PARAKEETS AND PARCHESI
563
flow all day long, and lounge or sleep throughout the night. Our bed–
room, in the house where we stayed
in
Bombay, had no doors, but only
loose curtains across the openings, moving in the winds that filtered
through the garden and across the porches. The morning began with a
barefooted procession that equaled the first act of
Der Rosenkavalier.
First came Ahmed Shah, the Moslem chief of the household staff,
splendid in his starched white tulle head-dress, or more sober in gray
caracul, to wake us, and-with a studied ignoring of Marcia, who
as a woman should doubtless have been as invisible as his own obedient
wife (whose face Ahmed Shah had never seen) -to bring my dressing
gown, draw my bath, and make ready for breakfast. Then would come
a silent man (all the servants are, of course, male: the women are
servants of servants) whose sole function seemed to be to replace yester–
day's with new-picked flowers, and to change the water in the bowls and
vases. Outside on the porch, a kind of sub-gardener would
be
sweeping
with a bundle of twigs. A relatively higher-caste
hamil,
qualified to
touch the bed and our clothes, would enter, on bare feet without
knocking, to carry out a few of his chores. For them all, it was a
matter of entire indifference what we were doing or about to do. Lower–
grade sweepers, of the sort that could get as far down as the floor
itself, or even the unmentionables who venture into bathrooms,
wandered in and out. The laundryman, or the laundryman's boy, would
bring a shirt or two; the driver would come to be instructed about
shoes to be repaired or suits to be dry-cleaned. Just beyond the curtained
opening, a guard, armed with a dagger and a bundle of kIDtting, the
latter of which he was observably adept at handling, kept continuous
watch.
Whenever, in a place more or less public, you stop moving, you
are instantly surrounded. As the car stops at the hotel door, it is not a
single doorman who greets you and calls a single bellboy. The taxi or
bus has not yet come to rest before dozens of doormen, porters, guides,
salesmen, beggars and onlookers mass around you. A whole parade of
porters takes the bags--one bag, no matter how small, to one man, with
an unburdened boy to guide you, another to carry keys, and a couple
more as impartial observers.
Even as you enter the door of a restaurant, a half-dozen bodies,
pushing, jabbering, pointing, arguing, are precipitated out of the
saturate air before you.
It
is impossible to have just one waiter at your
table, nor can you shake off even for the time of a private bite or
two, the hovering, officious attendance of the several who will have
