Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! Read Online Free PDF

night he had instead pinched some lint from his pocket and dusted it on her lenses.
    Such was the story Mr. H had told me in the taxi on the way to the airport. When we arrived, he installed himself at the counter of a newly opened bar and began drinking beer or something stronger, ignoring me entirely. Our flight had been scheduled to leave at 7 A.M. , and in my uneasiness about separating from the Japanese writers’ group and setting out alone on a journey with Mr. H, there was no question that I had overdone my insistence on the accuracy of the timetable. Moving back and forth down the hotel's roofless corridor that faced a courtyard garden like a small forest, I had gone to awaken him repeatedly—I recall an unbearably desolate tree, the giant black trunk and fallen leaves of golden brown more like minerals than plants, a tree impossible to imagine outside India, which remains on my mind because I do not know its name—and later, when it appeared that he had no intention of getting up, I had tipped a bellboy to drag him from his room. What I had neglected to do was phone the airport to inquire whether the flight was on time. We had finally raced to the airport in a taxi, arriving just before scheduled departure time, and found that the flight had been delayed, and the delay had been extended hour after hour with no explanation, and then it was the afternoon and still there had been no announcement that the flight would be departing. It occurred to me that Mr. H, who understood how India worked and had even written a book based on his experiences in the country, might have known all along that an on-time departure was out of the question, and that his anger at me was therefore more than justified. While he sat at the bar drinking by himself, I waited near the electronic board on which departures were posted, listening for an announcement about our flight, and read a book about wild animals in India that I had purchased at the gift shop in our hotel. A memoir in dead earnest by a plantation owner named E. P. Guy, the book was written in a prose style that mirrored the rectitude of its author's character and life, yet was filled with details that were bizarrely amusing and made for perfect reading on the road. I have this book with me even now as I write, with Rostropovich's remarks copied on the inside cover. Based on eyewitness accounts from friends in the region of Kashmir, Guy described the following bizarre phenomenon at the time of the partition of Pakistan in 1947. As Hindus, who viewed cows as sacred animals, crossed the new border into India from Pakistan, and Muslims, who eat no pork, moved in the opposite direction, the wild animals in the region instinctively sought their own route to survival. Whole herds of wild oxen in Pakistan migrated to India, and wild pigs in similar numbers crossed into Pakistan in search of a safe environment.
    It was now late in the afternoon. We had been waiting that long and, even so, thinking I might make Mr. H laugh with the animal episode, I sat down on the bar stool next to his and ordered a beer. The bartender's attitude seemed, for want of a better word, Indian: with a dusky disagreeableness that might have been directed more at life in general than at his customers, and an expression on his face that seemed to say “So now we have a second Japanese alcoholic,” he passed me a lukewarm bottle of beer. When I told my animal story after drinking the beer, Mr. H listened without the slightest show of interest, his gaze never moving from the sorry shelf of bottles and the large map of India on the wall across from him. This left me helpless, with nothing to do but order another beer and stare at the same shelf of bottles and map on the wall. As I sat there, drinking one beer after the other, I felt the onset of an impulse that was by no means unfamiliar to me.
    When I first became aware of this impulse at age seventeen or eighteen—as I think of it, my son's current age—I