56-4
PARTISAN REVIEW
fastened themselves to your back.
As
you leave the hotel entrance, and
even before you leave it, you are hauled and shoved by cab-drivers,
starters, peddlers, guides, and always beggars.
If
your cab stops in front
of a store or market, at once appear two or three bearers, with their
large baskets, competing for your service, and several also of the name–
less omnipresent persons who, though they usually kriow nothing of
your language or intentions or interests, insist on piloting you along
whatever course of shopping or sightseeing or plain business lies ahead,
and who can be neither discouraged nor got rid of.
Vain is the hope for leisurely contemplation of temple or sculpture
or tank in some quiet town away from the metropolis.
As
your car slows
before the gate, forms spring from the surrounding earth. Every step of
the passage through the temple enclosure will be accompanied by a vast,
not silent retinue. Do not think that you will be permitted to look in
your oWn good time at a particular carving of your choice: a figure,
pointing elsewhere, chattering, pulling, will be at your side.
At the colossal rock sculptures, south of Madras near the site of
the Seven Pagodas, a boy of 13 or 14 attached himself to us, for
no possible functional purpose. He trotted along, a few feet behind.
When we got back in the car, to drive on a mile or two to the carvings
on the cliff face, and then to the one stone pagoda still left above the
sea, he ran, under that red-hot sun, in pursuit. We finally left, and
drove back three or four miles to a rest house, where we ate the
sandwiches and drank the hot soda water which we had brought.
Before the sand·.,yiches were finished, our boy came dog-like up the
dusty road.
And woe is yours if, overwhelmed by sentiment or guilt or love, you
begin, before your car or train is already rolling in departure, to
distribute alms among the desolate wretches who implore you. At
those same rock sculptures, which stand on the empty land, in no town
or village, my poor Marcia, torn beyond endurance by the misery she
saw in a hag and child before her, and by, no doubt also, obscure mem–
ories of missionary sermons in her Presbyterian childhood, started,
though she had been amply warned, to open her purse. At once, from
every quarter of that empty horizon, like gulls infallibly centering
toward the garbage about to be dropped astern, wild and grotesque
shapes thronged clamoring around us. What was, or seemed to be, the
dark and sudden threat did not subside until our driver, lounging
ambiguously in some background shade, sprang to the rescue, with a
volley of curses (by their sound, they must have been), and sharp
blows for a number of heads. After all, we were his prey, not theirs.
