to the shore of a great island. Houseboats stretched away on both sides, mere meters apart; about five hundred cluster near Srinagar.

Next to us were the Prince of Vale, the Rolex, the Floating Heaven, the Pinafore, and the Free Love. Some looked a century old, with a comic air from being so immobilized. All had stern staircases to the water, a low-slung curve, an attached kitchen-boat and servants. My luxurious Tehran cost only twenty bucks a day with meals—this was also part of Kashmir’s perennial charm.

The Tehran’s manager was a wiry man named Ghulam. When I told him I was American, he seemed surprised.

I said, “Don’t you get many Americans on the Tehran?”

This was at the height of U.S.-Iran tension.

He said with real sorrow, “It is an unfortunate name, sir, but what can I do? It is not my houseboat.”

“How do Americans react?”

“They worry,” he said incredulously. “They worry.”

Here along the shore the freshwater lake was less than ten feet deep, and filled with wavering, submerged ferns. Out where the lake was deeper, and possibly hygienic, floated four grand white houseboats, for diving. I swam from them daily—the water warm and clear, with chiseled mountains fanned out all around.

My houseboat’s salon, with sofas and Kashmiri carpets, was flooded by sunlight off the lake. Beyond was a Victorian dining room, complete with mahogany table, lace tablecloths, polished silver. The two large suites had embroidered drapes, ornate woven blankets, and a cigar-box coziness belied by their up-to-date bathrooms. Over my suite’s desk hung a busty, Indianized reproduction of the Mona Lisa.

As a journalist and an enthusiastic traveller I am used to arriving somewhere with a long list of things to do, either for work or self-improvement. It felt strange to arrive in this exotic place and realize I was there only to let it lull me—that to nod off and dream while reading was in fact the point.

No wonder that during World War II the Dal Lake, with its Red Cross hospital, was a favorite convalescence spot. Soldiers got well there quickly, for it was easy to rent a houseboat and a willing Kashmiri girl. And what could be more soothing than to fall asleep to the groan of houseboats and the gulp of paddles as shikharas murmured past, going home for the night?


The tradition is to take breakfast on the stern veranda and window-shop from shikharas, a maritime Macy’s that pesters you ceaselessly with silver and jade jewelry, a shave, apples, nuts, carpets, a sip from a hookah, saffron, treasures from Tibet, flowers, papier-maché boxes, and shawls. These shawls were, since ancient times, important in the Vale’s trade, for Kashmir lies on a silk route. Thus the shawls reached Egypt; and once Napoleon’s soldiers brought them back to Paris, they became fashionable. The Empress Josephine owned hundreds, as Napoleon’s method of baring her shoulders was to fling her shawl into the fire—an allegory for what separatist violence has done to Kashmir.

Near the houseboat a small boy, by an island scarcely bigger than his shikhara, was digging up weeds and mud and loading them on board. To him it was all moveable real estate which he could sell. The boy pushed off with his heart-shaped paddle and set off down a tributary into town with his valuable muck, followed by a fleet of ducks and a shikhara of Japanese tourists clicking away.

Just three houseboats down stood a gabled hotel, white with red trim, on the larger island to which we were moored. In front was a modest lawn. Large letters on one wing read: HOTEL LEEWARD. Since arriving, the name had nagged at me. It seemed familiar, though I couldn’t fathom why. Then it came to me.

V. S. Naipaul, in his 1964 masterpiece on India, An Area of Darkness, devotes the happiest chapter of the book (“A Doll’s House on the Dal Lake”) to his three months in Srinagar. Naipaul, only thirty, had already published four novels, including A House for Mr. Biswas, and his non-fiction examination of the Caribbean, The Middle Passage. Naipaul and his British wife Pat, seeking calm and privacy, stayed not on a houseboat but in the lake’s only hotel, just getting started.

There were numerous discrepancies. The tiny hotel claimed they had a flush-system; they had none. They agreed that before Naipaul moved in, a desk would appear. None did. Both these defects Naipaul got set right in a couple of days. When the light in his reading lamp burned out, he had to replace it himself. Other guests could be troublesome; one kept switching off the news on the radio. And Naipaul was continually being called upon by the hotel’s owner to intercede with the Srinagar Tourist Authority, to write recommendations of the premises, to invite important people over for tea.

Such a vocation was something of an ordeal. Yet Naipaul managed to produce in a single month (August, 1962) a masterly short novel of modern London, Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. And his relations with the hotel staff are among the most memorable in An Area of Darkness.

“In those early days the hotel. . . had a rough-and-ready air. . . we were in the middle of the lake. Beyond the alert kingfishers, the fantastic hoopoes pecking in the garden, beyond the reeds and willows and poplars, our view unbroken by houseboats, there were the snow-capped mountains. Before me a nightcapped man, hopping about restlessly, and at the end of the garden a new wooden shed, his home, unpainted and warm against the gloom of low-hanging willows. . . .”

In those days it was appropriately misspelled Hotel Liward. Was it still run by Mr. Bhat (spelled by Naipaul Butt, as it’s pronounced—“smiling shyly behind his spectacles. . . abstracted”)? Was Aziz, his principal servant (“one of Snow White’s own men in a woolen nightcap”) still there, too? Aziz had accompanied Naipaul on a long pilgrimage, 20,000 strong, to the Cave of Amarnath in the mountains.

“Yes, of course, it is Mr. Bhat’s hotel. Where else, sir, would they be?”

I got paddled the short distance over to the hotel. Mr. Bhat was indeed at home, seated in shade among his roses and smoking abstractly from a great gurgling hookah. His hair was thin and white, as was his beard, he had an Ahab face, he nodded at the name Naipaul. He didn’t speak, his attention directed to the hookah.

Aziz came waddling downstairs, looking similarly unchanged, his shape hugely indefinite in slack gray robes. He wore the requisite white Muslim skull-cap, and I decided—to finish Naipaul’s simile—his name might be Bashful. Or had there been a Sly?

Lying, I said I was a friend of Naipaul’s, and Aziz went into a side office and came out with a photograph of the hotel as it’d been. I asked to see the suite where the Naipauls had stayed.

“Only one room left, sahib,” said Aziz. “Others—” He made a magical gesture that suggested infinite expansion, remodelling, expense. As he led me upstairs, he said, “And how is Mrs. Naipaul?”

