James Burnham
PARAKEETS AND PARCHESI:
AN INDIAN MEMORANDUM
Polk Strait, which separates the southeastern tip of India
from Ceylon, is narrow. From a plane at 7,000 feet the eye, verifying
by a glance the conclusion of the geologists, links the island to the sub–
continent. Below in the serene water, like an old New England road
nearly drowned beneath the scrub and weeds, there stretches in a line
halfway across the Strait a series of sand formations, just breaking the
surface of the sea. These are the remains of Adam's Bridge. When
Rama left Ceylon after his swift visit, he took the Princess back with
him to India. The pilot of our plane was, by chance, Ceylonese, and as
he then told the story, the good King of Ceylon started in pursuit of
the kidnaper. The Strait was in the King's way, but his friends, the
monkeys, built for him in a twinkling the great bridge the relics of
which we still could so plainly see below us. The Indians, naturally
enough reversing the ethical roles, tum the King of Ceylon into the
God of Evil. They agree, however, that the monkeys (though to en–
able Rama to flee, not the King to follow) were the Bridge's architects
and builders.
It
is for this act of Rama's salvation that the monkeys
became sacred in India, and now sit uninterrupted in the streets to
pick each other's lice, and in the countryside, undisturbed by the starv–
ing spectators, strip fruit and grain and leaves.
The gap, non-existent geologically, and spatially so inconsequential
at 200 miles per hour, was world-wide in feeling. The mountain air
of the plane joined with the delicious blue of the water to sponge off
the relentless heat of the airport at Trichy a half-hour in the past,
and to erase the pointless questions of the control officer, a young man
already famed through the East for his removal of the last flaw of
sense from bureaucratic procedures. Ahead, the green of Ceylon rose to
wash our eyes, which were still smarting from a thousand miles of the
red, unshaded Indian soil.
To leave India was like escaping from a bottle, or like that shift
in August from a New York pavement to the dark interior of an air–
conditioned bar. The arrival at Colombo did not contradict our sense
of freedom regained. Though the April thermometer reading was as
high as Bombay's, the heat was cut by trees, wide leaves, and lawns
and parks of well-cropped grass. The smell of flowers and the sea was
