The Open World by Ryszard Kapuscinski

I have only read one other piece by Kapuscinski which was called Stiff and it appeared in the Granta Book of Reportage or Travel though it had been originally published in Granta 21: The Story Teller. It made for some breath taking reading about carrying a coffin through the freezing Polish night. Kapuscinski was a legendary Polish journalist (also a writer and poet) and built his reputation during the cold war years as the single Polish foreign correspondent covering over fifty countries. He is best known for his reporting from Africa and his book titled The Emperor about Haile Selassie's anachronistic regime in Ethiopia. I cannot vouch for the veracity of this claim I make, that Kapuscinski was the author of a piece in the Granta, which I cannot locate, about the war between Honduras and El Salvador over a pair of soccer games in 1969. Though the wikipedia page on Kapuściński informs me that he did write a book titled Soccer War on the above issue.

Photo Courtesy: www.artbyherring.com/images/journalist.jpg

The piece I am posting is titled, The Open World, which appeared in the Reporting & Essays section of The New Yorker on February 5, 2007 as a tribute to Kapuscinski who passed away on January 23, 2007. The essay is about his first trip abroad. For someone who merely wanted to see what lay on the other side of the Polish border(Czechoslovakia), the reaction at being sent to India on his first assignment is best read in his words,"My first reaction was astonishment. And, right after that, panic: I knew nothing about India. I feverishly searched my thoughts for some associations, images, names. Nothing. Zero."

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In 1955, after completing my studies at Warsaw University, I began working at a newspaper called Sztandar Mlodych (The Banner of Youth). I was a novice reporter, and my beat was to follow letters to the editor back to their point of origin. The writers complained about injustice and poverty, about the fact that the state had taken their last cow or that their village was still without electricity. Censorship had eased—Stalin had been dead for two years—and one could write, for example, that in the village of Chodów there was a store but its shelves were always bare. While Stalin was alive, one could not write that a store was empty: all stores had to be excellently stocked, bursting with wares. So this was progress...

I rattled along from village to village, from town to town, in a hay cart or on a rickety bus—private cars were a rarity, and even a bicycle wasn’t easy to come by. My route sometimes took me to a village along the border. But it happened infrequently, for the closer one got to the border the emptier the land became, and the fewer people one encountered. The emptiness only increased the mystery of those regions, a mystery that attracted and fascinated me. I wondered what one might experience upon crossing the border. What would one feel? What would one think? Would it be a moment of great emotion, agitation, tension? What was it like, on the other side? It would, of course, be . . . different. But what did “different” mean? What did the other side look like? Did it resemble anything I knew? Was it inconceivable, unimaginable? My greatest desire, which gave me no peace, which tormented and tantalized me, was actually quite modest: I wanted only one thing—to cross the border. To cross it and then to come right back—that would be entirely sufficient, would satisfy my inexplicable yet acute hunger.

But how to do this? None of my friends from school or university had ever been abroad. Anyone with a contact in another country generally preferred not to advertise it. I was sometimes angry with myself for my bizarre longing; still, it didn’t abate for a moment.

One day, I encountered Irena Tarlowska, my editor-in-chief, in the hallway. She was a strapping, handsome woman with thick blond hair parted on one side. She said something about my recent stories, and then asked about my plans for the near future. I named the various villages I’d be visiting and the issues that awaited me there, and then mustered the courage to add, “One day, I would very much like to go abroad.”

“Abroad?” she said, surprised and slightly frightened. “Where? What for?”

“I was thinking about Czechoslovakia,” I answered. I wouldn’t have dared to say Paris or London, and, frankly, those cities didn’t interest me; I couldn’t even imagine them. This was only about crossing the border—it made no difference which one, because what was important was not the destination but the mystical and transcendent act.

A year passed. Then one afternoon the telephone rang in the newsroom. The editor-in-chief was summoning me to her office. “We are sending you abroad,” she said, as I stood before her desk. “You’ll go to India.”