“I think she’s fine.”

Aziz grinned apologetically, his moon-face tugging his whole body forward. “His book banned in India.” He looked sheepish, as if his own presence in its pages might be the cause.

“It’s not banned any more. I saw it in the Srinagar bazaar. Have you read it?”

He said, “We had a copy, but a German three months past take our copy.”

There was something endearing about waiting twenty years to still not read about yourself. I wondered what people had told him. Or had he read it, after all?

The room was square, nondescript, with two beds. It was almost wholly without character, except for the sounds of the lake, and hence not a bad room to write in. I suggested Aziz put up a small plaque.

He said, “That is a fine idea, sahib,” but I felt he was just being polite.

Back in the garden Aziz brought me tea and Mr. Bhat ceased gurgling at his hookah long enough to ask how Mr. Naipaul’s career had gone.

I said, “Since he stayed here, it has gone very well.”

Both nodded. They were still imagining that young man and his wife who’d resided many years ago; they knew nothing of what he’d achieved. I asked if many people recognized the association.

Mr. Bhat’s face lit up. “Every so often someone who stays here asks.” He handed me a business card with a very blurred photo of the expanded hotel (The Biggest Of It’s Kind In Dal Lake, serving you since 1959). He said, “Give him our very best. Ask him to come back again.”

“Ask him to come back with Mrs. Naipaul,” said Aziz.

Leaving, it struck me that they were relieved to go back to their hookah or their chores and not be involved in the past. At first I thought it was that they did not like being reminded of their fame; but perhaps it was the thought of many strangers knowing so much, all of it still unknown to them, that was so unnerving.


Unlike most of India, Kashmir’s appeal lies in granting the easy, unearned wisdom of nothing active to do; ever since the Moguls the place has been described as more a fluid alternate dimension than a destination. I wanted to experience the Vale’s lakes and waterways, which on a map resemble a snake that has gorged itself repeatedly. I set off one morning in a daffodil-yellow shikhara with three paddlers. I sat under a forward canopy, on a sofa that kept swallowing me.

A narrow channel led us through a marketplace of huts on stilts and shikharas laden with fruit. We came on a small lake that was entirely a floating garden of blooming lilies. In a bigger lake were row upon row of vegetables, tilled fields growing right from the water. The method is ingenious. A long, wide plank of wood is fastened to the shallow lake bottom with reeds. Then muck is piled on the plank until it reaches the surface. (One paddler demonstrated by clambering out and bouncing on the floating garden like a diving board.) Some floating fields were fenced by barbed wire, since a whole livelihood could be stolen by simply towing it off.

The day unwound down silent waterways opening to endless lakes. In the heat it was as if life was only a universe of still water beneath a glazed sky, and all that was required was a slow-motion glide. Occasionally there’d be a small island with a tiny gazebo or temple, a shikhara pulled up, and picnicking schoolgirls unwrapping their sandwiches.

Once it was British picnics on these tree-shaded islands. Kashmir has mostly been ruled by non-Muslims; in 1846 the British had placed the local maharajah in power. By 1890 many British were summering in the Vale to escape the heat of the plains. The maharajah decreed it illegal for any non-Kashmiri to own land, so the houseboats were an astute loophole. British residents built them in droves, dreaming of “Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar.” Today even the Srinagar post office is on a houseboat.

We drifted down one narrow passage, beneath circling hawks, past a village of huts in the forest—the men cutting planks from poplar trees to be made into cricket bats for export, the girls slapping tattered clothes against stone stairs to the water, the boys splashing like seals. Then the lake we were crossing became fragrant, and swans appeared around our shikhara; we were at the Shalimar Gardens.

Conceived on a grand scale, the Shalimar’s episodes each still retain the modest intimacy of a gift offered to a lover. With many groves divided by small canals you can actually step across, they form a sympathetic descending carpet between the mountains and the lake. These receding levels, with ever-taller trees as you look back to the Himalayas, emanate a vast languor.

We stayed in the Shalimar a long time. Afterward we drifted under a tiny stone bridge; we kept drifting. Going back, the paddles’ heartbeat was slow, knowing a rest was coming. I fell asleep until the rain came pelting.

We reached the houseboat just as the sun came out again. Afternoon tea—British, with milk, not the salty green Kashmiri tea—was waiting on the veranda. Dark thunderheads, clouds of battle, were coming over the scarred mountains. But they were not here yet, and a rainbow was arcing down out of heaven. It filled the sky and came down into the lake. Around it the shikharas darted and dallied, skimming the water like dragonflies.


I might’ve stayed longer, but I was sure I could always go back. Because I am a novelist first, and a journalist second, for me the ultimate test of a new place is whether I imagine myself staying there to write—taking a room, establishing a daily routine, and getting a novel underway. Man needs time to dream as he needs his daily bread; a novelist puts that time onto paper. The pressures of the world conspire constantly against this kind of reflection, which makes the dream of Kashmir more valuable for all of us. For travellers the lesson is that it’s often the state of mind we achieve in a new place that we remember most deeply, beyond what we saw or did, for it shows us another vision of ourselves. Anyway, in the end all places exist only in memory.

Then the idyll was broken. My last two days in Kashmir were under a strict 24-hour curfew when separatist protests broke out near the city. Several died, and the army clamped down. No one was allowed in or out of a rumor-gripped Srinagar. To be unable to move in that splendor, to essentially be under house arrest on my houseboat, felt peculiar, like being stuck waiting for a war.

I escaped by getting paddled over at dawn to a grand hotel, formerly the maharajah’s palace, where a crew of Air India pilots were waiting to fly back to New Delhi. I checked in and made friends by watching pornographic videos with the pilots for an interminable afternoon and evening. When their jet took off the next morning, virtually empty, from an airport full of desperate tourists pleading to be allowed out, I was on it.

Fifteen years have passed. Those houseboats, lakes, and mountains are still there, but the tourists aren’t. A place of sumptuous beauty has all but vanished to an amnesiac outside world, and become instead simply another newspaper dateline of turmoil. Kashmir is once again inaccessible, a Shangri-La waiting for the world to discover it. We should never take such places for granted, because the dream they offer is more vulnerable now than in any other century.

