The Dancer and the Raja Read Free Page A

her bed and cry, she does not want to make a fuss in front of her companions. They will say she is a silly little girl, and how can she expect the raja in person to travel two thousand kilometers to meet her, and of course, they are right, she thinks, but even so she feels disappointed. So the best thing will be to go out and discover her new country.
    Let’s see if at the same time I can get rid of this dizziness that makes me stumble as if I’d been drinking! She has spent weeks dreaming of that moment: “Come on, I want to see it all and explore everything …” she tells Mme Dijon. Then she turns to her maid. “Lola, it’ll be best if you stay here, in case the smell makes you sick, like in Alexandria.”

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    In the street it smells of rotten fruit, of mud and incense from the little altars. Cows wander around freely and no one seems to be surprised, except Anita, who cannot understand why they do not use them to pull the rickshaws, little carts with two wheels that carry passengers, instead of allowing it to be done by skeletal men who look more dead than alive. “We would willingly eat them,” says the driver of the horse-drawn carriage, a Moslem named Firoz who wears a little beard and a kurta so dirty that it is impossible to even guess at its original color. “… But for Hindus, the life of a cow is worth more than that of a man, so … who’s going to eat them!” The carriage crosses paths with shiny new double-decker trams; they have just been put into service, and they drive around the streets in the city center between wide esplanades of lawn and magnificent buildings, all of the same Victorian, neo-Gothic style. “These trams are better than the ones in Liverpool,” Firoz states, proud of his city. When they arrive at Crawford Market, Anita is amazed at the profusion of merchandise: it is a real Oriental bazaar. “This is where the English and Parsis come to shop,” explains the Moslem. “They are the ones who have the most money.” They sell everything, from poodles to Turkish tobacco or fruits they do not even recognize. The shopkeepers offer the two women some to try, from the top of pyramids of fruit and vegetables. The bas-reliefs that decorate the metallic structure and the interior fountain are the work of an artist called Lockwood Kipling, whose son, Rudyard, has just been honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature barely two months earlier.
    Anita spends her time exploring all the bazaars that come after Crawford Market, full of shops and stalls that sell cereals and sugar from Bengal, sweets from Kashmir, tobacco from Patna, or cheeses from Nepal; in the cloth bazaar she wants to touch all the different kinds of silks in India; in the thieves’ market she cannot keep her eyes off the jewels and other more curious objects. In two square kilometers there are a dozen big bazaars, more than a hundred temples and sanctuaries, and more merchandise on sale than Anita and Mme Dijon have ever seen in their whole lives.
    Away from the colonial center, with its opulent buildings and wide avenues, there is a labyrinth of alleys, an ants’ nest of people, a hodgepodge of races and religions, an explosion of life and chaos such as only the great metropolises of Asia can generate. Anita and Mme Dijon have to stop from time to time to wipe away the sweat and take a deep breath. “What a noisy city, full of all kinds of Indians dressed, or half-dressed, in strange ways or almost barefoot!” Anita would write in her diary. 1 It seems to her that they are all talking in different languages at the same time. In a small fishing port, the koli are auctioning the morning’s catch. The shouts, the smell, and the atmosphere remind Anita of the fish market in the district of Málaga where she spent her childhood, a poor quarter known as El Perchel, because of the hooks where the fish was hung to dry. And the children with legs