230
PARTISAN REVIEW
decaying trench coats and flea-bitten Fedoras, smoking Fatimas and
watching the action on Easy Street from the sagging dashboard-ashtray
balconies of the Hotel Bijou , which has a Piper Cub on its roof, with a
monkey in the cockpit .
The bastard Hindu English of the signs speaks to the gibberish of
objects rollicking around the intersection, wagons teeming with junk ,
a burned-out typewriter keyboard hanging in the broken wings of an
umbrella , an English horn stuffed with newspaper, a pedal-style
sewing machine , an old Victrola, nothing new , complete or
unpatched , much of the scrap inherited from England like the scraps of
English childishly printed on signs, a pair of deformed spectacles
("Eyes Fixed " ) casting nervous sideways looks at the Cheshire Cat
smile of dentures ("Painless Tooth Extracted " ), a painted finger
pointing under carefree letters , "This Way for Private Sexual
Diseases , " or better , the blurb on the Indian edition of
Northanger
Abbey
crammed into my back pocket , " Cunning! Compassioned!
Strangely touchy!" English, logic , geometry- the old cow India
chews it all up and shits a masterpiece of happy nonsense more in
harmony with us and more beautiful than the full-moon Taj Mahal we
saw two nights ago. Meanwhile, smiling at everything , we play out the
vaudeville of the rickshaw fare dispute, Mutt and Jeff haggling with
the organ-grinder on a Turn-of-the-Century stage, the happy city
backdrop behind us, eye-windows winking , a cat on the fence and the
man in the moon. We leave him singing his curses as we highstep it
through the wild west rambledown burlesque and swing-door saloon
tonsorial parlor porches of cow town in the magic hour , looking for the
flver.
Mutilation Alley hits us like a slaughterhouse in the middle of a
feast , the taste of slime filming the air, coming with a spoiled-meat
smell carried by the smoke from the pyres. In India you strut from
honkytonk into the gauntlet of atrocities before you can think to stop
smiling . They line the approach to the river , mauled , chewed bloody,
stumps raised, prodding for alms , hectic faces crying long rag tongues ,
mouths to stuff, any scrap or coin , any token of disgust , scratching with
their voices to break the skin and open sores in our ears , to swallow our
averted wholeness in the hot contagion they blow into the air with
every breath . We plunge ahead with half-shut eyes as if it were raining
acid , each drop burning a passage through us. Everything I see has the
