35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

344
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
incurable disease; something that would probably have made him
think twice about walking anywhere without knee-length riding
boots. Staying healthy in India for visitors has always been largely
a matter of common sense. The diseases people fear are caused by
poverty; the ones that they get are usually caused by carelessness.
At least S. J. Perelman was free of the xenophobic English
superiority complex. The American humorist described the Taj in
1948, in his Westward Ha! or Around the World in Eighty Clichés. In it
he demonstrates, among other things, that architecture was an art
form he did not appreciate:
Like the half-dozen other passengers debarking from the President
Munroe, Hirschfield and I made a beeline for the Taj Hotel, a
huge Mauro-Gothic edifice of grey stone whose crenellated
towers, battlements, and drawbridges more accurately suggested
a college dormitory . . .
He discerns an atmosphere of gloom and apprehension hanging
over India in the wake of independence, and the Hindu-Muslim
riots that Partition exacerbated. The subcontinent was wounded
and terrified then, unsure of its future after the British withdrawal.
Perelman, with his cavalier lack of concern for poor nations and his
obsession with personal comforts, concentrates his attention on the
fact that alcoholic beverages had been banned in Bombay two days
a week, as a prelude to total Prohibition. And, as if unaware of what
the country had suffered over the preceding few years, the man
who wrote many of Groucho Marx’s best jokes grossly exaggerates
his own physical discomforts at the hotel famous for its luxury:
Our hotel room did nothing to help matters. It was a long,
monastic cell facing a courtyard, extremely hot, and so narrow
that two persons could not pass without scarifying each other’s
skins. Someone had made a half-hearted gesture in the direction
of cooling it by installing an overhead fan capable of two full
revolutions a minute . . . The bathroom was a masterpiece of