My first reaction was astonishment. And, right after that, panic: I knew nothing about India. I feverishly searched my thoughts for some associations, images, names. Nothing. Zero. The idea for the India trip came from the fact that, several months earlier, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, had visited Poland—one of the first premiers of a non-Soviet-bloc country to do so. The first connections were being established. My stories were supposed to bring that distant land closer.

It was an old twin-engine DC-3, well worn from wartime forays along the front lines, with wings blackened by exhaust fumes and patches on its fuselage. But it flew, nearly empty, to Rome. I sat by the window, excitedly seeing the world from a bird’s-eye view for the first time. Until then, I hadn’t even been to the mountains. Multicolored chessboards slowly passed beneath us, gray-green tapestries stretched out on the ground to dry in the sun. But dusk came quickly, then darkness.

“It’s evening,” the man next to me said, in thickly accented Polish. He was an Italian journalist returning home, and I remember only that his name was Mario. When I told him where I was going and that this was my first trip abroad, he laughed, said something to the effect of “Don’t worry,” and promised to help. I was secretly overjoyed, because I was flying West and had been taught to fear the West like fire.

Suddenly, the tension that afflicts all parts of a plane when its engines are at full throttle started to ease, and the sound of the engines grew quieter and less urgent; we were approaching the end of our journey. Mario grabbed me by the arm and pointed out the window. “Look!”

I was dumbstruck.

The entire length and breadth of the blackness over which we had been flying was now filled with light. It was an intense light, blinding, quivering, flickering. I had the impression of a liquid substance, like molten lava, glimmering down below, a sparkling surface that pulsated with brightness, expanding and contracting. The entire shining apparition was alive, full of movement, vibration, energy.

It was the first time in my life that I had seen an illuminated city. What few cities and towns I had known until then were depressingly dark. Shop windows never shone, there were no colorful advertisements, the street lamps had weak bulbs. Who needed lights, anyway? In the evenings, the streets were deserted, and one encountered few cars.

As we descended, this landscape of lights drew nearer and assumed enormous proportions. Finally, the plane thumped against the tarmac, crunched and creaked. We had arrived. We drove into the city through crowded streets. Traffic, lights, and sounds—it all worked on me like a narcotic. I must have looked like a creature of the forest: stunned, fearful, wide-eyed, trying to take in, understand, distinguish things.

In the morning, I overheard a conversation in the adjoining room and recognized Mario’s voice. I found out later that he was discussing how to dress me, since I had arrived sporting fashions à la Warsaw Pact, 1956. I had a suit of Cheviot in sharp, gray-blue stripes: a double-breasted jacket with protruding, angular shoulders, and overly long, wide trousers with large cuffs. I had a pale-yellow nylon shirt and a green plaid tie. Finally, the shoes—massive loafers with thick, stiff soles.

We started making the rounds of the shops, accompanied by Mario’s wife. For me, these were expeditions of discovery. Three things dazzled me in particular. First, that the stores were brimming with merchandise, the goods weighing down shelves and counters, spilling out in colorful streams onto sidewalks, streets, and squares. Second, that the salesladies did not sit, but stood looking at the entrance; it was strange that they stood in silence, rather than sitting and talking to one another. The third shock was that they answered the questions you asked them. They responded in complete sentences and then added, Grazie! Mario’s wife would ask about something and they would listen with sympathy and attention, inclining forward with such focus that it looked as if they were about to start a race.

In the evening, I felt brave enough to go out alone. I must have been staying somewhere in the center, because Stazione Termini was nearby, and from there I walked along Via Cavour, making my way to Piazza Venezia, and then back through little streets and alleys to Stazione Termini. I did not notice the architecture, the statues, the monuments; I was fascinated only by the cafés and bars. There were tables everywhere on the sidewalks, and people sat at them, drinking and talking, or simply looking at the street and the passersby. Behind tall, narrow counters barmen poured drinks, mixed cocktails, brewed coffee. Waiters bustled about, delivering glasses and cups with a magician’s agility and bravura, the likes of which I had seen only once before, in a Soviet circus, when the performer conjured a wooden plate, a glass goblet, and a screeching rooster out of thin air.