Thomas Coryat

Written in 1996 for Sky magazine

The English are well known for producing the world's greatest travellers and also the world's greatest eccentrics. It should therefore come as no surprise that nearly four centuries ago, in the Elizabethan Age, those two superlatives met in one odd, self-mocking, self-hawking, perpetually talking, perpetually walking gentleman—Thomas Coryat (1577-1617). A singular character in an age that produced titans of personality, Coryat was befriended and insulted by the luminaries of his day. He also walked from London to Venice and back, and wrote a book about it; and when that didn't make him as famous as he wanted, he walked to India.

Born in Odcombe, Somersetshire, the son of a clergyman who wrote Latin verse, Coryat from an early age showed irrepressible wit and a loquaciousness buttressed by a need for attention. He also had patience, exuberance, strong legs, and a large memory. These served him well at Oxford, which he left after only three years (in those days that meant merely that he didn't take holy orders). After a few years back home and his father's death in 1607, he went to London with little but his classical education.

James I had just taken the throne, and Coryat talked his way into the court of the king's son, Prince Henry. There he managed to survive as a kind of glorified jester, a "privileged buffoon," the butt of jokes who also gave as good as he got—a living version of a type found in many plays of the era. As one diarist of the Prince's court noted, "Sweetmeats and Coryat made up the last course at all court entertainments." He was also part of the regular crowd at the Mermaid Tavern, arguably the wittiest bar-cafe of all time, alongside Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Inigo Jones. None of this, however, meant cash or celebrity.

Then Coryat hit on the notion of gaining fame as a traveller—surely this would satisfy his deep need to be taken seriously. (He was evidently a natural target for teasing; his eagerness for attention doubtless increased others' marksmanship.) His big idea was to walk to Venice and back, via France, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. He left in May 1608 and was back in October, having covered nearly two thousand miles in one pair of shoes. These Coryat took home and proudly hung in Odcombe's church, and they would be immortalized by Shakespeare, who in Measure for Measure speaks of “brave Master Shoetie, the great traveller.”

It took him three years to publish the book of his journey, Coryats Crudities, hastily gobled up in five moneths travells ...Newly digested in the hungry aire... and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling Members of this Kingdome. An odd, overlong work, with passages cobbled and altered from others' books, it was still Coryat through and through, the "Odcombian Leg-stretcher," as he called himself. The great curiosity of the Crudities is its extensive preface, which consists of verses by much of the roster of Elizabethan literary talent, alternately praising and roasting Coryat. It is back-scratching unsurpassed, a shameless and waggish blurbdom, and much of it was unsolicited.

There are verses in English, in Greek and Latin, in French, Italian, and Spanish, in Welsh, Macaronic, even in "Antipodean" and "Utopian." Ben Jonson contributed a rhymed acrostic on the letters of Coryat's name; several verses were set to music, one was shaped like an egg. When Coryat saw how many there were, and how sardonic his "friends" could be, he got cold feet, but the Prince insisted he print all of them. Suddenly it was fashionable to make fun of this extraordinary traveller while commending his book. One poet referred to him as a "single-soled, single-souled and single-shirted Observer." Jonson called Coryat "an Engine, wholly consisting of extremes, a Head, Fingers, and Toes. For what his industrious Toes have trod, his ready Fingers have written, his subtle head dictating." He was "irrecoverably addicted" to travel, this "great and bold Carpenter of words."

And the book was a success. What this meant back then was several hundred copies printed, for the reading market was tiny. Coryat had to endure one penalty of fame: a pirated edition of the Preface to the Crudities, those verses that all London was talking about, available at a fraction of the cost, with a title page making fun of our hero's lengthy tome. Coryat was enraged, but at least everyone knew him, or of him. He was thirty-five.

He was also elated. Why not go farther? Why not walk from Constantinople all the way to India, see the Great Mogul, and ride an elephant? Let them make fun of Tom Coryat then!

He left in October 1612 by ship and reached Constantinople in April 1613. En route he visited the purported ruins of Troy and was there dubbed a knight by a fellow-passenger, much to the disappointment of several local onlookers who thought him about to be beheaded. Coryat was a master at accepting hospitality, and he stayed as the guest of the English trading agent until January, when he left Constantinople by sea for Iskenderun, now most of the way along the Turkish coast. He then started walking.

He walked to Aleppo, to Damascus, and on to Jerusalem. There he had his wrist tattooed with a Crusaders' cross—a popular souvenir among Christian pilgrims to the Holy City. He had a look at the Jordan River and walked back to Aleppo for a hot four months' wait for a caravan. Eventually he got lucky, and started east in September, via Diyabekir, where a Turkish soldier robbed him of most of his limited funds. Fortunately Coryat had adopted the habit of local dress, and kept a few emergency coins stashed in strategic folds of his robes. Remarkably undaunted, he pushed on with the caravan across Persia to Tabriz, Isfahan, and Kandahar.

Near the Indian frontier Coryat had a stroke of traveller's fortune, and ran into Sir Robert and Lady Sherley, on their way back west from the Court of the Mogul Emperor Jahangir. English being rare in these parts, they must've looked like the happiest of mirages to Coryat, and Sir Robert even had the Crudities with him, picked up in London. Sir Robert also offered to speak highly of its author to the Persian Shah so that Coryat might enjoy the ruler's hospitality on his return trek. This was guff, but Lady Sherley was sensible and kind enough to give Coryat some money.

In Multan Coryat got into an argument with a Muslim who had learned Italian as a slave and who called Coryat an infidel. This earned the hapless Mohammedan a long, florid, scurrilous reply before a large crowd who cannot have possibly understood what Coryat was saying, likewise in Italian. Coryat recounts this brave oration in one of the few letters home (mostly to his mother) which are, sadly, all that survived of his Great Walk.

He was now in the territory of "the Great Mogul" and from Lahore he walked what we call the Grand Trunk Road to Delhi and Agra, then to nearby Ajmer to meet the Emperor. This walk of 450 miles took him only twenty days, at a cost of about twopence a day (Coryat remarks on the locals' generosity). With typical gusto he called the road, with its regular shade trees, "the most incomparable shew of that kind that ever my eies survaied . . . I traversed afoot, but with divers paire of shooes, having beene such a propateticke . . . that is, a walker forward on foote, as I doubt whether you have heard the like in your life..." He had covered over 3300 miles from Jerusalem, the first European to thus reach India on foot since Alexander the Great's infantry.

