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

354
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
wearing rags, holding up his mangled hands. He’d aged well, I
found myself thinking uncharitably. I bought him a plate of gulab
jamoons and handed over a hundred rupees. He didn’t seem as grateful
as I remembered him once seeming, taking the offering as if he
expected it. He shoved the hundred rupee note, which would have
caused a riot twenty years before, quickly into a small bag he carried
and turned his attention back to the street. He clearly didn’t
remember me.
Beggars do perform a service in India. Charity is a religious
obligation; someone therefore has to be in need of charity – which
should give prophets of the Golden Age some food for thought.
Strolling down M.G. Road, I found things more familiar. The
Blue Fox restaurant was still there. I’d never been in it. The dive had
a rather sordid reputation, and was no place for university professors
or Sathya Sai’s devotees, but I thought I might give it a try now.
‘Dancingdancing?’ a man dressed like a shabby hotel doorman
inquired, leaning from the shadows of a doorway.
‘Dancing?’
He looked furtively up and down the street before replying, ‘Yes,
dancing – you like? Cabrett – you know the cabrett?’
‘Girls?’ I asked, receiving a knowing nod. ‘Drinks?’
‘Everything, sir. Comecome.’
I stepped manfully through his doorway.
‘Two hundred rupees,’ he muttered, barely moving his lips.
‘What?’ I started to retreat.
‘Okayokay,’ he whispered. ‘Fifty rupees, quicklyquickly.’
I had to keep reminding myself that fifty rupees was now barely
a dollar fifty. Inflation had been a glutton in India over the preceding
years.
Up a gloomy staircase I went, then through a dangling bead curtain
into a sepulchral and malodorous room about a hundred feet long
and twenty wide. In the centre was a low stage upon which several
portly musicians pitted their wits against wires and amplifiers.
Feedback and the screaming of lost souls in the electric void stabbed
through fetid air.
A huddle of Indian youths sat on chairs near this stage. Other
men sat at tables scattered around, giving a big hand to the tobacco