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PARTISAN REVIEW
stopped rubbing only to show how swiftly he could row us our of there .
His price was too fair. He seemed suspiciously anxious to get us in his
boat and have us believe that we could evacuate the disintegrating city
only by purting ourselves under the wings of his oars . The tiers of
ledges behind us were convincingly deserted except for one pallid ,
emaciated cow eating what looked to be nothing but a dribble of
gloom. Night spread like visible decay , breaking the edges of the steps
into a black powder, cracks opening between the terraces, walls and
temple-faces crumbling in a landslide of shadow, everything
truncated, pitted, distorted, half the cow gone already, as if it had
been eating itself. The boatman had to guide us down through the
smoky air at the water 's edge. We could barely see the ragged prow.
Mosca buzzed at our backs , chafing us to leap the black space of water.
Ray made it, but I landed off-balance, nearly capsizing
us .
The
boatman scolded, which made me feel I'd botched an initiation,
risking the anger of the river.
I believed it. India plagues the mind with vivid dramas of guilt,
every step a possible desecration of something , every callous thought or
averted look a violation that might have to be redeemed . The
transgression could have been my behavior on the train or my revulsion
as we shivered through the teeth of the gauntlet. As soon as I made the
jump I felt it was a test which would be judged , and the idea had
thrown me into a panic, that and the impact of the air, sruck to my face
like the rigging of a web. While he rowed us into the darkest spaces of
the river, I was picking bits of the stuff from my face , some of it fine as
down , bur slippery to touch . The night was swarming with vague
particles , pieces of the shore , which seemed to be diffusing itself, the
few last scraps curling like paper in a fire, temples consumed,
imploded, sucked back into their own hollows. The soft things in the
air, the moth-smooth grains that brushed my face as they drifted, must
be ashes.
Every stroke of the oars scattered Benares behind us like a trail of
dissolving embers . Within a minure I had lost sense of our relation to
the shore. The boatman probed as much as he rowed , treating the river
as a being whose complex desires could be satisfied only by the tips of
these particular oars . He faced us, buzzing , humming to himself,
distorting his mouth , stirring up a suction of noises and images so
