Indian Nocturne Read Online Free

whimsical film director. You have to be careful of the crows, they have very dirty beaks. The Bombay town council has had to arrange for the enormous
reservoirs that feed the city’s aqueduct to be covered over, because more than once the crows, who themselves arrange for the re-introduction into the ‘life cycle’ of the corpses
the Parsees lay out on the Towers of Silence (there are quite a number of towers in the Malabar Hill area), have dropped the odd mouthful into the water supply. But even with these measures the
town council certainly hasn’t resolved the hygiene problem, because then there are the problems of the rats, the insects, the seepage from the sewers. It’s as well not to drink the
water in Bombay. But you can drink it at the Taj Mahal which has its own purifiers and is proud of its water. Because the Taj is not a hotel: with its eight hundred rooms it is a city within a
city.
    When I arrived in this city I was received by a doorman dressed as an Indian prince with red sash and turban, who led me as far as the lobby, all done out in brass, where there were other
employees likewise disguised as maharajas. Probably they imagined that I too was disguised, though in reverse – that I was a tycoon dressed up as a nobody – and they busily set about
finding me a room in the noble wing of the building, the part that has the antique furniture and the view of the Gateway of India. For a moment I was tempted to tell them that I wasn’t there
for aesthetic purposes, but just to sleep in consciousless comfort, and that they could put me anywhere they liked, in a room with shamefully modern furniture, even the skyscraper of the
Inter-Continental was okay by me. But then I thought it would be cruel to disappoint them like this. The Peacock Suite, however, I refused. It was too much for one person on his own; but it
wasn’t a question of price, I explained, to maintain the kind of style I had opted for.
    The room was impressive, my case had come along ahead of me by some mysterious route and stood on a wicker stool, the bath was already full of water and foam. I sank into it and then wrapped
myself in a linen towel. The windows opened onto the Arabian Sea. The sun was almost up now, and a pinkish light tinged the beach; beneath the Taj Mahal the life of India had begun to swarm once
again. The heavy curtains of green velvet ran sweetly and softly as a theatre curtain; I drew them across the scene and the room was reduced to half-light and silence. The lazy, comforting hum of
the big fan lulled me and I just managed to reflect that this too was a superfluous luxury, since the room temperature was perfect, when suddenly I found myself at an old chapel on a Mediterranean
hillside. The chapel was white and it was hot. We were hungry and Xavier, laughing, was pulling out some sandwiches and cool wine from a basket. Isabel was laughing too, while Magda stretched out
on a blanket on the grass. Far below us was the blue of the sea and a solitary donkey dawdled in the shade of the chapel. But it wasn’t a dream, it was a real memory; I was looking into the
dark of the room and seeing that distant scene which seemed like a dream because I’d slept for a long time; my watch told me it was four in the afternoon. I stayed in bed quite a while,
thinking of those times, going back over landscapes, faces, lives. I remembered the trips in the car along the pinewoods by the sea, the nicknames we gave each other, Xavier’s guitar and
Magda’s shrill voice announcing in mock-serious tones, like a fairground showman: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, we have among us The Italian Nightingale!’ And I
would play along with her and launch into old Neapolitan songs, mimicking the out-dated warbling of singers in the old days, while everybody laughed and applauded. Amongst ourselves, and I was
resigned to it, I was ‘Roux’, short for Rouxinol, Portuguese for nightingale. But the way they said it it