“Music on the move, Gan. From radio stations strategically placed so no American needs to be without music at any time of the night or day. Rock music, country music, sweet music, pop music—all or any of these are there for him at the touch of a button.”
“In India also—”
But they had arrived at the crest of the hill.
“Look, Gan, look. For Christ’s sake, look, won’t you?”
“Yes, yes. I am looking.”
Fred Hoskins brought his enormous car to a halt just off the road, its wide front pointing at the valley spread below.
“Gan boy,” he demanded, “is that or is that not the best view you’ve ever seen?”
It was certainly a huge extent of country that lay spread out before them. And behind as well it was possible to see for as far as twenty miles or more, though there the scene was for the most part obscured by the smog. In front, however, everything was clear. Far below, tiny, thin roads crossed and re-crossed in a huge grid pattern, with little bright beads of colour moving along them everywhere, sometimes in long necklaces, elsewhere as miniscule individual beetles. Above, against a purely blue sky, planes by the dozen buzzed to and fro like so many purposeful bees.
Ghote turned to the private eye.
“Yes, Fred,” he said. “A truly marvellous sight. But, tell me please, were you at any time having an interview with the Swami With No Name?”
The private eye yanked furiously at his car’s starter key, slammed at a lever and shot the machine suddenly backwards on to the road again. Then, as poundingly, he hurled the car into forward and plunged off down the hill in front of them.
“Mr. Hoskins,” Ghote said adamantly, “did you see the swami?”
“There just wasn’t any need,” Fred Hoskins answered at last, peering through the wind-screen in front of him as if he was by no means the domineeringly confident driver he had shown himself to be up to now but some spinster lady setting out for her very first drive. “I saw the Shahaneye kid, didn’t I? I put her father’s heartfelt plea to her. I put it to her straight. And she just doesn’t want to go back home. Period. Finito. That’s it.”
“Yes,” Ghote said.
Mechanically he looked round him as they twisted down the sharp hill at a speed now he felt must surely be reckless. There were houses again though these were set yet farther back from the road because of the steepness of the slope. And then there were every now and again extraordinary squares of high walls, black, plastic and mysterious, set with what looked like portholes. What could they be? A sudden jump of the imagination gave it to him. They were tennis-courts. Yes, tennis-courts surrounded by high mesh walls. And practically every other house had one.
What a country, what a tremendous, rich-to-bursting country. It was not just a land where time was money: it was a land where money was play.
And it was supporting—in some way, he felt, as the topmost jewel on a pyramid of richly gleaming gems—the Swami With No Name. The man that Fred Hoskins, despite his two thousand rupees a day plus expenses, had not succeeded in obtaining an interview with.
Well, at least the fellow had ceased that incessant yammering.
Ghote shut his eyes and hoped that in the quiet the steady thudding in his head would gradually calm down. The big car had soon entered the freeway—for a few moments Ghote had dazedly regarded the great sweep of the eight-lane road in front of him, but soon he had fallen back into his doze—and for minute after minute now they zoomed along with only the muted booming of the car’s powerful engine breaking the silence.
Resolutely Ghote refused to let himself think anymore about the ashram that lay at the end of this journey. It was no use, he decided, trying to guess what the situation there would be like. Worrying about it would only worsen his headache.
But, whatever efforts he made to drop completely into a healing sleep, he was unable to shake off the malaise that afflicted him. There was a slight feeling of sickness in the pit of his stomach. His limbs still seemed to be elsewhere. His temples thudded.
So from time to time he cautiously opened his eyes.
The sights he saw did nothing to bring to an end the pervasive feeling of unreality. Even before they had got on to the endless stretch of the freeway he had had his first shock.
There had been an alteration in the big car’s speed. He had glanced out. And there ahead, just off the road to his right, he had seen, soaring up into the sky, an enormous double arch of pure gold.
The ashram, he had thought at once. We are there. I must have been sound asleep. The ashram. Oh, my God.
“Please, please. We have arrived?”
“What the heck?”
“But that”—he had jerked his head in the direction of the pure shining arch—“it is the ashram?”
“Gan, boy, that is a McDonald’s. That’s the sign of a McDonald’s. The fast-food chain. Don’t you have those in India?”
The tone of disparagement was so crushing that all he had been able to do was to murmur some apology, something about being asleep and dreaming, and shut his eyes tight once again—and then had done his best to blot out everything. But in vain.
His inner uneasiness woke him to find himself looking straight at a huge thundering truck made in the form of a great bread-roll with an enormous sausage stuck between its two halves, oozing with bright yellow plaster mustard some five or six inches thick. A hot-dog. At least he knew enough about the American way-of-life to recognise that. But such a gigantic advertisement, and whamming along the freeway at—it must be—seventy miles an hour.
Fred Hoskins’ car purred past the extraordinary sight, and Ghote shut his eyes again to open them once more to see the sweeping road in front of them splitting into two quite different sections as they climbed a mountain range and on the far section, some fifty feet above them on the hillside, a whole procession of cars was descending at speed, each one of them topped by a bright-coloured shape fastened to its roof which, as he closed his eyes firmly once again, he realised were surfboards.
All those people, going all that way, at such a speed, to take those hugely expensive-looking pieces of shaped wood to play with at the ocean side. The land where money was play. And where, surely, one whole group of these huge, confident people were playing at being a swami’s disciples.
But, no, no, no. He must not think about that.
Peace and calm. That was what would get rid of this pounding in his head, this detachedness in his limbs.
In another glimpse he saw a house being swept along on a trailer, down on the far side of the mountains now. A house? Certainly half a house, a wooden house complete with curtains at its windows, flapping like sails in a stiff breeze, and wallpaper to be glimpsed in the interior.
Then, not on the unending road itself but down beside a farmstead some fifty yards from it, casually left as if it was a battered old lorry, there was a plane. A plane in a farmyard. It must be a dream. It was not.
He made himself then keep his eyes open for a little, taking care to hold himself so that Fred Hoskins could not see that he was awake. Another word-battering from the jackal-fur-crowned private eye and his throbbing head would split.
From the twisted angle he was looking down on to the road he began to notice what lay on the verge just beside it. For yard on yard it was littered by rubbish. There were bright drink cans of every colour, some crumpled, others intact and rolling a little to and fro in the wind of the passing speeding vehicles. There were bottles, glinting in the sun intact or broken into a thousand glittering fragments. There were, sparkling white and indestructible, dozens and dozens and dozens of little beakers made out of some substance so light that they drifted back and forwards in the slightest puff of air. Throwaway