558
PARTISAN REVIEW
unmixed with corruption. The neat Western clothes of the men were as
white as their teeth against their dark brown skin. The laughing sud–
denly reminded us how rare a laugh is in India.
Ceylon, though, was only a three days' detour. Two weeks later,
we left India again, this time from Calcutta, for Bangkok. Against the
immediate background of Calcutta in the midst of the hot season, the
feeling of explosive relief was even more total. Calcutta, eastern paw of
the Indian cat, had scratched us deep before we were let go. Sharing
in the farewell indignities, our intestines, until then proudly defiant of
the prophecies of our traveled friends, were twisted into knots. This
was as much a moral as a physical wound. On the first of our two Cal–
cutta noons, the immense heat had finally, like Ugolino's hunger, over–
come our hygienic pieties. For the first time in India, we had had
ice put into our drinks, and, thus fallen, one lump of ice led quickly to
another. For this sin, on the next (and last) morning, the gripes duly
punished us--or so, at any rate, it irrefutably seemed on the moral bal–
ance sheet which one always strikes at the onset of pain or disaster.
Most disturbing of all was the morning of departure. Planes leave
early from Indian cities: partly from the early-to-bed and to-rise
goodyness of the new nation, and partly in order to get the trips as much
as possible over with before the full sun, smashing at the land, has
filled the air with convection currents in which planes buck and rear
like rodeo Brahmas. Since the border slough of papers, questionnaires,
permits, authorizations, police cards, visas and declarations through
which one must wade is wide enough to make a Western bureaucrat
suicidal with envy, these early airplane hours impose an almost NKVD
regime on the departing visitor, who must sleep with his packed bag
beside him, and awaken in the dark to the summons at the door.
As, then, dawn and the day were beginning, the grinding and
springless bus took us to the airport through fifteen or so miles of the
spread-out city. Daybreak over the streets and gutters of Calcutta does
not recall that charming, Rene Clair succession of sounds and cheerful
sights through which Paris or London, or even New York, starts, still
fresh, to go about its daily business. In Calcutta, all those morning–
pangs that Paris or New York hides behind walls and shaded windows
are there in the streets before you. The day openly begins with the
ugliness, but not the joy, of birth. For hundreds of thousands, these
streets and gutters are bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, parlor and closet.
There is something quite unspeakable, as well as tragic and absorbing,
in looking into a thousand beds at once, and watching a thousand
scarecrow humans going through a kind of infantile parody of the
