The Dark Horse by Rumer Godden Page B

ramshackle, most of them hung with notices in Hindi and English, ‘Malik Amrit Lal Patney, advocate’, ‘Goodwill Electric Company’, ‘Happiness Coffee and Tea House’, alternating with shacks and open-fronted shops. Each street seethed with traffic – trams, buses, carts drawn by heavy white bullocks or even heavier massive wide-horned black water-buffaloes at whom their drivers shouted; Ted shuddered as he saw how the men cruelly twisted their tails and the sores, rubbed raw, on the bullocks’ necks. Queer high box-carriages passed, shuttered and closed, with a clatter of hooves and bumping wheels, and again he was sickened by the thinness, rubs and sores of the horses that drew them, some no more than ponies; though they wore strings of blue beads round their necks, and some had aigrettes of feathers in their browbands, their ribs and hip bones stood out, and some were lame but driven on with whips. The trucks had jewellery too, hung with tassels, as did some of the cars and taxis, with turbanned black-bearded drivers who seemed never to stop sounding their horns; now and again a shining well-kept car slid through, with perhaps one person in it and a smart, capped or turbanned chauffeur, but each taxi seemed to hold a dozen people and there were rickshaws, laden too, each with a skinny little man, glistening with sweat, running between the shafts and sounding the clank clank of its flat bell and, around and among them, on the pavements and in the gutters and in the road itself was a river of people.
    Ted had never seen so many people, brown-skinned, some in only a loincloth, like those men on the dock, but here pushing loads on carts or with yokes balanced across their shoulders, or on their heads, women too, balancing a pitcher or a basket, or even a bucket, with a poise he could not help admiring. A few men were dressed in immaculate flowing white, a loose shirt, draped muslin instead of trousers, slipper shoes, and carried umbrellas and briefcases – Ted was to meet one of them, John Quillan’s office clerk, or babu, Ram Sen – but babies were naked except for a charm string; they crawled on the pavements. Some of the boys were naked too, with swollen stomachs, and it seemed people lived in the streets; Ted saw women washing themselves under the street tap; true, they were wearing a sari, but the thin cotton, wet, showed every curve. A man, squatting on the pavement, was having his head shaved; another was dictating a letter; the letter writer had a desk, without legs, on the ground. Men turned their backs and relieved themselves in the gutter and Ted saw women slapping cakes of dung – yes, manure! thought Ted, astounded – to dry on walls; it was only afterwards he learned dung was used as fuel. Pigeons picked grain from the grain shops, pai dogs nosed rubbish and everywhere was a hubbub of voices, creaking wheels, motor horns, shouting, vendors’ cries, mingling with a smell of sweat and urine, woodsmoke, acrid dung smoke and a pungent smell that later he was to learn came from cooking in hot mustard oil and, now and again, a waft of heavy sweetness as a flowerseller passed, or from a garland of flowers hung on a door, or from a woman in a clean, softly flowing sari, with flowers round the knot of her hair. Ted saw that between her short bodice and her waist, her midriff was bare and, What would Ella say? he thought; already his tuft of hair was standing on end and he was shocked to the depths of his clean Methodist soul – this is a dreadful place – yet, at the same time he was fascinated, so curiously drawn that he almost forgot Dark Invader.
    Dark Invader though, with his customary calmness, passed unruffled; he did not know it, but this was his first encounter with his public.
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    Ted was more than glad when they left the streets and the hordes of people, to strike off across the green turf he had glimpsed from the ship. ‘Maidan,’ said