At Ajmer Coryat settled in with ten fellow Englishmen, local representatives of the East India Company—that strange trading and eventually military organization which soon enough controlled most of India. In the meantime any Englishman was welcome at a Company table, and they happily put up Coryat for fourteen months while he planned further travels (Samarkand and Ethiopia) and polished his Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, and Arabic. A dedicated wordsmith, he liked linguistic brawls and, in his native garb, came to be looked on as "a half-witted English fakir" by the locals.

Coryat earned the admiration (and a donation) of the Mogul emperor one morning, at Jahangir's regular appearance before his people. His need was great: he had all but run out of money. But Coryat's Persian was eloquent. He spoke of the ruler's "glorious court" and said he had come all this way to see "Your Majesties elephants" and the Ganges, "captaine of all the river[s] of the world." He had on this journey "sustained much labour and toile, the like whereof no mortall man in this world did ever perform, to see the blessed face of Your Majesty . . . ."

The speech worked; Jahangir replied in Persian and threw him 100 silver rupees, about ten pounds sterling. Later the English Ambassador complained to Coryat that it was most unbecoming for a countryman to beg. Coryat was at home duelling with wits like Ben Jonson; he could eviscerate a mere bureaucrat. "I answered . . . in that stout and resolute manner that he was contented to cease nibling at me."

Coryat kept walking. He saw Agra again during a plague, and Hardwar and the Punjab; but the climate and his exertions proved too much. He had fainting spells and managed to make his way to the East India Company's hospitality in Surat. Their kindnesses did him in. In December 1617 he became the first Western tourist to die in India from a bad stomach, brought on by an English diet of too much local beer on top of meat in hot weather. Yet to him belongs the very real honor of being the first Westerner to visit the subcontinent with no thought of either trade or conquest.

What, in the end, does Coryat amount to? Scholars of Asia relish him as much for his humor and exaggerations as for his observant eye; he is far more entertaining than the usual traders and missionaries. One goes to him not for his facts but for his personality. He travelled not for plunder or science or God but for his own personal pleasure, and to our eyes he seems modern in this regard. He was an exceptional linguist, the first English travel-writer, and the greatest pedestrian of his era. He well understood that speed not only erases the detail but blurs the mind. He rarely complained of hardship. People made fun of him, but then again this is the protest of the stay-at-home against the incessant adventurer even today. And if Coryat didn't exactly have the last laugh, perhaps he had the best one. Here we are four centuries later, still praising his enthusiasm and his shoe leather: he would surely puff with pride. Plus he saw the world.

The Watch

I wrote this short story, never offered for publication, as a deliberate exercise in the early 1990s. The idea was to take a short story of the past and update it. I used Guy de Maupassant’s (1850-1893) masterly The Necklace, which goes by many titles in translation and is really about the relationship within the couple, not about the necklace. Flaubert wrote his own version, as did Henry James and V. S. Pritchett. Well, I figured, what was good enough for them was good enough for me.


It began, you see, not as a simple deception but simply as a gift. I am too good a businessman not to know the limits of my own success and I take a modest delight in transcending them. At that time, at my age—fifty-three—I could afford to buy for my young second wife, Sylvia, anything she wanted. My company, mine and mine alone, specialized in handsome leather-bound and gilt-edged datebooks, notebooks, address books, memo books, etc. You have got to specialize to succeed big: Exodus, VI.

I wasn't surprised that the sudden rise of the pocket-size personal computer industry had hurt my business not at all, perhaps even encouraged it. Let the buzzards bicker all they want; my line is status, and there is no substitute for the fragrance of genuine morocco, which by the way comes nowadays from southeast Asia. No substitute, in other words, for the real thing, when it comes to status. In an endlessly perverse world, you see, status is the preferred form of truth.

This is scripture out of the N. T., from the Bible for All Businessmen, William Marlow Edition, not available to the general public. From Genesis came my belief in never missing a chance to create a better deal where before there was only darkness; no matter how thick the serpents lie on the ground, Eden may wait just around the corner. Say what you will of mistakes I made, at the end of the day my opponents and colleagues alike know me as a gentle man, grown portly of late, who does his own travelling and buying himself, by himself. The selling you can leave to lesser luminaries in a company; any fool can sell. It takes special genius to know how to buy.

I was on one of my bimonthly buying trips, and had finished three days of business in Singapore—a new contract with a smart young company that produced marbleized endpapers for me, quick to spot an opening as Chinese always are. Having planned a week’s stay, I decided on a surprise swing through Bangkok to investigate printing possibilities there. I don't and never did believe in resting, no matter what day of the week—Deuteronomy, XVII—and I'd never been to Bangkok. I telephoned Sylvia on the other side of the world at the summer house on the Jersey shore and left a message with our fat Barbadian housekeeper about the change of plans. After six years together, Sylvia was used to living on-the-fly and rather enjoyed, I think, my unpredictability.

Bangkok in July was sweltering. I don't need to tell you how heat dampens a man's spirit and leaves him open to temptation. I assured myself in one sticky afternoon I’d best stick with my printers in Hong Kong. The Thais smelled rancid to me: a charmless people too busy trying to make a penny on each side to see where the dollar profits lie. I went back to my hotel and had them change my ticket (Tokyo / Los Angeles / New York) to the next morning. I reminded them to confirm an aisle seat—Travels, XIV—then decided to go out for a walk before dinner. I knew Sylvia would ask me about Bangkok. She always teased me about avoiding the city out of worry about what mischief I might get myself into there.

"Every other man who goes there gets what he wants," she said. “Why shouldn't you? Just don't bring back anything dangerous.”

I wasn't interested in risking any diseases, but I also wasn't sure quite what to bring her instead. I have never been at ease choosing presents. It always seems a little amateurish; and you can easily end up wasting your time on items that aren't first-rate, you see. Still, I went for a walk. It wasn't far from the confines of my hotel, the famous one with a string quartet sawing wood in the lobby, to Patpong, the so-called Street of Sex.

