PARAKEETS AND PARCHESI
659
ritual of rising. The secret scratchings and movements, the grimaces and
adjustments, were unblinkably public. Squatting by twos on the curb,
one scarecrow-member, I suppose, of the appropriate caste, for the
act was never self-done-shaved another. Men pissed squatting, as they
seem to do generally in India. Children looked at the fly-buzzed heaps
of rice and other grains in the opening hut-like shops.
The identic street was also, 'of course, stable, or rather temple, as
well as house. On all sides, their diseased and bone-protruding divinities,
the gray and milk-dried cows, were sleepily stirring their frames. The
first sacred shite of the new morning, destined later for hearth-fire or,
mixed with mud, for wall of swarming hut, splashed close beside a still
unconscious worshiper, or by the counter of a devout food merchant.
Their serenities were conscious of their place. They took their time
about leaving their nocturnal couch, and, before mixing with the pasliing
throng, tranquilly surveyed their world and subjects. Here, two Olym–
pians strolled down the trolley tracks, while two cars, passengers bulging
from the windows and hanging from the sides, followed obediently in
retinue, bells hushed. There, in a dusty lot between two office buildings,
perhaps fifty of the deathless companions were gathered in a morning
audience. By twos and threes they nuzzled the roadside altar-bins
erected to hold the offerings of food and drink. Graciously, here and
there, a single goddess received from a favored worshiper a small bundle
of hay, or a handful of golden grain.
The plane for Bangkok, a K.L.M. Constellation fresh from Amster–
dam, was waiting on the field. After the last round of form-fillings, as
the sun completed its clean-up of each guerrilla patch of coolness that
had infiltrated under cover of the night, we popped like a cork into the
stomach of the blue and silver sky-whale. The plane door was Alice's
mirror: and on the other side, the inverse wonderland of the West.
How clean was each inch of upholstery, how rationally arranged each
functional gadget! The tall, blond Dutch steward and the brisk, blonde,
bronzed Dutch stewardess, with their unclouded blue eyes and their
well-soaped, unspotted skin, and their nurse-clean blouse and shirt,
looked as if they had just jumped, intact and fully clothed, out of the
forehead of a laundry machine. How was it possible for brandy to
taste as good as in those draughts which, at such an hour, as the plane
reached the cool air at 13,000 feet, we wickedly commanded? How
could bowels, so lately writhing in the Third Circle, so rejoice as at that
Flemish meal, wafted by the magic of the West from a scrubbed Dutch
kitchen to our receptive laps?
