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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-framedcharpoybeds, 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 somesamosas, 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 animals from all the reaches of
the land came together for the night to shelter behind the crumbling Moghul
walls. Bindra took some annas from Holmes and came back with an armload of
feed for the donkey, then requested a greater sum and went off again. I eased
myself down onto my pack, feeling all the muscles that I had not worked for
months. My skin, toughened though it was from the sea journey, tingled with
sunburn, and my feet had rubbed raw in three or four spots. I was very happy
to sit quietly. I would have been happier to lie down and sleep, but it was
still broad daylight, so I compromised by closing my tired eyes and paying
attention to my other senses.
The cooking fires here smelt like nowhere else. Not coal or wood, nor Irish
peat, nor even the varied substances used in Palestine. Here, cow dung mixed
with straw was slapped onto the walls in dinner-plate sized mounds to dry,
then peeled off, heaped into baskets, and hawked to travellers in the
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caravanserai. The musky smoke rose around me, blended with the odours of
fresher droppings, horse sweat, unwashed clothing, and the spices that went
into the evening meals. Someone was cooking chapatis, the delicious smell of
wheat flour waking my salivary glands and making me aware of a sharp interest
in dinner.
I was just stirring to ask Holmes if he thought we had seen the last of
Bindra and our rupees when the boy sauntered up, laden with sacks and
twine-wrapped scraps of paper, onions and carrots sticking out of his pockets.
He caught up one of the pots and filled it at the communal pump, then dropped
to his heels before the fire that we had made (he had gathered a surprising
quantity of sticks in his apparently aimless scrounging during the day) and
set about constructing dinner. A generous pinch of mustard seed popped and
spattered into meltedghee,followed by a sliced onion, half of a somewhat tired
cauliflower, and pinches of turmeric, pepper, cumin. And as that mixture was
cooking, he took a pair of bowls and placed them between his feet, then pulled
over the heavy little canvas sack he d come back with, rolled down the top,
and plunged in a grubby hand. Without taking his eyes off the bustle and
activity of our various neighbours, Bindra began to sort the contents. I
watched his quick little fingers for a few minutes, then curiosity got the
better of me and I went over to see what he had in the sack.
It held a mixture of rice and pulses an inadvertent mixture, it would seem,
because Bindra was separating it back into its component parts. And he did so
at an amazing speed, flicking the rice into one bowl and the pulses into the
other, dropping any stray pebbles to the ground. I looked at him, looked back
at his hands, and couldn t believe the mechanical speed and precision of his
motions: Watching closely, I could see no rice grains join the lentils, no
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Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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