One day, I spotted an empty table, sat down, and ordered a coffee. After a while, I became aware that people were looking at me. I had on a new suit, an Italian shirt white as snow, and a very fashionable polka-dotted tie, but there still must have been something in my appearance, in my way of sitting and moving, that gave me away. I sensed that I stuck out, and although I should have been happy, sitting there beneath the miraculous skies of Rome, I began to feel awkward and uncomfortable. I had changed my suit, but I could not conceal whatever lay beneath it. Here I was in the wide, wonderful world, and it was only serving to remind me how alien I felt.

A stewardess dressed in a pastel-colored sari was greeting passengers at the doors of the four-engine Air India International colossus. The subdued hues of her outfit suggested that a pleasant flight awaited us. Her hands were arranged as if in prayer—what I soon learned was a Hindu gesture of greeting. In the cabin was a strong and unfamiliar aroma, surely, I thought, the scent of some Eastern incense, Hindu herbs, fruits, and resins.

We flew by night, only a small green light twinkling at the tip of the wing visible through the window. This was before the population explosion, when air travel was still comfortable, with planes often carrying only a few passengers. Passengers slept stretched out across several seats.

The night ended and day came. Looking through the little window, I was able to gaze for the first time on an enormous expanse of our planet. The world I had known until then was perhaps five hundred kilometres in length and four hundred in width. And here we were, flying forever, it seemed, while the earth, very far below, kept changing colors—burned brown, then green, and then, for a long while, dark blue.

It was late evening when we landed in New Delhi. I was instantly awash in heat and humidity, and stood dripping with sweat. The people with whom I had been flying suddenly vanished, swept away by the animated crowd of friends and relatives who had been waiting for them.

I was left alone and had no idea what to do. The airport building was small and deserted, a far cry from Rome’s. It stood all by itself, cloaked in night, and I had no idea what lay beyond it. After a while, an old man in a loose white knee-length garment appeared. He had a gray beard and wore an orange turban. He said something I didn’t understand, although I assume that he was asking why I was standing there alone, in the middle of an empty airport. I didn’t know what to say. I was quite unprepared for this journey—I had no names or addresses in my notebook. My English was poor. I’d wanted to achieve the unachievable—to cross the border—but by expressing that wish I’d started a chain of events that had deposited me on the far side of the world.

The old man thought for a while, then motioned with his hand for me to follow him. A scratched-up, dilapidated bus was parked by the airport entrance. We got in, the old man started the engine, and we set off. We had covered only a few hundred metres when the driver slowed down and began honking loudly. Before us, where the road should have been, I saw a broad white river vanishing somewhere into the thick blackness of the sultry night. The river was made up of people sleeping out in the open, some on wooden plank beds, others on mats and blankets, but most of them directly on the bare asphalt or on the sandy banks on either side.

I thought that the crowds, awakened by the roar of the horn sounding directly over their heads, would fall upon us in a rage. Far from it! As we inched forward, people rose one by one and moved aside, taking with them children and old women barely able to walk. In their ardent compliance, in their submissive humility, there was something apologetic, as if sleeping here on the road were some crime whose traces they were quickly trying to erase. Like this, we made our way toward the city, the horn blaring, people stirring and giving way—on and on and on.

We arrived at a place illuminated by a red neon sign: “HOTEL.” The driver left me at the reception desk and disappeared without a word. The man at the desk, this one sporting a blue turban, led me upstairs to a little room furnished with only a bed, a table, and a washstand. Without a word he pulled off the bedsheet, sending some panicked bugs scurrying; he shook them off onto the floor, muttered something by way of good night, and departed.

Left alone, I sat down on the bed and considered my situation. On the negative side, I didn’t know where I was. On the positive, I had a roof over my head; an institution (a hotel) had given me shelter. Did I feel safe? Yes. Uncomfortable? No. Strange? Yes. I could not define precisely wherein lay this strangeness, but the sensation grew stronger in the morning, when a barefoot man entered the room bearing a pot of tea and several biscuits. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. He placed the tray on the table, bowed, and, having uttered not a word, softly withdrew. There was such a natural politeness in his manner, such profound tactfulness, that I felt instant admiration and respect for him.

