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up to the surface. The grandmother gulps as much air as she can, but the instant they let her go, she goes under again. I can see her bulging eyes, her terrified face. She sinks once more, they search for her again in the murky waters and again pull her out, barely alive. The whole ritual looks like torture, but she endures it without protest, perhaps even in ecstasy.
    Beside the Ganges, which at this point is wide, expansive, and lazy, stretch rows of wooden pyres, on which are burning dozens, hundreds of corpses. The curious can for several rupees take a boat over to this gigantic open-air crematorium. Half-naked, soot-covered men bustle about here, as do many young boys. With long poles they adjust the pyres to direct a better draft so the cremation can proceed faster; the line of corpses has no end, the wait is long. The gravediggers rake the still-glowing ashes and push them into the river. The gray dust floats atop the waves for a while but very soon, saturated with water, it sinks and vanishes.

THE TRAIN STATION
AND THE PALACE
    I f in Benares one finds cause for hope—a cleansing in the holy river, and with it the improvement of one’s spiritual condition, the promise of drawing closer to the infinite—Sealdah Station in Calcutta has the opposite effect. I arrived in Calcutta from Benares by train, a progress, as I was to discover, from a relative heaven to an absolute hell. The conductor at the Benares station looked me over and asked: “Where is your bed?”
    I understood what he was saying but apparently looked as if I didn’t, for a moment later he repeated his question, this time more insistently:
    “Where is your bed?”
    It turns out that even the moderately wealthy, not to mention members of a chosen race like the European, travel the rails with their own beds. They arrive at the station accompanied by servants carrying rolled-up mattresses on their heads, as well as blankets, sheets, pillows, as well as, of course, other luggage. Once aboard (there are no seats in the train cars) the servant arranges his master’s bed, then vanishes without a word, as if dissolving into thin air. Raised as I was in the spirit of brotherhood and individual equality, this situation, in which one walks empty-handedwhile another walks behind, laden with a mattress, suitcases, and a basket of food, seemed offensive in the extreme, a cause for protest and objection. But upon entering the train car I quickly reevaluated my position, as voices of clearly astonished people resounded from every direction.
    “Where is your bed?”
    I felt idiotic to have nothing with me except my hand luggage. But how could I have known that I would need a mattress in addition to a ticket? And even if I had known, and had bought a mattress, I couldn’t have carried it by myself and would have had to engage a servant. But what would I have done with the servant later? Or with the mattress, for that matter?
    I had noticed already that a different person is assigned here to every type of activity and chore, and that this person vigilantly guards his role and his place—this society’s equilibrium seems to depend upon it. One person brings tea in the morning, another shines shoes, another still launders shirts, an altogether different one cleans the room—and so on ad infinitum. Heaven forbid that I ask the person who irons my shirt to sew a button on it. For me, of course, raised as I was in the manner foregoingly described, it would be simple just to sew on the button myself, but then I would be committing a terrible error, for I would be depriving someone burdened with a large family and obliged to make his living by sewing buttons on shirts of his livelihood. This society was a pedantically, meticulously woven fabric of roles and assignments, classifications and purposes, and a great deal of experience, a profound knowledge and a keen intuition were required to penetrate and decipher the delicacies of its structure.
    I passed a sleepless