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

‘IT IS NOT MY FIRE THAT BURN YOU HERE’
out on the streets); motor scooter repairers, kept busy by Benares’
two hundred thousand Indian-made scooters and their two hundred
thousand built-in faults; an entire business based on selling old
Bisleri mineral water bottles (which is why you check that the seal
is intact before buying new Bisleri mineral water bottles); the vital
rice stores, this commodity sold by the half-ton sack, a week’s supply;
the string wallah – Indians being unusually fond of string and
insisting on several hundred different kinds for the many functions
string performs; the jet-powered-firefly blaze of welders, men who
weld night and day to prevent the collapse of infrastructures into
chaos; on each corner, the deep fryer, deep-frying almost anything
that will hold up during the ordeal, emerging golden with batter,
heavy with fat; there a man selling nothing but fan belts – any
Indian appliance employing a fan belt needed a new one at least
once a day; then the old-butane-can wallah, his wares freshly
patched by the welder, since they were frequently purchased from
the next-of-kin after some lethal domestic tragedy they’d played a
major role in; and, stacked exquisitely like art, the fruit and vegetables
for vegetarians: aubergines, gourds, cucumbers, mangoes,
tomatoes, papaya, breadfruit, potatoes, onions, chillies in reds and
greens and yellows and oranges in tiny, small, medium, large,
enormous, short, fat, long, thin; more fan belts; screws; nuts and
bolts; deep-fried chillies; yet more fan belts; and seven men with
sewing machines, furiously pumping the pedals on the pavement,
feeding through new cholis, kurtas, smart Western shirts – thirty
cents a job; near them, the sari stalls, ablaze with shimmering
rainbows of colour; then the lungi wallah, his walls sober, white on
white, the khadi cloth dhoti, symbol of rebellion against British
rule, and now symbol of political power, prominent by its coarse
dullness . . .
Every need the citizens of Benares had was catered to somewhere,
and catered to by the small businessman, the one-man op, the Maand-Pa
shop. This is life before industrial capitalism. Poverty or
slavery is the choice. And thrown in for those who make the right
choice: the ubiquitous smell of corn roasting on open charcoal
braziers, basted with lime juice and spices. Two for three cents.
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