Something more disconcerting occurred an hour later, when I stepped out of the hotel. Across the street, on a cramped little square, rickshaw drivers had been gathering since dawn—skinny, stooped men with bony, sinewy legs. They must have learned that a sahib had arrived at the hotel. A sahib, by definition, must have money, so they waited patiently, ready to serve. But the very idea of sprawling comfortably in a rickshaw pulled by a hungry waif of a man filled me with revulsion, outrage, horror. To be an exploiter? A bloodsucker? To oppress another human being in that way? Never! I had been brought up in precisely the opposite spirit, taught that even living skeletons such as these were my brothers, kindred souls, near ones, flesh of my flesh. So when the rickshaw drivers threw themselves upon me with pleading encouragement, clamoring and fighting among themselves for my business, I began to push them away firmly, rebuke them, protest. They were astounded—what was I saying, what was I doing? They had been counting on me, after all. I was their only chance, their only hope. I walked on without turning my head, impassive, resolute, smugly proud of not having allowed myself to be manipulated into assuming the role of a leech.

Old Delhi! Its narrow, dusty, fiendishly hot streets, with their stifling odor of tropical fermentation. And this crowd of silently moving people, appearing and disappearing, their faces dark, humid, anonymous, closed. Quiet children, making no sound. A man stared dully at the remains of his bicycle, which had fallen apart in the middle of the street. A woman sold something wrapped in green leaves—what was it? A beggar demonstrated how the skin of his stomach was plastered to his spinal cord—but was this even possible? One had to walk carefully, to pay attention, because many venders spread their wares directly on the ground, on the sidewalks, right on the edge of the road. Here was a man who had laid out two rows of human teeth and some old pliers on a piece of newspaper, thereby advertising his dental services. His neighbor—a wizened, shrunken fellow—was hawking books. I rummaged through the carelessly piled, dusty volumes and settled on two: Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (useful for learning English) and Abbé J. A. Dubois’s “Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies.” Father Dubois arrived in India as a missionary in 1792 and stayed for thirty-one years, and this book was the fruit of his studies of the Hindu way of life.

I returned to the hotel and opened the Hemingway, to the first sentence: “He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.” I understood nothing. I had a small English-Polish pocket dictionary, the only one available in Warsaw. I managed to find the word “brown,” but none of the others. I proceeded to the next sentence: “The mountainside sloped gently.” Again—not a word. “There was a stream alongside.” The more I tried to understand this text, the more discouraged I became. I felt trapped. Besieged by language. Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and blocking my way, closing off the world, making it unattainable. It was an unpleasant and humiliating sensation.

I might have fled India and returned home, if not for the fact that I had bought a return ticket on the passenger ship Batory, which in those days sailed between Gdansk and Bombay. President Gamal Nasser of Egypt had just nationalized the Suez Canal, and England and France had responded with armed intervention; as war broke out, the canal was blocked, and the Batory was stuck somewhere on the Mediterranean. I was cut off from home, condemned to India.

Cast into deep water, I didn’t want to drown. I realized that only language could save me. I began cramming words, night and day. I placed a cold towel on my temples, feeling as if my head were bursting. I was never without the Hemingway, but now I skipped the descriptive passages, which I couldn’t understand, and read the dialogue:

“How many are you?” Robert Jordan asked.
“We are seven and there are two women.”
“Two?”
“Yes.”

I understood all of that! And this, too:

“Augustín is a very good man,” Anselmo said.
“You know him well?”
“Yes. For a long time.”

I walked around the city, copying down signs, the names of goods in stores, words overheard at bus stops. In movie theatres, I scribbled blindly, in darkness, the words on the screen; I noted the slogans on banners carried by demonstrators in the streets. I approached India not through images, sounds, and smells but through words; and not the words of the indigenous Hindi but those of a foreign, imposed tongue, which by then had so fully taken root there that it was for me an indispensable key to the country.

During all those days after my arrival in Delhi, I was tormented by the thought that I was not working as a reporter, that I was not gathering material for the stories that I would later have to write. I hadn’t come as a tourist, after all. I was an envoy, engaged to render an account, to transmit, relate. But I found myself empty-handed, at a loss even how to begin. I knew nothing about India, but the Suez war had made returning home impossible, so I could only move forward. I decided to travel.

