The Game - Laurie R. King [52]
Now, I had stepped into the painting, which mixed Breughel’s activity with Persia’s colours, with just a touch of Bosch horrors.
Women dressed in crimson and apple-green and yellow ochre swayed with loads balanced on their heads, one hand steadying the brass pot or the straw basket, the other holding one end of their scarf up, lest strange eyes see what they shouldn’t. Men in cheap suits and men in filthy lunghis scurried or lounged, chewing betel or smoking thin brown bidis. Naked children tumbled in the gutters while pale hump-backed cows roamed freely through the markets, snatching greens where they might.
And when we were finally clear of the city, when the tree-lined road stretched out before us through fields of cauliflower and onions, sugar cane and chilis, the air began to smell of something other than dust and diesel. The acrid odour from a brilliant field of flowering mustard blended with the soft sweet incense wafting from the doors of a small whitewashed temple. The stink of putrefaction slunk over from a heap of scrap-draped bones, too leathery even for vultures, then the next moment the nostrils tingled with pepper and turmeric from a spice-seller’s, and rejoiced with the rich rosewater smells from the sweetmeat stand. Wet dust around a well; drying clothing from a long hedge; the ripe dung of an elephant; hot-burning coal and overheated metal from a blacksmith’s; urine and feces; opium from an upstairs window; sweet-cooking wheat chapatis from below.
We were on the Grand Trunk Road, that river of humanity flowing fifteen hundred miles across northern India from the swampy heat of Calcutta to the thin, dry air of the Khyber Pass, linking the Bay of Bengal with Afghanistan, passing the lands of conquest: Darius and Alexander, Timur and Babur, slaughtering and conquering and looting; the plains of Kurukshestra where the Aryans first took root; the battlefields of The Mahabharata and of the Indian Mutiny three millennia later; the place where Babur killed fifteen thousand and brought the Moghul empire to Delhi, where Afghans killed Mahrattas, and where Persians killed Moghuls (twenty thousand in two hours, the historians say) then walked on to strip Delhi of its gold, its Peacock Throne, and its Koh-i-noor diamond. Holy places and bloodshed lay all around me, while in the fore, Bindra gnawed on a length of sugar cane and skipped beside the placid donkey.
To begin with, all was dust and turmoil, even at an hour when the dew was still damp on the canvas. With the distinct sensation of becoming a twig tossed into a fast-moving stream, I gave myself over to the current, needing only to keep the boy’s head in sight, and to keep from stepping under the feet of an ill-tempered camel along the slower edges or the wheels of a hurtling lorry in the swift-flowing centre. It was exhilarating, it was exhausting, and it served as nothing else to set me firmly into this foreign land. We paused for lunch at a roadside tea shop, an open-fronted shack with a roof half thatch, half waving tile, beside a spreading mango tree under which the café owner had arrayed his ranks of the ubiquitous wood-framed charpoy beds, the piece of furniture that is dining table, chaise longue, and business centre in one. As I took up my position on the sagging ropes, I felt almost at home in my foreign raiment, as if my skin had changed.
Certainly my tongue had. Without much pause for thought, I told the boy to bring us some samosas, pointing with my chin at the seller across the way. We ate our greasy snack from the clean leaf-plates as the road swept past, watching the traffic as if we were a Thames-side picnic party on a summer’s Saturday afternoon. At the end, we tossed our earthenware cups onto the pile of such, and continued on our way.
We came that night to a caravanserai that Holmes said had been there since the days of the emperor Akbar, where men and