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who was waiting when the dust cleared, leaning over his handlebars ,
smiling through us as if he ' d seen our little movie before. He had the
absolute, indifferent power of rickshaw illumination, ready to pedal
you upside-down to Tierra del Fuego or any of the other cosmic
water-holes hidden in the' '0" he was forming with his fingers. "River
going?" His tone implied that the only road to the river passed
through that "0." Quoting the price , he was like a bored aristocrat
offering a fortune to street singers, for one song. He displayed his
rickshaw as a work of art, pointing out the cozy interior, the Victorian
upholstery , the fluted canopy, and, with lingering fingers, the
painting of the Ganges and the gold towers of Benares on the rear of
the carriage. We climbed in , and he pedaled off, singing to himself,
laughing , too.
Nooked in black plush , not like a coffin or a gondola, but a jaunty
black , for an erotic rendezvous on the Santa Fe trail , so it feels , we
move along, lulled over the ruts in a cradle rhythm, around sudden
elephants , relaxing in rickshaw fog, squeezed to a balance of hips and
shoulders, feeling every gritty wrinkle of the road , the train of images
broken and mended in the rolling momentum, oily motor debris, fans
and fly-wheels reassirnilated into the horned shadows of bullocks
pulling wagons, the horns looping innertubes, the loops cropping
angles , all junk smoothly digested by motion , eye and wheel in
symmetry, no loose ends, even as the lines of motion multiply
approaching city center, objects flowing in from all sides, shanties,
bicycles , tins , signboards, latticed shutters, each striking off the next
into the next , bewitching us with the magic shadow theater of the
wheels until we pour into a great drain of a square whirling with
rickshaws, bullock carts, tongas, horses, jitneys, comicstrip jalopies
and hundreds of bicycles ringing adolescent music with every pressing
of bells.
Any minute now Donald Duck might round the corner in his
canary-yellow coupe while the open-mouthed face of my childhood
watches us overflowing the bright frame, Pluto , Mickey, Charlie Chan,
the Green Hornet, Gabby Hayes, Kilroy , the Shadow , the monocled
Peanut man , the whole crowd, the drifters, the Gunga Dins , the
pith-helmeted jungle troopers , the seersucker-suited traders and
conspirators , the Sydney Greenstreets and Peter Lorres of the grade Z ,
washed-up zombies and wolfmen on the last cure, seedy spies in
