The Monkey Grammarian Read Free

later, Galta was abandoned. Not for long however: first monkeys and then bands of wandering pariahs occupied the ruins.
     
    It is not more than an hour’s walk away. One leaves the highway on one’s left, winds one’s way amid rocky hills and climbs upward along ravines that are equally arid. A desolation that is not so much grim as touchingly sad. A landscape of bones. The remains of temples and dwellings, archways that lead to courtyards choked with sand, façades behind which there is nothing save piles of rubble and garbage, stairways that lead to nothing but emptiness, terraces that have fallen in, pools that have become giant piles of excrement. After making one’s way across this rolling terrain, one descends to a broad, bare plain. The path is strewn with sharp rocks and one soon tires. Despite the fact that it is now four o’clock in the afternoon, the ground is still burning hot. Sparse little bushes, thorny plants, vegetation that is twisted and stunted. Up ahead, not far in the distance, the starving mountain. A skin of stones, a mountain covered with scabs. There is a fine dust in the air, an impalpable substance that irritates and makes one feel queasy. Things seem stiller beneath this light that is weightless and yet oppressive. Perhaps the word is not
stillness
but
persistence:
things persist beneath the humiliation of the light. And the light persists. Things are more thinglike, everything is persisting in being, merely being. One crosses the stony bed of a little dry stream and the sound of one’s footsteps on the stones is reminiscent of the sound of water, but the stones smoke, the ground smokes. The path now winds among conical, blackish hills. A petrified landscape. This geometrical severity contrasts with the deliriums that the wind and the rocks conjure up, there ahead on the mountain. The path continues upward for a hundred yards or so, at a not very steep incline, amid heaps of loose stones and coarse gravel. Geometry is succeeded by the formless: it is impossible to tell whether this debris is from the dwellings fallen to ruins or whether it is what remains of rocks that have been worn away, disintegrated by the wind and the sun. The path leads downward once again: weeds, bilious plants, thistles, the stench of cow dung and human and animal filth, rusty tin oil drums full of holes, rags with stains of menstrual blood, a flock of vultures around a dog with its belly ripped to pieces, millions of flies, a boulder on which the initials of the Congress Party have been daubed with tar, the dry bed of the little stream once again, an enormous nim-tree inhabited by hundreds of birds and squirrels, more flat stretches of ground and ruins, the impassioned flight of parakeets, a mound that was perhaps once a cenotaph, a wall with traces of red and black paint (Krishna and his harem of cowherds’ wives, royal peacocks, and other forms that are unrecognizable), a marsh covered with lotuses and above them a cloud of butterflies, the silence of the rocks beneath the luminous vibrations of the air, the breathing of the landscape, terror at the creaking of a branch or the sound of a pebble displaced by a lizard (the constant invisible presence of the cobra and that other, equally impalpable presence, which never leaves us, the shadow of our thoughts, the reverse of what we see and speak and are), until finally, again walking along the bed of the same dry stream, one reaches a tiny valley.
     
    Behind, and on either side, the flat-topped hills, the landscape leveled by erosion; ahead, the mountain with the footpath that leads to the great sacred pool beneath the rocks, and from there, via the pilgrim path, to the sanctuary at the summit. Scarcely a trace of the abandoned dwellings remains. Along the path here there are three towering, ancient banyan trees. In the shade of them—or rather: immersed in their depths, hidden in the semidarkness of their bowels, as though they were caves and not trees—are a