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night on the train, for those old cars, dating back to colonial times, shook, hurled you about, rumbled, and youwere even pelted with rain, which came in through windows that could not be shut. It was a gray, overcast day by the time we pulled into Sealdah Station. On every square inch of the enormous terminal, on its long platforms, its dead-end tracks, the swampy fields nearby, sat or lay tens of thousands of emaciated people—under streams of rain, in the water and the mud; it was the rainy season, and the heavy tropical downpour did not abate for a moment. I was struck at once by the poverty of these soaked skeletons, their untold numbers, and, perhaps most of all, their immobility. They seemed a lifeless component of this dismal landscape, whose sole kinetic element was the sheets of water pouring from the sky. There was of course a certain, albeit desperate, logic and rationality in the utter passivity of these unfortunates: they sought no shelter from the downpour because they had nowhere to go—this was the end of their road—and they made no exertion to cover themselves because they had nothing to cover themselves with.
    They were refugees from a civil war, which ended but a few years earlier, between Hindus and Muslims, a war which saw the birth of independent India and Pakistan and which resulted in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dead and many millions of refugees. The latter wandered about for a long time, unable to find succor, left to their own fate, vegetating for a while in places like Sealdah Station before eventually dying there of hunger or disease. But there was more to this. These columns of postwar vagabonds encountered throngs of others along the way—the legions of flood victims evicted from villages and small towns by the waters of India’s powerful and unbridled rivers. And so millions of homeless, indifferent people shuffled along the roads, dropping from exhaustion, often never to rise. Others tried to reach the cities hoping to get a sip of water there, and perhaps a handful of rice.
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    Just getting out of the train car was difficult—there was no room for me to place my foot on the platform. Usually, a different color skin attracts attention here; but nothing distracts the denizens of Sealdah Station, as they seem already to settle into a realm on the other side of life. An old woman next to me was digging a bit of rice out of the folds of her sari. She poured it into a little bowl and started to look around, perhaps for water, perhaps for fire, so that she could boil the rice. I noticed several children near her, eyeing the bowl. Staring—motionless, wordless. This lasts a moment, and the moment drags on. The children do not throw themselves on the rice; the rice is the property of the old woman, and these children have been inculcated with something more powerful than hunger.
    A man is pushing his way through the huddled multitudes. He jostles the old woman, the bowl drops from her hands, and the rice scatters onto the platform, into the mud, amidst the garbage. In that split second, the children throw themselves down, dive between the legs of those still standing, dig around in the muck trying to find the grains of rice. The old woman stands there empty-handed, another man shoves her. The old woman, the children, the train station, everything—soaked through by the unending torrents of a tropical downpour. And I too stand dripping wet, afraid to take a step; and anyway, I don’t know where to go.
    From Calcutta I traveled south, to Hyderabad. The south was very different from the north and all its pains. The south seemed cheerful, calm, sleepy, and a little provincial. The servants of a local rajah must have confused me with someone else, because they greeted me ceremoniously at the station and drove me straight to a palace. A polite, elderly man welcomed me, sat me down in a wide leather armchair, and was surely counting on alonger and deeper