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

‘BHAGAVAN IS STILL WITH US’
Bangalore is unusually dark at night, a consequence of all the unlit
parks and public gardens responsible for its title, ‘Garden City.’
Off M. G. Road – Mahatama Gandhi Road – ran Brigade Road, a
mildly disreputable street of bars, restaurants, and many bookstalls
selling salacious film magazines. Their covers flashed photographs
of busty Bombay starlets, hot items even back then. On pavement
corners vendors roasted corncobs over charcoal, basting them with
salt, lime juice and spices.
An especially terrifying crew of beggars also worked this strip. A
boy whose spine had been tied in a reef knot at birth bounded along
after me in the dirt on all fours, nearly naked, his limbs gnarled and
filthy and mottled by blackened sores. He gazed up hopefully, his
face almost serenely beautiful, with clear, bright eyes that seemed to
hold no resentment or pain. A belief in karma and reincarnation
entirely changes Western notions of luck and egalitarianism. When
I handed him a rupee and the bag of milk sweets I’d just bought, he
smiled like a saint in paradise. A leper who would never smile again,
his face having melted, leaving only slits for eyes, thrust out the
bandaged stumps of what had been his fingers. A man whose body
ended just below the navel propelled himself along on a little cart
with hands more like a gorilla’s feet. Another creature with no arms
or legs wriggled through the cowshit, dust, and rubbish like a filthy
sack of rice with a head. Somehow he kept a cigarette always burning
in his mouth, which had countless other functions to perform, not
the least of which was picking up coins or gifts of food and secreting
them in a pocket positioned below his thick, muscular neck. An old
blind man with frosted pearls for eyes had tied his right hand by a
length of rope to the neck of a young boy, who led him around. It
was an image of hideous symbiosis, the boy and the blind man
forced to share the charity their partnership earned, till death did
them part.
Brigade Road, in 1975, often seemed like the City of Dreadful
Night itself. But after Prasanthi Nilayam, everywhere was Babylon
at best. Here a dollar would buy you a ten-year-old hooker for the
night; a girl of eighteen was thirty cents; a boy was ten cents. You
could still buy a teenage girl to use in any way you wished forever
– wife, slave, both – for less than $100. Today she would cost at least
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