The receptionists in my hotel advised me to go to Benares. “Sacred town!” they explained. I arrived in the late evening. The city seemed to have no outskirts; the bus emerged all of a sudden out of the dark and empty night into the brightly lit, noisy city center. After getting off the bus, I went for a walk. I reached the edge of Benares. On one side, in the darkness, lay the still, uninhabited fields, and on the other rose the city, densely peopled, throbbing with loud music.

The locals advised me not to go to sleep that night, so that I could get to the banks of the Ganges while it was still dark and, on the stone steps that stretch along the river, await the dawn. “The sunrise is very important!” they said, their voices resounding with the promise of something truly magnificent.

Already people had begun converging on the river. Singly and in groups. Entire clans. Columns of pilgrims. The lame on crutches. Aged virtual skeletons, some carried on the backs of the young, others—twisted, exhausted—crawling with great difficulty on their own along the asphalt. Cows and goats trailed beside the people, as did packs of bony, malarial dogs. I, too, joined this strange procession.

Dawn had barely touched the sky, and thousands of the faithful had gathered. Some were animated, pushing their way through. Others sat in the lotus position, stretching their arms up toward the heavens. The bottom stairs were occupied by those performing the purification ritual—wading into the river and now and then submerging themselves completely. I saw a family subjecting a stout grandmother to this rite. The grandmother didn’t know how to swim and sank at once to the bottom. The family rushed in and brought her back up to the surface. The grandmother gulped as much air as she could, but, the instant they let her go, she went under again. I could see her bulging eyes, her terrified face. She sank once more, they searched for her again in the murky waters, and again they pulled her out, barely alive. The whole ritual looked like torture, but she endured it without protest, perhaps even in ecstasy.

On the opposite bank of the Ganges stretched rows of wood pyres, on which hundreds of corpses were burning. For a few rupees, the curious could take a boat over to this gigantic open-air crematorium. Half-naked, soot-covered men bustled about, as did many young boys. With long poles they adjusted the pyres to direct a better draft so that the cremation could proceed faster. The line of corpses had no end; the wait was long. The still glowing ashes were raked and pushed into the river. The gray dust floated atop the waves for a while but soon, saturated with water, sank and vanished.

I passed a sleepless night on the train to Calcutta, for those old cars, dating back to colonial times, shook, hurled you about, rumbled. You were even pelted with rain, coming in through windows that could not be shut. It was a gray, overcast day by the time we pulled in to Sealdah Station. On every square inch of the enormous terminal, on its long platforms, its dead-end tracks, the swampy fields nearby, sat or lay tens of thousands of emaciated people, under streams of rain, in the water and the mud. It was the rainy season, and the heavy tropical downpour did not abate for a moment. I was struck at once by the poverty of these soaked skeletons, their untold numbers, and, perhaps most of all, their immobility. They seemed a lifeless component of the dismal landscape, whose sole kinetic element was the sheets of water pouring from the sky.

Some of these people were refugees from the war between Hindus and Muslims that had ended a few years earlier—a war that saw the birth of independent India and Pakistan, and resulted in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths and many millions of refugees. The refugees wandered about for a long time, unable to find succor, and, left to their fate, vegetated for a while in places like Sealdah Station, before eventually dying of hunger or disease. But there was more to this scene. These columns of postwar vagabonds encountered throngs of others along the way—the legions of flood victims evicted from villages and small towns by the waters of India’s powerful rivers. And so millions of homeless, indifferent people shuffled along the roads, hoping to reach the cities, to get a sip of water there and perhaps a handful of rice.

Just climbing out of the train car was difficult—there was no room for me to place my foot on the platform. An old woman next to me was digging some rice out of the folds of her sari. She poured it into a little bowl and started to look around, perhaps for water, perhaps for fire, so that she could boil the rice. I noticed several children near her, eying the bowl. Staring—motionless, wordless. The children did not throw themselves on the rice; the rice was the property of the old woman, and these children had been inculcated with something more powerful than hunger.