At this point nearly everywhere reminds me of somewhere else. Patpong reminded me of New Orleans—less lascivious than I’d imagined, with little of the pure lust they advertise. I know how to buy; I know what pure lust is. The Thai girls with their long black eyes and their long black hair strode around in miniskirts and invoked me with their hellos, and clung to my arm for a friendly moment, or danced naked to deafening music in ground-floor bars with obscene names and stroboscopic lights where upstairs, no doubt, I could have absolutely anything I desired done to me. This much I saw from the street.

None of that fascinated me as much as the fact that Patpong’s tables and stalls were busy selling every imaginable brand-name fake by the thousands. Fake upon fake, from videos and cassettes to Chanel T-shirts and leather Gucci bags and Kenzo pocketbooks and Cartier watches. Not one of them the real McTavish. Most of Patpong’s clients weren’t desperate men but elderly tourists or American teenagers buying fake Levi's blue jeans or Ray-Ban sunglasses. And there was a real McDonald's on the corner whose antiseptic light made even the available girls look innocent. On a whim I had dinner there and eavesdropped—I'd have made a good spy—on a German trying to convince a slender local lovely to come away with him to Koh Samui for a week.

On a greater whim I finished my cheeseburger, walked ten yards along Patpong, and found myself bargaining over a fake Rolex watch for Sylvia.

My intention, you see, was to buy it simply as a joke. Sylvia and I have no secrets from each other and besides, I had bought her a very handsome gold and jeweled Rolex for our second anniversary for more than ten thousand dollars. I thought it would be rather a good joke to buy her a fake one.

The joke was that it was a beautiful watch. What caught my eye was the style: it seemed deliberately aged, perhaps thirty-five years old, squarish, mannish for a lady, with a tinted face and slant formal numbers, very distinguished, with sleek echos in it of the Art Deco style. I can't say why, but that wristwatch reminded me of Lauren Bacall and those old Bogart films. The watchband was cheap black plastic but even as I glanced over at the others, the watch leaped out at me like Sylvia herself from the table of heavy silver and gold men's Rolex and Omega and Bulova and Patek and Christian Dior imitations. I moved several around experimentally before the vendor pushed the one I wanted before me.

"Let's have a look at you," I said, and held it up and turned it this way and that. I put it back on the table.

"Not bad," I said. "Not much of a watchband, though. What will you take for it?"

His first price, nine hundred baht, was stratospheric.

“Nonsense,” I said, and turned on my heel. He pulled me back. "Just a moment," he said. “Best price." He stabbed away at his calculator and offered me a 5% reduction. "Don't waste my time," I told him, and walked away again. He pulled me back like a stagehand with a hook, told me about his family miseries, and knocked off another point or two. It took me ten minutes, but I chewed him down another forty percent to about eight dollars American, including a replacement leather watchband. I was so engaged in securing this wristwatch for Sylvia that it didn't occur to me look for one for myself.

"Beautiful watch, sah. Taiwan-made, not Hong Kong. Better."

"Don't be absurd. Better? It's a fake," I said.

“Yes, yes," he said, taking the money and counting it with skillful fingers. “But work always better in Taiwan. You wait and see. That why your Rolex more expensive than Hong Kong Rolex."

Oddly enough, it was the fellow in the plane beside me between Bangkok and Tokyo the next morning who confirmed that. It was one of those rumpled youngish men who seem to be perpetually travelling but whom you rarely see among the professionals in the front section. This made me think he might know what he was talking about.

I had taken the watch out and was having a good look at it, in the light of day and all that, and thinking: what a laugh Sylvia will have when I get home. Miriam would've been incensed, of course.

"Handsome watch," said the fellow. "What kind?"

"Rolex," I said.

"Can't beat that," he says. "May I?"

"Be my guest," I said, and handed it over. I let him look for a moment, debating whether to spoil the fun, and finally I asked, as if I weren't sure myself, “How old do you suppose she is?"

"That's a good one," he said. “It's harder to date a Rolex than you might expect. Because they keep ahead of everyone and yet remain classical in terms of style. I’d say—oh, late fifties. Am I warm?”

"Not even tepid," I said, taking the watch back.

“Guess what I paid," I said.

He flushed. Money embarrasses the young.

“I wouldn't presume—" he began.

“Presume away.”

“Nine? No, no,” he corrected himself. "I'll say eight thousand dollars.”

"Seven," I said. "Only seven.”

"In fact," I said conspiratorially, "That's a Taiwan Rolex. Not a Swiss one. Seven dollars. Think I overpaid?"

He took the watch back from me without asking, he was so astonished. He looked like someone about to blow a bubble. He made a careful examination, right down to the silver label and serial number on the back. He peered carefully at the lettering on the face. He shook his head. He said finally, "And we think we're going to beat those people at light industry? We don't have a chance."

"Now you're learning," I said.

He had, no doubt, spotted the ring on my finger. He said casually, "Do you think your wife will know the difference?"

"I'll tell her, of course."

“I wouldn't," he said.

Now it was my turn to be astonished. You may find this difficult to believe, but that possibility hadn't crossed my mind. As I said, Sylvia and I have no secrets from each other. Psalms, X.

"It'll amuse her to have one from Bangkok," I said. "Even if she never wears it. I picked her up a real one, a beauty, a few years back."

He shrugged. "None of my business. Still, that's an exceptionally handsome watch. It's an immaculate copy. No one will ever know the difference. Why spoil it for her?"

I dismissed this right away. Not long afterward he got off the plane in Tokyo, and I had both seats to myself for the duration of the flight. I alone must take responsibility for my decision. But I don't need to tell you that eighteen hours’ flying at thirty thousand feet can do strange things to a man’s judgment. Even in first class.



"Why, it's beautiful," Sylvia said, and laid it across her wrist. "You're outrageous, darling, you know you've already given me one."

"Not one like this," I said.

She had that triumphant glow on her lovely face that I always associate with a square-rigger under full sail; and her auburn hair swept back and shining like her eyes. At a moment like that I would always think that to be childless was not so important to her, that the security and luxury I had given her against the chaos of her own family was enough. Nobody meeting her would ever have guessed what she had made her way up from. Should I tell her the truth? I wondered. Would she see the joke? In this case I wasn't so sure she would. And, to tell you the truth, the watch really shone on her wrist, and I don't think it was the blouse or shoes she was wearing that day in particular. For once, I had got a present right.

I did not tell her the watch was a fake. She was very happy to have me home, and thanked me in her way, even though I could only stay for the weekend and was back in Manhattan on Monday morning.

