Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“Shawls from Benares for the most beautiful…blessed shawls,” they called patiently.

On the upper floors behind gratings made of flimsy wooden slats appeared a multitude of rouged faces. They were strangely cheerful. This sudden atmosphere of pleasure, the provocative cries, the laughter like the gurgling of pigeons and the jangle of music Margit found disquieting. She looked around the clusters of heads on the porches. Women pointed fingers at her, emitting birdlike cries of astonishment. She raised a hand to them and fluttered it in greeting. A roar of merriment answered her.

“Is that a school?”

“No. A brothel.”

She looked down the street. Gramophones were playing; radio speakers blared. Girls who seemed identical, all with jewels in their hair, leaned out of innumerable windows.

“How is it possible? All those houses?” She could not conceive of it. “The whole street? There must be hundreds here.”

“Thousands,” he corrected her. “They don’t have an easy life. Every Saturday the father comes from the country to collect money for rice for the family.”

“Have you ever been here?”

“The very poorest come here, those who cannot afford a wife. This is not for a European.”

The noise in the alley mingled with the strumming of music. Someone called from a roof and clapped his hands to attract their attention. There was a pungent smell of incense.

They walked one behind the other like straying children, holding hands. The paving was uneven and slippery from dishwater and fermenting peelings.

“Oh, wait” —she caught hold of his arm— “something’s wrong. I’ve broken a heel.”

“Go barefoot — I don’t care,” he laughed. “Half the people here do.”

“Let’s go back to the car. Really, I don’t know what you find so amusing.” She was limping.

“You’re hopping like a sparrow.”

Suddenly it seemed to Margit that from all the houses, from roofs and porches, they were looking at her and laughing. Even the throng moving about in the street seemed to have become a mob of scoffers. Her whole body was covered with perspiration. What concern are they of mine, she scolded herself. I’ll get into the car, I’ll go away, disappear. It will be as if I died. I am from another world.

“Good evening,” someone behind them said in English.

They stopped. Ram Kanval had overtaken them. Nothing distinguished him from other men in this neighborhood: not the unfastened shirt over a slender chest glistening with sweat, the sandals on feet without socks, or the black eyes with the somnolent, hungry look.

“Perhaps you would like to visit me?” he suggested. “I live not far away, by the Ajmeri Gate. I will show you my new pictures.”

“That would be nice, but not today. Miss Ward has broken a heel. She must buy some sandals.”

“My acquaintance has a shoe shop not far from here. I will take you there.”

Through a murky yard littered with barrels, beside a little restaurant where strips of cake were being fried in an enormous pan, they squeezed past a gate and came out on another street.

The red reflection in the sky was not enough; the interiors of the shops burned with glittering lights. Thousands of colored bulbs blinked.

When chairs had been pulled up and they were seated, the painter disappeared for a moment into the labyrinth of rooms and partitions from which the rattle of a machine and the noise of hammering issued.

The owner had put a jacket on over his untucked shirt. He was a bearded Sikh with a fleshy nose. He ordered coffee to be served. They sensed that their presence had aroused his hopes and that large purchases were surely expected.

Two men knelt by Margit. They took off her shoes. A low lamp placed on the ground beside her threw a bright beam on her narrow bare feet. Bundles of varicolored sandals were brought. A large finger unfastened a strap and grasped her instep obliquely. In full light Istvan saw her legs, slender, graceful, exposed. The motions of the kneeling men, whose shadows played on the ceiling, seemed to transform the measuring of the shoes into a mysterious ritual.

“The shop is a real discovery!” Margit was elated as she walked out with three pairs of sandals. “I feel different already!”

On the street, night was falling. The air was still and heavy, choked with scents. “Just a moment — please wait — I will accompany you in a moment,” the painter said, then edged his way back into the interior of the shop.

“What are they quarreling about?” Margit was listening intently. “Did the Sikh cheat us?”

“Don’t pry,” Terey said. “You were not supposed to notice this scene. The painter is pressing his claim for a percentage because he brought them customers, and good ones, who didn’t haggle over prices. Understand: this is not greed. He is struggling to live. To live — that means to eat, and where does the money come from?”

“I had no intention of injuring his self-respect. Look — now the street is like a scene from an opera.”

In spite of the host of lights and winking neon signs, figures swathed in garments like sheets swarmed about in the golden dusk. They had embroidered openings for their eyes, like specters. The Muslim women were returning from the mosque. The slender figures in saris, with their beautiful eyes, moved with stately grace. Flashes of colored light dotted the men’s white shirts. An intoxicating aroma came from inside the shops: the smell of spices, insecticide, and incense. Bands of carefree, giggling children raced about in the crowd.

Ram Kanval returned with a boy who took the parcel of sandals from Margit. “I had to see to it that your purchases were put away in the car,” he said.

The little watchmen raised a joyful clamor on receiving half a rupee. The painter said his goodbyes, inviting them to come again and look at his pictures.

The walls of the Great Mosque reached the nearer stars. The minarets were like spears thrust into the sky. “Are you satisfied?” Terey turned to Margit as the beams from their headlights sent the white figures scampering.

“I felt that I was a drop in that relentless river of life, imperceptible, insignificant. We, white people, consider ourselves very important, as if the world would collapse without us. Newspapers, films, and our limited range of acquaintance feed that sense of superiority. Here I felt how terribly full of living things this country is. They multiply, they teem, they are on the march. One would like to know, where is this march going?”

Terey listened with an indulgent smile: the enchantment with India! She is still carried away with the spiritual life, the philosophy of renunciation. And then she will notice the effects. She will understand.

“I will show you where that river ends.”

He grew somber. They passed the last homestead. They drove down along the Yamuna. Its water flowed through a slimy bed and wove itself into a riffling current under a railroad bridge. A guard with a rifle paced up and down, whistling a doleful tune.

Dozens of fires blazed on the bank. Some were overgrown with bristling heaps of stone; others simply glowed red when light breezes from the water drifted over them.

“Why have you brought me here?”

From a clump of trees, cicadas strummed so gratingly that it was like a drill in the ears.

“Do they burn the dead here?” she whispered.

“And there is the cemetery.” He pointed to the water spotted with starlight. Streaks of smoke wandered above its surface. Over the bridge rumbled a line of tiny lighted squares: the windows of the southbound train to Bombay.

He took Margit’s hand and guided her among the burning pyres. A dry crackling came from the flames. Two fire tenders covered the stones sparingly with kindling, forming a meager bed of sinewy sticks for a body shrouded in a white cloth. A woman in white brought a small brass vessel and poured a little melted butter on the remains. The pyre, kindled with a torch, burned laboriously, reluctantly.