A man was pushing his way through the huddled multitudes. He jostled the old woman, the bowl dropped from her hands, and the rice scattered onto the platform, into the mud, amid the garbage. In that split second, the children threw themselves down, diving between the legs of those still standing, digging around in the muck, trying to find the grains of rice. The old woman stood there empty-handed; another man shoved her. The old woman, the children, the train station, everything—soaked through by the unending torrents of a tropical downpour. And I, too, stood dripping wet, afraid to take a step; and, anyway, I didn’t know where to go.

From Calcutta I travelled south, to Hyderabad. The south was very different from the north and all its sufferings. The south seemed cheerful, calm, sleepy, and a little provincial. The servants of a local raja must have confused me with someone else, because they greeted me ceremoniously at the station and drove me straight to a palace. A polite elderly man welcomed me, and sat me down in a wide leather armchair, surely counting on a longer and deeper conversation than my primitive English would allow. I stuttered something or other, and felt myself turning red. Sweat poured down my forehead. The elderly man smiled kindly, which set me more at ease. It was all rather dreamlike. The servants led me to a room in one of the palace wings. As the guest of the raja, I was to stay here. I wanted to call the whole thing off, but didn’t know how—I lacked the words with which to explain that there had been some misunderstanding. Perhaps just the fact of my being from Europe conferred some prestige on the palace? I don’t know.

The raja’s palace—all glassed-in verandas, maybe a hundred of them, which, when the panes were opened, allowed a light and bracing breeze to waft through the rooms—was surrounded by lush, well-tended gardens, in which gardeners were constantly pruning, mowing, and raking. Farther on, beyond a high wall, the city began. There one walked along little streets and alleyways, narrow and always crowded, passing countless colorful stalls selling food, clothing, shoes, cleaning products. Even when it wasn’t raining, the streets were muddy, because all waste got poured into the middle—the streets belonged to no one.

The raja’s palace was full of servants. I saw no one else, really, and it was as if the entire estate had been given over to their rule. Butlers, footmen, waiters, maids, and valets, specialists in brewing tea and frosting cakes, clothes pressers and messengers, exterminators of mosquitoes and spiders, and many more whose duties and roles it was impossible to fathom, passed continually through the bedrooms and living rooms, along the corridors and up the stairs, dusting rugs and furniture, beating pillows, arranging armchairs, cutting and watering the flowers. All of them moved about in silence, fluidly, cautiously, giving a slightly fearful impression. But there was no visible nervousness, no running about or gesticulating. It was as if a Bengal tiger were circling around somewhere; one’s only chance of safety was to make no sudden movements. Even during the day, in the glare of the sun, the servants resembled anonymous shadows, moving about without speaking, careful not to meet anyone’s gaze.

They were variously dressed, according to function and rank: from golden turbans pinned with precious stones to simple dhoti—bands worn around the hips by those at the bottom of the hierarchy. Some were attired in silks, embroidered belts, and glittering epaulettes, while others wore ordinary shirts and white caftans. They had one thing in common—all were barefoot. Even if they were adorned with embroideries and tassels, brocades and cashmeres, they had nothing on their feet.

I noticed this detail right away, because I have a thing about shoes. It started in 1942, during the war, and the German occupation. Winter was approaching, and I had no shoes. My old ones had fallen apart, and my mother didn’t have money for a new pair. The shoes available to Poles cost four hundred zloty. They had tops made of thick denim coated with a black, water-repellent paste and soles made of pale linden wood. Where could one get four hundred zloty?

We were living in Warsaw then, on Krochmalna Street, near the gate to the ghetto, in the apartment of the Skupiewskis. Mr. Skupiewski had a cottage industry making bars of green bathroom soap. “I will give you some bars on consignment,” he told me. “When you sell enough, you can buy your shoes. And you can pay me back after the war.” People still believed then that the war would end soon. He advised me to work along the route of the Warsaw-Otwock railway line, frequented by holiday travellers; vacationers will want to pamper themselves a little, he counselled. I listened to him. I was ten years old, and I cried half the tears of a lifetime then, because in fact no one ever wanted to buy the little soaps. In a whole day of walking I would sell none—or maybe a single bar. Once I sold three and returned home bright red with happiness.