Our arrangement in the summer was this: I spent four nights in the week at the apartment on East 53rd and then three nights with her out on the shore, unless we had tickets to a show or a concert, for my wife is a music-lover. In that case, she would come in. (I always enjoyed the opera, even before meeting Sylvia, but Miriam and I were not subscribers.) As it was, I did not see her from Monday morning until Friday evening, which was just as well as my sense of time was very confused from travelling halfway around the world and I wouldn't have been very good company. She came to pick me up at the breezy train station, as usual, but I sensed right away something amiss.

“I didn’t want to to trouble you in the city,” she said. “I'm sure it's nothing. It's the new Rolex. I’ve worn it every day, I'm mad about it. But it stopped yesterday. It's the strangest thing. The other one never has."

Mentally I cursed the Thais and all their progeny. How had I let myself be hoodwinked? Perhaps it was simply the quartz. I swallowed and made grumbling noises. That would've been the time to tell her—another opportunity that convenient might not come my way again. But I didn't seize it.

"Leave it to me," I said. "I'm sure it's only the battery. I'll have it replaced on Monday. You're coming in for Mozart on Tuesday, no? So you can wear it that night."

"Be sure to take it in to Samuelson’s," she said. "I don't want just any old dealer fiddling with it, they're not used to to dealing with watches of that quality."

"Don't worry," I said. You notice I didn't exactly agree.

I was relieved, anyway, that she hadn't taken it to some local fellow who might ask her where it came from and get openly suspicious. Down on the shore they have a tendency, I've noticed, to strike back against the outsiders who keep their bread buttered.

I wasn't about to take the watch into Samuelson, who'd sold me Sylvia's anniversary Rolex four years earlier and her necklace last winter and several other items in-between. After all, it was simply a question of replacing a battery. There was a large electronics store around the corner from my offices, run by a family of Koreans. They'd sold me camera equipment from time to time and I noticed they have a selection of digital watches. I went round right off the train first thing Monday morning.

“Stop already, eh?” said the young man at the watch counter when I handed over the Rolex. I didn't like his smile, it seemed to say: Serves you right for being rich enough to buy one of these.

With a tiny screwdriver he pried open the back, a little maliciously, I thought. I said sharply, "Be careful with that."

“Yeah, yeah, careful.”

He pulled the battery out with tweezers like a dentist removing a rotten filling. When he started to open a a package with a new battery, some impulse made me ask him to check the old one first. Over the years you develop instincts that you have to follow, even when behind them lies only bad news.

He nodded and attached my dead battery into some apparatus on the wall. He took it out with some surprise and set it before me on the counter. He said, “Battery okay, no problem,” and looked bored.

I hate the way these foreigners move in, out of their broken sweatshops and their choking cities, and not knowing the first thing about local business practices, they set themselves up and get around important regulations by collaborating with their cousins back home; and when you wander in for a little assistance in a catastrophe of their own people’s making they treat you disdainfully.

I said to this young man, “Pay attention. What’s wrong with it, then? If it isn't the battery?”

He shrugged and indicated the watch’s innards with his screwdriver. "Can be anything, maybe," he said.

We both waited for the other to speak. He skated the battery back and forth like a chess piece on the counter, called out something in his language to someone a counter over, then turned back, surprised I was still there. He said, "You want me to put the battery back?"

"That's exactly what I'd like.”

He did so swiftly, punched the back in place, then pushed the watch over to me. "No charge, sir," he said, and glanced away, waiting for me to leave, not willing to admit his own inadequacy. I did not thank him. I thought: Let him learn the hard way.

At the office everything was shipshape. I left a little early for lunch and went around to Samuelson's over on Madison. I thought: This has gone far enough. I felt a little apprehensive when I walked in, but another client, some woman, was leaving and Samuelson greeted me cheerfully, a grasshopper with his antennae on the alert and his hand out.

"Mr. Marlow, good to see you again, sir. You're looking very well these days."

"Probably this diet Mrs. Marlow's got me on.”

"They do know how to look after us, don't they? Now, what can I do for you this afternoon, Mr. Marlow?"

He wanted to demonstrate how well he remembered my name after not seeing me for over a year. Can't blame him for that—it's a technique I use myself. Labors, I. Names are everything.

I said, “It's about a watch I bought Mrs. Marlow overseas. It seems to be broken.”

“I'll be surprised if we can't take care of it. May I see the watch?"

This was an embarrassing moment for me, but I had steeled myself for it. I will credit Samuelson that his eyes betrayed little of what he must have thought.

He said gently, "It certainly doesn't seem to be running.” He cleared his throat. “May I, uh, ask you Mr. Marlow, how much you paid for this wristwatch?”

From the way he peered closely at the face I suspected he knew. I said, hitting the ball into his court, “About eight.”

I still held out hope he might say: Ah, eight thousand.

"Eight dollars?" he said. But there was no astonished surprise in his voice: he knew the watch was fake.

"That's right.”

His lips were pursed, not sealed. He did not look at me but at the watch as he spoke. "Hong Kong?"

"No, I bought it in Bangkok."

"I was referring to where it was made."

I paused. "I was told by the vendor that the best copies come from Taiwan. Like this one."

He shrugged. "Perhaps, Mr. Marlow. This one smells like Hong Kong to me." He handed it over. "Not a very good copy, I'm afraid."

"What's wrong with it?” I said, a little loudly I'm sure, then caught myself. "Apart from the fact it doesn't work."

"There's nothing wrong with it,” he said, with a little too much emphasis on the word for my taste. “For eight dollars it's probably not a bad buy. But it doesn't resemble a Rolex at all. Except for the fact it bears the name."

He saw I was not impressed with this vague speech.

He said, “Look at the label on the back. It's the wrong color and size and shape, to start with. It's not even well-affixed. The instant I saw that label, I knew your watch hadn't even come out of Taiwan, much less Switzerland. And it says on the face that it's a quartz watch. Rolex simply doesn't make quartz watches, period. Never have. Even more evident, it's not a sweep second hand. See how it ticks off the individual seconds? Rolex has never made a watch like that. And it's missing, at the base of the face, a certain word which you'll see immediately if you look at the Rolex you purchased here several years ago. And look at the quality of the crystal.” He tapped the glass and we listened to the clack of cheapness. He smiled sympathetically. "Do you want me to go on, Mr. Marlow? It's simply a question of professionalism, that's all. I spotted it immediately because it's my line of work to know the difference. You shouldn't feel bad. I have customers come in as you did, but after having paid several thousand dollars for a copy no better than yours. It's a shame.”

