kinds of dress, women gliding, women in full-length embroidered white veils, a mesh aperture at the eyes, hexagonal, to give them a view of the latticed world, the six-sided cage that adjusted itself to every step they took, every shift of the eyes. Donkeys carrying bricks, children squatting over open sewers. I glanced at my directions, made an uncertain turn. Copper and brassware. A cobbler working in the shadows. This was the lineal function of old cities, to maintain an unchanged form, let time hang with the leather goods and skeins of wool. Hand-skilled labor, rank smells and disease, the four-hundred-year-old faces. There were horses, sheep, donkeys, cows and oxen. I received impressions that I was being followed.Signs in Urdu, voices calling over my head from the wooden balconies. I wandered for half an hour, too closed in to be able to scan for landmarks, the minarets and domes of Badshahi, the great mosque at the northwest edge. Without a map I couldn't even stop someone, point to an approximate destination. I moved into a maze of alleys beyond the shops and stalls. Intensely aware. American. Giving myself advice and directions. A woman stuck cow dung in oval disks on a low wall to dry.I turned to see who might be following. Two small boys, the older maybe ten. They held back for a moment. Then the younger said something, barefoot, a bright green cap on his head, and the other one pointed back the way I'd come and started to walk in that direction, looking to see if I would follow.They led me to the house Owen was in. One slender white man looking for the other, that boy had reasoned. What else would I be doing in those lost streets?The door to his room was open. He reclined on a wooden bench covered with pillows and old carpets. There were some books and papers in a copper serving tray on the floor. A water jug on a small chest of drawers. A plain chair for me. Not much else in the room. He kept it partially dark to reduce the effects of the April sun.He was reading when I entered and looked up to regard me in a speculative manner, trying to balance my physical make-up, my shape, proportions, form, with some memory he carried of a name and a life. A moment in which I seemed to hang between two points in time, a moment of silent urging. The house smelled of several things including the trickle of sewage just outside.Owen looked a little weary, a little more than weary, but his voice was warm and strong and he seemed ready to talk.
(It wasn't until I'd put my hand to the marble tomb, the night before, that I knew I'd try to find him, talk to him one last time. Wasn't that the image he'd wanted me to retain, a man in a room full of stones, a library of stones, tracing the shape of Greek letters with his country-rough hands?)
'I've been preparing for this all my life,' he said. 'Not that I knew it. I didn't know it until I walked into this room, out of the color and light, the red scarves worn as turbans, the food stalls out there, the ground chili and turmeric, the pans of indigo, the coloring for paint, those trays of brilliant powders and dyes. The mustard, bay leaf, pepper and cardamom. You see what I've done, don't you, by coming into this room? Brought only the names. Pine nuts, walnuts, almonds, cashews. All I can tell you is that I'm not surprised to find myself here. The moment I stepped inside it seemed right, it seemed inevitable, the place I've been preparing for. The correct number of objects, the correct proportions. For sixty years I've been approaching this room.”'Anand speaks of you.”'He wrote. He told me you'd been there. I knew you'd come.”'Did you?”'But when you stood in the door I didn't recognize you at all. I was surprised, James. I wondered who you were. You looked familiar-but in the damnedest way. I didn't understand. I thought something was
He was a wanderer. He wandered by bus and train and walked a great deal, walked for six weeks at one point, rock-cut sanctuary to stone pillar, wherever there were inscriptions to look at, mainly ancient local languages in Brahmi script. Anand had offered to lend him a car but Owen was afraid to drive in India, afraid of the animals on the road, the people asleep at night, afraid of being stuck in traffic on some market street with crowds moving around the car, men pushing, no space, no air. The nightmarish force of people in groups, the power of religion-he connected the two. Masses of people suggested worship and delirium, obliteration of control, children trampled. He traveled second-class on crowded trains with wooden seats. He walked among the sleeping forms in railroad stations, saw people carry rented bedding onto the trains. He slept in hotels, bungalows, small cheap lodges near archaeological sites and places of pilgrimmage. Sometimes he stayed with friends of Anand, friends of other