Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“So you only have to be promised half a rupee to betray my trust and intrude on my privacy? Aren’t you getting enough?”

“Sahib, I wanted to do the best for myself. We will take out the carpet in two days.”

“Serve the dinner. If you don’t like working for me, you can quit any time and be that merchant’s helper, since you know so much about rugs.”

The cook stood as if stricken by a thunderbolt. His jaw dropped at the thought of leaving the house. There were tears in his eyes. Istvan was sorry for him.

The sweeper had vanished some time before; on hearing angry words, he preferred to disappear.

Terey pulled off his shirt, which was clinging to his back, and removed his sandals. With relief he immersed himself to the neck in the water that was waiting for him in the tub, and relaxed. A few minutes had hardly passed when Pereira was scratching discreetly at the frosted glass in the bathroom door.

“Sahib, dinner is on the table,” he said coaxingly. “Today we have chicken with rice and raisins.”

When he drove the car toward the center of New Delhi at six, the heat had subsided in a golden dust; the softened asphalt smacked under the wheels. He passed slow-moving two-wheeled arbas pulled by docile white oxen. Birds sat on their pale necks and combed through their coats with their beaks, searching for ticks. The drivers, nearly naked, dozed squatting on the shafts. Half asleep, they emitted cries and made disjointed motions, prodding the animals’ hindquarters with sharp sticks. At the sound of the horn they woke and tugged at the strings attached to copper rings in the beasts’ wet nostrils. But before he had passed the arbas their heads had already fallen onto their meager chests, which gleamed with trickles of sweat.

The bare, stony hills around the city looked as if there had been fires on them not long ago, with their dark red, glowing rocks and ashy white bristles of dry grass. The wind raised columns of reddish dust; it powdered the foreheads of pilgrims shrouded in white who moved with small, determined steps as their hands rested on shepherds’ staffs.

Figures like those in Doré’s copperplate etchings in the old Bible, Istvan thought. The world of a thousand years ago.

Huge trucks, with raised coops on their flatbeds, wobbled as they moved along, loaded with sacks of cotton. The hoods painted with stars and flowers reminded Terey of the tops of boxes made by peasants from the region around Debrecen. They passed each other, exchanging joyful blasts of their horns. Some drivers had fastened copper trumpets with red rubber bulbs, two or even three, to their vehicles. They drove the trucks with one hand and with the other played the whole scale of squeals and whines. Passengers casually picked up, sprawling as best they could on the freight, raised lean, twiggy hands in friendly salutes.

In a flutter of dhotis like great skeins of white unrolling, breathless cyclists came riding up in swarms, a little dazzled by the glare, their dark knees moving up and down like levers on a machine. Their unlaced boots dangled from their bare, callused feet. At this time of day the streets were a pulsing mass of bodies; the return from work had begun.

Terey made his way under the viaduct, with difficulty passing the tramways plastered with clusters of people hanging on, and turned into Connaught Place. Motionless clumps of trees and blossoming branches gave off a smell of blighted greenery and dust. The silence startled him. Bicycle bells in the distance chirped like cicadas. Cows, sacred to Hindus, slept in the shade; beside them were whole families of peasants seeking a semblance of coolness and relaxation.

He put on the brakes.

The colonnade of Central Delhi spread in a wide arc of separate shops which even had glass windows. It was possible to walk all the way around it in the shade, under arches supported by light-colored columns. Here sat sellers of souvenirs hammered out of heated horn into the shapes of chalices and lamp shades; a potbellied fellow hawked a stack of sandals; the colorful covers of cheap American detective novels were displayed on a piece of plastic. A peddler discreetly pushed forward a collection of pictures of sensuously entwined couples — an imitation of a frieze from the Black Pagoda, produced somewhere among the bordellos of Calcutta or Hong Kong.

From a little stove under a pillar came the smell of roasted peanuts. A hand studded with rings was extended, offering the nuts in a horn formed by twisting a large leaf. He looked with pleasure into the woman’s beautiful eyes, but shook his head.

“Not today,” he said, so as not to leave her without hope.

He collected Ferenc’s films and was driving to Volga for iced coffee when he caught sight of Miss Ward — her slim figure, her graceful legs. Her chestnut hair glistened red in a streak of sunlight. She was so absorbed in examining some homespun cotton printed with little horses, buffalo heads, and dancing goddesses that he overtook her without her noticing. He stood close behind her, watching the hands through which a cascade of linen poured, before saying in a laughing voice:

“Hello, Margit.”

“Hello,” she flung back. But no sooner had she thrown him a sharp glance with her blue eyes than her face lighted in a friendly smile. “Ah, it’s you.”

“You have forgotten my name? Istvan. Why have you given no sign of life? I thought you were stuck in Agra.”

“For the time being they are keeping me in Delhi. I have four hours’ work at a clinic. I’m learning the language, the indispensable phrases, ‘Be calm,’ ‘This won’t hurt,’ ‘Look to the left, to the right,’ ‘Don’t move,’ ‘Everything will be all right.’”

“Are you staying long?”

“Till the end of the month.”

“What do you do by yourself?”

“How do you know that I am by myself? Do you think I’m bored?” the girl laughed. “True, Grace is in Jaipur. I was counting on her to initiate me into this world, but now I see that I can take care of myself very well. I make the rounds of the shops, I see more than I buy. Folk crafts cost nothing here! Embroidery, peasant prints like this”—she shook out a strip of material printed with galloping horses. “Sandalwood figurines. I must take something home to each of my women friends to prove that I thought of them even in India.”

“Don’t buy them here.” He took the fabric printed with blue and vermilion out of her hand. “I will show you real peasant saris. Have you been to Old Delhi?”

“No. I go around the neighborhoods I know. Mr. Vijayaveda advised me not to venture there. Would you have time to go with me some day?”

“It would be a pleasure to take someone there for the first time, to hear their cries of rapture and admiration — to look at India again through other eyes.”

“Do you have your car? I sent away the one from UNESCO. I wanted to walk around a bit when the heat let up.”

Angular rays of sunlight invaded the tiled passage under the arcade. Motes of dust sailed in the glare. The seller of fabric unfastened his shirt to the navel to cool his bulging, shaggy chest with a palm leaf fan.

“How do you feel — being here?” Terey took the young woman by the hand.

“Well, even very well. Look how I’ve tanned.” She showed him a supple arm. Her skin had a golden tint. There were freckles on it, which made him smile.

“Shall we begin with coffee and ice cream? Or go on a souvenir hunt first?”

“Can one risk eating anything here? So many times they’ve frightened me with talk of amoebae, dysentery, typhus.”

“Look — they all eat, and they are still alive.” He pointed to peasant women in orange skirts who were camping under the trees.

“But there are such multitudes of them, and only one of me,” she laughed.