The Dancer and the Raja Read Free Page B

as skinny as toothpicks and eyes blackened with kohl look like the poor children of Andalusia, who also ran about naked in the slum districts. But here they are poorer. There are children so sick that they look like old men and others with their bellies swollen with worms; there are also beggars with terrible mutilations, which the skillful Firoz ensures are pushed away. “Here the poor are really poor,” says Anita, turning her eyes away from a leper covered in sores, who comes up to her holding out a bowl. She cannot hold back a grimace of disgust when she realizes that instead of hair, as she thought, the beggar’s head is covered in flies.
    Too rich, too poor: the contrasts in Bombay bewilder the girl from Málaga, but even so she wants to see it all, as though on her first day she wants to see and understand the complexity of her new country. Firoz takes them to the other side of the bay, and the carriage goes along a street that snakes up a hill. The horses pant as they go up. At the top there are five towers from where you can see the whole city. The view is magnificent, although the place looks as if it belongs in another world. The silence is constantly broken by the flapping of the vultures’ wings and the cawing of thousands of crows. These are the Towers of Silence, where the Parsis celebrate their funeral rites. Founded by a follower of Zarathustra, a priest from the east of Persia who composed hymns that re-created his conversations with God, the Parsi religion is one of humanity’s oldest. When they were expelled from Persia by the Moslems, the Parsis ended up in India. The English granted them a hill in Bombay so they could dispose of their dead. They do not bury or burn them; they place them naked on marble slabs on those five towers. The vultures and crows pounce on the corpses and devour them in seconds, so that death goes back to life. The only ones that have the right to handle the bodies are the “conductors of the dead.” Dressed in a simple cloth round their waists and carrying a stick, they throw the bones and any remains that have not been eaten into the sea. This is a place that attracts foreigners for its spectacular views and perhaps also out of a kind of morbid curiosity. But Anita cannot bear the spectacle. The air laden with smells, the heat, her nausea, and the sight of the predatory birds and some men who seem already to be in another world, are making her feel bad. “Get me out of here, please!” she begs Mme Dijon.
    On the way back, going round the bay, the funeral pyres that light up the dusk impress Anita almost as much as the Towers of Silence. She is not used to death being so close. For the young girl from Málaga, the day has held too many strong emotions. Dizzy from the colors, smells, and sounds, she feels faint. What she has seen is not a city, or even a country, but a whole world. A world too strange and too mysterious for an Andalusian girl who has hardly come out of adolescence. A world that makes her feel afraid. Suddenly she feels like sobbing, like emptying her body of tears, but she restrains herself. She has a great sense of honor; she is brave and she makes an effort to overcome her feelings. How far away Spain is! she says to herself, sighing.
    Later, as she goes down to the Sea Lounge, the hotel restaurant, stunningly beautiful in her evening gown, as etiquette requires, Anita Delgado stumbles. Perhaps it is because of the heat that the ventilators cannot dissipate or perhaps owing to the familiar melody played by the orchestra that reminds her so much of her previous life. This time, the effort she makes to regain control of herself does no good. She takes a few hesitant steps and ends up collapsing on the thick Persian carpet, causing a little stir among her companions, the other diners and waiters, who crowd around the young woman of pristine beauty, not knowing exactly what to do to make her come to.
    1 Excerpts of the sentences