colleagues. He would reflect. A lifetime of colleagues with their worldwide system of names and addresses. Bless them.The rusty tin villages, the brick kilns, the water buffalo silvery with mud. His bus always seemed to sit between diesel trucks shooting smoke. Near Poona a dozen people sat under a banyan tree, all wearing pink-white gauze. In Surat he wandered down along the railroad tracks, finding a shadow city that stretched from, was part of the real city. The uncounted were here in shacks and tents and in the street. The streetcorner barber and eye doctor. The ear cleaner with his mustard oil and little spoon. The shaver of armpits. Life swarmed and brooded in the pall of smoke from a thousand cooking fires. Hindi graffiti in blue and red. Swastikas, horses, scenes from the life of Krishna. A man in an Ambassador picked him up on the road outside Mysore. The man drove with his hand on the horn, moving bullocks and people but at their own pace, in their own weary time. He was young, with a faint mustache, a ripe underlip, and wore a green shirt and sleeveless pink sweater.'You are from?”'America.”'And you are liking India?”'Yes,' Owen said, 'although I would have to say it goes beyond liking, in almost every direction.”'And you are going exactly where at the present moment?”'Just north. Eventually to Rajsamand. This is the major destination, I would say.”The man said nothing. The car was wedged for a ten-mile stretch between a pair of diesel trucks. horn ok please. A long line of trucks, a hundred trucks with turquoise grills and cabs full of trinkets and charms, stood along the road outside a gas station, tanks empty, pumps empty, waiting for days, drivers cooking over charcoal fires. Men in one village wore only white, women in a field in flared red skirts. The high-pitched voices, the characters engraved in stone. All over India he searched for the rock edicts of Ashoka. They marked the way to holy places or commemorated a local event in the life of Buddha. Near the border with Nepal he saw the fine-grained sandstone column that was the best preserved of the edicts, thirty-five feet tall, a lion seated atop a bell capital. In the countryside north of Madras he found an edict on forgiveness and nonviolence, translated for him two weeks later by one T. V. Coomeraswamy of the Archaeological Museum in Sarnath. To the study of Dharma, to the love of Dharma, to the inculcation of Dharma.The man took his hand off the horn.'Rajsamand is actually the name of a lake,' Owen said. 'It's somewhere in the barren country north of Udaipur. Do you know the place by any chance?”The man said nothing.'An artificial lake, I believe. Essential for irrigation.”'Precisely!' the man said. 'This is what they do, you see.”'Marble embankments, I've been told. Inscriptions cut into the stone. Sanskrit. An enormous Sanskrit poem. More than one thousand verses.”'That is precisely the place. Rajsamand.”'Seventeenth century,' Owen said.'Correct!”The cows had painted horns. Blue horns in one part of the countryside, red or yellow or green in another. People who painted cows' horns had something to say to him, Owen felt. There were cows with tricolor horns. There was a woman in a magenta sari who carried a brass water pot on her head, the garment and the container being the precise colors of the mingled bougainvillea that covered the wall behind her, the dark reddish purple, the tainted gold. He would reflect. These moments were a 'control'-a design at the edge of the human surge. The white-clad men with black umbrellas, the women at the river beating clothes in accidental rhythms, hillsides of saris drying in the sun. The epic material had to refine itself in these delicate aquarelles. Or he needed to see it as such. The mind's little infinite. India made him feel like a child. He was a child again, maneuvering for a window seat on the crowded bus. A dead camel, stiff legs jutting. Women in a road crew wearing wide cotton skirts, nose rings, hair ornaments, heavy jewelry dangling from their ears, repairing broken asphalt by hand. horn ok please. In the upper castes they calculated horoscopes precisely. He learned a few words of Tamil and Bengali and was able to ask for food and lodging in Hindi when necessary, and to read a bit and ask directions. The word for yesterday was the same as the word for tomorrow. Professor Coomeraswamy said that if he asked someone for details of his life, the man might automatically include details from the lives of dead relatives. Owen was taken by the beauty of this, of common memories drifting across the generations. He could only stare at the round face across the desk and wonder why the concept seemed somewhat familiar. Had he discussed it himself on one of those bright-skied nights with Kathryn and James?'White city, Udaipur. Pink city, Jaipur.”Whole cities as
