566
PARTISAN REVIEW
to give in return--on the inapplicable Benthamite calculus--consider–
ably less than nothing.
The impious leather industry, working on cattle dead by nature,
is allotted to the lowest order of the Untouchables; and a powerful
tendency of the Congress Party-numbering among its leaders Purushot–
tamdas Tandon, the Congress President-has as its political platform the
total elimination of leather footwear from Indian life.
Driving along a country road one day, we had the driver stop the
car to see what two men were carrying in a kind of hammock slung to
a long pole. The car drew to the side of the road in front of them,
and they, declining to change their route in order to by-pass the car,
stood still. As we walked back toward them, the assured head of a calf
peered over the folds of cloth. The men explained through our driver
that they were thus carrying the calf "because it was only a month old."
In 1570, the Emperor Akbar, who had already squared some sort
of circle by marrying a Hindu, a Moslem, and a Christian, and by
adopting for his own faith a fusion of his wives' contradictory profes–
sions, built the fortress-city of Fatehpur Sikri. After living in it, as his
capital, for fifteen years, he, and all other human beings, abandoned it
forever-why, no man knows. Fatehpur Sikri still stands, almost intact
in that dry, hot air. The red sandstone, of which it is built and carved,
glows in the sun. Vast empty courtyards are bounded by pavilions, many–
storied columned treasuries, and great towers. Each wife has a palace
of her own, with the red stone intricately cut for each in the style of
her faith and culture. Great balconies overlook stone channels planned in
the Mogul fashion for continuously flowing water, audience halls open
to the sun, and a gigantic parchesi board on which the pieces, played
by the Court, were pretty boys and girls. In this red city, with the least
of changes, tens of thousands of Indians could live better housed than all
but a handful of their countrymen. Though two large villages have
welled up only a few miles away, no one but a colony of monkeys, in–
variably seen just as they disappear over a wall or balustrade into a
remoter section, lives in Fatehpur Sikri, or has ever lived there in the
three centuries and a half since the withdrawal of Akbar.
A sensible utilitarian, when he makes a little money, improves his
standard of life, as all the world knows-gets a cup of coffee or a Cadil–
lac. You can, on an Indian street, see the rupee that a starved Hindu has
somehow got hold of, passing to the soothsayer who is reading his palm,
or buying an offering for the responsive goddess of fertility. One often
sees two brilliant diamonds set into the skin at the sides of the noses of
shrunk peasant women, or a ruby on a kind of toe-ring or anklet.