I could practically see his antennae waving in triumph. I don't like being made to feel like a fool anymore than the next man; plus I had my company's reputation to think of. When he was finished I said, “Well, what's to be done?”

"The watch is for Mrs. Marlow, of course.”

Was he suggesting I had a mistress? "Yes, of course.”

"Have you given it to her yet?”

"I'm afraid so. I had planned to give it to her as a gag, but she liked it so much—”

"Of course," he said soothingly. "And now you don't wish to tell her?"

“I don’t think so.”

He said delicately, “Perhaps if put the right way—”

"It's too much of an insult.”

"I see."

I said, "Is it an exact copy of a particular Rolex? Perhaps I could purchase a genuine one and exchange watchbands."

I thought my willingness to part with another king’s ransom might disarm him, but it had no effect. He shook his head slowly. "I'm afraid not. Let me show you something." He pulled a hefty book like a phone directory down from the shelf behind him and flipped through it. "There, you see what they've done? Those crafty fellows over in H. K. They've amalgamated two different designs, one from 1947, the other from 1933. Your  Rolex really doesn't exist. It's like a pair of mismatched Siamese twins. Right part of the world, anyway.”

I had made the noble gesture, at least. I said, “And what about repairing this one?"

He said, "Normally, Mr. Marlow, as I'm sure you understand, we legitimate watch dealers absolutely refuse to repair copies. It’s bad for everyone, our customers in particular, if we do. It diminishes the fine watches we sell and it diminishes our clients.”

“Perhaps you could make an exception, Mr. Samuelson. I’ve been a very good customer of yours for many years, as two Mrs. Marlows would attest,” I said, steadily.

“One of our most faithful.  And we appreciate that you came to us with this problem.” He sighed, for both our predicaments. “Let us at least see what’s wrong. Perhaps it’s only a battery.  Any number of shops could install a fresh battery for you, if that’s the case.”

I did not tell him I had already been through this elsewhere. He opened the back expertly with a precision tool, but I noticed he didn't have one of those apparati for testing the battery. He slipped in a new one and said, "I did mention to you that a Rolex is never battery-powered, didn't I? Of course I did. Now let's see what difference a new battery makes.”

It didn't, naturally, make any difference at all. The watch resolutely refused to run.

"Oh, dear,” said Mr. Samuelson. “Just a moment.” He disappeared into a back room and returned with a strange band slipped over his skull with a sort of headlight built-in with, I assume, a magnifying glass. He looked like Jiminy Cricket in a space helmet. He opened the watch’s back again with his little tool and switched on his headlight and peered down.

“Oh, dear,” he repeated.

“What is it?” I dislike being at anyone’s mercy.

He switched off his hi-beam and removed his space helmet.

“Junk, Mr. Marlow,” he said. “Junk, plain and simple. I would suspect your watch wasn't made more than three months ago. And in Bangkok, I bet—it's not even of Hong Kong quality. It's got a lifetime of six months at most. There’s nothing to be done with it. Throw it out. I'll throw it out for you, if you like.”

He was capable of it, too, but I held onto the watchband. “Can't you save the face and replace the innards?”

"One can always save face, Mr. Marlow. We don't do that sort of work here. Besides, it's risky at best. Suppose you repair this watch. Your wife wears it. It's a handsome watch, we must admit this. We see why you bought it and why Mrs. Marlow, with her taste, enjoys wearing it. But supposing she shows it to one of her friends, as we both know women are prone to do? And perhaps one of her friends is observant, as we both know women of taste can be. Women love to talk, they love to talk about each other, they especially love to say nasty things about each other. I really do think, Mr. Marlow, that in this instance, if I may say so, valor is the better part of discretion. I recall that Mrs. Marlow has a fine sense of humor. Perhaps she'll surprise you by laughing it off as a joke.”

“She loves this watch," I said. "She prefers it to the real one I bought from you.”

“She chose that one herself," he said. “You chose this one for her. Of course she prefers it. You could always choose her another.”

A sly salesman, Samuelson; I could spot that one coming a mile away. First, tell me there was no Rolex like this one, not to dream of buying another like it, practically refuse to sell me anything at all, then reverse gears and offer to solve my problem with a brand-new watch for the price of a mortgage. I had to admire his tactics.

He said, "Why let her know that you bought it knowingly? What if you bought it at a duty-free in Bangkok at what you thought was a reasonable price, and then I gave you the bad news? But you felt you absolutely must have a fine watch. We have a distinguished selection, I'm sure we can find something Mrs. Marlow would like equally.”

We were entering the decisive last stages of a sea battle, where two opposing ships-of-the-line square off and let their gun crews blast cannonade after cannonade at each other until someone's masts come down in a tangle. I said, “Well and good, but I want to leave the choice up to Sylvia. Not compound and confuse the problem.”

He said astutely, “What problem is there in receiving a lovely watch? With the same atmosphere as the one it replaces? I'm sure that if she's able to set them side-by-side, she will have no reluctance at distinguishing the finer of the two, a woman of her exquisite—”

I said, "You can't predict. Let's leave it at that. I appreciate your candor, Mr. Samuelson.”

"Not at all, Mr. Marlow. Glad to be of some small service."

That was when he tried to sweep Sylvia's watch nimbly away. But I caught him. And I made him put it together again, old battery and all.



We were to see The Marriage of Figaro the following evening, and fortunately Sylvia, doubtless not wishing to trouble me any further, did not telephone that night to inquire about her watch. I like to be on time; if she has any failing it is a tendency very occasionally to be late. At the opera house she managed to arrive, breathless, barely in time to give me a peck on the cheek and for us to slip into our usual seats before the lights went down. She asked about the watch just as the overture began. I made a playful librarian gesture of silence but could feel her question pressing my hand in hers. Then, at last, the curtain went up.

Mozart’s operas always seem to go by quickly. After only a rattling tune or two, it seemed, we had reached intermission.

