DIARY
IAN JACK I'm watching a particularly exciting moment of the Old Trafford Test when the phone rings. A voice from the past, from Delhi, one Bhaskar Battacharya, some- times known as the Duster and sometimes as the Brahmin of Bond Street, both names given to him by others for reasons that I now can't remember. He has grave news. The last steam locomotives in India are to be withdrawn from their duties in August. I can't believe it. Also, I don't want to believe it. 'You're sure it's not just the last of the broad-gauge engines?"No, these are on the metre-gauge branches in Gujarat. they're the last of them all — broad-, metre-, narrow-gauge, all gone except on the tourist lines to Ooty and Darjeeling.' When I first went to India, in 1976, there were 9,000 steam locomotives; their smoke smudged the air above remote railway junc- tions; you could hear their hooting in the small hours of the night even in the green- est, richest parts of New Delhi, as they dragged freight around the loop line. Rail- waymen said they would last into the next century. They seemed permanent, as fixed a part of the landscape as they must have seemed in Britain in 1950, when the coun- try still looked like a monochrome photo- graph by Bill Brandt. Then I remember that in Britain they had all gone by 1968, when the country looked like a colour snap by David Bailey. The transformation in India, 1976 to 1995, has been no quicker. It's just that, foolishly, one doesn't expect India to be transformed. If Indophiles ran India (rather than the global swill of money and actual Indians) it would be a subconti- nent covered in aspic-steam locomotives, dhobi wallahs and poverty and.
The Duster and I met 15 years ago, when he lived in a squat on Haverstock Hill, wore a ponytail and smoked a chillum. He looked like that rare thing, an Indian hippy, but the impression of unworldliness was misleading. He had a talent for society, for putting who together with whom and what, and when Granada TV decided to film The Jewel in the Crown it wisely hired the Duster as its Indian fixer. Now he tells me on the phone that he is 'for some rea- son or other' the director of programmes for one of India's new television stations. His old talents for matching desires to objects hasn't deserted him. Do I want to buy an Indian steam locomotive? There are, he says, graveyards of them in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh and they're going cheap: 'Three lakhs of rupees or ten thousand dol- lars will get you a YP class.' The YPs are beautiful little locomotives, metre-gauge Pacifies built in Japan and Germany as well as in India. I've watched them fly with expresses along the north banks of the Ganges in Bihar, the light from their fires splashing yellow in the dusk. The equiva- lent of £7,000 is not a bad price. I must remember to call the Duster and ask him about the shipping costs.
The paperback bestseller at the top of the non-fiction list is the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. This can be partly explained by its price and status as one of the 60 little books, each priced at 60p, which Penguin have published to celebrate the imprint's 60th anniversary. Penguin has printed a total of 5 million copies, so it's not surprising that they have swamped the bestseller lists (17 out of 20 titles in last week's top tens for fiction and non-fiction). But why is Marcus Aurelius at the top? Why not Stephen Jay Gould, or Oscar Wilde, or Elizabeth David? We used to have an old edition of Aurelius at home — my father must have been a fan — but, of course, I never read it; all I can recall is its position in the bookcase close to the works of Maurice Maeterlinck and H.G. Wells. It looked the kind of book that an earnest young man might buy in 1923, and copy bits from into his diary (which my father did) and never open again. And now, when I try to buy a copy of these thoughts of a Roman emperor (he ruled 161 AD to 180 AD and was fond of the Stoics), I find that the first two bookshops I try have sold out.
Marcus Aurelius, he saith, 'Dig within. There lies the well-spring of good: ever dig, and it will ever flow.' And, 'Love nothing but that which comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny. For what could more aptly fit your needs?' With so many people reading him, the world must be a better place. Or must it? For the past few days I've been trying to remember the recent, famous fictional character who quotes Aurelius, in the belief that his new popularity might be prompted by a film,
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• • • I **** • • • P • • • like the Auden boom that tohowea Four Weddings and a Funeral. The Aurelius- quoter is, I now discover, the psychopath in Silence of the Lambs, Dr Hannibal Lecter.
Lord Hanson may be making the share- holders of Eastern Electricity happy peo- ple; privatisation may even have reduced electricity bills for the rest of us. But some- thing less happy has happened to electricity itself. It keeps going off. In the past few weeks there have been power cuts at home, in the office, and, for at least four hours, in a West End hotel that a few of us were try- ing to have dinner in. There have been none of the usual customer-friendly leaflets through the door explaining that this might happen and why, and nothing in the news- papers, so I think it's safe to blame the sin- ister cable-laying that promises the new joys of interactive shopping and 522 televi- sion channels. The fibre-optic cable could be defined as progress, but progress in Britain is usually marked by lengthy public inquiries, lobbying and protest; see any plan for a new supermarket or an adjust- ment to a grade two listed building. Oddly, for an innovation that threatens to dig up most British streets and blight a good per- centage of our urban trees, nobody has sought even a token of public blessing. Two sets of men simply arrive in your street. The first mark the pavement with multi- coloured arrows and signs that might be the spoor test in Scouting for Boys. The second bring drills and make a terrible racket. Nobody complains or even inquires. Not in our street, anyway, and not me either.
Since the Duster called, I have been try- ing to work out when I last travelled behind an Indian steam locomotive; the final mem- ory. My copy of Newman's Indian Brad- shaw tells me it was in West Bengal, between Balagarh and Bandel Junction on the 346 down. I'd been to look at an aban- doned fleet of ancient paddle-steamers on the Hooghly with my friend from Calcutta, the Major. We'd fallen in the river mud and we looked a mess. Our fellow passengers were curious and the Major kept them entertained with stories from his career as a pharmaceutical salesman. He doesn't have a military bone in his body (`Major' came from an old family joke — he was thought a Major Genius). He is one of the most delightful men I've ever met. Man's love of old mechanical objects may be inexplicable and tiresome, but out of it can spring pro- found human friendship. As Marcus Aure- lius would certainly have said, had he ever travelled by the 346 down.
Ian Jack is editor of Granta.
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