Winter weather arrived, the cold nipped at the soles of my feet, and because of the pain I had to stop selling. I had three hundred zloty, but Mr. Skupiewski generously threw in another hundred. I went with my mother to buy the shoes. If one wrapped one’s legs in flannel and tied newspaper on top of that, one could wear the shoes even in the worst winter freezes.

I received a return ticket from Delhi to Warsaw via Kabul and Moscow. I landed in Kabul just as the sun was setting. An intensely pink, almost violet sky cast its last light onto the navy-blue mountains surrounding the valley. The day was dying, sinking into a total and profound silence—it was the hush of a landscape, a region, a world that could be disturbed neither by the bell on a donkey’s neck nor by the fine patter of a flock of sheep passing the airport.

I had no visa, and the police detained me. But they could not send me back, because the plane I’d arrived on had already left and there were no other aircraft on the runway. They conferred among themselves before driving off to town. I remained with the airport guard. He was an enormous, broad-shouldered fellow with a coal-black beard, gentle eyes, and a shy, uncertain smile. He wore a long military coat and carried a Mauser rifle.

Night descended suddenly, and at once it grew cold. I was trembling; I had flown here straight from the tropics and wore only a shirt. The guard brought some wood, kindling, and dry grasses and started a fire on a slab of concrete. He gave me his coat and wrapped himself up to the eyes in a dark camel-hair blanket. We sat facing one another without uttering a word. Nothing was happening around us. Some crickets awoke in the distance, and later, even farther away, a car engine growled.

In the morning, the policemen returned with an elderly man named Mr. Bielas, a merchant who bought cotton in Kabul for the factories in Lódz. Mr. Bielas promised to see about a visa; he’d been here for some time already, and had connections. Indeed, he not only secured a visa but invited me to his villa, pleased to have some company for a while.

Kabul was dust upon dust. Winds blew through the valley where the city lay, carrying clouds of sand from the nearby deserts. A brownish-gray particulate matter hung in the air, coating everything, pushing its way in everywhere, settling only when the winds died down. And then the air grew transparent, crystal clear. Every evening, the streets looked as if an improvised mystery play were being staged on them. The all-pervasive darkness was pierced only by oil lamps and torches burning on the street stalls, feeble flames illuminating the meagre goods laid out by venders on patches of road, or on the thresholds of houses. Between these rows of lights people passed silently—hunched, covered figures whipped by the cold and the wind.

When the plane from Moscow started to descend over Warsaw, my neighbor trembled, squeezed the arms of his seat with both hands, and closed his eyes. He had a gray, ravaged face, covered with wrinkles. A musty, cheap suit hung loosely on his bony frame. I looked at him furtively, out of the corner of my eye. Tears were flowing down his cheeks. And a moment later I heard a suppressed but nevertheless distinct sob.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. But I didn’t believe that I would return.”

It was December, 1956. People were still coming out of the gulags.

India was my first encounter with otherness, the discovery of a new world. It was at the same time a great lesson in humility. I returned from that journey embarrassed by my own ignorance. I realized then what seems obvious now: another culture would not reveal its mysteries to me at a mere wave of my hand. One has to prepare oneself thoroughly for such an encounter.

My initial reaction to this lesson was to run home, to return to places I knew, to my own language, to the world of already familiar signs and symbols. I tried to forget India, which signified to me my failure: its enormousness and diversity, its poverty and riches, its incomprehensibility had crushed, stunned, and finally defeated me. Once again, I was glad to travel around Poland, to write about its people, to talk to them, to listen to what they had to say. We understood each other instantly, were united by common experience.

But of course I remembered India. The more bitter the cold of the Polish winter, the more readily I thought of hot Kerala; the quicker darkness fell, the more vividly images of Kashmir’s dazzling sunrises resurfaced. The world was no longer uniformly cold and snowy but had multiplied, become variegated: it was simultaneously cold and hot, snowy white but also green and blooming.

(Translated, from the Polish, by Klara Glowczewska.)