562
PARTISAN REVIEW
colleague, in such a way that no shadow is thrown: cringing, on all
fours, against the floor, and crawling like an interrupted bug against
the wall or into a corner.
In the trees below the abandoned battlements of Fatehpur Sikri,
the green parakeets flashed
in
the sun, as handsome and colorful as the
gayest Mogul painting. But in the branches just outside the windows
of our big white bedroom on Cumballa Hill, the birds were large and
black. On the second morning, we recognized them. These were the
vultures of Malabar Hill, half a mile away, who had come to digest the
breakfast of Parsee bodies which had just been served them in the
Towers of Silence. They sat by the windows, looking us over appraising–
ly as we lay there, undertakers studying the new stiffs on their slabs.
Nothing is hidden-which is perhaps the heart of the mystery. In
the temples of Siva, there is an inner sanctuary, the holy of holies,
the perambulation of which is the most sacred of ritual acts. The sanc–
tuary's sole furnishing is a
lingam:
a massive, unadorned, upthrusting
stone phallus. This is no witty or beauteous symbol, no creature of
rational imagination prettily masked to slip past the Censor's prurient
eye, but the essential prose, the thing itself. I was told that on one of
the holy days at a temple in the south, a saintly yogi each year lies
for all of the twenty-four hours on his back in the sanctuary. Through
the power of his holiness and art, he maintains during the entire period
an erection rivaling the stone
lingam
beside him. The barren wives of
the region enter to him one by one, to be made fertile by the ap–
propriate touch of his remarkable member.
Wealth, too, and luxury and power are as unblinkingly displayed.
We did not visit any of the palaces of the princes, but it is plain that
India's independence and their own political demotion have not yet
toned down the unblushing extravagance of their personal lives. Much
of the meaning of wealth is, as Marx taught, by contrast, and con–
trast is present as sharp as Picasso in every town. The stump-armed
beggar opens the limousine's door. On the sidewalk in front of the
city's luxury hotel sleep during the night the wretched poor, so that
the departing guest has to step warily, as
if
searching for firm tufts in a
marsh. At the gates of great houses, stick-thin children and mothers
squat in the dust. Streetcars and buses swell with passengers, like a can
of spoiled vegetable; and no European, or wealthy Indian, ever rides
in a streetcar or local bus. The few who are very rich have, materially,
everything; tens of millions have, quite simply, nothing.
It
is impossible to be alone in India. Along every street, the crowds
