Stuart Mitchner
INDIAN ACTION
The dying man ' s imaginary food keeps catching in his
rhroar , every swallow grinding the hot skull into my thigh, wetting me
with his fever while I think how I would film the scene in a movie, no , a
cartoon of India the cow , swallowing everything she laps up with her
black tongue , the little wooden decomposing train of cars the color of
dried blood funneled through the passages and alleys of her system.
All
rhe time we hold onto our seats , telling ourselves it ' s only a night
ride between Agra and Benares , nobody's dying, and nobody's eating
us . To survive India , stop trying to assimilate it; let it assimilate you.
The man saucing me with his sweat knows ; his eyes strain to say it,
' 'I'm being eaten!" His head rolls in the lap of the big red-robed
woman taking him to Benares to die. He can't see us, can't see the
window or the hot coals Ray calls tiger's eyes flashing and dissolving in
rhe acid of the night. His gaze is fixed on the fat spider bustling in the
empry complexity of its web , up by the ceiling where the caged bulb
sways and fades. Maybe he sees a fantasy of Benares in the web's
luminous streets, the spider-river waiting to drink his ashes after they
burn him . When we get off to change trains , I can still feel his sweat on
my leg , like a cold touch in the four-in-the-morning Ganges
mist .
1
India drops a hush and a bomb in the same breath . Sometimes the
bomb comes as a relief, because the intensity of the hush has you
lisrening seriously to the voices in your blood. We were in that state of
quiet, eating fly-specked cupcakes and sipping tea, nervously aware of
rhe hundreds of pilgrims camped in the chill of the platform, one mass
breath rising above them in a haggard cloud suddenly gutted by
violem mushroomings of steam delivered of the thing we all wanted ,
rhe rrain , the bomb , fallen upon us without warning , a hole opening
in rhe sky, all noise on the other side ofit . Everything explodes at once,
smokestack , wheels , lights , astonished eyes, the engineer's teeth, no
two rhings in the same frame, nothing in scale , rushing crowd and
