PARAKEETS AND PARCHESI
St.1
clothes against the laundry rocks, a kind of pervasive soft shuffling
noise, from birds, bare feet, the big tropical ceiling fans, and the low,
often whispering voices in which so many Hindus speak.
It
is through the eyes, those windows to the soul, that the main
thrust is carried. We, whose culture is Anglo-Saxon as well as European,
have decided, for the sake of business and tranquillity, not to look at
many things. Our animals are murdered by professional executioners, in
parts of town which we do not visit, and we receive into our ken only
the unreproaching steak and chop. Our idiots and halt and senile, we
lock up behind walls and grass and trees, where we seldom or never
pass. We thrust birth and disease and death into the sterilizing pans
of our hospitals. We consider beggars in the streets a crime against the
law as well as nature. The poor, if they are always with us, are taught to
be decent and respectable, to keep the floor clean and the curtains
drawn. In the extremity of our squeamishness, we even begin to abolish
poverty itself.
But India, with the pedantry of the traditional villain who compels
the fair maiden to witness the torture of her lover, puts everything
naked before us. This poverty, compared to which our lowest Neapolitan
slum
is
palace,
is
neither decent nor respectable, but stark, abject, disease–
and dirt-ridden, absolutely and unyieldingly wretched. These are no
quaint and human beggars: alcoholic Irishmen who you know will
use the quarter for a shot of bad whiskey, or picturesque town charac–
ters adding a little spice to the night
life,
or, perhaps, a fellow who
has had a bad break and may make a comeback with a bit of help
to tide him over. These beggars are thoroughbreds, born and trained
for the sport of saints. They arise out of the ground at the approach
of a stranger, like the damned before Dante and Vergil in the wildest
chasms of Hell. They are thinner than skeletons, with distorted strings
of black hair, backward twisted feet, stumps for arms, with sprouts of
cartilege or flesh growing out in a dozen directions like new shoots from
the stump of a maple, blind eyes with dripping sockets, withered babies,
pus-filled sores, and voices that whine like sawmills.
The low-caste "sweepers" in the hotels or private homes-the
lowest of them among the Untouchable "scheduled castes" which have
been abolished by the new Constitution, but not by life-do not allow
the higher-born the moral luxury of the reflection that all men are
after all equal, in worth, dignity, law, and so on. For millennia, the
shadow of an Untouchable has been enough to pollute a high-caste
Hindu. No doubt that is part of the explanation why the sweepers,
sub-human by definition, move, on the approach of anyone except a