I suggested we take a brief stroll outside. The fountain was geysering up and there were couples around it enjoying the sense of getting a little wet. Sylvia’s beauty seemed to me particularly poignant that night, shining in a short gold silk dress I had brought back once from Hong Kong. Perhaps it is only hindsight, but as we walked among the other people she seemed as evanescent as the singing we had heard and the arcing illuminated water.

I said, "Darling, I got some difficult news today. Not at the office. Personal. It's about your watch. Look, we were both a little suspicious when it stopped so suddenly."

I pulled it from my jacket pocket and handed it to her. She only glanced at it an instant, then her eyes came back to my face. Instinctively, I am sorry to say, she buckled the watch back on.

"Surely it's only the battery?" she said.

"I wish it were," I said. "I wish it were."

By now she was looking at me curiously, one hand protectively over her wrist, as if I were trying to take the thing away from her.

"Samuelson has his doubts," I said. I frowned and took a deep sigh. "The truth is he's not sure it can be reliably repaired."

"What does that mean?"

Inside the opera house they were calling us back, blinking the lobby lights in that pantomime that always seems to me more urgent than any music. I said, "Let's not get into it now, we can talk about it in the next intermission."

"Tell me now," she said—rather crossly, I thought. Almost like a little child stamping its foot.

"Look," I said, "the upshot is that it's not really what it purports to be. It's a lemon. These things happen. And what's wrong with it can't be fixed with a new battery." I paused. "If it could be fixed I wouldn't be telling you this. Perhaps I should've paid more attention when I bought it. You've got to be on your toes in that part of the world and I was a bit doggy from all that travel, I guess. I saw it in one of those duty-free places and I thought you had to have it, and I didn't examine it closely enough."

She said, “But surely we can send it back, can't we? The company will have to do something, they have a lifetime guarantee—"

"Of course they do," I said soothingly. “With a new watch, anyway. That doesn't matter. What matters is what we are going to do about replacing it—look, we're going to miss the second act. We can discuss this later." I ushered her into the lobby, talking a mile a minute. "The short and long of it, I'm afraid, is that they haven't made that model for years. It's a collector’s watch, really. I've had Samuelson calling all over the country, to the top vintage dealers, with no luck. The fellow in Bangkok had only that one. I'm just a little worried that if we don't get lucky, you may have to choose yourself another Rolex. Even one from the same era. Ah, we made it," I said, as the lights went down, just in time.

All through the second act I felt her rubbing her wrist a little disconsolately. Otherwise she was taking the bad news passively and rather well, I thought. I enjoyed the second act much more than the first, though Sylvia kept up her rubbing.

I bought us both champagne at the next intermission. Sylvia went to the ladies’ room and when she came back she said wistfully, "A woman just complimented me on my watch. I don't care if it runs or not, it's the most handsome gift you've ever bought me."

I said, "No, you need to have a watch that works. The next one won't be a lemon, I promise."

That was when she glanced at it. Her eyes widened, and her smile followed instantaneously. She said so loudly that everyone around us could hear, “It's running again!"

I couldn't believe it. She held it up to my face—people glancing in our direction—and I saw the hand tick-ticking.

The worst kind of Oriental revenge, I thought. That watch was going to punish me for not hiring its countrymen. Sylvia was going on about having rubbed it like Aladdin's lamp, or having shaken it up, or something harebrained about blood circulation beneath the wrist activating it again. I managed to get her back to her seat and while she sat poised, renewed, attentive to Mozart, I let the music pass by and pondered what I was going to say.

There is no question of you wearing this wristwatch. The fault is mine. It can be spotted as a bastard a mile away. The fault is mine. You cannot wear it in public, it is against every standard I and my company have ever stood for. The fault is mine. I will gladly buy you another one, a real one nearly like it or a dozen. The fault is mine. You must throw that one away.

After the opera we went straight back to the apartment. I began to make my little speech. She was still rubbing her wrist. Her sense of triumph startled me.

I took the requisite deep breath. "I wasn't sure whether I should tell you," I said. “The fact is, Samuelson thinks it might be, well, a copy. A very good one, but a copy nevertheless."

“A copy? What do you mean?"

“A fake," I said.

"But William, all that money—”

"I'm sure I can get the money back. It'll mean some paperwork with the credit card people, but they usually back you up in these situations. I'm afraid I never presumed to know very much about wristwatches."

She stopped me cold. "It's not your fault," she said. "You were hoodwinked.”

"Taken in, let's say."

"I'm afraid," she said, "I'm not being very kind, am I? I'm so glad it's running again. You've never bought me anything that made me happier."

I said, "We don't know who made it, you know. Anyone could've made it."

"I don't care who made it. It's a beautiful watch and I don't care what anyone says, I'm going to wear it as long as it works."

I said, "Are you sure you should?"

She flared. "Why not?”

Keep calm, I thought. She'll listen to reason in a few days.

I said delicately, “It's a little embarrassing, that's all."

That was when she said it.

"You poor, dear fool," she said. “Did you really think I couldn't tell the difference?"

"What?" I said. "I don't believe you."

She was practically laughing. That was what stung me.

“What do you mean by that? You knew and didn’t tell me?”

"I didn't want to upset you," she said. “It was obvious, I could compare it with the other one easily.”

"You knew it wasn't real?"

"Right away." She laughed again.

"And you were going to go ahead and wear it anyway?"

I think I may have shouted. I could see Samuelson and that damned Thai vendor just behind her, chortling away.

She said, “Don't be an old woman. Of course I intend to wear it."

"People don't care," she snapped. "Only you care."

"My success has been built on the error of that assumption."

“‘Error’ is right,” she said.

And walked out of the room.



Six months have passed. Sylvia insists on wearing the watch everywhere. It is still running and she claims it keeps good time. She has refused the offer of a genuine one. Instead she has made me promise that, when next I am in the Far East, I will bring her back a duplicate or two to replace it should it ever stop again. I wonder if this is not a small price to pay for a young and attractive wife. Revelations, XIII?

Do not misunderstand me. It was not an error for me to marry a second time. It does strike me, though, as perhaps a lapse in sound judgment to expect another person to continue to live up to all one's personal ideals. In the end it doesn't surprise me that Sylvia would behave in such a way; I knew all about her and her origins before I married her. What surprises me is that she actually thought I couldn't tell the difference.