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To step into the Taj Mahal's lobby, with its white marble fountains
and air-conditioned breeze, after the dust and humidity, was to enter
a desert nomad's vision of paradise. Even its inhabitants moved and
spoke and looked like the members of another species - clean, cool,
starched, relaxed. I stood for a while on my balcony. Finally I was
alone in India, for the first time since before my arrival. Two sights
below impressed themselves into memory: a man mowing a lawn
growing incongruously on a flat rooftop; and a Western hippy with
blond dreadlocks sitting beneath a banyan tree, with a monkey
squatting on his shoulders. The monkey was picking out fleas from
matted tubes of hair and eating them with the delicacy of a gourmet.
Symbiosis?
With these two images, I fell asleep, the heavy, rotting, spiced and
salty, sultry air pushing its way in from my open balcony to do
battle with the room's pristine air-conditioned blast. Two Titans,
two Lords of the Air, fighting it out overhead. I had no idea then of
the real battle that would take place inside my head. Like all good
stories, this one is about a love affair and a war. Both began that
dawn back in September 1974.
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