Mysteries of the Noise
Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz— / The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? / Do you remember the rats; and the stench / Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench— / And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? / Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’
From “Aftermath”
By Siegfried Sassoon
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US stocks made a healthy show yesterday, with the Dow up 188 points. Fears of a crash subsided, according to the papers, on earnings and unemployment data. Blah. Blah. Blah. Meanwhile, we got a glimpse of Bombay’s new huge, ultra-modern airport when we arrived. It is an engineering and architectural marvel…Â
An airport is necessarily a rational, planned affair. Travelers, luggage, airplanes – all must function with as much efficiency as possible. Schedules must be kept. Procedures must be followed. Order must be maintained.Â
But all around the airport was chaos. Support towers for a modern highway rose up out of the dirt… where chunks of broken, discarded concrete had been abandoned. Tools… building supplies… shacks and sheds… trash… and, of course, throngs of people mingled in complete disorder. Why don’t they straighten the place up? Why not put things away? Why not impose some order? Will India always be a poor, messy confusion?Â
“You will never understand India until you’ve read the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedas,” cautioned an old friend. We didn’t have time to read the ancient texts. So, we kept our eyes and ears open.
Last night, we made our way through the festivities for Kala Ghoda in central Bombay to the Sassoon mansion. The streets were crowded. Pedestrians. Motorcyles. Automobiles. There was little open space. Women in their bright sarees… odors of spices on the sidewalk… vendors selling jewelry and drums. Horns honking. It was Bombay, after all.Â
