The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [164]
“We do not say ‘doozy,’” Mitchell said.
Rüdiger raised his eyebrows skeptically. “When I was in America they always said ‘doozy.’”
“When was that, 1940?”
“1973!” Rüdiger objected. “Benton Harbor, Michigan. I work for a fine printer for three months. Lloyd G. Holloway. Lloyd G. Holloway and his wife, Kitty Holloway. Children: Buddy, Julie, Karen Holloway. I have this idea to become a master printer. And Lloyd G. Holloway, who was my master, always said ‘doozy.’”
“O.K.,” Mitchell allowed. “Maybe in Benton Harbor. I’m from Michigan, too.”
“Please,” Rüdiger said dismissively. “Let’s not try to understand each other by autobiography.”
And with that he went back to his book.
After reading ten pages of The God Who Is There (Francis Schaeffer ran a foundation in Switzerland where Mitchell had heard you could stay for free), he put the book back on the shelf and left the library. He spent the rest of the day walking around the city. Mitchell’s concern that he wasn’t coming up to the mark at Kalighat coexisted, oddly enough, with a surge of real religious feeling on his part. Much of the time in Calcutta he was filled with an ecstatic tranquillity, like a low-grade fever. His meditation practice had deepened. He experienced plunging sensations, as if moving at great speed. For whole minutes he forgot who he was. Outside in the streets, he tried, and often succeeded, in disappearing to himself in order to be, paradoxically, more present.
There was no good way to describe any of this. Even Thomas Merton could only say things like “I have got into the habit of walking up and down under the trees or along the wall of the cemetery in the presence of God.” The thing was, Mitchell now knew what Merton meant, or thought he did. As he took in the marvelous sights, the dusty Polo Grounds, the holy cows with their painted horns, he had got in the habit of walking around Calcutta in the presence of God. Furthermore, it seemed to Mitchell that this didn’t have to be a difficult thing. It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.
Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing. Calcutta was a city like that. Mitchell walked along Chowringhee Road, gazing up at the buildings, repeating a phrase he remembered from Gaddis, the accumulation of time in walls, and thinking to himself that the British had left behind a bureaucracy that the Indians had made only more complex, investing the financial and governmental systems with the myriad hierarchies of the Hindu pantheon, with the levels upon levels of the caste system, so that to cash a traveler’s check was like passing before a series of demigods, one man to check your passport, another to stamp your check, another to make a carbon of your transaction while still another wrote out the amount, before you could receive money from the teller. Everything documented, checked over, scrupulously filed away, and then forgotten forever. Calcutta was a shell, the shell of empire, and from inside this shell nine million Indians spilled out. Beneath the city’s colonial surface lay the real India, the ancient country of the Rajputs, nawabs, and Mughals, and this country erupted too from the baghs and alleyways, and, at some moments, especially in the evening when the music vendors played their instruments in the streets, it was as though the British had never been here at all.
There were graveyards filled with the British dead, forests of eroded obelisks in which Mitchell could make out only a few words. Lt. James Barton, husband of. 1857–18–. Rosalind Blake, wife of Col. Michael Peters. Asleep in the Lord, 1887. Tropical vines infiltrated the cemetery,